How to tell a story

How to tell a story

Friday, September 11, 2015

Important essay on the dying university

Why We Should Fear University, Inc. http://nyti.ms/1K8JSUV

"Having spent a life in the academy, I now find myself in the increasingly common position of having one foot out and one foot in. I have finished my Ph.D., and I have no long-term job. I am an instructor but not a professor; I am on campus but not of it, an itinerant visitor. In this standing I join countless thousands of others whose contracts don’t extend past the next semester. Meanwhile, a new generation of students has become acclimated to the experience of college as luxury resort hotel, one they will pay for in student loans for the rest of their lives. Every day, there are fewer who remember what campus once was, or would want to fight for it. The colleges themselves, motivated by only the desire to please their alumni and their boards by advancing in the relentless competition up the rankings, cannot conceive of a world beyond the viewbook."