Date: Fri, 7 Nov 1997 01:17:43 -0400
From: Stirling Newberry <allegro-AT-thecia.net>
Subject: PLC: Tethered Education III


The questions are:

"Is there some external pressure which this system is incapable of dealing
with?"

and

"Has the social organisation overwhelmed the nominal purpose of the system?"

Let me outline some points:

1. If the first purpose of expertise is to deal with dangerous and
counter-intuitive ideas, then on the one hand many of the dangerous and
counter-intuitive ideas that the current system was founded to deal with
are being abandoned. Industrialisation is being forced to give way to
greener alternatives, similarly nuclear weapons are being abandoned, as is
nuclear power. Statistics is being replaced by computational visualisation.

2. The need for a managerial class is being obliterated. These were the
people fired by the downsizing of the most recent economic cycles.

3. The large structure of corporation and government by which the
intelligensia's ideas are put to use is disintegrating. I believe George F
Kennan's remarks on the subject dating from the 1980's are most eloquent.

4. The very structure of the university system itself is being exploited.
If having a degree means the "ability to keep ones head down" - the
corporations looking for people willing to work as units on a task that
they have no connection to are willing to hire. The college degree is the
certification, not of knowledge, but of ability to keep oneself in line.

5. The above fact, more and more obvious since the 1980's is in itself
being exploited. If a degree is a professional license - then the ability
to get it without the social gamesmanship of "keeping ones head down" is a
commodity that an increasing number of people will wish to purpose. See
"University of Pheonix" for more details.

6. The declaration by economic elites that they do not government
technology, nor do they need "expertise". Instead what they crave is the
academy as a "legitimiser" of positions that they already hold. Again -
since the person in the university is a pragmatist - skilled at doing what
it takes to stay in - his loyalty can be bought. After all, it was by
selling his loyalty to be credentialed that got him to where he is in the
first place. The same is true of other causes - from far right to far left.
The university is a source of legitimacy as much as academicism was in the
19th century. It bears the shimmer of the past.

7. The passing away of "objective standards and criteria" which accompanied
the shift from people of say - Professor Ball's generation - to the
essentially interpersonal and intertextual relationships which are more
useful to scholars who rose as part of the generation that followed them -
hollows out the very defense that previously could be offered. That is to
say: superiority of ideas.

Consider the importance of such standards to a system whose purpose it is
to be a laboratory for the general society. One thinks, and then one
applies orthagonal standards to the idea, in the belief that those
standards will simulate the effect of the outside world. These standards
"preflight" the idea.

Consider why they are abandoned in a world more concerned with creating
social organisation by marketing and so on - the importance of an idea is
its dissemenatability. Not its duplication mind you, but its ability to act
as a synchroniser of behavior. Standards are less important than the
ability to reduce the idea to slogans.

8. Most damagingly: there are new ideas which the academy is unable to deal
with itself - and hence creating the need to ban those technologies. I will
mention 2 in particular:

a. The application of computer technology to financial markets. For the
last decade we have had to ban the use of arbitrage to move markets beyond
a certain amount. There is at least some indication with the
interconnection of global markets that recent events have cemented that a
weakness in this system has arisen - it should now be possible to attack
some undefended part of the global system to produce the same arbitrage
effects even in markets that have regulations against "program trading".
Most particularly making use of the Dollar Peg in Hong Kong and its
inter-relationship to stock prices seems to offer a favorable avenue.

b. Cloning. The recent developments in cloning make it clear that a great
deal more life is possible to offer people with large budgets. Not yet -
but within a decade or so. What Billionaires want to buy, then generally
can if it is possible to do so.

- since the current system was founded on the idea that technologies need
not be banned - but merely controlled, this loss is in fact the most
devastating admission by the current system that it has reached the point
of not being able to deal with the very products of its own successes.

What the above amounts to is a crisis of the one thing which an
intelligensia needs above all else: credibility. The only thing the
intelligensia has, in the end, is ideas and the ability to organise around
those ideas. When the university becomes no more than a seal of approval -
then credibility is lost. It neither controls key ideas any more, nor does
it have the ability to control the new ones that it is creating.

In short the argument over tenure is a symptom, not, in any real sense a
"problem". It is merely the defense of particular mechanisms which were
essential in the past - but whose relevance is now moot in the face of
larger issues. Like the defense of the NEA - it is not particularly
important in itself- it is of symbolic value. The symbol is the superiority
of those inside versuses those outside. It is the talisman of legitimacy.
"We are the elite."

The loss of credibility is reflected in the crisis of positions for young
lecturers, in the loss of connection between the general populace and the
philosophical ideas coming from Universities, and the disaffection of the
economic class for any product of University except legitimacy.

It is the upper crust version of the mistake of the trade unions of the
1970's and 1980's. As jobs shrank, the demand was increasingly for the
protection of seniority and current members. When I worked on a payroll
survey for General Electric in the 1980's there was a bimodal distribution
of assembly line workers: union employees clustered around 20 years of
service, and non-union clustered around 3. As the union movement cut off
new members - it aged, increasing the pressure on leadership to protect
seniority even more and so on. It makes an interesting chapter in labor
history.

- - -

There in lies the reasoned case for reform - the basis for the current
system has been removed. The need for an intelligensia - per se - has not
gone away, indeed there has not been a greater need for real thinking in
the last 20 years. However - the social organisation of the current
University system is ill-equpped to deal with these problems, and indeed
the general disdain, obnoxiousness and arrogance which infests many of its
members mean that it is quite likely to drive out the very people who it
should otherwise be recruiting. The system takes too long to give out
credentials, and places too many arbitrary and capricious barriers.
Increasingly talented people go in for long enough to get the stamp and go
on to other things.

20 years ago University could say "play by our rules or not at all."
However in the interim this has changed, and such declarations ring
increasingly hollow to a generation that lived through double digit tuition
increases while classes were cut, who graduate to a stagnant job market -
while watching college dropouts go on to make more money per year than
anyone who is not a superstar professor...

Tenure's removal will be among the smaller changes which are required.





Stirling Newberry
business: openmarket.com
personal: allegro-AT-thecia.net
War and Romance: http://www.thecia.net/users/allegro/public_html




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