CHE: The University in Ruins

[Wahoo Redux]

What the Subject Line says:

The University in Ruins: The innovations that promise to save higher education are a farce

Some of this reads like every other highhanded come-to-Jehovah article I've read on the subject...

Daniels believes not only that universities "serve and enrich liberal democracy" but that they have the obligation to do so. By seeking truth, speaking truth to power, and creating campuses in which dialogue across difference checks dogmatism, colleges "are among liberal democracy's cornerstone institutions." Although Canadian by birth, Daniels gives his book an American focus. Universities must make the case that they serve not just democracy, but American democracy.

...which I just don't think gets at the heart of the real problems, i.e. that people resent us because we cost too much; that college is seen merely as an employment passport; and that there just aren't enough students to sustain the bureaucracy and campus lifestyles that evolved in the '80s and '90s.

[marshwiggle]

From the article:

Even in 1996, Readings concluded that the university no longer functioned as "an ideological apparatus of the nation-state."

It seems this is supposed to sound like a loss. I don't care what ideology the nation-state has; indoctrination (e.g. "activist" faculty) is antithetical to the search for truth, in the same way that journalism descends into propaganda as it values ideology over meticulous focus on factual accuracy, and spends more time on commentary than on reporting.