Good News from the Universities?
Posted by Steven Hayward
Liberal professors from the 1960s generation are starting to retire And not a day too soon.
But what kind of professors are replacing them?
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Professors aren't replacing them, part-time adjuncts are
Perfect time to down size our overly engorged univeristies. Wouldn't be great if we required two years of vocational education for all potential college students? Maybe many would discover that four years isn't necessary. Its time to throw another shovel of dirt onto the grave of the Great Society.
Is there any reliable information that can help answer Steven Hayward's question? With so many able undergraduates preparing for something else, and with the non-science disciplines specializing ever more narrowly, is it possible that the replacement generation of college teachers will be even less prepared to defend a liberal (arts and sciences) education -- which is hardly a product of the Great Society -- than their predecessors?
Steve may be right--There's in a way more affection for liberal education from the residual sixties than anything from the dominant subsequent trends. The sixties, at least, during their prime were all about leisure, creativity, authenticity, love, as well as fake rage and theatrical activism etc. Give me Todd Gitlin over any rational choice guy...And I always think of political correctness, deconstruction, de Man etc. as seventies things. Those who say this is the dumbest generation say the sixties paved the way...and there's a lot to that...But there's still an argument that today's dumbness in more dumb than at least mid-sixties dumbness.
Minor correction: Yes they are adjuncts. But the Liberals are being replaced by Leftists.