The Slow Death of the University - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Chronicle Review

April 6, 2015

The Slow Death of the UniversityBy Terry Eagleton

few years ago, I was being shown around a large, very

technologically advanced university in Asia by its proud

president. As befitted so eminent a personage, he was flanked by

two burly young minders in black suits and shades, who for all I

knew were carrying Kalashnikovs under their jackets. Having waxed

lyrical about his gleaming new business school and state-of-the-art

institute for management studies, the president paused to permit

me a few words of fulsome praise. I remarked instead that there

seemed to be no critical studies of any kind on his campus. He

looked at me bemusedly, as though I had asked him how many

Ph.D.s in pole dancing they awarded each year, and replied rather

stiffly "Your comment will be noted." He then took a small piece of

cutting-edge technology out of his pocket, flicked it open and spoke

a few curt words of Korean into it, probably "Kill him." A limousine

the length of a cricket pitch then arrived, into which the president

was bundled by his minders and swept away. I watched his car

disappear from view, wondering when his order for my execution

was to be implemented.



Deconstructing Academe

Colleges claim theyre the last hope for revitalization. But can

they really revive struggling towns and cities?

The False Promise of 'Practical' Education

Today's calls for pragmatic education are at odds with the

idea's history.

This happened in South Korea, but it might have taken place almost

anywhere on the planet. From Cape Town to Reykjavik, Sydney to

So Paulo, an event as momentous in its own way as the Cuban

revolution or the invasion of Iraq is steadily under way: the slow

death of the university as a center of humane critique. Universities,

which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been

derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the

accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves

and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling,

allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a

social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term

practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the

globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to

nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John

Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced

priorities of global capitalism.

Much of this will be familiar to an American readership. Stanford

and MIT, after all, provided the very models of the entrepreneurial

university. What has emerged in Britain, however, is what one

might call Americanization without the affluence the affluence,

at least, of the American private educational sector.

This is even becoming true at those traditional finishing schools for



the English gentry, Oxford and Cambridge, whose colleges have

always been insulated to some extent against broader economic

forces by centuries of lavish endowments. Some years ago, I

resigned from a chair at the University of Oxford (an event almost

as rare as an earthquake in Edinburgh) when I became aware that I

was expected in some respects to behave less as a scholar than a

CEO.

When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier, any such

professionalism would have been greeted with patrician disdain.

Those of my colleagues who had actually bothered to finish their

Ph.D.s would sometimes use the title of "Mr." rather than "Dr.,"

since "Dr." suggested a degree of ungentlemanly labor. Publishing

books was regarded as a rather vulgar project. A brief article every

10 years or so on the syntax of Portuguese or the dietary habits of

ancient Carthage was considered just about permissible. There had

been a time earlier when college tutors might not even have

bothered to arrange set tutorial times for their undergraduates.

Instead, the undergraduate would simply drop round to their

rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a

civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.

Today, Oxbridge retains much of its collegial ethos. It is the dons

who decide how to invest the colleges money, what flowers to

plant in their gardens, whose portraits to hang in the senior

common room, and how best to explain to their students why they

spend more on the wine cellar than on the college library. All

important decisions are made by the fellows of the college in full

session, and everything from financial and academic affairs to

routine administration is conducted by elected committees of

academics responsible to the body of fellows as a whole. In recent

years, this admirable system of self-government has had to

confront a number of centralizing challenges from the university, of

the kind that led to my own exit from the place; but by and large it

has stood firm. Precisely because Oxbridge colleges are for the

most part premodern institutions, they have a smallness of scale

about them that can serve as a model of decentralized democracy,

and this despite the odious privileges they continue to enjoy.

Elsewhere in Britain, the situation is far different. Instead of



government by academics there is rule by hierarchy, a good deal of

Byzantine bureaucracy, junior professors who are little but

dogsbodies, and vice chancellors who behave as though they are

running General Motors. Senior professors are now senior

managers, and the air is thick with talk of auditing and accountancy.

Books those troglodytic, drearily pretechnological phenomena

are increasingly frowned upon. At least one British university has

restricted the number of bookshelves professors may have in their

offices in order to discourage "personal libraries." Wastepaper

baskets are becoming as rare as Tea Party intellectuals, since paper

is now pass.

Teaching has for sometime been a less vitalbusiness in Britishuniversities thanresearch. It is researchthat brings in themoney, not courses onExpressionism or theReformation.

Philistine administrators plaster the campus with mindless logos

and issue their edicts in barbarous, semiliterate prose. One

Northern Irish vice chancellor commandeered the only public

room left on campus, a common room shared by staff and students

alike, for a private dining room in which he could entertain local

bigwigs and entrepreneurs. When the students occupied the room

in protest, he ordered his security guards to smash the only

restroom near to hand. British vice chancellors have been

destroying their own universities for years, but rarely as literally as

that. On the same campus, security staff move students on if they

are found hanging around. The ideal would be a university without

these disheveled, unpredictable creatures.

In the midst of this debacle, it is the humanities above all that are

being pushed to the wall. The British state continues to distribute

grants to its universities for science, medicine, engineering, and the

like, but it has ceased to hand out any significant resources to the

arts. It is not out of the question that if this does not change, whole

humanities departments will be closed down in the coming years. If

English departments survive at all, it may simply be to teach



business students the use of the semicolon, which was not quite

what Northrop Frye and Lionel Trilling had in mind.

Humanities departments must now support themselves mainly by

the tuition fees they receive from their students, which means that

smaller institutions that rely almost entirely on this source of

income have been effectively privatized through the back door. The

private university, which Britain has rightly resisted for so long, is

creeping ever closer. Yet the government of Prime Minister David

Cameron has also overseen a huge hike in tuitions, which means

that students, dependent on loans and encumbered with debt, are

understandably demanding high standards of teaching and more

personal treatment in return for their cash at just the moment when

humanities departments are being starved of funds.

Besides, teaching has been for some time a less vital business in

British universities than research. It is research that brings in the

money, not courses on Expressionism or the Reformation. Every

few years, the British state carries out a thorough inspection of

every university in the land, measuring the research output of each

department in painstaking detail. It is on this basis that government

grants are awarded. There has thus been less incentive for

academics to devote themselves to their teaching, and plenty of

reason for them to produce for productions sake, churning out

supremely pointless articles, starting up superfluous journals

online, dutifully applying for outside research grants regardless of

whether they really need them, and passing the odd pleasant hour

padding their CVs.

In any case, the vast increase in bureaucracy in British higher

education, occasioned by the flourishing of a managerial ideology

and the relentless demands of the state assessment exercise, means

that academics have had little enough time to prepare their

teaching even if it seemed worth doing, which for the past several

years it has not. Points are awarded by the state inspectors for

articles with a bristling thicket of footnotes, but few if any for a

best-selling textbook aimed at students and general readers.

Academics are most likely to boost their institutions status by

taking temporary leave of it, taking time off from teaching to further

their research.



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They would boost its resources even more were they to abandon

academe altogether and join a circus, hence saving their financial

masters a much grudged salary and allowing the bureaucrats to

spread out their work among an already overburdened

professoriate. Many academics in Britain are aware of just how

passionately their institution would love to see the back of them,

apart from a few household names who are able to pull in plenty of

customers. There is, in fact, no shortage of lecturers seeking to take

early retirement, given that British academe was an agreeable place

to work some decades ago and is now a deeply unpleasant one for

many of its employees. In an additional twist of the knife, however,

they are now about to have their pensions cut as well.

s professors are transformed into managers, so students are

converted into consumers. Universities fall over one another

in an undignified scramble to secure their fees. Once such

customers are safely within the gates, there is pressure on their

professors not to fail them, and thus risk losing their fees. The

general idea is that if the student fails, it is the professors fault,

rather like a hospital in which every death is laid at the door of the

medical staff. One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is

the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion

among 20-year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means

vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley,

fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than

the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated political and

economic forces come to shape syllabuses. Any English

department that focused its energies on Anglo-Saxon literature or

the 18th century would be cutting its own throat.

Hungry for their fees, some British universities are now allowing

students with undistinguished undergraduate degrees to proceed

to graduate courses, while overseas students (who are generally

forced to pay through the nose) may find themselves beginning a

doctorate in English with an uncertain command of the language.

Having long despised creative writing as a vulgar American pursuit,

English departments are now desperate to hire some minor

novelist or failing poet in order to attract the scribbling hordes of

potential Pynchons, ripping off their fees in full, cynical knowledge

that the chances of getting ones first novel or volume of poetry



past a London publisher are probably less than the chances of

awakening to discover that you have been turned into a giant

beetle.

Education should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But

this is not the same as regarding yourself as a service station for

neocapitalism. In fact, you would tackle societys needs a great deal

more effectively were you to challenge this whole alienated model

of learning. Medieval universities served the wider society superbly

well, but they did so by producing pastors, lawyers, theologians,

and administrative officials who helped to sustain church and state,

not by frowning upon any form of intellectual activity that might

fail to turn a quick buck.

Times, however, have changed. According to the British state, all

publicly funded academic research must now regard itself as part of

the so-called knowledge economy, with a measurable impact on

society. Such impact is rather easier to gauge for aeronautical

engineers than ancient historians. Pharmacists are likely to do

better at this game than phenomenologists. Subjects that do not

attract lucrative research grants from private industry, or that are

unlikely to pull in large numbers of students, are plunged into a

state of chronic crisis. Academic merit is equated with how much

money you can raise, while an educated student is redefined as an

employable one. It is not a good time to be a paleographer or

numismatist, pursuits that we will soon not even be able to spell,

let alone practice.

The effects of this sidelining of the humanities can be felt all the way

down the educational system in the secondary schools, where

modern languages are in precipitous decline, history really means

modern history, and the teaching of the classics is largely confined

to private institutions such as Eton College. (It is thus that the old

Etonian Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, regularly lards his

public declarations with tags from Horace.)

It is true that philosophers could always set up meaning-of-life

clinics on street corners, or modern linguists station themselves at

strategic public places where a spot of translation might be

required. In general, the idea is that universities must justify their



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existence by acting as ancillaries to entrepreneurship. As one

government report chillingly put it, they should operate as

"consultancy organisations." In fact, they themselves have become

profitable industries, running hotels, concerts, sporting events,

catering facilities, and so on.

f the humanities in Britain are withering on the branch, it is

largely because they are being driven by capitalist forces while

being simultaneously starved of resources. (British higher

education lacks the philanthropic tradition of the United States,

largely because America has a great many more millionaires than

Britain.) We are also speaking of a society in which, unlike the

United States, higher education has not traditionally been treated

as a commodity to be bought and sold. Indeed, it is probably the

conviction of the majority of college students in Britain today that

higher education should be provided free of charge, as it is in

Scotland; and though there is an obvious degree of self-interest in

this opinion, there is a fair amount of justice in it as well. Educating

the young, like protecting them from serial killers, should be

regarded as a social responsibility, not as a matter of profit.

I myself, as the recipient of a state scholarship, spent seven years as

a student at Cambridge without paying a bean for it. It is true that as

a result of this slavish reliance on the state at an impressionable age

I have grown spineless and demoralized, unable to stand on my

own two feet or protect my family with a shotgun if called upon to

do so. In a craven act of state dependency, I have even been known

to call upon the services of the local fire department from time to

time, rather than beat out the blaze with my own horny hands. I am,

even so, willing to trade any amount of virile independence for

seven free years at Cambridge.

It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population

attended university in my own student days, and there are those

who claim that today, when that figure has risen to around 50

percent, such liberality of spirit is no longer affordable. Yet

Germany, to name only one example, provides free education to its

sizable student population. A British government that was serious

about lifting the crippling debt from the shoulders of the younger

generation could do so by raising taxes on the obscenely rich and



recovering the billions lost each year in evasion.

It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university

as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in

which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous

scrutiny. What if the value of the humanities lies not in the way they

conform to such dominant notions, but in the fact that they dont?

There is no value in integration as such. In premodern times, artists

were more thoroughly integrated into society at large than they

have been in the modern era, but part of what that meant was that

they were quite often ideologues, agents of political power,

mouthpieces for the status quo. The modern artist, by contrast, has

no such secure niche in the social order, but it is precisely on this

account that he or she refuses to take its pieties for granted.

Until a better system emerges, however, I myself have decided to

throw in my lot with the hard-faced philistines and crass purveyors

of utility. Somewhat to my shame, I have now taken to asking my

graduate students at the beginning of a session whether they can

afford my very finest insights into literary works, or whether they

will have to make do with some serviceable but less scintillating

comments.

Charging by the insight is a distasteful affair, and perhaps not the

most effective way of establishing amicable relations with ones

students; but it seems a logical consequence of the current

academic climate. To those who complain that this is to create

invidious distinctions among ones students, I should point out

that those who are not able to hand over cash for my most

perceptive analyses are perfectly free to engage in barter. Freshly

baked pies, kegs of home-brewed beer, knitted sweaters, and stout,

handmade shoes: All these are eminently acceptable. There are,

after all, more things in life than money.

Terry Eagleton is a distinguished visiting professor of English

literature at the University of Lancaster. He is the author of some 50

books, including How to Read Literature (Yale University Press,

2013).

306 Comments The Chronicle of Higher Education Login!



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alex_small a month ago

"In fact, you would tackle societys needs a great deal more effectively wereyou to challenge this whole alienated model of learning."

Indeed.

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Howard Johnson 15 days ago# alex_small

Agree; when you go from 5-50% you are in a paradigm shifting space.Let's begin with Neoclassical Econ but go far beyond. Also, I do love Prof. Eagleton's wit.

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millermp1 15 days ago# alex_small

Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty and eradicated disease. Thesame cannot be said of critical theory or medieval literature. The priestlycaste is simply upset that their life of leisure is no longer valued orsubsidized.

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Z Mooradian Furness 14 days ago# millermp1

I had no idea that disease was eradicated, let alone thatcapitalism (not the work of scientists and doctors) wasresponsible for such a wondrous turn of events! This is trulyexcellent news, sir, and I believe that I speak for every Chroniclereader when I say 'thank you' for bringing this empirically soundfact to our attention. I presume that more people would beaware of this evidence-based truth were they not so constantlydistracted by the blather of the welfare queens known as'professors'. I'm not sure what sickens me more: their lavish,taxpayer-subsidized lives of carefree leisure or their callousedability to let billions rot in poverty. The world these days is sopreoccupied with critical theory and medieval literature thatnobody pays attention to capitalism. Everywhere I go people areall like, "Blah, blah, blah, ten centuries worth of literature," and"Whine, whine, whine, we should think critically about oursociety." What about market-driven solutions?! What aboutinvestment portfolio management needs?! What aboutdeliverables?! You just don't hear about those kinds of thingsthese days and I, for one, would like to live in a world wherethings like quarterly statements and managerial efficiencyactually matter.

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Orin Ivan Vrka! 12 days ago# Z Mooradian Furness

Thank you, oh so much, for this. I am much obliged!

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Dr Reg Fardell 10 days ago# Z Mooradian Furness

I am finding it difficult to wipe the smile from my face.Should you wish to leave academe (assuming you arepart of the 'dreaming spires' environment) you have anew career ahead of you. Well said sir!

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Mark Kohler 12 days ago# millermp1

Proof that trolling isn't limited to Facebook or Twitter.

Recommend $ 37

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Pete Grady 11 days ago# millermp1

It's all a matter of balance. Capitalism once had a good purposebut is now out of control and suppresses innovation, creativethinking, limits consumer choice and politicizes health care,investment, the environment and education. A touch of theclassics would do us all well at this point.

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YetAnotherChronicleReader a month ago

"Education should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But this is notthe same as regarding yourself as a service station for neocapitalism. "

Most quotable line.

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JamesAllen a month ago# YetAnotherChronicleReader

I don't know, even more quotable than the one about the giant beetle??

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AllTheRooms.com 15 days ago# JamesAllen

I wonder if the giant beetle is a reference to the Highly MagnifiedWoggle-bug, which is L. Frank Baum's send-up of pompousprofessors from the Wizard of Oz sequels.

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EmreS 15 days ago# AllTheRooms.com

Kafka's Metamorphosis.

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Orin Ivan Vrka! 12 days ago# EmreS

I do believe he knows that :)

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roxbury86 a month ago# YetAnotherChronicleReader

I agree! That says it all.

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lurch394 16 days ago# YetAnotherChronicleReader

And more quotable than "They would boost its resources even morewere they to abandon academe altogether and join a circus, hencesaving their financial masters a much grudged salary and allowing thebureaucrats to spread out their work among an already overburdenedprofessoriate"? That one would have ruined my keyboard had I beenconsuming a beverage at the time.

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Mark Jackson 9 days ago# YetAnotherChronicleReader

I'm partial to "I myself, as the recipient of a state scholarship, spentseven years as a student at Cambridge without paying a bean for it. It istrue that as a result of this slavish reliance on the state at animpressionable age I have grown spineless and demoralized, unable tostand on my own two feet or protect my family with a shotgun if calledupon to do so."

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Professor in Ohio a month ago

This could have easily been written about American universities... Too bad ourbrothers across the pond are in the same boat... Another timely article isavailable here, about American Universities, which has a similar flavor at theleast... http://readersupportednews.org...

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kat karsecs a month ago# Professor in Ohio

Very true. I did my undergrad studies in the University of Californiasystem (American citizen), in Art History/Religious Studies, where westopped getting paper syllabi b/c our dept. had been told that printingthem was too costly for the reduced Art History budget. Each year mycourses had fewer and fewer TAs. Meanwhile the Computer Gamingdept. was/is receiving huge grants from, for example, the US militaryand Israeli government, since gaming technology was useful to thingslike drone technology.

Now I'm doing my PhD work in the UK, and I shake my head inbewilderment at why this country seems to think the American model isworthy of emulation. I don't think the responsible parties here have aclear sense of the damage being done to Merican education, andsociety, by this kind of disdain of education in critical inquiry andhumanities.

Funny ('funny') thing is, one reason I came here is that the cost to me,as a foreign student, is scarcely more than it would've been if I decidedto do grad school back home. I don't know who that speaks iller of...

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Maximus a month ago# kat karsecs

Computer gaming is the "art" of the 21st century. It's also wherejobs and money are. Art History is a dead end for all but a selectfew. Why would it surprise you that Computer Gamin is gettinggrants while the Art History department is cutting back?

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procrustes a month ago# Maximus

Been listening to Obama? Shame, shame.

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Maximus a month ago# procrustes

No, just aware of the labor market.

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061150 a month ago# procrustes

Beats the heck out of listening to Dr. Dementia,Ted Cruz.

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tee_bee a month ago# Maximus

So, you're part of the instrumentalist camp too.Congratulations, I guess.

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Robert Davidson 20 days ago# Maximus

Nah, it's just one of the many ways of doing art in the21st century. Galleries are still doing fine, and art historyis not dead in the least.

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miamifella 19 days ago# Maximus

Maximus is part of a current a trend of talking as ifdisciplines were only applicable within narrowparameters.Art History teaches ways of thinking that willhelp everyone from a retailer setting up a selling space toan office manager dealing with unruly workers toentrepreneurs trying to figure out why their website isineffective. But he acts as if only professors and currators

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will be using the skills learned in Art History.

Maybe Computer Gaming is also broadly applicable, ifthere is critical thought and a demand that studentsarticulate ideas built on information. Yet, somehow Idoubt that is what is happening there.

Colleges have turned into vocational training--a moreupscale version of the programs that teach car repair orcourt stenography. Majors without wide applicability areprized because the direct correlation to jobs is clear.Classes and majors, which are more widely applicableare derided as irrelevant because the skills they teach arebroader.

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Guest a month ago# kat karsecs

Usually, information technology staff at the various universitiesare taking salaries that compare to most tenured professors,though much of the IT staff have no formal education. This alsois a contributing factor to rising tuition costs. I have suggested tomany to allow graduate IT students to work in thesedepartments rather than competing for the top bid of aseasoned technology employee.

So you see, you noticed a trend that is critical to the survival offormal education.

Most men in the world at the end of the workday would ratherplunk themselves down in front of the 100 inch television screento play video games than earn a degree.

There we are.

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JustAnotherTechWriter a month ago# Guest

In all fairness, student workers are flaky. If you want tohave professional IT infrastructure, you need professionalIT folks. When the authentication servers go down, youDO NOT want to be calling up students, you want thepros.

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David Lloyd-Jones 18 days ago

# JustAnotherTechWriter

JustAnother,

So Japan, which does things your way, is better atcomputer science than America, where all thegood computer schools are run by scruffy Joltswilling hippies?

-dlj.

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Docent a month ago# Guest

...... or read a book.

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martisco a month ago# Guest

Most professional IT staff members are busily engagedcleaning up the messy legacies of work half-done bygraduate or undergraduate students. Try getting anymeaningful infrastructure in place when the person who

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meaningful infrastructure in place when the person whoworked on it six months ago has moved on to their "reallife."

(Did you think very hard before suggesting this? I don'tbelieve you did.)

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David Lloyd-Jones 18 days ago# martisco

Martisco,

Well put, but just your opinion. I think you're justgrumping "get off my lawn."

My impression of American universityinfrastructure is quite the opposite of yours.

-dlj.

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Al Powell a month ago# Guest

While you're looking down your cyber-nose at IT staff, trydoing your job as a faculty member without them. Theydesign and manage the critical data and communicationsat your institution, and they're dealing with matters ascomplex as most of the faculty do. Further, at ourinstitution they all DO have degrees. Consider thenumber of people in IT and the number of facultymembers, and you'll easily see how dead wrong you are -there aren't enough IT people to make a dent in theoverall budget. Faculty pay is a much bigger factor...andtheir "productivity" is often much less.

I agree that grad students can fill some gaps, but theyturn over on a regular basis so they can't serve criticalfunctions which require continuity. Do you REALLY wantthe wireless systems at your institution run by a newperson every two years while they learn on the job?

And for that matter, how many faculty are as continuallychallenged to keep up with the pace of change in the ITarea? Every few weeks or months, the technology andoptions in that area change. It's a learning game everyday. (No, I'm not in IT, but I work closely with them and Ideeply respect the work they do.)

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Brad Weiss a month ago# Al Powell

Ha! If only I could try doing my job without them.

You really think that an IT staffer's "productivity" isgreater than a faculty member at an institution ofhigher learning?

Furthermore, I assure you I can teach a class withnot a thing that they provide. It was only done thatway for centuries. The IT are the lifelines anddarlings of administration, not of faculty. If youthink that changing technology and options everyfew weeks or months is more vital to a universitythan honest to goodness teaching is, you shouldreassess your priorities!

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061150 20 days ago# Brad Weiss

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Just because you can teach without using any IT-based devices doesn't mean that you're teachingwell. It also doesn't mean that you are addressingstudents in any manner that is effective for THEM.Your teaching may be effective or irrelevant.Ignoring modern tools that are available to you asa teacher limits your effectiveness and creates agap between you and your students. Any teachershould be proud to master the range of toolsavailable and to use them effectively.

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Brad Weiss 19 days ago# 061150

At my university, we use a system called studentevaluations, where a student who has taken one ofmy classes fills out an anonymous questionnairenear the end, which addresses the points youhave raised (among others). The questionnairesare filled out with pen and paper. Mine almostalways turn out just fine, so much so that Icontinue to be gainfully employed. In anunimaginably competitive field, this is widely heldto be an indication that one is "teaching well." Iappreciate your concern, 061150.

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We used to use paper for that, too - but we gave itup a few years ago and use online evaluations.The data moves faster, is easier to analyze, andMUCH less staff time is required to deal with it.Cheaper, faster, and easier to analyze. I don't seethe problem. Paper works - but it doesn't work aswell for many functions. I sense that Brad is adedicated guy and sincere in his approach; myrespect goes out to him for that!

But - let's accept the fact that information movesonline today, and more of it is moving there. Justbecause someone doesn't step into a classroomto teach (I don't, but I do teach online) doesn'tmean their work isn't as important to the universityas yours.

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You in some kind of hurry? Sit down, relax. :)

There were no servers at the Academy in Athens.There wasn't even any staff, just some very oldolive trees and some (not quite as) old men whothought they knew something worth passing on.Yet somehow they made do. The work is only asimportant as you, or I, or whoever makes it. Soyou are quite right in your rebuke.

I offended you, and I apologize. I was beingflippant and--perhaps in a misguided way--eventongue in cheek. There will always be moreinformation than there is time. In the words ofBruce Lee, if you concentrate on the fingerpointing at the moon, you'll miss all that heavenlyglory.

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glory.

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Hey Brad, anyone who quotes Bruce Lee is a guyI'd share a craft brew with! I'm engaged in helpingfaculty find the windshield, not the rear viewmirror, so I'm challenged to be patient with afocus on where we've been. Universities andfaculty need to have a little Wayne Gretzky aboutthem, and skate to where the puck is GOING tobe. Cheers!

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Likewise, and fair enough.

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swhite12345 a month ago# Al Powell

Sr. IT folks, like myself, have years of experience,many of us have master's degrees from brick andmortar schools; and we make more than facultybecause schools can't keep us if they don't paycompetitive wages. It's just that simple.

People like me manage your SIS, CRMs andonline college; I understand the business ofeducation & technology. I can show you how astudent's information conveys across multiplesystems and you use my systems and their datato maintain accreditation.

When people say my work has little value to acollege, I just imagine how hilarious it would be ifthey had to manually calculate SAP for thousandsof students.

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antiutopia 20 days ago# swhite12345

Totally agree that tech is essential to the UShigher ed environment. It's just inessential toteaching.

But then, teaching isn't that meaningful in the UShigher ed environment.

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Chris 18 days ago# swhite12345

I suspect that academics are a little testy aboutthe allocation of university resources because theyare the people at the actual coalface of auniversity, the people who perform the two centralfunctions of a university: produce research andeducate the next generation. It is a little gallingwhen a university can find the budget to hire yetanother IT administrator on substantial salaries,yet cannot find the money to hire anotheracademic to ease the pressures on teaching andresearch staff already working 60 hours a week.

It seems to many of us that senior managementhave forgotten A. what it is like to actually like tohave a full teaching load, and B. what the functionof higher education actually is.

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of higher education actually is.

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antiutopia 20 days ago# Al Powell

Yeah, sounds ignorant of what faculty do andwhat teaching is, and of the fact that most facultythese days are adjuncts making, essentially,minimum wage.

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Chris 18 days ago# Al Powell

Quite so.

Just think how empty and meaningless our liveswere before the IT revolution. Remember whenthose university room booking systems comprisedjust a single person and a big wall chart? Howeverdid universities survive? It is, of course, muchbetter to have introduced a shakey IT replacementsolution which requires half a dozen fulltimesupport staff and takes twice as long to beallocated an entirely inappropriate lecture theatre.Does anybody remember that distant past whenessays were submitted with carbon-papercoversheets, so that written feedback could bereturned to students while also creating a copy forfiling purposes? It is, of course, a vastimprovement now that we have all electronicsystems, again with a sizable support staff, whichactually increases the time it takes to mark anessay by around 50%.

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beedizzle a month ago# kat karsecs

I think it is worthy to note the comparable political climate in theUK over the past several decades...the conservatives seem towant to emulate all things American.

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Professor in Ohio 21 days ago# kat karsecs

I am heavily involved in an international society and it is veryapparent that my UK colleagues are given significantly moretime and money to pursue creative and important research thanthose of us in the US... This was not always true and anespecially large shift has appeared in the last 4-5 years - as theAmerican university budgets have squeezed faculty includingincreasing workloads... all while the UK seems to be on a varydifferent path as far as their treatment of faculty. And notsurprisingly, those UK faculty are more productive in thatregard... and significantly more happy in their professions.

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jmars0101 15 days ago# Professor in Ohio

I think you've missed some rather large developments inthe UK, including the resignation of senior faculty inprotest because of demands to increase teaching loadsat the expense of research/scholarly work, the viralaccount of a professor's death in the wake of a universityassessment because of the obsessive need to meetparticular research standards (yes, those two examplesseem to be in contradiction, but they add up to workloadissues), and a rather large outpouring of literature on theneo-liberalization of British academia that makes the US

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seem slightly less crazy by comparison.

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heathertwo a month ago

I had not known this:

"Some years ago, I resigned from a chair at the University of Oxford (an eventalmost as rare as an earthquake in Edinburgh) when I became aware that I wasexpected in some respects to behave less as a scholar than a CEO."

Bless him for taking a stand. Except for Martha Nussbaum in "Not for Profit, " Idon't know anyone else in academia, who has so aptly described thecorporatization of the university system and the ghastly consequences of thatprocess.

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Eric Martin Usner a month ago# heathertwo

For further reading on the transformation of US higher ed by the metricsof neoliberalism, see Randy Martin's work, esp.: Under NewManagement: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the ProfessionalTurn. Henry Giroux has spent a career critiquing the transmogrificationof education into a NL corporation, see his books or the distillation ofthese in his writing for Truthout.org. And for privilege-invokingrefutations of such critiques, start with Stanley Fish's polemics,including Save the World On Your Own Time.

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bsarchett a month ago

Wow! First Laura Kipnis and now Terry Eagleton. Thank you, Chronicle, forengaging REAL WRITERS in your wonderful publication, especially writers whotake on contemporary pieties with such wit and and style. Keep 'em coming!

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The Slow Death of the University - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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