Turning from truth to more dubious pursuits

Abstract

A professor heading to class meets another professor. I 'm off to do my Liza Minnelli routine, says the first professor; the second laughs knowingly at the level of performance expected of a teacher in the college classroom today, and goes on to share the joke with yet a third. An educator with forty years of experience writes a letter to the Christian Science Monitor confidently pronouncing that most colleges today have become expensive institutions competing primarily as youth resorts, complete with pools, hockey rinks, catered meals, student centers, television rooms. The Chronicle of Higher Education features an opinion piece defending the old-fashioned lecture against the interactive pedagogy in vogue today, and another decrying student evaluations and their part in the dumbing down of higher education. And recently the New York Times saw fit to give front-page coverage to the problem of grade inflation, an inflation which has achieved Weimar-like proportions, especially at selective schools, and followed this with a piece in their Sunday review section that raised questions about the extraordinary emphasis placed on student evaluations in tenure, promotion, and salary decisions. What is happening? After what seems like years of progressive and cutting edge reforms to democratize higher education and make the university student friendly following the campus protests of the 1960s-reforms that could scarcely be questioned, so right, just, and inevitable were they once made to seem-the results in lowered standards of performance, achievement, and seriousness about the world of ideas is emerging to such an extent that they can no longer be ignored. Thoughts once confined to crabby out-of-the-way journals like Academic Questions are making their way into mainstream discourse, and even more important, the voices are not just from the right, long loudly critical of developments in the academy, but from other corners as well. A prime example of this is an extraordinary article that appeared in the September 1997 issue of Harper's by Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and, among other things, the editor of Wild Orchids and Trotsky (1993), a collection of essays by such writers as Eve Kosofsky