More Money than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, & Idiots Think They’re Right

by Penny, Laura

  The grading certainly does not stop when profs start grading others. There are peer reviews that will determine whether they publish or perish, endless grant applications, and piles of files for tenure and promotion reviews. At the end of almost every course in North America, the students get to grade their instructors too, filling out little Wendy’s comment cards rating their professorial expertise, helpfulness, and so forth on a scale of one to five.

  Nerds are hardly strangers to scrutiny. Universities love to crank out performance indicators and metrics and studies about themselves. They form associations to create new surveys and studies. They regularly poll the kids and the profs and the alums. Many of the universities on both sides of the border that dropped out of the college rankings have made piles of stats available on their websites. The problem is making this tide of info legible for non-experts such as high-school students, workers who want to take some classes, or parents, to present this information in a way that strikes a balance between specialist wonkery and marketing puffery.

  I’m not saying the university is above or beyond scrutiny. It may be my favourite place, but several criticisms of the university are totally legit. Let’s start at the beginning. Many first-year classes are cash cows that treat students worse than cattle; at least future burgers get free drugs. If you’re sitting in a theatre with several hundred other people looking at PowerPoint slides straight out of some overpriced Psych 101 textbook, then you are being ripped off. And at the worst possible time too.

  Given the gap that looms between high school and college-level work, it’s absolutely unconscionable and counterproductive for universities to leave students stranded during their frosh year. But that’s when the kids take the really huge prerequisite lectures they need to qualify for something that’s more like teaching and less like a cheesy motivational speech.

  We could fix this with rigorous – and affordable – transition-year programs, sort of like Quebec’s CEGEPs. Give every student a basic grounding in reading, writing, humanities, and sciences. Throw in some practical things like fiscal awareness to keep the real-worlders happy. Get the gen ed in at the beginning rather than in piecemeal electives that are too little, too late. This would provide a more structured and supportive introduction to the university or, for that matter, community college.

  A transition year could serve as a bridge, allowing wafflers to sort themselves into college and community college slots. Departments of both institutions would ideally have a chance to tell students what they’re all about before they enrol there, only to drop out. And we could certainly run evening and weekend versions of such programs too, in order to accommodate the growing numbers of working adult students. We could even give them some sort of credential at the end, something to take up that awkward space between high school and a B.A., between under- and overqualified for crappy-to-middling work. At least students would have something to show for their efforts other than successful completion of a pile of multiple-choice tests or becoming part of the universities’ annual mass cull.

  The most popular college major in America, according to the nice people at the Princeton Review, is business, a practical, get-a-job program that does not belong in the university at all. Business programs are relative Johnny-come-latelies; the first one, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, started in 1881. The collegiate business school did not really catch on in Canada or Europe until the middle of the twentieth century. It is now a popular major in Canada as well, ranking just behind social sciences and law, which tie for first place on the list of most popular majors, and just ahead of health and education, the third-place winners.

  If I were Queen of the Colleges for a day, the first thing I would do is burn down all the business schools and salt the ashes so no more M.B.A.-lings could spring up from the ruins. Then I’d torch public relations, leisure studies, hotel management, and every other career-training program, until all that remained at the university were the truly academic disciplines, namely the hard sciences, the social sciences – yes, that includes economics – and the liberal arts. These fields of study all offer something other than practical applications and ways to make a buck. If the university wants to survive as an intellectual institution, it must slash and burn the professional suburbs to save the theoretical town.

  In all seriousness, we should transfer the primarily practical, get-a-job programs, such as business schools and faculties of public relations, to the community college system. This would also have the salutary effect of removing the outdated blue-collar stigma from community colleges. A much-ness of ink has been spilled about the acute shortage of skilled tradespeople in Canada and the U.S. The idea that white-collar jobs are the only good jobs, and that university is the only way to get them, is part of the reason why we have too many bad students and not enough good plumbers.

  The kind of person who goes to school because he wants to make a lot of money in managing or marketing has much more in common with people who go to school because they want to make a lot of money being electricians. They are at school for the same reason: to get a credential and the technical skills that qualify them for a career. The nerds, conversely, are there out of love for a specific discipline, a love that seems silly and self-indulgent to stolid money-minded types.

  Of course we still need to train businesspeople and hotel managers. And I’m not saying their work isn’t complicated too. But the key word in that sentence is train, and training is not the same as teaching. Training means instructing students to do something specific, like marketing or accounting or welding. Teaching is all about developing broader skills, such as argumentation or experimentation, by looking at specificities that may well seem useless, like the literature that ate my youth or the protein my biochemist pal pursued for years. Those subjects might have some useful applications eventually – teaching, medical research – but that is not why we squandered our twenties in libraries and labs.

  It is unlikely that its administrators will raze the toniest suburbs of the bloated, sprawling metropolis that is the contemporary university. I have no doubt that they will do the exact opposite and continue to generate more anti-academic, anti-intellectual job-training departments. We might as well just hang up big signs that say “Boss Studies” or “I Love Kids” or “E-Z Computer Jobs Here” and make things totally student-centred. Moneyed entities will continue to endow chairs in however they made their fortunes so that franchising and hawking take their places of honour beside the shrivelled husks of philosophy and history.

  Administrators aren’t going to turn down donations or fees to preserve the tiny, quaint town squares that spawned the university, the places that look backwards and hold on to the old. No dean or recruiter will ever encourage students who signed up for job training and got English lit and Rocks for Jocks to go elsewhere, to where their aspirations and talents might be better served.

  Students are also subject to another pernicious bait-and-switch. The university sells teachers, but it hires researchers and then pushes them to produce, which means they spend less time teaching. Enter the grad students, part-timers, and assorted adjuncts who do most of the teaching, particularly in those first few sink-or-swim years of study. In the U.S., for example,

  Three decades ago, adjuncts – both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track – represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private.18

  There aren’t any comparable recent Canadian numbers. The last time StatsCan counted, back in 1998, there were 28,000 part-time profs and 34,000 with tenure. But Canadian universities have since persuaded the federal bean-counters that it’s too dang hard to keep track of the adjuncts who come and go.

  Does any school really want to ‘fess up and let parents and students know how many of their costly clas
ses will be conducted by greenhorn grad students and “roads scholars” or “freeway flyers,” who teach a bunch of different courses on different campuses to cobble together a meagre living? Teaching matters sooo much to deans and admincritters that they are willing to pay someone approximately one tuition fee – if they are lucky – per class per term. Some U.S. schools pay as little as $1,000 per class per term. If there are thirty students in that class, they should receive approximately $33.33 worth of expert attention apiece. Surely the business types would approve of such an efficient apportionment of teacher attention. But do you think Any University U.S.A. will include that figure in their promotional brochures and web pages?

  It’s easy to see the values of the contemporary university. Just take a stroll through your friendly local campus and look at the buildings. There’s always cash for a new dorm or a new stadium, since benefactors like to slap their names on those. Mall-ish food courts are common. I’ve never set foot in a business building that wasn’t state of the art, from the floors to the chairs to the classroom tech. Conversely, I have taken and taught liberal arts classes in mouldy rooms strewn with trash in the wings of the university that nobody bothers to maintain, since nobody wants to donate a Bigwig Memorial Mop-and-Paint Job.

  All the angry talk about elite institutions existing at a luxurious remove from the “real world” is risible. Does a tenured prof at Yale or U of T have a sweet ride? Sure. But they are at the tippy-tippy top of their fields, and investment bankers of like rank would laugh at the paltry sums nerds consider good money. Moreover, the really high salaries at universities go to non-academic types such as management and athletic coaches.

  Most college and university instructors in North America are harried, underpaid contract or part-time workers, just like many of their students. Both groups are short on money and time, busting their humps in pursuit of a promotion that may never arrive. Ivory tower, my arse! This sounds exactly like the mercenary shit-show that the commonsensical call the “real world.”

  Universities hire more contingent workers because they’re cheaper and because they can, as there are more Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s than there are real jobs, particularly in the humanities. Some boomers are finally aging out of the profession, as promised throughout the 1990s, but they aren’t going to retire as quickly as people think. Just look at the way they’ve prolonged Rolling Stones tours and their erections beyond all seemliness. Even when they do retire or die on the job, their exodus is often seen as a great opportunity to convert costly tenured positions into cheap part-time work and to recruit the starriest research stars to fill the few spots that remain.

  The starrier the stars, the less likely students are to see them, as they must maintain their school’s place in the firmament. These stars may well be great teachers too, but they will likely spend more of their time on the road or in the lab than with students. Research hauls in money – private and public – and prestige. There is not much room on the tenure track for people who prefer teaching and would rather spend their time working with students than proving themselves to their peers. Hiring committees do consider teaching philosophies and student evaluations, but there is always the suspicion that someone might garner high ratings from the students for the wrong reasons, like being a snappy dresser or an easy grader.

  The number of books and papers published and grants successfully snared are more reliable, objective indicators. “Publish or perish” is evidence of the quantitative mania at work in the humanities. Hiring committees hardly have time to read all those articles candidates list in their CVS. They are doing more administrative work, thanks to the university’s increased dependence on part-timers, and they have to write their own articles and books for people to not read so they too can level up.

  The teaching that most prospective students and parents think they are paying for just doesn’t pay. Part-timers who focus on teaching do so at their own peril. And the perverse economy of the university too often rewards profs who think they are too good to teach, who would rather impress their guild than help their students.

  I’m not impugning academic research tout court, but the fact that it is a must – the only road out of adjunct serfdom – means there are a whack of forced and futile verbiage and stacks of stupid studies out there. And those heaps of rarely read journals and books only confirm the use-minded’s dismissive preconceptions about the liberal arts even as they strain to conform to their quantitative standards.

  Universities are cutting their library book budgets in favour of more tech, which means fewer guaranteed university press sales and more people trying to cram their tricked-out dissertations through an increasingly narrow bottleneck. Lindsay Waters, the former humanities editor of Harvard University Press, argues that the publish-or-perish model is bad for books and the humanities. He writes, “there is a causal connection between the corporatist demand for increased productivity and the draining from all publications of any significance other than as a number. The humanities are in a crisis now because many of the presuppositions about what counts are absolutely inimical to the humanities.”19 The useless studies have a hard time measuring up to the standards of the useful studies because they have different ends and advantages, ones the use-minded dismiss as imaginary or irrelevant.

  Training is wrecking teaching. Budding nerds have been overrun by people who are in college so they can be somewhere else. We’ve poured a bucket of water into a bowl of soup, so neither constituency gets the nourishment it needs. Or, to put this in more dramatic terms, the humanities are occupied territory, ruled by hostile foreign powers that have run them off their own native turf. If we can’t measure “humanity” in the same way that standardized tests assess intellect or M.B.A.-lings measure profits, then it is a meaningless category, one unworthy of sustained inquiry. People should sort out what being humane means on their own time and their own dime.

  I could monetize this argument and point to the scores of liberal arts graduates who eventually do well, or contend that culture is a powerful economic engine. But I don’t want to make this case on Gradgrindist grounds, to twist things around and insist that useless school can turn out to be really useful after all. That is true, but it is not my point.

  The useful studies – because they are nothing more than useful – are pale shadows of their elderly relatives in the useless studies. The useful studies are puffed-up training programs, job descriptions masquerading as academic disciplines. The more the merely useful encroaches on the university, the harder it gets for the seemingly useless to survive there. And where else is all that useless beauty supposed to live? I suspect the answer to this question, for many cost-cutters and real-worlders, is another question: who cares? If there is no more market for ancient Greek, there should be no more ancient Greek. If there are no jobs for historians, there should be no history. If there is no money in brains, there should be no brains – except for the brains that make money.

  Chapter Five

  BULLY VS. NERD

  On the Persistence of Freedumb in Political Life

  BALLOT BOX: The altar of democracy. The cult served upon it is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

  – H.L. MENCKEN1

  A snoozer conference: Last night’s primetime news conference, President Obama’s fourth since taking office, was as much a dry health-care symposium as it was a give-and-take with reporters. Honest question: Is there a point when the president knows too much about an issue?

  – CHUCK TODD, NBC’S LEAD POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT2

  When Barack Obama won the 2008 U.S. election, many pundits argued that his victory was a repudiation of the incompetence and anti-intellectualism of the Bush years, a sign that the public longed for smart leadership. “Brains are back!” declared Michael Hirsh, Newsweek’s Washington correspondent. Obama’s victory marked a return to rationality and pragmatism. Hirsh reported: “Sun Belt politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intel
lectualism – ‘has for the moment played itself out,’ says presidential historian Robert Dallek.”3

  Hirsh’s column ran in November, right after the election, when the world entire was abubble with hope. In the intervening months, we have all learned just how stubborn the politics of rigidity, zealotry, and anti-intellectualism really are. Republicans may be in the political minority, but rump status has only made the right’s remnants louder and crazier, more strident and emotive.

  Throughout 2009, Fox News bloviators, gaggles of disgruntled crackers, and a handful of Republican politicos gathered for “teabagging” parties where they protested the taxation and tyranny of the new administration. Some even went so far as to don Glenn Beckian Founding Fathers drag, while others mailed teabags to their representatives or dumped tea in local bodies of water, a gesture that shows their lack of respect for all things public, including historical accuracy.

  Throughout the summer of 2009, when members of Congress and senators held town hall meetings to discuss the administration’s proposed health-care reform plans, the question-and-answer sessions degenerated into hooting and hollering, boos and bellowing. Prune-faced honkies and fresh-faced LaRouchies eschewed questions in favour of conspiratorial nonsense and paranoid fear-mongering, baying that health care was un-American, likening the President to a Nazi, a commie, and a fascist.