Several weeks ago, an old friend of mine from my undergraduate days at Sarah Lawrence College (who, it should be noted, is about to enter a graduate program in Business Administration) sent me a link to a New York Times Op-Ed article. His comment was “this op ed is great. He’s basically saying that all universities should be like Sarah Lawrence.”
The editorial, “End the University as We Know It” by Mark C. Taylor, did not actually mention Sarah Lawrence College at all. The article does call for the end of the tenure system, of doctoral dissertations, and of the system of academic departments based on traditional disciplines such as Psychology, English, Philosophy, etcetera.
It is this last detail that must have reminded my friend of our alma mater. That is, the curriculum at Sarah Lawrence is arranged around “problem-focused” topics (to borrow a phrase from Taylor’s editorial). Students can take courses such as “Surgically and Pharmacologically Shaping Selves” or “Contemporary American Politics: the 2008 Election in Context,” (two offerings from the 08/09 Course Catalogue) without being a Political-Science major or first taking introductory courses in medical anthropology. In addition, the way the professors are tenured — without rank — in disciplines rather than in departments allows for the fluid creation of new disciplines to adapt to changing fields of study. Disciplines such as Global Studies, Ethnic and Diasporic Studies, and Science, Technology and Society were created in all likelihood by interested faculty in extant disciplines. The college has no majors or minors. Every undergraduate takes a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree. Some students choose to prepare for entry into law school or medical school or to design a highly specialized program suiting their own passions. However, the net effect of this curriculum is that the college graduates class after class of knowledgeable generalists.
That is the extent of the similarity between Sarah Lawrence College and Mark C. Taylor’s idea of a “university for the twenty-first century.” Sarah Lawrence does not grant doctoral degrees so his suggestions about how to revise the dissertation hardly apply. Taylor’s suggestion of ending tenure certainly is not exemplified by Sarah Lawrence where all faculty, in theory anyway, are tenured or on the tenure-track.
The idea to end the tenure system, radically distracting as it is from his other ideas, seems to me the only proposal that Professor Taylor puts forth in the article that would actually address the set of problems he starts out with — the failing economy of graduate education. Prior to the recent meltdown in the global economy, the problem of a glut of Ph.D.s for a dearth of tenure-track positions seemed to me a bit of a bugbear. Daunted by the job market as a doctoral candidate and no stranger to exploitation as an adjunct, I nonetheless had felt curiously optimistic that after several years of grueling applications I could land that sought-after tenure track position somewhere in the United States. This optimism had been based on the impending retirement of the baby-boomers, however, and it shrank along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the value of all those 401k accounts. Reading this Op-Ed after a season of cancelled jobs and announced hiring freezes, I found myself sympathetic to Taylor’s polemical claim that “graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning” and also found myself for the first time oddly receptive to a proposal to end the tenure system. Certainly, mandatory retirement age seems like a reasonable idea.
For many years, I have been pondering the economics higher education. With the skyrocketing numbers of young people enrolling in college and especially junior college in the United States, there must be another way to increase the access of all these students to higher learning than exploitive adjunct labor.
Professor Taylor’s proposals seem unlikely to implemented any time soon. But maybe his example should be followed. I propose we all go out on a limb and imagine our ideal universities. What ideas do you have? Perhaps the existence of one college that has managed to become an elite institution without playing by the rules (besides having no majors, did I mention — no grades!) should inspire us with the value of the improbable.
Michael,
I remember reading this article when it first came out and I remember thinking “Here we go again! Yet another Stanley Fish-style Jeremiad about the end of the university and why we must destroy the village in order to save it.
I am sorry but I simply cannot abide discussion of getting rid of tenure and I find all of the arguments about tenure and academic freedom put forward by Taylor, Fish, and his ilk to be largely knee-jerk (often glaringly hypocritical)responses to a crisis they do not have the sustained attention or will to properly and thoughtfully address.
The problem of a glut in PhDs, as we know, is not tenure, but the thirty-year trend in state budget cuts to higher-education across the country. Colleges and universities are relying more and more on tuition to cover their rapidly increasing expenses, and, as in any free market, there is a limit to what people will pay, which creates competition and forces colleges to have to drive down costs wherever they most easily can. This usually means getting rid of professors and replacing them with adjuncts. Ironically, it also often means spending more money on athletics, campus amenities, administration, and support services, all of which are only tangential to education, but which serve to entice more customers to pay more tuition for a supposedly more fulfilling college experience.
Fish, Taylor and other university reformers seem to think this free market model is fine. I think it could mark the beginning of the end of equal access to quality education as well as the dreams of those PhDs who have chosen to dedicate their lives to the creation and dissemination of knowledge, many of whom will be forced to have to find their way and sell their labor in the jungle of the free market. The idea of all those qualified doctors of cultural theory working IN the market instead of AGAINST it, is enough to keep me awake at night. Instead of getting rid of tenure let’s get rid of tuition, athletics, wasteful technologies, and needless administrators and get back to the work of actually teaching.
As for the rest of Taylor’s ideas I think the idea of interdisciplinarity is interesting and useful and we should do more of it, but really, his arguments for getting rid of departments is just another way to cut what he sees as academic fat and make the university small enough to drown in the bathtub (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And all of this from a booshie Columbia professor who has benefitted from everything he wants to destroy.
PS our very own Marc Bousquet, as he so often does, is on the money on this one and offers a pretty intelligent critique of Taylor at his Chronicle blog:
http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bousquet/more-drivel-from-the-new-york-times