PROFESSOR CRITICIZES THE ANACHRONISTIC "FACTORY UNIVERSITY"!

PROFESSOR CRITICIZES THE ANACHRONISTIC "FACTORY UNIVERSITY"!


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 10, 20009

“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”

Professor Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University, “Time to end the university as we know it” (St. Petersburg Times, May 10, 2009)

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Dr. Taylor is addressing the anachronistic institution of higher education. I have been writing about the factory mentality of our society, which has stubbornly maintained anachronistic institutions since 1990 (Work Without Managers, The Delta Group) without as much as a fair thee well.

Does it angry me that so little has been done about this? Yes. Am I surprised? No. Will Dr. Taylor’s article in a Sunday newspaper change anything? I doubt it.

My daughter graduated from the University of South Florida in communications in December of 2008, and she still cannot find a job. She is a waitress in a restaurant to keep body and soul together. She will be paying student loans well into the next decade.

Is this right? It depends. If the product of the investment gives a sufficient return, it is money well spent. But I taught in the university system for tens years (1970 – 1980), as an adjunct professor at mainly the graduate school level, and I was not impressed with the curriculum or with the return students got on their investment. I wrote this in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990):

“American has been trading off its early greatness for the past 150 years. Look at any organization in America, and you will find the same arid landscape. Education is an excellent example:

(1) Even at our most prestigious (and expensive) universities there is not an opportunity for a decent education because teachers are not personally involved with their students. Students get instruction, not education, in the form of information transferals, communication techniques, or some other impersonal and antiseptic phrases to cover non-teaching teaching to facilitate non-learning learning.

(2) Interaction between professors and students is minimal or non-existent because professors are preoccupied with scholarly research and publication. Career-minded faculty cannot afford to spend time with students. They must publish or perish by having their scholarly tomes appear in the right journals. This helps them win promotion and tenure, which means they stay employed.

“The results are a ‘cult of dullness’ in which clear writing and inspired lecturing are deviant and suspicious behaviors. Nothing is done to challenge the system, the prevailing mode of thing or doing. This incidentally fits nicely into the industrial model of non-thinking thinking to do non-doing doing of non-thing things because what these professors have to say amounts to practically nothing at all.” (pp 256 – 257)

In my missive “It isn’t America’s student math and reading skills that are the problem, it is the factory society we have become” (Peripatetic Philosopher: April 23, 2009 -- see blog), I wrote:

“Dr. Keith Hart, professor emeritus of anthropology at the London School of Economic, was on a discussion panel recently on C-Span ruminating about our current economic chaos . . . Professor Hart said essentially that we have been in the business since WWII of creating synthetic jobs to fuel our synthetic economy which has in turn created a synthetic infrastructure to support a synthetic foundation. This has in turn taken us away from our values and therefore our concrete sensibilities.”


He was defining our factory society. In SIX SILENT KILLERS (CRC Press 1998), I zeroed in on a particular discipline at the center of the current economic crisis:

“The MBA degree is essentially a vocational degree in the same sense as a trade school education. MBAs scoff at the idea that their work has cultural implications. They find the concept of the workplace culture suspect, too abstract. Being trained in a set of skills – finance, information systems, macro economics, statistics, computers, and management practices – they find little time and less inclination for background reading on culturally related subjects.” (p. 237)


Since the baby boomer generation, there has been a mad dash into the factory mentality with identity, status, prestige, and recognition based on “how much you made,” and where was the making better place to make it than on Wall Street, or in the insurance and real estate industries, all part of the factory economy’s current crumbling walls.

Dr. Taylor writes:

“If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.”

I agree with the restructuring but not the regulation. The more government is involved the more inefficient everything becomes and we are at an all-time low now in inefficency.

I sense, unfortunately, that Dr. Taylor still has remnants of the factory mindset. Here are his six steps in brief:

(1) Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs. The division of labor model (i.e. factory model) is obsolete and must be replaced like a web or complex adaptive network.

(2) Abolish permanent departments, even in undergraduate education, and create problem (solving) focused programs to be reevaluated every seven years.

(3) Increase collaboration among institutions. Strong institutions in one discipline should partner with strong institutions in another.

(4) Transform the traditional dissertation. There is no longer a market for books modeled on medieval dissertations.

(5) Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold a job for which they are trained.

(6) Impose mandatory retirement for academics and abolish tenure. Initially, tenure meant to protect academic freedom but has instead produced professor impervious to change.

This broad outline is a start but I feel there is too much emphasis on the professor end of it and not enough on the actual curriculum. Professors didn’t create the factory mentality. They simply have been culturally programmed to sustain it. We don’t teach students to think, to wonder, and to intuit and we never have. If Einstein had not resisted this factory programming, he would never have been Einstein, but he did, and he changed the world.

That said it is encouraging to have a sitting professor say in print what distant voices have been saying for years. I went back to graduate school after working across the world, at age 37, and I was astounded how little interest academics had in learning how their precious theories, algorithms, and paradigms worked in the real world. They were more interested in cementing me into the factory mentality demonstrating little sense of humor when I resisted. Time has made me aware, however, that we both were equally victims of the same anachronistic system.

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