On 12 Oct 2010 at 13:45, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > The only question in my mind - and you raise many good challenges even to > the question - is: Would "we", whoever "we" is, be happier 25 years from > now, if there were a City University of Santa Fe offering graduate > education in the things that Santa Fe does best.
"Graduate education" (particularly in the current sense, with its overlay of increasingly bogus "accreditation" standards and standards-enforcement bodies [1], and the creeping cargo-cult management [2] that has already laid much "undergraduate education" low) is neither intensionally nor extensionally identical with "educating graduates". How could "you"-all not be happy (or, more precisely, happier than you would be otherwise) if you and your successors were (among other activities) truly educating graduates "in the things that Santa Fe does best"? That's not a rhetorical question; I really don't find it easy to imagine how someone, engaged in right livelihood and knowledgeable about it (and other things), *wouldn't* enjoy truly educating others (who had come to seek such education and who had given some evidence of being educable as well as willing). On the other hand, I find it very easy to imagine how engaging in "graduate education" as it is (and how it is coming to be) could make someone unhappy. It very often does (and perhaps oftener ought to). Lee Rudolph [1] A couple of years ago, I heard the then-provost of Vanderbilt University on the radio, speaking as a member (perhaps as the chair) of a Federally-chartered commission charged with setting accreditation standards for higher education. They had been charged with creating--and were in the process of pilot testing--a *standardized test* for "critical thinking", whereby to determine how well given institutions of higher learning were teaching "critical thinking". Jesus wept. (The project seems to have sunk out of sight for the time being.) I admit, this was for "undergraduate education", but the trend is there at the graduate level as well, just delayed. [2] I mean this in a sense analogous to Feynman's phrase "cargo-cult physics". University administrators increasingly go through ritual performances that have the *form* of activities that businesses (at least, businesses run by MBAs) go through for (presumably) reasons that bear a demonstrable relation to those businesses' reason for being, and have been validated empirically. These rituals involve an enormous amount of quantification, 5-year-planning, "branding" [3], and so on, but in (I hope) contrast to the practices in businesses, the university practices are entirely ungrounded in the reality of the university (even the tawdry one on the ground, much less the ideal "community of learners"), they are never validated empirically *even on their own terms*, and they consume enormous amounts of time and effort extorted from non-administrative staff (definitely including professors). Yet somehow the cargo plane loaded with goodies never lands! [3] Clark's new brand is "ClarkYOU". I am not kidding. How *could* they? ClarkYOU and the horse you rode in on, pardner. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
