博文
研究大学的终结？
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真是“无巧不成书”。四月二十九日在机场候机时，朋友把当日的《作家文摘》给了我。一页页翻完，对一篇摘自《环球时报》名为“危机没动摇美国的教育根基”短评印象很深，特别是作者在文章最后的断言：“可以预见，金融危机不会削弱美国的教育根基，在应对经济危机的过程中，美国教育水平反而会有新的提升。”虽希望作者的断言能成真，但这与我了解的情况不太相符。不过，毕竟无人可准确地说出何为“根基”，动不动摇就更难弄清楚。《环球时报》已出英文版，如果美国大学的校长们能看到此文就好了。
飞机晚点，抵沪已是凌晨一点。匆忙打开邮箱，第一件就是同事发来的一个连接，建议我看一看，并放到我的播客上。打开一看，居然是《纽约时报》上的一篇关于美国大学研究生教育的短评，而且与《作家文摘》上的短评之结论恰恰相反，名为“End the University as We Know It”。作者是哥伦比亚大学的Taylor教授，在他眼里，根本就没有什么危机动不动摇“美国的教育根基”的事，他认为美国的“GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning”，而且还是今日的“华尔街”。联想当下克莱斯勒的破产、投资银行的消失、通用汽车和各个银行的惨状、Taylor的观点够吓人的。
《环球时报》上的短评海外网站也有转载，有意思的是转载后的题目被改为“危機正在動搖美國的教育根基？”，但内容并无“篡改”。
很想分析一下两篇短文，可惜没有时间，现将Taylor的文章附下，供读者自享。
“危机没动摇美国的教育根基”见
http://opinion.huanqiu.com/roll/2009-04/437471.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html
Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
Alain Pilon
By MARK C. TAYLOR
Published: April 26, 2009
GRADUATE education is the
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.
If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and
1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.
Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.
It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.
Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.
A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.
6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.
https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-2374-230258.html
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