Higher education in impractical subjects

[_Physics Guy]

According to your formulation, higher education should educate in various skills involved in producing information, but the skill of consuming information should be classified as a luxury good and left to whim of the marketplace.

Under these conditions, a given set of people will learn (in the university, at taxpayer expense) to produce science, art, religion, propaganda, or the mutually agreed-upon fictions of money and justice--but consumers will lack the basic information (and critical thinking skills) to understand and wisely consume these goods, because consumption skills are a luxury good and should be left to the free market to provide.

Hmm. I didn't think of it that way, but you have a point.

The distinction between consumption and production is not a deeply-held dogma of mine. It's an idea that strike me a couple of years ago after reading that one blog comment, and I haven't had much chance to examine it. I'm not sure whether foxes or hedgehogs are better (I'm still enough of a fox to have that excerpt of Berlin's Tolstoy essay saved on my laptop) but age tends to make hedgehogs of us. Few of my colleagues have time for debates like this, and no doubt this is part of why things are as they are.

So okay, there's actually a lot to be said for educating consumers. Is the distinction between consumption and production really capricious? It might not hit the mark. From the viewpoint of an advertising executive, after all, the consumer is the ultimate creator. The consumer produces the market, and the producer merely consumes that demand. The agent suffers and the patient acts.

It still seems to me, though, that there is some kind of distinction to be made and that making it is important. There may be a tragedy of the commons problem, where it's bad for everyone if no-one has skills in consumption, but one's own lack of production skills is what most hurts individuals.

[_Physics Guy]

[B]usiness language (or whatever technical) field is by definition limited and particular to that field and by design as far away from metalinguistic concerns as possible. Literature, by contrast, is marked off from other kinds of language precisely because it is grand concern is language as a social technology, and everything that follows from it (story, narrative, myth, culture, and so on).

I think you are unfairly comparing the best of the humanities with the worst of business or engineering. Most undergrad term papers are not jewels of human culture. You yourself were just saying that most contemporary scholarship in your field is mindlessly turning out templates. And even at the high end great Homer often outright snores.

Why should business be narrow? By definition it's whatever can extract a buck from a human. The high end of business writing ought to be very high. If Shakespeare himself were going to college today, what would he study? Probably not four-hundred-year-old plays.

[_Morley]

If Shakespeare himself were going to college today, what would he study? Probably not four-hundred-year-old plays.

Please tell me you're joking.

[_Morley]

On second thought, I think you're serious.

If Shakespeare himself were going to college today, what would he study? Probably not four-hundred-year-old plays.

I'm going to guess that it's because playwright Walmart Shakespeare (in either past or present incarnations) wouldn't fit into the 'producing' subset.

[_Chap]

Fortunately, acquiring a scientific education does not always result in the individual concerned thinking he or she can reduce the complexity of human society and culture to simple binary oppositions.

[_Maksutov]

Fortunately, acquiring a scientific education does not always result in the individual concerned thinking he or she can reduce the complexity of human society and culture to simple binary oppositions.

Just the opposite.

[_Symmachus]

I think you are unfairly comparing the best of the humanities with the worst of business or engineering.

I'm just comparing the averages as I have seen them in teaching all kinds of majors, very few of which have been in humanities fields. My best writer the last time I taught writing was majoring in actuarial science (but he also liked to read novels on his own).

Most undergrad term papers are not jewels of human culture.

True and irrelevant.

You yourself were just saying that most contemporary scholarship in your field is mindlessly turning out templates.

More irrelevance. What I was saying is that their ideas are simulacra of each other; I didn't say that what they are publishing is poorly written qua technical skill, which is what this discussion has largely been about.

And even at the high end great Homer often outright snores.

Given that you see little difference between "the high end" of business writing and Shakespeare, I doubt you've ever seriously read Homer, though you have probably looked for several hours at some words on pages that had a cover with the words "Homer: The Odyssey" on it.

Why should business be narrow? By definition it's whatever can extract a buck from a human.

Question asked, question answered.

The high end of business writing ought to be very high.

And yet it isn't in comparison even to some of the worst writing on Mormondiscussions.com.

If Shakespeare himself were going to college today, what would he study? Probably not four-hundred-year-old plays.

Sounds like the beginning of a first-year essay on Homer.

[_moksha]

If Shakespeare himself were going to college today, what would he study? Probably not four-hundred-year-old plays.

I think he would catch up on some of the events between the discovery of the New World and today before starting a new play, perhaps Two Gentlemen of Palo Alto.

[_NorthboundZax]

A recent statement from AAUP (American Association of University Professors) that is relevant to this subject.

In recent years, the disciplines of the liberal arts, once universally regarded as central to the intellectual life of the university, have been steadily moved to the periphery and increasingly threatened—by some administrators, elected officials, journalists, and parents of college-age children. The study of the history of human societies and forms of human expression is now too often construed as frivolous, and several colleges and universities have recently announced the wholesale elimination of liberal arts departments. Politicians have proposed linking tuition to the alleged market value of given majors. Students majoring in literature, art, philosophy, and history are routinely considered unemployable in the technology and information economy, despite the fact that employers in that economy strenuously argue that liberal arts majors make great tech-sector workers precisely because they are trained to think critically and creatively, and to adapt to unforeseen circumstances.

The American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities are not disciplinary organizations, but we believe that institutions of higher education, if they are truly to serve as institutions of higher education, should provide more than narrow vocational training and should seek to enhance students’ capacities for lifelong learning. This is as true of open-access institutions as it is of highly selective elite colleges and universities. The disciplines of the liberal arts—and the overall benefit of a liberal education—are exemplary in this regard, for they foster intellectual curiosity about questions that will never be definitively settled—questions about justice, about community, about politics and culture, about difference in every sense of the word. All college students and not solely a privileged few should have opportunities to address such questions as a critical part of their educational experience. And the disciplines of the liberal arts are central to the ideal of academic freedom, as well, because the liberal arts, by their nature, require free rein to pursue truth wherever it may lead. As a result, they provide an intellectual bulwark for academic freedom.

Almost eighty years ago, in their joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the AAUP and AAC&U emphasized that “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good” and that “the common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition.” The free search for truth and its free exposition in the liberal arts are essential components of a functioning democracy. Higher education’s contributions to the common good and to the functioning of our democracy are severely compromised when universities eliminate and diminish the liberal arts.

https://www.aaup.org/news/joint-statement-aacu-liberal-arts

I am kind of surprised that they haven't been hitting this more than they do. The statement seems rather reactive when it could be a far stronger position statement. I still think there is a lot to the idea that having robust liberal arts programs makes for a better society, whether or not the skills learned make for great jobs training - although this statement does not touch on that at all.