Curtis Dahlgren
January 28, 2005
War of the (academic) worlds: Mega-U State v. Normally Normal
By Curtis Dahlgren

"Posterity — you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it." — John Quincy Adams

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE THREE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER LEARNING. One was Normally Normal, a small private college that had to refuse "federal aid" in order to preserve as much of its 19th century standards as possible. Then there was WES-CON-sin, a Mega-U. with 40,000 students, 1,000 of whom actually studied; 1,000 more played on one of the 14 athletic teams (6 male sports, 6 female sports, and 2 "miscellaneous" sports). The other 38,000 were there to drink beer and wine, and to "enable" the faculty members to pull down unbelievably high salaries for an unbelievably light work load!

The University of WESCONS, as it was called for short, had a cross-state rivalry with U. Kantdodat State, whose sports teams are called the Golden Teddies. The former mascot, the Bull Dog, was considered "just not nice" anymore.

But why am I writing in the past tense? All of this is occurring in the here and now! Even more curious is — why am I trying to write satire? You can't out-ridicule "Reality" anymore!

I'm reading a book entitled "THIS BEATS WORKING FOR A LIVING, The Dark Secrets of a College Professor," by an anonymous "Professor X." Here are a few excerpts:

"James E. 'Pa' Ferguson in running for governor of Texas in 1918 centered his whole campaign on a fight with the University of Texas. He derisively told of one University professor who had spent two years in an attempt to grow wool on an armadillo's back . . . He predicted that someday other nations would be raising armies to put down the University 'autocracy' . . .

"Unfortunately for the state of higher education, the public has had good reason to believe the worst about professors, not because most of them are wild-eyed radicals bent on overthrowing the system but rather because too few of them have anything to profess. The Ph.D. has become a license to steal, inasmuch as the position of college instructor demands little work, less intelligence, and no courage." This was written by a professor, a "department head"!

He goes on to talk about the "work load" of typical professors, which averaged about 12 hours of teaching per week (except that — with 50 minute "hours" — this amounts to 10 hours a week or less than 400 hours a year). That averages about 1.07 hours of teaching per day in a 365 day year.

However, for the most "prestigious" profs at the most "prestigious" universities, the work load can range all the way down to three hours of teaching per week (or 20 minutes per day on average). Pretty nice "work" if one can get it! Then there's the textbook issue:

Professor "X" says, "Once the professor has gathered sample copies of possible textbooks for his course, he has the choice of selection . . . Certainly it is not the readability of the book that counts. In fact, I have observed that the more literary (readable) a book is, the less likely it is to be adopted. I think that intuitively professors shy away from well-written books because they realize that their lectures [would] suffer by comparison . . . Inasmuch as most professors are liberal, they select textbooks written by men with a liberal image . . . The result is that most of them are wretchedly written, dull, ponderous — and liberal . . .

"Inasmuch as few people read scholarly writing, the reality has been made a virtue, and the fewer readers a man has the more scholarly his writing must be. Therefore scholars have become mere legmen for journalists and novelists, people who are trained in a skillful and literate use of words. The failing there is that journalists and novelists all too frequently do not let the truth stand in the way of a good story . . . And God help the poor professor who tries to combine both good research and good writing."

ON ELITISM: "It will come as no surprise to anyone who has listened to a commencement speech in the last ten years to know that a spirit of elitism has been fostered among students — and deliberately — by politicians.

"'You are the best-educated, smartest, healthiest generation in history,' they say. Not so well known is the fact that many professors pander this same line to their classes. They do this through the same approach that politicians use: telling the students how smart, how well educated they are. And they do it by indirection.

"They have promoted the concept that 'learning can be fun.' Learning can be interesting; it can be rewarding; and it can be exciting. But it is not fun. It is work.

"Preaching the doctrine that learning can be fun soon leads to the student attitude that learning SHOULD be fun, implying that society has an obligation to make life a barrel of laughs. The result is an antiwork attitude which already is far too prevalent in America . . .

"In short, too many professors pander to their audience and help the student to believe what his feelings of inadequacy have led him to assert: that he is smart and educated, that youth equates with eternal wisdom, that age equates with obstinacy and wrongness, and the past has no lessons for the present."

Trickle-down academics: This university/college mode of thinking about education trickles down, like the 2-story outhouse, to the public high schools, public middle-schools, and public elementary schools. Thus we have little Johnnies who can't read, but would surely tell you how well they can, if they could only write it out!

P.S. This book, "THIS BEATS WORKING FOR A LIVING," was published in 1973 (Arlington House). I wouldn't change a thing about Professor X's analysis, even though more than 30 years have passed and the book is "out of print" no doubt. For a somewhat more recent book on the subject, get "Profscam" by Charles J. Sykes.

I mentioned some other books in my last column also. I probably failed to mention many good ones; one would be "Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel" by Mike S. Adams. Another is "Weapons of Mass Distortion: The coming meltdown of the liberal media" by Brent Bozell. Plus, "Destructive Generation," by Horowitz and Collier.

Maybe "Pa" Ferguson had it right, and foreign nations may someday be raising armies to put down our universities.

© Curtis Dahlgren

 

The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
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Curtis Dahlgren

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in the frozen tundra of Michigan's U.P., and is the author of "Massey-Harris 101." His career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton... (more)

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