Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, May 24, 2009

The Academy Is Reaping What We Sowed

Peter Schmidt has an interesting article up in yesterday's AlterNet, directing some very well-aimed criticism for our debased distressed culture of greed at a too-neglected target, the groves of academe:
[T]he nation's elite colleges and universities have taken a financial beating over the past year… Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford all watched their endowments shrink by about 20 percent as a result of investment losses.

Despite all their brainpower, such institutions appear to have failed to learn what every simple farmer knows: you reap what you sow. Elite colleges and professional schools bear a share of the blame for the economic crisis that now plagues them, because it is they who educated and bestowed academic credentials upon many of those who got us into this mess.

It should come as no surprise to them that many on Wall Street and in Washington have proven ethically bankrupt and without regard for people of lesser means, because their admissions policies have done much to ensure such a result… [S]uch institutions rely on standardized admissions tests such as the SAT, even though they know perfectly well that the nation's massive test-preparation industry has severely compromised the reliability of such instruments, turning them into tools for measuring, as much as anything, wealth and willingness to seek unfair advantage.

To improve their odds of having favors done for them by people in positions of power, many selective higher-education institutions also admit mediocre applicants… [C]olleges end up giving the nation's high school students crash courses in cynicism. They teach young people that money talks, fairness is for losers, who you know matters more than what you know, and some people are simply entitled to what others may never attain, no matter how hard they work.

The article doesn't even scratch the surface, of course, in that it doesn't discuss the swelling tide of the ongoing corporatization of public universities, the catastrophic shifts in University policies defined no longer by the long-term commitment to investment in public knowledge and expressivity in the service of general welfare but by considerations of short-term profitability, the intensive infiltration into communities of learning and critical nonconformism of multinational corporations and the ever more ubiquitous insulting harassment of their barking brainless advertisments and strobing logos, the pathetic and absolutely guaranteed-to-fail effort of humanities departments desperate to convince the bomb-builders and statisticians and greedheads that they, too, can produce solid stolid "results" like the "hard sciences" do or churn out "marketable skills" like vocational training programs do, when in fact the humanities produce nothing but more people who are free and more people for whom freedom is worth having in the first place (something altogether different from, and often directly at odds with, the robotic brutalities celebrated as "productivity"), and so on.

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