Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 546.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com> (10)
Subject: Re: 14.0543 corporate universities
[2] From: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@prairienet.org> (42)
Subject: Re: 14.0543 corporate universities
[3] From: mc9809@mclink.it (96)
Subject: corporate university: Dewey's response
[4] From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance) (44)
Subject: Re: 14.0543 corporate universities
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 07:39:47 +0000
From: "Norman D. Hinton" <hinton@springnet1.com>
Subject: Re: 14.0543 corporate universities
I guess it depends on what those people mean by "university" --
MacDonald's has run "Hamburger University" for many years, teaching
people how to flip burgers without breaking them, how to avoid getting
burned with deep-frying fat, how to become an Assistant Manager, etc.
I find that only amusing.
I do think, though, that the chance that some CEO or other exec would be
able to create a "real University" (or, from what I've seen of Colleges
of Business including the one at my school) laughable and dismaying, and
I wish we could nail down the rights to the word, as if it were a wine
variety....
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 07:40:07 +0000
From: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@prairienet.org>
Subject: Re: 14.0543 corporate universities
On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Humanist Discussion Group wrote:
> "Managing education as a business project" (from the interview) isn't
> exactly the first thing that comes to my mind when contemplating a
> university education. I mean, I wonder what the role of things like
> critical thinking and the liberal arts, free inquiry and, God forbid,
> dissent, are at places like this. Or are those things to be relegated to
> poorly funded and all too easy to marginalize "public"
institutions? What's
> next -- what's the next cultural or social value not of one's own making
> that's going to be appropriated? Religion? Opps, I just remembered
"Divine
> Right" George Baer.
>
> LEO
>
Much as I would like to agree with Leo's position here, I am afraid
the degradation of the Liberal Arts is far ahead of what has been a
consideration of any public forum such as this.
I am sad to report, and have been for over a decade, that even that
august institution known as Benedictine Univeristy, where I hang my
professorial hat, has been organized for some time such that anyone
can graduate without ever having read a single Shakespeare play.
Personally, and professionally, I abhor the idea that Liberal Arts,
such as they are, would not require the reading of even one single,
solitary Shakespeare play, much less half a dozen.
I remember reading Julius Caesar in 8th grade, and then it was just
about always at least one more Shakespeare play per year.
Well, I won't go on about it. . .but I DID receive my degree in:
"Human-Machine Interfaces" from the College of Liberal Arts, at the
Univerisity of Illinois, some three decades ago, simply because the
UI didn't have the concept of the Computer Revolution at the time--
but, if the truth be known, even though I tested out of English for
the entire degree, I don't think that the courses I would have seen
otherwise would have included any Shakespeare plays.
Still. . .I just don't like the idea of a Liberal Arts degree, from
such highly ranked institutions as the two I mentioned NOT having a
requirement to be at least somewhat read in English literature.
Alway nice to hear from you!
Wishing You The Very Best For The Holidays,
Michael S. Hart
<hart@pobox.com>
Project Gutenberg
"Ask Dr. Internet"
Executive Director
Internet User ~#100
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Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 07:40:34 +0000
From: mc9809@mclink.it
Subject: corporate university: Dewey's response
I agree with what Willard says (especially his second point).
The idea of a corporate university is a chilling, though (I fear)
inevitable one.
We don't have to forget our responsabilities in this situation. What I
mean by "our" is the responsability of the university, or more
precisely the Humboldtian model of university. This model has
reached a crisis point. Responses to this crisis vary (some
universities, not only in Usa, have been flirting with companies, and
we can see now the results). But I will not go into further details, as
in the last ten years many good books have been published on this
topic both in Europe and North America (Willard will certainly
remember one: Anne Matthews, Bright College Years: Inside the American
Campus Today).
What I would like to say here, is that the "Humboldt vs. Ford" game goes
back to the
first half of the century (when the "old" world of education begins to feel
the
consequences of the industrialization).
Hope Humanists will forgive me for this long quote:
John Dewey, _The Middle works, 1899-1924_,
Volume 8: 1915, Southern Illinois University Press,
London and Amsterdam, Feffer & Simons, Inc., pp. 411-413.
EDUCATION VS. TRADE-TRAINING: REPLY
TO DAVID SNEDDEN
Sir: I have written unclearly indeed when Dr. Snedden
interprets me as giving, even in appearance, "aid and comfort to the
opponents of a broader, richer and more effective program of
education," or else Dr. Snedden has himself fallen a victim to the
ambiguity of the word vocational. I would go farther than he is
apparently willing to go in holding that education should be
vocational, but in the name of a genuinely vocational education I
object to the identification of vocation with such trades as can be
learned before the age of, say, eighteen or twenty; and to the
identification of education with acquisition of specialized skill in
the management of machines at the expense of an industrial
intelligence based on science and a knowledge of social problems and
conditions. I object to regarding as vocational education any
training which does not have as its supreme regard the development
of such intelligent initiative, ingenuity and executive capacity as
shall make workers, as far as may be, the masters of their own
industrial fate. I have my doubts about theological predestination,
but at all events that dogma assigned predestinating power to an
omniscient being; and I am utterly opposed to giving the power of
social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any
group of fallible men no matter how well-intentioned they may be.
Dr. Snedden has been fortunate if he has not met those who are not
so well-intentioned, and if he is so situated that he believes that
"the interests" are a myth of muckrakers and that none of "the
interests" have any designs upon the control of educational machinery.
Dr. Snedden's criticisms of my articles seem to me couched in
such general terms as not to touch their specific contentions. I
argued that a separation of trade education
and general education of youth has the inevitable tendency to make
both kinds of training narrower, less significant and less effective
than the schooling in which the material of traditional education is
reorganized to utilize the incus trial subject-matter -- active, scientific
and social -- of the present-day environment. Dr. Snedden would
come nearer to meeting my points if he would indicate how such a
separation is going to make education "broader, richer and more
effective." If he will undertake this task there will be something
specific to discuss. In order that the discussion may be really
definite, I suggest that he tell the readers of the New Republic what
he thinks of the Gary system, and whether he thinks this system
would have been possible in any of its significant features except by
a mutual interpretation of the factors of general education and of
industry. And as his article may be interpreted as an apology for the
Cooley bill in Illinois, I should like to ask him whether he is familiar
with the educational reorganisationn going on in Chicago, and
whether he thinks that it would be helped or hindered if the Chicago
schools came under a dual administration, with one agency looking
after a traditional bookish education and another after a specific
training for mechanical trades. I should like to know, too, how such
educational cleavage is to be avoided unless each type of school
extends its work to duplicate that of the other type.
Apart from light on such specific questions, I am regretfully
forced to the conclusion that the difference between us is not so
much narrowly educational as it is profoundly political and social.
The kind of vocational education in which I am interested is not one
which will "adapt" workers to the existing industrial regime; I am not
sufficiently in love with the regime for that. It seems to me that the
business of all who would not be educational time servers is to
resist every move in this direction, and to strive for a kind of
vocational education which will first alter the existing industrial
system, and ultimately transform it.
I can readily understand how a practical administrator becomes
impatient with the slowness of social processes and becomes eager
for a short-cut to desired results. He has a claim upon the sympathy
of those who do not have to face the immediate problems. But as long
as there are as many debatable questions as Dr. Snedden admits there
are, and as long as conditions are as mobile as he indicates, it is
surely well that those
outside the immediate administrative field insist that particular
moves having short-run issues in view be checked up by
consideration of issues more fundamental although remoter.
( Signed ) JOHN DEWEY
[First published in New Republic 3 (I9I5): 42-43. For letter to
which this was a reply, see this volume, pp. 460-65.]
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 07:41:00 +0000
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 14.0543 corporate universities
Comrade Willard,
Leo Klein's posting along with yours seem to make a set of assumptions
that I find quite puzzling.
1) Post-secondary institutions of higher education successfully teach
critical thinking.
2) Schools for the trade-oriented mechanical arts do not teach critical
thinking.
These assumption are implicitly marshalled by many defenders of either
liberal arts or techno-know-how to propose the adoption of a rhetorical
position that posists a coveted prize as the outcome of an educational
process and which then moves to argue for access to resources for that
particular process. It is often wise to disentangle "turf", "outcomes" and
"access".
The social good can also be served by adopting the perspectives that the
pedagogue is the receiver of the gift. Students keep teachers keen. In
some ways, we can imagine educational institutions of whatever stripe as
parking grounds for a surplus labour pool. The gift of student bodies to
the institution may not be the most uplifting of social metaphors. And it
does mark the teaching professions as belonging in the same ambit as the
care giving professions. And most subscribers to Humanist will understand
the expression "pink collar ghetto".
The humanist is the artful practicioner of the _convivium_. Does the
practice of this art cease _extra muros_?
You allude to the corrent use of words and you imply that the proper names
of the places of activities can change the world. Michael R. Saso in his
introductory material to the _Taoist Cookbook_ reminds us that there are
very different attitudes besides the Confucian to the efficacy of words.
The Taoist would toss away the name like a husk once a full meditation on
its meanings were complete. Naming is but one way of doing things with
words. Threading and unraveling are others.
Can anyone who has never swung a machete to cut cane in sweltering heat
truly appreciate certain evocative passages in Carribean diaspora
literature? I would argue that both the academic and the technical
instructor model empathy that permit the leaps of imagination that ground
critical thinking. Whether that model is resisted or accepted is the
students prerogative. If class distinctions fall away from within the
pedagogical sitution, is there hope for the world beyond?
I'm off to experience the Canadian physical equivalent of cane-cutting:
shoveling snow but in a far different social dynamic than
colonlial metayage. And then some rum with friends.
--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
Member of the Evelyn Letters Project
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dchamber/evelyn/evtoc.htm
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