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Thursday, May 01, 2003
posted by gbarto at 2:06 AM:
Steve Den Beste has thoughts on academia, and its being flushed into the open by the war. Having spent quite some time there, I particularly appreciate his comments on the software engineer who makes a living being understood by people outside his profession versus the prof who makes his living by not being understood. It's a problem that I run up against from time to time in writing this blog because there are shorthands I came to take for granted while closer to academe on a day to day basis. But shorthands carry the risk of being, to pull a term from the software engineer's bag, black boxes. That is, students and professors alike come to assume that if certain things are under consideration, certain conclusions must be drawn, though they do not know why, only that that is what always comes out of the process. (A black box - and I hope I remembered the right term - is a piece of code that you do not need to understand, or even see, just know what to put in and how to read the outputs; you might use one for temperature conversions, for example, to get a piece of software done more quickly rather than creating your own function for what is a rather standard procedure.) I am glad to report that some of the black boxes are being cracked and their contents inspected. For example, I had a historiography seminar a few years ago in which we looked at the practical ramifications of (jargon alert) postmodernism, post-modernism, environmentalist postmodernism, practical realism and the not so good old-fashioned way of doing history. However, while some grad students are being taught to do bullshit tests on the theories they're reading, the professions within academe (particularly in literature) have not done enough to rein in the freaks and lunatics.Contrary to the fears of many, however, academia is not getting a free pass. People are saying to hell with university educations and getting associates degrees, Sun and Microsoft credentials, trade school certificates and more while universities see enrollments dwindle. As an unemployed academic, I'm not happy about this, but as a free-market capitalist I have to admire the way in which the market is reducing funds from enterprises that have wantonly ignored their clients' needs. When we get academics as dependent upon explaining themselves as Steve's correspondent, I expect we'll see some pretty major shakeups. But we'll also see just how much value good academics offer in terms of thinking skills taught and life lessons shared, even in seemingly useless subjects. That would be a very good thing indeed, both for the profession and for students who wonder why an associates degree isn't enough.
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