A college or university is a place where, in both research and teaching and in the spirit of collegiality, people create and exchange knowledge and rigorously question its truthfulness. If there is no opportunity to test if knowledge is true, and indeed if testing for the truth is not the central activity, then it is not a college or university, though it may be licensed by one or another state agency to grant postsecondary degrees. If there is no creation of knowledge (which can and certainly does include work in the classroom as well as in research), then there is no college or university. If the transmission of knowledge is only in one direction (from instructor to student), then it is not exchange but imposition, so it is not a college or university. If the spirit is anything other than collegial, in its exact sense, then it is not a college or university. For the sake of having a name to name this thing that a college or university is not, I will call it a diploma market, an institution trading in commodities, selling and delivering instruction in order to sell and deliver the instructed. ...[This] is certainly what many outside of higher education want [our institutions] to become. It is also what most faculty rightly spend increasing amounts of time and energy combating. James Slevin, Introducing English: essays in the intellectual work of composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001. 234.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:27:04 +0000
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