Quote:
|
Originally Posted by !@#$%!
however (however) there remains the matter of personal ethics and intellectual integrity.
the people in charge had a choice to say no, and resist the pressure, and to foster quality over quantity, but they bent over & took the financial sausage, and now they are running the equivalent of a wall street flooded with shitty housing securities, and so the roof caves and it's suddenly and endless pit of doom-- DOOOM!!!
as i was saying before, may jeebus save us.
|
This issue of personal ethics is a real problem. The fact is (in the UK, anyway) that a lot of academics are vain fuckers who like nothing more than to see their name in print and couldn't care less what their name's attached to. These people get promotions because of their swollen CVs and appoint other academics with the same attitude. I know a number of very good academics who are being edged out of the door by infinitely inferior ones, simply because they refuse to play that game. The whole shambles needs a complete rethink.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
what happens at the University level now is that, if a course of study does not have immediate applications to the job market, it gets dumped or ill-funded. witness the dearth of art education in the USA. the humanities are from the old sense of University, which was a place to learna nd in which you learn HOW TO learn, and a place which creates a well-rounded educated person.
nowadays ,University (in USA, I cannot speak for the UK or the world) is a mill for creating new feed for the job market. It is a bullshit thing. witness how many people graduate with "business" degrees.
|
It's exactly the same here. Courses like philosophy, art history, etc., are being forced to incorporate vocational elements into their curriculum in a way that is both impossible for staff to teach and hated by the students themselves - none of whom ever took the course as a fastrack into any kind of career. As you say, it's a complete misunderstanding of what an education in the humanities was meant to provide in the first place.