Carrol
On 9/2/2011 7:06 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:28 AM, Chris Brooke<cb632 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 02/09/2011 02:22, "Jim Farmelant"<farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>>
>>> We know that from statements that Smith had made concerning his own
>>> university experiences, that he claimed that he got far more out of his
>>> undergraduate studies at Glasgow University than he did from his graduate
>> studies
>>> at Oxford...
>>
>> Yes, indeed. In a letter from Oxford, Smith wrote that, "It will be his own
>> fault if anyone should endanger his health at Oxford by excessive study,
>> our
>> only business here being to go to prayers twice a day and to lecture twice
>> a
>> week". And when preparing one of the later editions of the Wealth of
>> Nations
>> for publication, Smith added this entry to the index: "Oxford, the
>> professorships there, sinecures".
>>
>> C.
>>
>
>
> Without picking out anyone in particular, I think the same-as-it-ever-was
> tone of a lot of the discussion here verges on ridiculous… particularly in
> the context of contemporary struggles over education.
>
> Yes, since long before Smith there's been great ambivalence about
> institutions of higher education… or whatever you want to call them. The
> material conditions associated with such institutions and the class status
> of the intended enrollees, much less the social meaning of a degree, has
> changed just a tad since 1750. On the one hand, a great deal of the
> difference between English and Scottish universities lies in the clearly
> subordinate status of the latter to the former due in no small part to the
> effective colonization of the latter by the former… along these lines, I
> wonder what Smith and so many others thought of William and Mary or Harvard?
>
> Despite all this, however, it was much more the German model of education
> that informed the development of public/land grant universities in the US.
> Of course, the relationship between various strata of the citizenry,
> business, science, technology and the canon was deeply contested, but to
> treat Edinburgh, Oxford, Harvard, UVA, UofM, MSU and the many many Normal
> colleges, much less Swarthmore, Skidmore, Earlham, Knox, Grinnell, Mills,
> Pomona, or Howard, Tuskegee and the 1890s public universities as having more
> in common in 1900 w/r/t their entrepreneurial and/or disembedded and
> disembodied character is materially unsustainable.
>
> You don't have to have an uncritical stance on the ideological role of
> colleges and universities to be less than blase about the deskilling and
> deprofessionalization of education workers, much less the
> intended-yet-always-implicit denigration of students and the meaning of
> education. Sure, much about the Cold War explosion of the
> university-science-industrial complex sucked. Sure, a great deal of
> disabling crap was, has been and is taught to the last three or four
> generations of first-persons-in-family-to-attend-college. Sure, there are
> intelligent, educated, cosmopolitan and political people who got that way
> without college - public or private. But the glib dismissal ("Yeah, well,
> whatever, higher ed's always sucked… just look what Adam Smith said.") of
> the real consequences for real people of the neoliberal and neoconservative
> attack on education - primary, secondary or higher - is pretty irritating.
> It not professor's salaries or benefits either that's at issue, it is the
> way the attack on higher education is an attack on public space, public
> discourse, the ever-so-slight democratization of the state, and the mere
> idea that the reification of markets, militarism, and individualism might
> could just be fetishized horseshit.
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