"This transformation gave the professoriate a new autonomy, but at a price: If professors wanted academic freedom, insulation from the demands of the commercial marketplace, they had to start thinking of what they did in nonvocational terms—as the pursuit of specialized knowledge for its own sake. This self-conception helps to explain why the attempt to construct a general-education curriculum has been so fraught. General-education requirements are designed with the idea that there are some nonnegotiable ends to a college education—to provide, for example, the 'social glue' that bonds disparate Americans to one another, or to generate productive minds for the purposes of Cold War defense—but professors have been socialized to believe that what they do can't be reduced to something so vulgar and utilitarian."
Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Slate reviews Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Reaction in the American University.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment