Credentialism, Etc.

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Mar 20 11:59:50 PST 2001



>>From: Yoshie Furuhashi
>>
>>The New York Times September 22, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
>>SECTION: Section 6; Page 78; Column 1; Magazine Desk LENGTH: 3016
>>words HEADLINE: How to Make a Ph.D. Matter BYLINE: By Louis Menand;
>>Louis Menand teaches English at the Graduate Center of the City
>>University of New York ...
>>
>>When the market tightened, professionalism grew and credentialism
>>became wildly overvalued. And the more the academy walled itself
>>off by specialization and credentialism, the more it exacerbated
>>its division from the rest of the educated world....
>
>Which certainly contributed to the marginalization of the liberal
>arts and virtual extinction of the left.
>
>Carl

Instead of raising the standards of hiring, tenure, & promotion in a vain attempt at "professionalism" in the face of increasing proletarianization (part-time faculty, full-time faculty hired on the contract basis, "post-tenure reviews," outright abolition of tenure, etc.), tenured professors should have been mounting a vigorous defense of higher education & public funding for it, creating full-time jobs for which there has existed a measurably increasing need, both on the supply & demand sides (the glut of Ph.D.s & increasing enrollment of undergraduates).

What is tenure for, if not for the protection of political freedom of tenured professors? Why not use it while they still have it?

Every class I teach comes with a _long_ waiting list, often much longer than the list of students enrolled in it, and this despite the fact that many of the courses I teach (Intro to the Humanities, Intro to Fiction, etc.) have doubled their respective class sizes over the last decade or so. Students often complain of large classes & bottleneck courses that lengthen "time to degrees." Surely there is a need for more full-time college teachers; what is lacking is a political will to gain state funding for them.

And there would be even more undergraduates if higher education were free & employed "open admission" as it should!

While Kelley recommends cutting corners to reduce work time, I'd rather have smaller classes -- say, 10-15 students instead of 24 in a composition course, 24 students instead of 45 in an "Intro to X" course. With smaller classes & more full-time teachers, both students & teachers will be happier.

Yoshie



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