This is a serious crisis. Universities face untenable budgets and a dire faculty job market at the same time the public is questioning the value of a college education in light of rising tuition and student loan burdens. But the transformation in public attitudes toward universities is not based on a concrete loss of value: Higher education continues to correlate with improved employability and incomes. U.S. universities continue — for the time being — to maintain a global competitive edge.
Instead, people’s attitudes about college reflect a changed political perception about the role that higher education plays in American life. Rightward shifts in attitudes toward government investment and the value of social mobility and diversity have transformed the idea of public investment in education from a staple of American society to a partisan wedge issue….
The crisis is set to become even more acute: Jobs are changing faster than people can train for them, and what college does best is teach people how to think and process information.
Especially vital are a group of disciplines we should call the information sciences, a.k.a. the humanities, social sciences, library science, computer science and digital humanities…. Identifying high-quality information (and knowing what makes it high-quality) and communicating complicated or abstract ideas from multiple perspectives are at least as important to our digital future as the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math) have been to the industrial age.
h/t Robert Townsend (@rbthisted)
While it is well known that the humanities are in a crisis, the reasons put forward by Prof. Antonova are fundamentally flawed. ‘Conservative’ thinkers from Adam Smith to Edmund Burke to William Buckley have always defended the humanities. Adam Smith’s educational background was in philosophy; and it was the wisdom distilled thereof that cast his innovative economic theory. The erosion of the humanities began with the politicalization of learning, specifically with the introduction of affirmative action, the quota system and tenure by liberal ideologues who attempted to circumvent the mandates of merit as the gold standard of education, both for students and teachers.
Antonova’s call for more public funds for education, a mentally enervating mantra of the liberal Washington Post, is in itself not the solution, as Maria Montessori and other merit-based, innovative educators understood long ago.
Dr. G. Heath King
Moreover, one asks in what kind of academic bubble the professor abides when she claims that U.S. universities « maintain a global competitive edge »! The latest results of the The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows American students do not even rank among the top 20 nations, not only in math and science but also in reading. The PISA states, «While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance.» http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/12/03/248329823/u-s-high-school-students-slide-in-math-reading-science
John Dewey, one of the most eminent educators of the 20th century and one of the first to notice the real reason for this decline wrote, «Too large a part of our citizens has left our schools without power of critical discrimination, at the mercy of special propaganda and drifting from one plan and scheme to another according to the loudest clamor of the moment.» (“Need for Orientation» 1935, 91).
The «loudest clamor of the moment» is a banal liberal libretto, bemoaning financial impoverishment rather than the intellectual destitution brought about by the schemes of affirmative action, the quota system and the unassailable iron rice bowl of professorial tenure, one not surprisingly in tune with the trendy Washington Post, though discordant with the enduring gold standard of merit.
Dr. G. Heath King