ACTA's Must-Reads
« Professor Wilfred McClay | Main | Liveblog: Professor McClay, Part III »
Liveblog: Professor McClay, Part II
McClay: "I think of the keynote in the musical sense - the note to which the rest of the orchestra will tune."
And: "My talk will follow the pattern of a sermon - which may indicate to some of you that you can nod off to sleep right now. But I mean. . . that we have to be honest about the bad news. . . before we get to the good news."
The bad news, he says, is like the housing bubble. In a market awash with easy credit, there's incentive for sellers to raise prices. McClay quotes Herbert Stein, the economist: "Everything that can't go on forever, won't." (That gets a big laugh from the audience.) He compares it to higher ed - the other thing middle class families worry about on a scale with their worries about their houses, and a good assumed to have an imperishable price - higher education, people assume, will always allow people to pay it off. Student debt approaches $1 trillion, exceeding credit card debt, and not counting "shadow debt," i.e., loans (and other debt devices) taken out to pay for college but not called student loans.
McClay points out that just as prices are getting really out of control, the reputation of higher ed got "a kick in the teeth" from authors such as Andrew Hacker, Mark Taylor, Craig Brandon, and others. The AFT magazine has an article called "Beyond One Size Fits All College Dreams: Alternative Pathways to Desirable Careers," and Camille Paglia has "gone all the way with this, as she tends to go all the way with everything she does" in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "we need a sweeping re-valorization of the trades." The point, McClay says, is that the assumption that higher education is always and necessarily good, a good that will always go up in value, is being challenged. That's his sermon’s "bad news."
McClay rejects some solutions, such as Paglia's call to pure vocationalism. "True education cannot be oblivious to jobs, but education's value shouldn’t be measured solely by [jobs.]"
So, McClay says, we need to recover the purpose of education - and he recommends that we look back to the views of the Founders.
The good news in a minute.
Posted by Michael Pomeranz on November 05, 2010 at November 5, 2010 10:02 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/843