Hollywood Trumps Harvard – NYTimes.com.
Professors Gates and Oz are just doing what hordes [of] professors and administrators do regularly – act in their own interests, letting us praise “academic virtues”, not them.
I’m a former math professor. After over twenty years inside the tower, I have seen how easy it is to prey on the false belief that professors have any more “..academic virtues..” than anyone else; to paraphrase Mark Twain, the problem is that they are just as bad as the rest of us.
Clark Kerr knew professors. He wrote that he
“.. [had] been startled at how reluctant academics seem to be to treat ethical issues…[inside the academy]..” Kerr also describes what he calls a “new academic paradigm” brought on by a new “me generation” of academics.
To believe that colleges and professors don’t want “…fame and fortune…” allows those profs who do want it to con us.
They regularly con students and parents’ into believing that they are educating their “consumers”.
They con us about their “educational quality” by “solving for the winning solution” in US News metrics.
As early as 1980, David Riesman tried to warn us that,
“…the “wants” of students to which competing institutions, departments, and individual faculty members cater are quite different from the “needs” of students…” (How they do this can be found on my blog inside-higher-ed .)
Realizing that there is nothing special about the stories here should be a step toward readjusting our perceptions, the first step toward fixing the problem.
Recent Comments