Viva Academia - Just a Different Academia

A recent op-ed in the New York Times raised the interesting idea of completely revamping the university, with a particular focus (it seems to me) on graduate education in non-professional fields. The writer, Dr. Mark Taylor the chairman of the religion department at Columbia University, proposed six major ideas. I think that he's onto something here.

Here are the six steps and my thoughts:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. 

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. 

The first two sort of go hand in hand, and Taylor makes the very good point that certain problems cannot be addressed in isolation. Taylor makes the political science exclusive of religion point. I wonder, though, how he will effectively prevent all curriculum from being a mish-mash of subjects. The reality is that almost everything is connected somehow, and it seems that you'd run the risk of pouring out people who are jacks of all trades but have no mastery or depth in any segment of knowledge.

Even his examples of having departments such as Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water. Isn't there an economic component (Money) that exists in most of the other departments? So don't these problem-based programs still have the "too narrow focus" problem that plagues the current model?

He gives the example of the Water program, which "would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture". I'm not sure where people with those skills would come from, if you've eliminated discipline-based programs, even at the undergraduate level as he proposes, in favor of problem-based ones. Am I missing something?

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. 

Makes sense. I can't see how knowledge-sharing and the building off each other's ideas could possibly be a bad thing.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation.

Yeah! Dissertation by YouTube and Twitter. I'm all for that, especially if it means less wasted time writing about obscure subjects nobody really cares about. Perhaps the rule of thumb will be "If you can't Twitter a compelling  summary of your main points or put it in a five-minute YouTube video, it's probably irrelevant and uninteresting to most of the world." Actually, I hope it doesn't come to that.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. 

Seriously, shouldn't universities be doing this already? There's nothing more depressing than hearing about the plights of people who have been churned out by universities and graduate schools in disciplines which there is clearly an insufficient market for their services. My friend had mentioned that in a particular Scandinavian country, they actually limit those who study art and music, with particular attention in regulating supply for demand.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.

Makes sense to me. I have some tenured professor friends who wouldn't been keen on this. Generally speaking, has guaranteed employment without repercussion for poor performance ever led to better quality? Nope. On the other hand, do you know of anybody who would prefer to go from guaranteed employment to at-risk employment? Nope.