
Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University but Don’t - leephillips
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/dear-parents-everything-you-need-to-know-about-your-son-and-daughters-university-but-dont
======
cafard
Those who become professors tend to spend their college years around those of
similar inclinations. Once they become professors they have to deal with the
general population, and I think this can be a shock. Very little that I have
read about the universities of other years (going far back) suggests to me
that there was ever an age in which a large majority of the students were in
it for the learning.

It is perhaps the case that students read less and so write worse than they
did once. But having worked as a copy editor long ago, I can tell you that a
lot of Ph.D.s wrote pretty damn badly before most of HN was born. (OK, Ph.D.s
in the social sciences and E.D.s are mostly what I'm thinking of.)

And "Finally, the very act of employing, empowering, and often elevating such
people [term employees] denigrates real scholars and scholarship by
definition." I haven't heard of a lot of empowered adjuncts. And if that
adjunct happens to have what it takes to teach freshman composition or an
introductory survey course, I don't see the denigration. As for real
scholarship, well, not everything published in a refereed journal is more than
formally scholarship. One could, for example, compile an entertaining
anthology of things that writers and highly qualified critics have said about
_Proceedings of the Modern Language Association_.

Finally, what does a parent expect who sends a child off to school unable to
write well and disinclined to read? It does seem to be a premise of US
education that if you keep people in a classroom setting long enough then
something will happen. But why should parents believe that?

------
pnathan
If this is news to you, dear HN reader, then you _really_ haven't been paying
attention to the discourse surrounding education in the last 30 years of the
United States. I believe the big work to hit the popular mind initially was
Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, which _essentially says the same thing_
, but the disease was slightly less advanced then.

As an interesting linguistic note: the _liberal_ arts were conceived of as the
arts for free men; rather then the techincal things - technicalities - which
were to be done by slaves. A careful reading of michaelochurch's polemics
should suggest to you that this has not changed in substance in the general
case.

No computer science will save you from someone who can out-rhetoric you.

~~~
mooreds
Loved the reference to 'Gorgias', which, incidentally, I read in my college
days at a liberal arts school.

Rhetoric isn't the path to truth, but it can sure help with power.

Here it is online:
[http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.html)

Edit: added link to 'Gorgias'.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Finished reading. The text is cut short on this page, but even after reading
what is there, I am left amazed. A few points (mind you, I haven't read
anything from the classic besides what they managed to force me to ingest in
school, which as you can imagine is not much):

\- Though I found the discussion overtly long (yay my non-existent attention
span), it's surprisingly easy to read; I expected ancient Greek texts to be
much more difficult in terms of language and style.

\- All the whining I see and do about manipulators, liars, salesmen and
contemporary advertising industry, Plato has described thousands of years ago.
It's like, fuck, why do I bother rediscovering and repeating what ancient
philosophers knew all along, and why the society doesn't seem to be learning
from those lessons?

\- I should have learned this already, but I'm still amazed every time I read
an old text describing _exactly the same problems_ we have in the contemporary
world. Here's me thinking they are unique to our age, but apparently King
Solomon _is_ right, and there truly is nothing new under the Sun, at least in
human relations - we keep repeating the same patterns, generation after
generation.

\- I guess I'm starting to appreciate the stated reasons for classic
education.

Thank you for linking to the text.

~~~
Luc
There's another link on that page that has the full text (a fair bit is
missing in the web version):
[http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.1b.txt](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/gorgias.1b.txt)

------
hbosch
In all honesty this writer sounds utterly curmudgeonly. He writes passionately
about what "real education" is, dispenses some good ol' Hard Facts About Life,
and urges us all to put down those dang computer-devices and just _learn_!
This is classic finger-pointing, angsty whining.

I'm sorry, but the conceit here flagrantly disregards modern reality. Learning
is easier now than it's ever been. People don't need to give undivided
attention to professors anymore. Kids today can listen with one ear, read with
one eye... Do their research with one tab and chat on Facebook with another.
The education system in generally feels like an industry that is just barely
stepping into a technological age in terms of format, expectations, and
content.

I don't think young people need to force themselves to regress to the antique
stylings of almost all Universities, I think Universities need to realize
their systems do not suit young people. And that's their fault.

~~~
rayiner
> Kids today can listen with one ear, read with one eye... Do their research
> with one tab and chat on Facebook with another.

Can you code with one tab open to Facebook chat? Because the overwhelming
consensus here on HN is that coding requires concentration and lack of
interruptions. So does learning.

Technology doesn't change the basic biological processes of learning, and the
fact is that technology has proven itself to be a fantastic failure as applied
to education. Remember the "multi-media in every classroom" shit that failed
in the 1990's? Same thing with iPads today. Research even shows that taking
notes on a computer doesn't help you retain material as well as writing it on
paper. Until we invent neural downlinks Matrix-style, educational technology
peaked with the invention of the printed book 500 years ago.

~~~
cableshaft
I was too smart for the pace of learning at my public junior and high school
(not too smart for college, but that's another story), and regularly either
doodled, wrote stories or poetry, or programmed simple text-based games in TI-
BASIC on my calculator in order to get through my classes, while looking up
periodically to make sure I was still following everything they said. And this
was during the 1990's that I was in junior/high school.

I graduated with almost a perfect GPA too, so at least in my case, yeah, I
could code and learn at the same time.

I still can for some coding tasks professionally, but not for all. I'll have
podcasts or Netflix while programming sometimes. When I really have to
concentrate, though, yeah that's when the lyricless music gets put on.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
No you didn't do it at the same time. You did learning at a higher pace than
the average pace (which is the pace at which the teacher will cover material),
and then did not learn for the remainder of the time. That's completely
different from doing things simultaneously, i.e. at the same time.

~~~
cableshaft
In some cases that was definitely true, perhaps most cases, but there were
several times when I was being taught brand new material and was coding while
I was listening to the teacher. In math class especially there was almost
never a moment when I wasn't doing some form of programming during the class,
since I could get away with having my calculator out the whole time.

This was TI-BASIC, though. I mean, it didn't get much more complicated than
"PRINT", "INPUT", "IF THEN ELSE", "FOR", and "GOTO LABEL". I wasn't trying to
figure out how to integrate a horribly documented third party API or anything.

------
marcosdumay
Guess what, when you insist on doing only useless work, people start to think
your work is useless.

Humanities are incredibly important. I'd kill for somebody to help me
communicate better at my undergrad, or understand people better, or any deep
understanding of politics. Was any of that available? Of course not. There
were only boring lessons, full of useless bullshit with professors claiming
even objectively false facts. I'd think half the professors at the humanities
dept were politically naiver than me at the time, today I think I
underestimated it. (Oh, yes, I got some nice lectures about geography at the
biology dept - go figure.)

Now the writing is on the wall, humanities "uselessness" is almost unanimous.
That's a shame, but maybe that causes things to change for once.

~~~
trgn
I think I know what you are getting at, but there's an important historical
dimension.

The humanities are useless, in the sense that they do not fit the current idea
of what a University's place in society should be.

Universities used to teach humanities almost to all students, some years even
exclusively; not because it was useful in the olden days, but precisely
because it was useless. It was a luxury. A university was a place for the
upper tiers of society to park their kids until they got their hormones out of
their system and were mature enough to assume their new leadership role in
society. By studying the humanities, students connected with the past and it
elevated their spirits for the future (meaning, they could make lower class
people feel stupid for not having read Goethe). Studying latin, greek,
literature, ... has largely been irrelevant for centuries, but this did not
matter one bit for the students (or their parents paying for it). For them,
this was just a time to learn dedication to hard work, sharpen their mind,
network, and hopefully not knock-up too many custodian's daughters.

Students who did not follow in their parents situation (factory owners,
lawyers, physicians, what have you ...) could end up in Academia, as faculty.
It kept them out of trouble, they got paid handsomely, it made for a cute
dinner table story when they were rambling about their field trip to Timbuktu.
The "set-for-life" (aka tenure, high pay) nature of Academia is the most
important give-away that these positions had nothing to do with usefulness,
and everything to do with protecting status, about ensuring excess spawn could
live comfortable lives and did not embarrass their families. Academia was (is)
a different kind of clergy; highly educated, a path to an unencumbered life,
but also somewhat irrelevant.

The big shift is not that the humanities have become useless - they've always
been. The big shift is that the university has become a vocational school.
They have become, what used to be the technical and trade colleges, a
replacement for the lifetime learning on the job condensed in a few years for
the unwashed masses. In this neo-liberal meritocracy or ours (jk), people are
widgets, and they need to be jiggered correctly so they can be slotted in to
the correct spot and be useful for society. If you explained 150 years ago to
Winthrop that in 2015 farmer Joe would send his kids to Harvard to learn how
to operate some new fangled bleepy bloopy thingie (aka programming a
computer), he'd think your nuts.

Yes, the infantile mental state of many humanities professors is baffling. I
guess they dedicate themselves to their work because they are passionate about
the content, yes, reading&thinking is fun! Some may even think they are
useful. "I teach my students to think critically"! As if physics professor or
your uncle cannot do that. "I teach my students to understand systemic
societal problems!" Sure, but your adherence to those shift with the winds of
political expedience, your own age and experience, and maybe that movie you
once saw. But what they are really doing is that they've taken up the scraps
of a role that no longer exists.

IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for "higher"
learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands and keeping
your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most wonderful human
achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has never been so.

~~~
6502nerdface
> IMO, the humanities have a big place in the University - a place for
> "higher" learning. It elevates us over the day-to-day drab of doing errands
> and keeping your shoelaces tied, they connect us to some of the most
> wonderful human achievements of the past. But it is not useful, and has
> never been so.

How can it be that there is no use in being "elevated" or in being connected
to "the most wonderful human achievements of the past"?

~~~
trgn
I guess you're right, I formulated that too flippantly. I meant, they have no
use in the utilitarian sense, in the neo-liberal university-as-a-trade-school.

------
Mikeb85
I was expecting the worst judging from the comments here, but it's actually an
excellent essay (or article, or whatever you want to call it).

I personally agree. University should be more about learning and becoming
better thinkers than simply learning a few facts and getting a piece of paper.

Pretty much none of the students I interact with care about 'learning', or any
form of critical thinking. They want the profs to teach them a few facts, then
base the test on those few facts. They optimize for this so they can get their
A, then get the hell out.

~~~
geofft
I think there's a valuable role for such an institution in the world, but I'm
not sure why it should be the university.

The vast majority of people who attend university don't really care about
optimizing for that goal. The vast majority of people who require university
attendance as a prerequisite for something else don't really, either. And the
vast majority of people who provide outside funding to universities don't:
they fund research, not teaching. And as a result, the vast majority of
successful employees in this system are those who at best want the university
to be a place where faculty and graduate students learn things, and only
secondarily where undergraduates learn things.

The change to make universities, _as a system_ , be about people who
specifically care about being a better thinker would be greatly disruptive to
society, and for what benefit? Those who are interested in becoming better
thinkers can go to a different sort of institution.

Arguably there is such an institution already, namely graduate school. That
you have to go through undergrad first is not particularly more onerous than
that you have to go through grade school first. Grade school sucks a _lot_ for
people who care about learning.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It should be university because it originally was. It _evolved_ towards being
a very elaborate vocational school. The _actual_ vocational schools are uncool
now, so you get basically the same thing from Ivy League, only less
efficiently and for more money.

I think both approaches are fine; what messes things up is the dissociative
identity disorder the university suffers from. On one hand, it is expected to
carry great traditions of scholarship. On the other, economic incentives
create strong pressure to do vocational training instead. If we could split it
(back) into two separate institutions, things would be much better.

------
at-fates-hands
The main point which hit home for me was that the students are running the
asylum now and there is no respect for the professors or faculty attempting to
teach them.

From the comments:

 _The key to this article is the explicit statement that administrators are
aligned with students against faculty. I work at a major university, and my
department head has often sided with students without even contacting me to
hear my take on the incident. I get an angry email from him saying that a
student complained that I say hello (Really! I didn’t say hello!), or that I
must give a student the opportunity to do an assignment after the deadline,
because she said it was impossible to do it for technical problems. In fact,
though, 21 students had completed it successfully, despite the alleged
technical problems. Still, I was ordered to allow the student to complete the
assignment late, for full credit. I was never consulted, or I would have
mentioned that the student spends most of class on facebook, among other
things. Another time, a student sent him an email saying that I “diminished
her” in class. The head sent her a passage from the student handbook saying
that students are to take it up with the professor. She refused, saying that
made her “uncomfortable.” Instead, the department head insisted on visiting my
class to observe my teaching. At the time, I said that he was spineless --
that she had told him to jump, and he did. That may or may not have been
correct, but I’ve since realized that backbone had nothing to do with it.
Instead, the head was actively searching for opportunities to baby students.
It explains, for example why I was told to teach a student to use a calculator
that I do not even require in my class._

I feel like this professors experience is fairly consistent with what I know.
I had six friends who all went into academia and education. Within a year
nearly all had exited the profession and only two remained. They all cited the
same thing - the over coddling of students by administration or faculty. The
stories they told were eye opening to say the least. The crazy part? This was
going on in the early aughts, nearly two decades earlier.

~~~
ginko
Seems the main problem here is the high tuition fees, which to some degree
give the students the impression that they deserve good service for which they
have paid. Coming from a country where most of university is state funded
(minus a nominal fee of about 300€ per semester), I can see that I might have
had other expectations of my professors had I paid ten thousands of dollars
per year.

~~~
staticint
Additionally, while I do not know in which country you reside, generally
countries who fully subsidize higher education have much more stringent
requirements to entry, allowing only those who are completely serious about
receiving an education access.

In America, if you are willing to pony up the cash, you're pretty much
guaranteed a spot. Combine that with the common idea that you will not be able
to find a job without a degree and you end up with a lot of people who aren't
really in it for an education, but feel like they have to be there anyway.

------
vinceguidry
I can't count the number of things I learned in college on my fingers because
I didn't really learn anything. Nor did I learn good study habits, nor did I
cultivate my appreciation of knowledge there.

I did all that after I dropped out of college and the ugliness of the work
world drove me to cultivate my inner garden. I am exponentially smarter now
than I ever was in school. I am a firm believer in the sentiment behind the
phrase "Never let your schooling get in the way of your education."

The author believes in a fiction that never existed. Professors have always
had to fight to earn the attention of students, iPhones weren't the only
competitors. What's happened is that reality has gotten so naked that even the
absurdly idealistic professors have had to acknowledge it. They were the only
ones who ever really believed it. I feel like even parents, for awhile now,
pay lip service to the value of schooling without actually believing in it.

Education is not, and never was, what academia seems to think it is.

------
jccalhoun
As someone who has taught college for over a decade, I can say that while
there are a lot of problems in higher education students are not high on my
list.

~~~
jseliger
_while there are a lot of problems in higher education students are not high
on my list._

I've not taught quite as long as you, but I'll add that I like to tell
students that life is going to be their ultimate punishment or reward: If they
don't learn how to read and write (I teach English), they'll be the ones who
suffer. Not me.

Some people of course don't learn anything and are fine. Many however don't
learn anything and aren't fine.

------
bbayles
This article is OK overall, but I could do without the "I am so brave for
exposing this" trope at the beginning. The author presents some new insights,
but complaining about the state universities isn't exactly original.

~~~
jackmaney
The author is a non-tenure track faculty member. Expressing his criticism of
his university--not to mention a whole class of similar universities--is
taking an enormous risk, as he could be fired (aka his contract won't be
renewed) for any reason.

He was even threatened with just that for expressing his complaints in a
colloquium:

    
    
        I tried to illustrate this old-style understanding for colleagues and 
        administrators at a colloquium at my university a couple of years ago 
        by offering a pictorial representation of the university as I thought 
        it should be. First I drew a very large building named “Students,” 
        then another of comparable size named “Professors,” then a still 
        larger one named “Library,” and finally a tiny shed well off to the 
        side named “Administration.” I wasn’t attempting to insult 
        anyone by this, but simply to make a serious point in a mildly 
        amusing way. In the event, my meaning was not lost on one 
        administrator, who, noting the disparity in proportions and considering 
        it necessary to match wits with me, suggested that come time for the 
        renewal of my contract, I would not be found in any one of my 
        fictitious university buildings. How is that for real university 
        debate? Suggest a deficiency in university governance and it’s a 
        pair of cement galoshes for you.

------
ColinWright
From the article:

    
    
        "Hey, you, pay attention! This is important."
        Say that today and you won't hear anger or
        shame. You'll hear something like: "Wha...? Oh,
        sorry sir. My bad. I didn't mean anything."
        And they don't. They don't mean anything. They
        are not dissing you; they are not even thinking
        about you, ...
    

I wonder what students think they are paying for, and what, indeed, they
_should_ be paying for.

~~~
marcosdumay
They are paying for a piece of paper, with their name written on it.

~~~
cmiles74
Not just a piece of a paper: a credential. The paper itself is unimportant,
they simply need the institution to reliably tell possible employers (the rare
few that even bother to check) that the credential was duly earned and
appropriately filed.

------
lintiness
i found at least one blatant typo, and it takes this guy about 1000 words what
can be said in a quarter that. no wonder his students are bored.

~~~
hcayless
Found at least 2 before I quit paying attention. It's not 100% crap by any
means, but there's a disturbing narrow-mindedness to it as well.

------
geodel
I have mixed feeling about this article. On one hand I agree with heavy
commercialization of education. I feel same about my life where all my
education was one step closer to better life in term of money and comforts
that money brings. Now after working for more than a decade and having
reasonably successful career I feel more and more empty. On other hand I
slightly disagree or more accurately, feel sad and scared that online
education is not something that will bring any intellectual fulfillment to
life. I use to think a few online courses here and there will bring in some
content to me.

------
jackmaney
The author and I are in very different fields, but this article echoes a lot
of the reasons why I left my tenure track position and ultimately ended up in
industry.

The final nail in the coffin was an email sent out by some middle-
administrator schmuck to all of the faculty, encouraging us to think over the
winter break about how to "provide excellent customer service" to our students
(or some such horse shit...this was several years ago, so I don't remember the
exact words).

------
Namrog84
On an unrelated topic. Anyone else experience the inability to scroll properly
on that page? I am on mobile but even requesting desktop version didn't fix.
There are a few seconds of full scroll then it locks into a range. It's not
even necessarily the beginning. One time it locked in some middle portion. Is
this the fault of poor web design or is something wrong on my phone? Thanks!

------
kaitai
A great contrast to another article currently trending on HN, with no
discussion yet:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10815072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10815072)

I read "Gettin’ bodied by Classics: the joys and challenges of public
scholarship" (to whose HN discussion I linked above) and thought, wow, cool,
who is Hermes Trismegistus and what's the reference? Hey, those articles on
exclusion, inclusion, and the ideas of citizenship from antiquity to today
sound really interesting. Wow, a Princeton classicist doing something I can
understand! I'm going to look at buying his book, this guy is rad. (Halfway
through morning coffee, so excuse the shallowness of the thoughts.)

I read this OP and started rolling my eyes again. Right, right, kids these
days, telling kids to think about their Halloween costumes is so PC (telling
kids to think! can't have that! wait, next paragraph he wants kids to think,
just about something else). As I continued to read, I realized why we have
such different experiences in part: I teach math. I can see that my students
_did_ learn something this semester. Now most of them can discuss geometric
Brownian motion. That's cool. As the author here says,

 _Many of the engineers who were painted purple during frosh week are now
running the institutions where we teach. And they weren’t kidding when they
were pissing on our guitars in the quad. It was a promissory note on the
future — a future they could feel in their bones belonged to them, not us._

I'm one of _them_ \-- the heathen, uneducated STEM people! If I call his
thoughts about Camus "fluff" he no longer has any defense! Needing to be
polite in his response renders him... gosh, impotent? in the face of such
trenchant criticism. Hm.

Things are different on the STEM side of campus than the classics side. Many
on that side say that they're terrified of their students
([http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-
afraid](http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid)) but it
seems to me that these folks are terrified of discussion -- and the other
thing to note is that every single one of them brings up the fear of _losing
their job_ over a discussion. It's curious, in one of the only professions in
the world with tenure. Why are all these guys afraid of losing their job for
challenging the PC SJW orthodoxy or whatever? For professors with tenure, this
is a fear entirely unsupported by statistics. The only case even marginally
close is when Salaita had a job offer withdrawn because of his views on Israel
and Palestine, and I think he was on what would be stereotyped as the PC side
at the moment. So, tenure gives golden handcuffs -- you can't move
institutions -- but you'll still have your job even if you're a grump.

Ok, so why are these profs on the liberal arts side scared? Because of the
adjunctivization of higher ed -- no tenure for most (including me). One great
discussion here: [http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-
identi...](http://www.vox.com/2015/6/5/8736591/liberal-professor-identity)
Because of the corporatization of higher ed: more discussion here.
[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/05/college...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/05/college_students_are_not_customers_a_political_shorthand_that_needs_to_die.html)
Because the STEM and business profs are "winning," as the OP said. Because he
can't see his own relevance anymore, unlike Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Because he
can't connect with his students anymore.

It's hilarious that these problems are so acutely felt when more American kids
than ever feel required to go to college. The audience is bigger than ever.
That means the message can't be as niche, but this is still an opportunity.
Hate online education? Why, and what are you going to do about it? Hate
telling students they should be thoughtful when considering cultural
appropriation? Have the cojones to join the discussion in a more substantive
way than "overcoddled kids these days!"

