My brother pointed me to a painful, well-written article on the collapse of the UK degree: The great university con: how the British degree lost its value.
Among many other pieces of this slow, agonizing, and entirely predictable collapse, is the Jarratt report. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:
The report viewed Universities as enterprises not unlike a factory, and in which students were the customer.
Compare this to the Berkeley student protests, and the famous “Bodies on the Gears” speech by Mario Savio, in 1964:
Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be—have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product. Don’t mean … Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings!
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
Comments
Stéfan van der Walt
stefanv, berkeley.eduThe twist, I guess, is that the student no longer is the raw material, but also the customer. The customer who willingly submits to a process in which they know they will not be altered much, but after which they will carry a certain brand that will allow them to move on to the next green pasture. When a university peddles too much to the needs of the students, then the students do not work, and become self-entitled. When they err on the side of satisfying industry, the students suffer but end up with some skills—but often not skills that benefit society much. Instead, universities should teach correct ways of reasoning about the world, so that candidates who walk out their doors can contribute to and build upon, in a healthy way, all that which has previously been accumulated.