University-industrial complex corrupts meaning of education

John Calvert:

According to the established wisdom, President Joseph Chapman's tenure at North Dakota State University has been a fabulous success. He's the fellow who made everything grow - enrollments, sports, construction, institutional status, research and graduate programs to suit the quirkiest of tastes.

It was all so extravagantly admired that to ask whether any of it had anything to do with education would have seemed impertinent; indeed, over the past 11 years, Chapman himself never, so far as I know, uttered a single word about issues that are related to education, such as student quality, the dissolution of the core curriculum, the adjunctification of the faculty, and so on. That didn't seem odd because no one else ever talks about them, either - not the governor, not the Legislature, not the State Board of Higher Education, not the trustees and not the leaders of other institutions.

It isn't entirely their fault, because the anti-intellectualism that has always been a part of American life makes education a dangerous topic. Much, perhaps most, of the public expects education to yield a direct material payoff, and when it doesn't, there are mutterings about public resources being wasted on something that is plainly "useless."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 9, 2009 1:22 AM
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