Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
|
Beshrew my heart, but I recognized that there is a point to be made about undergraduate education in all this - that many students do feel "expelled" by their professors, not because of "Darwinism," but because they perceive their professors to be remote (because faculty are rewarded for research, not teaching) and the university system to be bureaucratic. I don't doubt that these new Bible colleges that have sprung up manage to create, as did Harvard college at its founding, a warmer, more personal experience for students, with real professional concern for their development.
The trick is to re-partner that sense of service, which flowered in America's A&M universities just after the Morrill Act (while the theologically-based Harvard and Princeton denounced them as "cow colleges"), with our ongoing committment to scholarly research.
Ben has a cause, but he doesn't really know what it is. But this is why it is important for people like Fogel to at least pay attention to Expelled. Fanatics often have their finger on a pulse - it's their analysis that off. But really, the question of a return to student-centered higher education is a crucial one! At their founding, universities used to be student guilds. In our modern, Web 2.0 era, we need to rethink higher education to make it more responsive to students.
--------------
Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
|
