Killing higher education with liberal arts

Faculty claiming authority without accountability, credibility without credentials.

One of the most profoundly disturbing problems I encountered in my fifty years in education was the unmitigated hubris -- if not arrogance and absolute gall -- of liberal arts faculty who claimed to be the omniscient owners of the college and of the entire curriculum, while absolving themselves of all responsibilities for the generating the financial resources needed to maintain the university while also demanding more funds for whatever harebrained project they conceived, and demanding lifetime tenure with zero academic or financial accountability, including pre-absolving themselves of attending to the career needs of their students.

Saturday's Wall Street Journal article on Miles Davis (no, not the musician), the former business school dean and current president of Linfield "University," a small, liberal arts college in Oregon, illustrated just how crazed, unrealistic and unreasonable liberal arts faculty can be.

Set aside for a moment the social engineering drivel being built into the curriculum and driven into the formative heads of anxious undergraduates, the absence of any adult-like behavior and responsibility for the sustainability of the college, the curriculum, and the careers of their graduates by these smug, self-serving faculty should be appalling to any parent, prospective student or even a person on the street with no direct interest in the matters of the college.

As Mark Steyn has noted, when you're very rich you can afford to be stupid. Liberal arts faculty tend to believe that they are both rich in knowledge and rich in terms of the financial resources they demand be provided for them when, truth be told, their liberal arts education seems to interfere with their grasp of reality as well as their sense of personal and professional responsibility. And colleges, public or private, large or small, endowed or not, are no longer 'rich' in the sense that their traditional stream of multiple sources of resources -- namely parents, students, taxpayers, alums, donors, and politicians -- are a thing of the past.

Administrators have aided, abetted and effectively joined the liberal arts faculty in both putting aside realistic educational objectives (in exchange for conducting expensive social engineering activities and offering meaningless, solipsistic 'liberal arts' indoctrination courses) and asserting their claim for additional resources from all of their traditional stakeholders. In this sense, the administrators are the faculty's worst enemies, as the faculty whims have produced larger numbers of even better paid administrators to manage the chaos of a college campus, reducing the faculty pie and, more and much worse, the resources actually devoted to teaching substantive, serious courses.

Miles Davis is no fool. And he is no anti-Semite. He may have a trustee or two with issues with sexual harassment. Yet his real problem is the preening divas of the liberal arts faculty who believe that the purpose of the university is to serve their interests and to allow them to pursue any folly they so choose with all the resources they can squeeze from the administrators. And all the time demanding that any and all applicants be offered a place at university and, better yet, for free, regardless of the cost to society, taxpayers, or parents. To liberal arts faculty, "that's not my problem."

These dinosaur faculty are trying to take the university down with them as they stumble into the dinosaur graveyard. They are ignoring if not killing off the true nature of the university which is NOT to allow a life of learning for all people. Rather, the university is there to serve society, to advance the state of knowledge and innovation, to be good stewards of the resources and trust placed in the hands of teachers, and to prepare its graduates to be useful citizens, not just credentialed idiot savants.

Ah, the joy of being away after fifty years watching this descent into madness.

Rebellion in the Faculty Lounge - WSJ.pd

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