Stanley Fish, who we just happen to have linked last week with an older essay, asked that question in the NYT this weekend. (h/t, Dr X's The Death of the Humanities in University Education).
Being old-school folks with an appreciation for the variety of interests and talents that exist in different people, we view education as having three components:
1. What everybody needs to know to function as a citizen in a free republic
2. What somebody needs to function in a job
3. The opening up of the life of the mind without regard to utility
#3 is, of course, what the original Liberal Arts college education was designed for. It was assumed that #1 was accomplished already, and #2 for most non-professional jobs.
Prof. Fish is not happy with the invasion of the marketplace into academia, but I think it is inevitable; inevitable because employment demands are requiring college degrees, whatever they might be and however silly such requirements might be. It's about monopoly credentialization, like education degrees.
We all know people with good IQs but without degrees who know more and are more interested in life than most of the folks we know with fancy degrees. I need not refer to George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Bob Dylan, or Bill Gates: I need only refer to our appliance repairman who is an impressive Shakespeare scholar (about whom I have posted here in the past).
The identity of the "college" has changed enormously over time, as has the amount of stuff to learn about. In 1700, many barbers doubled as dentists and surgeons, and our few colleges were as much about producing educated and literate Congregationalist ministers as anything else. Things have changed. A "college degree" can mean almost anything now.
A quote from Fish's piece:
What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the higher learning. John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that expand their minds nonsense.
The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.
In this latter model , the mode of delivery a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up doesn't matter so long as delivery occurs.
Yes, it's a downscale, mass-market Kollege-Mart now. Read Fish's brief, poignant NYT essay, The Last Professor.
