Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand, all at a rapidly rising cost.
Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in cr for decades, and the seeds of this cr go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work The Conflict of the Faculties, wrote that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee (理事)."
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures (终身职位) will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for pay to maintain life and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence (不妥协) of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic words, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets strongly oppose it in their own departments.
If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.
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