Corporations Join Up With Colleges to Design Curricula – WSJ.com.
This reporting is excellent and important. I commented but this is a topic that I want to think about more. Here is my comment.
“Good news? or, bad news? Here is the view from a former math professor who has been worried about higher education (and all education, for that matter) for a long time. (I comment on education on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com.)
The good news is that students in these programs will likely get a good education. (not assuredly, but likely)
The bad news (and it’s not really news) takes more explaining.
First, in general, students have not been getting a good education. That’s is because much of higher education unscrupulously caters to student “wants”, not student “needs” – which can be quite different things. After all by definition, students don’t yet know their “needs”.
The other main reason takes a little more explaining.
As this article points out, academic freedom is important to society, and it is dangerous to give it up. But, who gave it up? the professors who made their schools and their careers into businesses. They gave up their academic “soul” when, in search of doing more research, earning more money, or whatever, they gave up on the integrity of the educational part of their mission – as I pointed out above. If they did their job as professors (in every sense of the word), there would be no need for corporations on campus to tell them what to do. As Clark Kerr commented in the nineties, the biggest threat to the university is from within the university.”
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