Monday, March 9, 2009

The Gordon Gecko of Education

I'd told that many PhDs are having trouble finding jobs.  They should all read this guy's article, which is an amazing defense of having greedy educators.  He makes a hundred grad (or so he claims) running around Colleges, schmoozing with administrators, and mass-teaching.  

It's easy to attack this line of thinking--educators should stop being so exploitative with precious adjuncts!--but the education system would be substantially better if we had more people who were as results and money-oriented, instead of simply status-oriented.  Tenure is slowly disappearing across Colleges as currently tenured professors sit atop a pyramid-scheme and leech away money, while the prohibitive costs of hiring new tenured faculty has fueled the growth in adjunct and temporary staff.  

Hopefully, in all but the most elite Colleges, the majority of teaching will be done by teaching-oriented people, who will hopefully be ranked and paid on their competence in this field.  Research in fields without strong external funding will slowly dwindle, while mega research complexes will dominate the funding and composition of Universities.  Everyone else will work on educating the professional class, who will enter guild-like regulated positions.  You want to learn something?  Get a masters degree, read a book, or go to the 'real world' with the other subterranean bottom-feeders.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I thought this guy was a schmuck. Then I read this quote:
"I donate thousands of dollars a year to the Green Party, the private Catholic high school that I attended, and Amnesty International."

Now I _know_ he's a schmuck.