As universities all over the Western world start to sputter and fail because of funding shortages and bloated, costly bureaucracies, here’s an interesting take:
Universities’ response to the cash crisis reveals their deeper crisis of purpose. Up to 10,000 university jobs are reported to have been cut this year. Yet diversity, equity and inclusion teams seem to have been largely spared the axe. Instead, universities are cutting core academic disciplines. The University of Kent has closed its philosophy department, while Canterbury Christ Church University will no longer teach English literature – a university spokesperson described the course as ‘no longer viable in the current climate’.
Once, it would have been unthinkable for a university not to offer degrees in major branches of learning, such as literature or philosophy. These subjects were taught not because ‘the market’ made them ‘viable’, but because they contributed to our understanding of the word and what it means to be human. That they can now be so readily discarded speaks to an impoverished intellectual climate that universities themselves have helped to create.
Note the emphasized sentence.
What it shows to me is that the so-called intellectual rigor of the ivory tower has faded, if not disappeared altogether. (I know, I know: “Wake up, Kim, it’s been going on for decades!” )
As long as universities continue to be regarded as simply an adjunct to the marketplace — i.e. providing certification for careers — then of course the “thoughtful” classes such as philosophy or Shakespeare are going to suffer. (Of course, certification is probably critical for careers such as engineering, medicine and the hard sciences, less so for law and suchlike.)
Why one would need a B.A. to be a personal assistant or office receptionist, of course, simply underlines the fact that the high school diploma has ceased to be any kind of qualification whatsoever.
And universities are becoming equally useless. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of Gramscian Marxists.
I’ve heard that for a couple decades now the first 2 years of college are the last 2 years of high school.
Community College was called “High School with ashtrays” in 1973.
There was an entrance exam to high school floating around the interwebs awhile ago from back in the day – 1890s I think, that today’s college graduates would have trouble passing. Even when I went to high school, we had vocational classes we could take, such as typing, shop, auto shop, bookkeeping, that sort of thing.
One could graduate and get an entry level job without being totally useless like many I see today.
The one I have seen was the Exit Exam for a Kansas rural school district circa 1895.
Our local university offered an early out to long tenured professors that included full health care benefits. This let them advance younger profs and instructors at a lower pay to fill those positions.
It would appear today’s college is about indoctrination not education. Gone are the cinder block dorm room and they are replaced by the college experience, four or five years in a resort setting. Students determine what will and what will not be taught by the staff.
I am so happy I went to school in the 70’s.
“It would appear today’s college is about indoctrination not education.”
100% true
Confirmed
Meanwhile, the skilled trades are doing pretty well.
I know a man who 30 yrs ago started his own local HVAC business, just him and a couple of helpers. Now he owns numerous satellite offices all over the GoM coast.
And he takes his wife on vacation in one of these: https://cirrusaircraft.com/aircraft/vision-jet/
A good handful of colleges have gone out of business since the Obama days.
Enrollment in the last decade has gone down at many community colleges and universities and state colleges around the country due to many reasons but some being lower birth rates aka less students and high prices of college and many potential students seeing what bullshit college has become
I hope way more of these liberal indoctrination centers go out of business soon.