The Utilitarian Approach to Education

If you pay attention to multiple sources of information, you can see patterns and trends that paint a picture of where an institution or organization is headed.

I just got another e-mail from the A&M campus bookstore trying to sell me t-shirts and posters so I can be ready for College Colors Day Sept 3^rd and pimp out my dorm room (think my wife would mind a Shakira poster in the bedroom?). This is the same university bookstore that has run out of the books I ordered for my SPAN 302 class, leaving 1/4 of the students still without textbooks by the end of the first week of classes.

I also saw a newspaper article (props to my boy Zane for putting it on Facebook), the link to which I’ll attach here: http://www.theeagle.com/am/A-amp-amp-M-grades-faculty

You can read it for yourself, but the moral of the story is that there is a plan afoot to measure faculty members by their financial effectiveness: how much money they generate from teaching and how much research funding they receive.

These three tidbits are indicators of what I think is a larger problem: Universities are more and more about producing revenue and less and less about learning. A few years ago, our campus bookstore was sold to a well-known commercial bookseller. Now, we know the bookseller is all about making money, so why shouldn’t they be more focused on selling clothing and dorm room doo-dads than textbooks for small classes? But shame on A&M for selling out to them and abdicating a basic university responsibility: making sure the students have access to a textbook.

An even bigger piece of the academic process is deciding what gets taught, and it seems to me that this proposal to apply a profit and loss approach to measuring faculty effectiveness could completely turn the university, as we know it, wrong side out. Profs will be forced to market their classes and absolutely maximize class size to show they’re getting a lot of bang for their buck. Why would I teach a class of 20 students when I can automate everything and pack 300 into a lecture hall and do the class that way? Liberal arts? languages? writing? philosophy? sociology? – out. The guys who can get grants to genetically modify a corn plant for more production or make a chicken fatter – in.

I don't think Socrates lectured with a big corporate logo on his toga. Oh, but that's right, he was sentenced to death and made to drink hemlock for being critical of prominent Athenians.