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Newmark's Door: More blistering criticism of U.S. higher education
The Cranky Professor: The Academy - why we don't really love it
Reactions
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FML: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy 7 days ago |
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RT @smalljones: Louis Menand in Harvard Magazine on the state of PhDs http://bit.ly/ZwNm (via @the_real_mp ) 9 days ago |
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Engrossing read re reforming focus of research education http://tinyurl.com/yapnol8 @HarvardMagazine "The Ph.D. Problem" 9 days ago |
More blistering criticism of U.S. higher education
Newmark's Door —
Honest, I'm not going out of my way to look for it. It just seems as though there's more of it these days.
Louis Menand, Bass Professor of English at Harvard:
Weirdly, the less social authority a profession enjoys, the more restrictive the barriers to entry and the more rigid the process of producing new producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. . . .
There is a sense in which ...
Applications
Crooked Timber —
... and beyond—years that may wind up being just as lean as this one.) And in an academic job system that is deeply broken, it may sound silly to ask that some aspects of it should be relatively sane. But I remain curious about how other disciplines (and perhaps even other countries, where I hear they do things differently) conduct their junior-level job searches.
About that broken job system more generally: I’ll try to be back next week with a reply to Louis Menand.
The Academy - why we don't really love it
The Cranky Professor —
... producers tend to become. You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years. And the more self-limiting the profession, the harder it is to acquire the credential and enter into practice, and the tighter the identification between the individual practitioner and the discipline.
And that's from the first page. Read the whole thing - an essay by Louis Menand about the academy.
via Fr. Philip
