Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure while I’m on vacation.
The notion most of us have when thinking about the University (read that with a deep and important voice, please) is of a well-architectured limbo-land full of higher thought, in-depth learning, and forward motion steeped nicely in tradition. The University isn’t (or didn’t used to be) as susceptible to the rules of government and society; they’ve managed to create their own little spheres.
These days, when you really stop to ponder the reality of the University bubble, that place of higher thinking seems a lot more watered down in its autonomy. Money, politics and red tape have pulled the rest of the world into the fabric of the University, while the University is forced, more and more it seems, to rely on the non-University world in order to survive.
No less than eight members of my family, between 1932 and the present, have spent their careers at Universities. I’m not an idiot; I know that even in 1932 the University was already pretty susceptible to red tape and politics. But the University was still thought of, from without and within, as a place where academic freedom was considered sacred.
It appears, especially through the eyes of those on the inside, as though the last vestiges of higher learning and new thinking are being chipped away at an increasingly rapid rate, all in the name of popular research and big-name publishing. That all comes down to the ongoing faculty wrestling-match to figure out who will land the biggest chunk of grant money.
You can’t survive without money, and you can’t continue your research (or your job) without funding. Grant money is usually awarded to those trying to answer the newest, biggest, hottest question of the year. It’s difficult to land decent financial support for researching the esoteric topics.
When a dispute regarding academic freedom comes up, it’s usually about the rights of instructors to speak freely (within reason; there’s never any need to go overboard, for crying out loud) about politics and religion and all the Big Bads no one’s supposed to bring up in classroom discussions. Academic freedom is also supposed to include the rights of students and faculty to think, wonder, ask questions, and to perform research in order to find some answers. If money and funding are driving the machine, it seems obvious that the academic freedom to do research is being severely shaped by outside interests.
President Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago gave a speech recently at Columbia University’s conference entitled “What is Academic Freedom For?” He spoke about academic freedom at institutions of higher learning, what that means and why it’s important to protect and maintain that tradition in the modern-day University.
The greatest contributions universities can make to society over the long run are the ideas and discoveries of faculty and students that emanate from the resulting intellectual ferment and the work of alumni across the scope of human activity―alumni whose capacity for invention has been dramatically enhanced through their education in this environment. Moreover, that universities are almost unique in making this type of contribution only highlights its importance to society.
If this is the purpose of universities, the purpose of academic freedom is precisely to preserve this openness of inquiry and freedom of thought. In other words, academic freedom is designed to protect and preserve for the long run the unique capacity of universities to contribute to society. More…
Author’s Note: I’ve re-posted this article for your reading pleasure while I’m on vacation.
I love it when highly educated, intelligent, and knowledgeable scientists find something new that’s so damn cool, the only thing they can come up with to say is, “It’s a big weird looking freaky thing.” Ichthyologist Doug Long of the California Academy of Sciences came up with that one in an interview with Wired Science.
He’s right. I mean, look at that thing. It’s fascinating, but it’s a tad bizarre. I don’t care how many degrees that guy has, even I would be too giddy to remember my super science-y vocabulary words if someone had just discovered some crazy new organism that I was going to get to play with.
I don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.
Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.
Watch it, people. Just because information is second only in volume to pollution on this planet, it does not mean all info is available for you to use and then slap your name on to it like you wrote it or something. Plagiarism, for those of you who missed that day in class, is when you take someone else’s work and falsely claim it as your own. It’s very bad, and it makes you look like an ass@$%*.
The NY Times has an article up about plagiarism and the tech-savvy information generation. The lines are blurry for Gen-Y, apparently.
If you’d like to avoid being an uninformed cheating ass@#$%, the following links are helpful.
I must go. The line above regarding information and the volume of it is freaking me out. Can digital information have volume at all? And is it possible to measure the volume of every printed word on the planet? What about all the still-intact newspapers in old landfills? Do those count as existing information? Crap!
Ah, the wonderful careers we pondered when we were young. I can only recall ever having two career dreams for myself: when in elementary school, I knew absolutely that I would become an elementary school teacher when I grew up, and in high school I changed my mind and wanted to earn my degrees in physical therapy.
Practical and lacking incredibly in imagination, I know. What a lame kid I was. Didn’t I ever want to be a queen or a ballerina? Nope. I would have totally ganged up with the Dukes of Hazard, and in the fourth grade, during the 1984 Olympics, I spent a few months trying to work out how I could actually become Mary Lou Retton (cute, short, and all gymnastics-y, just like fourth-grade me).
The most impractical my real dreams and aspirations ever were: the bizarre number of graduate degrees I felt I needed to hold in order to follow my teaching/physical therapy paths. I was always certain that my working life would not begin until I had at east one PhD on my wall. Why? I have no good answer other than the fact that I thought my grandparents were all amazing and had all been academic badasses.
There’s a study in Britain that’s been going on for over fifty years, called the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study. When this group hit the age of eleven, the children were asked to write 30-minute essays about what their lives would be like at the age of 25. It’s fascinating to read how clear their plans were at age eleven, and how things turned out when reality hit.
– New partnership links IonE with Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund –
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (06/30/2010) —The University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment today announced a new partnership with the Natural Capital Project, a worldwide effort to align economic forces with conservation. The other partners include Stanford University, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.
Founded in 2006, the Natural Capital Project aims to mainstream the values of nature into major resource decisions. Working with public, private and nonprofit partners around the world, “NatCap” is developing practical, science-based software for mapping and valuing societal benefits provided by healthy ecosystems. The Natural Capital Project is using this software in major policy decisions now underway in Canada, China, Hawaii, Indonesia, South America and Tanzania.
The Natural Capital Project is led by an interdisciplinary team of scientists and project leaders from Stanford, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund. U of M applied economics professor Steve Polasky, an IonE resident fellow, is one of the leaders of the project’s ecosystem service mapping and valuation effort. This new partnership will increase opportunities for collaboration between IonE and other Natural Capital researchers and collaborators.
“We would be nowhere without the world-class expertise and experience from U of M, and we’re thrilled to recognize that formally now by teaming up as full partners,” said Gretchen Daily, Stanford-based co-founder and chair of the project.
“The Natural Capital Project is one of the most important environmental projects in the world,” said Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment. “It’s answering one of the really big questions: How much is nature worth, and how do we start to include ecosystem goods and services into our economic system? By joining this project, the Institute on the Environment will be working with world-class ecologists, economists and practitioners, and in return, we will be contributing our expertise in ecological economics, land use and agriculture, and environmental systems modeling. It’s a fabulous partnership for everyone involved.”
That’s crazy talk! That Jay guy writes a whole damn column about education (he’s for it), and I write an education blog (I’m a big fan of the learning as well). So a big yes on college and the campuses they’re attached to. And still, I totally agree with him about not sucking every ounce of fun out of a campus visit. Parents: Release! Retract! Recoil! Unclench! Attend the tour, ask real questions, get some information, then just wander around for a while, with or without your child, and let it all flow over you both. It’s not life or death, people.
Researchers analyzed 30,000 teens and the relationship between screen time (tv, video games, surfing the net, etc.) and the teens’ tendency toward experiencing routine backache and headaches. The study was just released, and the findings boil down to this: cumulative screen time, even in young, healthy bodies, causes headaches and back pain.
I’m pretty sure this can easily be applied to college students and full-fledged adults as well. Ergonomics, massage therapy, and a reduction in screen time: Know it. Live it. Love it.
Graduate school, should it have escaped everyone’s notice, prepares no one for reality. One learns insanely vast oceans of information, but this just means that the M-Something or the PhD in question just knows a lot of stuff—more than most other breathing bodies about one particular slice of one weensy area of reality. Knowing that much information is awesome. But a job it does not acquire. I know, I am an unnecessarily logical bitch. I get that a lot.
So, here you are, all filled up with the knowledge and no way to turn the smartness into cash money. There’s always teaching, fighting for tenure, and someday becoming a beloved professor. But that rarely works out these days. I’ve heard you have to either off someone, sell your soul, or hand over your firstborn to get a professorship. I’m going to officially state that academia may not be the best option. Which is unfortunate, as by this point, your particular topic and the world of academics are the two bits of this life you grok fully and without any doubt as to your capabilities.
I’m thinking you may require assistance with the prying off of your fingers from your lab table/thesis/dissertation/research notes/library carrel/desk in the windowless basement “office.” The Oxford University Press will save you: they’ve just published Jerald M. Jellison’s book, Life After Grad School: Getting From A to B. Technically still under the very edge of academia’s umbrella, but much more saturated with real life and logic.
Jellison’s book is simple; it reads like a To Do list with only the necessary explanations to go along with each item. This is not at all what I expected from a Univ. of California professor. He’s done well in academia as well as in the business world, so perhaps that combination has helped to simplify his writing. Whatever the reason, it’s comfortingly logical in its this-is-possible forward momentumness. Rarely do academics leave their world with emotional grace; they’ve invested too much to walk away easily. Jellison has broken down the horrific task of leaving one life and beginning another into absorbable and complete-able bites.
From the publisher:
There are 2.5 million graduate students across the U.S. in programs designed for a career in academics, and it is rarely acknowledged that less than five percent will realize their dream of becoming a professor. And as tenure track job openings disappear, this percentage will only shrink. The truth is that many of these students aren’t getting the support and instruction from their grad schools on pursuing a career outside academia, nor do many realize that they have the knowledge and skills that could make them a very attractive candidate for a job with a corporation, government agency, or nonprofit.
Wired magazine calls him “the explainer.” Michael Wesch is a social anthropologist who teaches at Kansas State University. In his 15-minute TED talk, he explains the effects of media (social and otherwise) on learners, on humanity, and on the classroom environment.
Wesch also manages to squeeze in a bit telling other educators how to take advantage of all the media and the technology humans have available as a way to make students more “knowledge-able” than just knowledgeable. It’s not just memorizing facts and theories anymore—all the information is out there, students need to learn how to find it and ponder it and bring their own thoughts and theories to the table.
Watch it. It takes about 15 minutes; that’s less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee. And no way one cup of caffeine will blow your mind like Michael Wesch can.
