Begin forwarded message:
From: Benjamin Kuipers <[email protected]>
Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
To: [email protected]
Cc: "ip" <[email protected]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know
It - NYTimes.com
Dave,
A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
reply:
With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
comprehensively.
First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the
world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
universities to get the very best students from around the world, so
graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to (what
I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very
different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to build
on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
"interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give
an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
involved.
Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions that
one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge created
by a selected community of scholars.
Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must
provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly too
much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
institution support creative thinkers.
Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get laid
off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that
in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a career,
the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and
cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem
with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
perhaps his department needs new leadership.
Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some
of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-disciplinary
work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
framework we have.
Cheers,
Ben
