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The slow death of the (British) university.

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2/7/08
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Eagleton's one of my favorite writers. Here he explains how British universities are going down the same road to hell as US universities -- but without the affluence. The following is an excerpt.

http://m.chronicle.com/article/The-Slow-Death-of-the/228991/

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 passé.

Philistine administrators plaster the campus with mindless logos and issue their edicts in barbarous, semiliterate prose. ...

As 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 professor’s 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. ...

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 one’s 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 society’s 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.
 
On costs: So it costs 9000 pounds for Oxford tuition? He. Cry me a river.

On academic culture: the issue nobody wants to go into is the cause of the loss of intellectualism in the Anglo university. It is increasingly obvious that the university has become a crude joke.

Now, notice that the Anglo world is NOT devoid of intellectual people. They are all over the internet. It is just that the universities do not represent their interests anymore.

So this is the interesting question: why has university life become so divorced from the life of the mind?
 
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