A plea from me to the NY Times editors on http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/opinion/a-solution-for-bad-teaching.html?ref=opinion
(Actually, given that the Times’ Tamar Lewin does a good job of reporting on higher ed, I’m surprised that the Times’s “doesn’t get it”.)
“This Op-Ed helps to demonstrate just how out of touch with the realities of higher education this paper’s editors are. I say that with frustration and grief since the Times could do so much good.
The reality of higher education is: too little integrity and too much reliance on fooling uneducated “consumers” – once quaintly known as “students”. If the editors want to learn about how bad this has become, they will read almost anything that Clark Kerr wrote after about 1980, or David Riesman’s “On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism”, or my blog inside-higher-ed.com.
I beg the editors to realize that believing some institutions of higher education is like believing some con artists. It really is that bad. I taught. I know.
(I have witnessed behind the scenes competition among departments for courses with big budget money. Competition that hinged on who could make the most students the happiest in what should be a fundamental and demanding course. It’s documented in my blog.)
The bottom line is this. Continually making recommendations for improving teaching in institutions – many of which are unscrupulous, even “elite” ones – is like going time and again to Bernie Madoff with suggestions, and believing him, when he says, “I’m following them. I’m trying. The money will be there next month.””
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