On Mon, 14 Mar 2011 22:51:43 -0500 "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
> ***This fits in someplace. Newman noted that the corrupt 18th-c
> equivalent
> of a dormitory bull session, with no instruction or discipline
> involved,
> produced several generations of treat men.
I take it that Newman was referring to the 18th century English universities (i.e. Oxford & Cambridge) rather than the Scottish universities. Back in the 18th century, Adam Smith in his "The Wealth of Nations" harshly criticized Oxford, arguing that the quality of instruction provided there was of inferior quality in comparison to the instruction provided in the Scottish universities. Smith himself had studied first at Glasgow and later at Oxford, and by his own account, he was quite unhappy at Oxford. In "The Wealth of Nations," Smith argued that the very fact that the English universities were much better endowed than their Scottish counterparts, was behind this inferiority. Oxford and Cambridge could afford to provide their faculty with generous salaries thereby undermining incentives for dons to become good teachers. The Scottish universities on the other hand, could not afford to pay their professors decent salaries. Therefore, most of them were dependent on the collection of fees that offered voluntarily by their students, with the students determining for themselves how much to pay. In Smith's view, this gave them a strong incentive to pay heed to the quality of their lectures.
However, it is possible that Adam Smith was perhaps missing the point here, since he was basically assuming that higher education was something took place mostly in the lecture hall. a natural enough assumption for a professor to make, but probably quite wrong as Newman seems to have realized, since in fact probably most higher education actually takes place mostly outside the classroom and lecture halls in the bull sessions that Carrol referred too.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math
> In the 1950s and early
> '60s
> campus leisure increased considerably, and college costs were low
> enough
> that relatively few students worked very many outside hours. Demands
> on
> faculty were relatively light. The phrase "publish or perish" goes
> back a
> long ways, but it is remarkable how many full professors even in
> many major
> schools had published rather lightly. Certainly no pressure to
> publish a
> book for tenure. Faculty had almost feudal privileges in their
> classrooms, and many classrooms were not much more than bull
> sessions.
> There was growing pressure to eliminate freshman composition. (The
> Harvard
> professor who originated that monstrosity spent the rest of his
> life
> condemning it and hoping for its liquidation. "Writing" bears no
> relation to
> even literary intelligence and it is a sort of torture to impose a
> standardized skill in writing on students as their passport to a
> semi-decent
> job. School is leisure or it is not school. That is, if freedom
> consists in
> living in the present without being terrorized by the future, and
> if
> learning is in any way linked to the freedom of the learner. (Job
> skills
> simply don't belong in schools; they should be part of the job.
> Probably
> Marx had this in mind when he suggested that child labor would be
> part of a
> good society, that labor of course being plentifully interlaced
> with
> learning and just lain loafing.) When the old recess was replaced
> with gym
> class, part of what makes school school disappeared; this is not
> against
> gym classes; it is against the whole day being spent in class. Long
> before I
> became a Marxist I was becoming uncomfortable with the role of the
> professor
> as gate-keeper, standing at the door of western civilization with a
> flaming
> sword to keep
>
> ***Only in developed capitalist nations do old age pensions become
> a
> necessity for a decent life: and what they do is separate, to some
> extent,
> the working life from the future. This is perhaps one of the
> supreme
> cruelties of the present society: men and women must worry all their
> life to
> insure a decent retirement, and leisure in any full sense is only
> achievable
> after retirement.
>
> to be continued, I hope.
>
> Carrol
>
>
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