By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-14 21:58:09 | Updated at 2025-01-15 05:11:57
7 hours ago
Is Higher Education Inevitably Stuck in the Past?
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | January 10, 2025 | George Leef
Posted on 01/14/2025 1:45:52 PM PST by karpov
A common refrain among observers of American higher education is that it changes at a glacial pace—if even that fast. The structure of our colleges and universities serves largely to protect faculty and administrators who are comfortable doing things pretty much the same way they were done a century ago. Many argue that our colleges desperately need to make changes but cannot.
One of those observers is Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College in Minnesota. He has written an engaging, informative, and sometimes frustrating book entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.
In the book, Rosenberg calls upon his years of experience as a professor and administrator to present a bleak picture for much of higher education (specifically schools other than those with gigantic endowments) because of institutional features including shared governance, tenure, and the fixation on scholarship and reputation.
He writes, “Yet this industry that ostensibly fosters growth and transformation in its students just cannot seem to change or transform itself in ways beyond the incremental.”
There isn’t anything new in Rosenberg’s analysis of arteriosclerosis in higher education. Higher-ed insiders have long noted that it is stuck with old if not ancient practices, but Rosenberg makes his case in an appealing and often humorous way. Isn’t this, however, a case of crying “wolf”? After all, our higher-ed system has managed to survive despite its resistance to change.
Rosenberg argues that although American higher education has coasted along fairly well in the past, conditions are changing dramatically.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: college
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1 posted on 01/14/2025 1:45:52 PM PST by karpov
To: karpov
We could lose about 90% of our universities and not really suffer from the loss.
To: karpov
As long as there are sheep willing to be fleeced then higher education will remain stuck in the past. It is in their self-interest to do so.
I don’t think there is any other service that has outpaced inflation more than the higher-ed scam. Just ridiculous amounts of bloat and waste.
I just saw a statistic on Gen-Xers between 55 and 60 years old and 11% of them still carried personal student loan debt (i.e., not their kid’s). Wow.
3 posted on 01/14/2025 1:57:35 PM PST by Obadiah
To: karpov
Education is important, but cold beer is importanter.
4 posted on 01/14/2025 1:57:44 PM PST by BipolarBob (are glass coffins the future? remains to be seen.)
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