Columbia Prof Shows Naivete of Chairs of Religion Departments

Since this is LONG, let me begin with my response to Mark Taylors's recent OPEd in the NY Times.

Professor Taylor seemingly has little understanding of WHY tenure exists. If I were asked to grade his rambling piece for a freshman class in rhetoric, the best I could give the younger man would be a C or even a C-.

1. Dr. Taylor confuses tenure with the unrelated issue of academic over specialization. What makes him think that replacing his own Dept of Religion with an arbitrary new entity would improve matters? Dr. Taylor may be equating over specialization in academia with feather bedding by unions.

To take his thesis to its illogical conclusion, back in the 50s we probably should have ditched academic studies in Farsi since we all knew Persia was irrelevant to the world's future. Or at least we did know that after WWII.

2. He seems to believe that some mystical force will select for the best of these new interdisciplinary studies. I think Dr. Taylor has faith in the free market magic hand but misunderstands of natural selection. Evolution does not automatically yield "better" animals.

This much faith I do not have.

2. Comparing "graduate education" to "Detroit" is at best a mixed metaphor. Detroit got into this mess by loosing any concept of long term planning. BTW .. our great automotive competitors .. Toyota et al, have a system a lot like tenure.

3. Blaming tenure for the lack of funding for jobs in the humanities is akin to blaming the papacy for lack of jobs in the priesthood. Catholic friends tell me there is a huge need for priests.

4. "Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments." WHO does this dear Professor of Religion propose SHOULD do the regulating? Olympia? Trained administrators?

5. The Chair finishes with six principles for action. I regrouped his goals into five:

A. Dump existing curricula and departments in favor of new interdisciplinary curricula.

"It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water."

Does he really think we would do better job if we replaced biology, ecology, epidemiology, geography .. with a new disciple called "Water?"

B. Redesign universities so each is more specialized:

". Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne., "

First off, schools already vary immensely in there areas of expertise. More importantly, at least in the sciences, we need more interaction to deal with the huge expansion of knowledge.

Again I may be "of too little faith" to understand this, but it seems to me that the great opportunity for students at a place like UW or even at Columbia is to "mix" with a rich, interdisciplinary academic word.

C. Do away with the thesis:

" For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce theses in alternative formats."

This reminds me of one of those misbegotten high school history classes where they replace memorizing the Gettysburg address with arranging the words around Mr. Lincoln's head using Adobe Photoshop.

If I were grading Mr. Taylor on this essay, I would give him a gentleman's C. How is it consistent to argue for more interdisciplinary training and at the same time diss the concept that once in ones' life you need to show that you can put together a complex set of ideas? I think Dr. Taylor may mistake the admittedly archaic form in which we require such ideas to be presented with the need for such dissertations to have content.

D. Look for new ways students can use their educations.

"Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained."

Hell, he got one right though the connection to his thesis is weak so he still gets a C.

E. Replace tenure with work contracts.

"Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the
programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This
policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers,
scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive
while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills."

I will not lower his grade to a D, but this professor should consider how effective short terms for managers and LACK of personal investment in the businesses they manage has helped American industry. Is AIG a good model for academia?

There is a final issue, not raised by this essay. Tenure does serve the purpose of academic freedom but it also acts as a form of payment in return for willingness of very talented people to commit their lives to careers in which the annual wage is usually far below the equivalent outside of academe. Look at Taylor's own discipline, how many young people would even consider a career devoted to understanding Mayayana Buddhism or Shiite Islam, if they knew they would receive lousy pay AND no job security? The going rate for people who do what I do in the clinical world or pharma, is easily four times what it is here. BUT, without tenure I would not be free to explore new ideas unless my bosses agreed.

April 27, 2009
OP-CONTRIBUTOR

End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate
programs in American universities produce a product for which there is
no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and
develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in
subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one
other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost
(sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into
sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for
decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation
of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work "The Conflict of the
Faculties," wrote that universities should "handle the entire content
of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor,
so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public
teacher or professor appointed as its trustee."

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to
separation where there ought to be collaboration and to
ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for
example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with
little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication
become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the
trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that
all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A
colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his
dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational
system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate
those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own
pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these
students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid
graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching,
universities couldn't conduct research or even instruct their growing
undergraduate populations. That's one of the main reasons we still
encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper
to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as
little as $5,000 a course -- with no benefits -- than it is to hire
full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard
for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the
illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical
presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there
will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are
self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review.
While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight
responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To
complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted
tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for
the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own
departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century,
colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be
rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to
make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin
with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and
proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The
division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must
be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex
adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become
cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who
had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never
considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the
world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate
understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines
are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on
questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology,
sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in
comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is
restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be
transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education,
and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving
programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one
should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly
changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around
which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law,
Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and
Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water
will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity,
quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific,
technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political
and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be
adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical,
religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as
much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts,
social and natural sciences with representatives from professional
schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work,
theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple
perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and
unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not
need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to
form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be
able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong
department in French, for example, and the other a strong department
in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can
be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have
already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the
Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities,
where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a
market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more
footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses
continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly
certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press
print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is
less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many
years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not
write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats
from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate
students should likewise be encouraged to produce theses in
alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students.
Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they
are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare
for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new
approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life
issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit
organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate
in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly
changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended
to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with
little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once
tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor
to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to
assume responsibilities like administration and student advising.
Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the
programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This
policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers,
scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive
while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, "Do not do what I do; rather,
take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never
imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it." My hope is
that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency
and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia,
is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere:
Reflections on Dying and Living.”