Primrose Road

Stanley Fish reviewed Frank Donoghue's The Last Professor: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities last month. Especially interesting here is the relationship between the adjunct "problem" in Research I and smaller liberal arts universities and the rise of the "for-profit" college in recent years:

"What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”"

Is the replacement of professor as teacher of "higher learning"/critical thinking with professor as deliveryperson of employable skills worth lamenting? Good question; worth thinking about, I suppose.