This is his column for today: Class, Cost and College – NYTimes.com.
I have a post and a link to one of his previous columns.
I made a couple of comments on his column to try to explain why I don’t totally agree with him. Here there are, in reverse order.
second comment
“…reminded…of the greatness of America’s universities…” (from the penultimate paragraph[of Mr. Bruni’s column.)
Education is a critical part of the mission of a university. Institutions that focuses on “students” as “consumers”, and cater to “consumer wants”, while knowingly ignoring “student needs” cannot be a “great” university – no matter how good it is at its other missions.
If the goal of undergraduate teaching is just to raise the visibility of its brand by making its “consumers” happy with their “experience, and to do this without bothering its professors, who either help with brand recognition or generate grants and startups, then it can be great at achieving its goals. But if education is not a serious goal, a university can’t be great.
We must discard the old notion of American universities as places to unquestionably trust before we can even talk about class. We don’t just take at their word energy companies when they say they are all about the environment. Why do we trust universities when they say that they are all for equal access, or, for that matter, “say” anything?
first comment
Many universities are businesses. Most professors don’t even realize it – or care. Clark Kerr noted “..how radical some professors can be when they look at the external world and how conservative when they look..at themselves..”
Robert Maynard Hutchins noted that “..[when a university ]..determines to do something to get money it must lose its soul…”
(These quotes and their sources can be found on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com )
And I noted that, at the “elite” school where I taught, “customer wants” seemed to trump education at every turn. The school seemed to take a quote from David Riesman as their guiding light:
“..advantage can..be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions..the “wants” of students…are quite different from the “needs” of students..”
I spent a semester fighting administrators who wanted me to teach an important engineering math course as a “cookbook” course. The course was apparently worth a lot of budget money to the entity that taught it. As the Math Chair told me – in almost the same breath as he begged me to dumb the course down – “…we just wrested a course from engineering..” and he wasn’t going to let them wrest this one from his department. (This story is on my blog.)
(What are “wants”? A physics teacher who gave out about 90% A’s was touted by the university as doing a great servivce to the students and the country.)
To think that these people care about any class but their own is a mistake.”
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