Higher Ed as Infotainment...

Here's yet another article describing the antipathy to learning displayed by too many of today's college students. I'm filing it to share with colleagues (or perhaps to reread myself) who are distraught after reading disparaging comments on students' course-evaluation forms. Like Stanley Fish and others, I find these anonymous evaluation forms not just useless but counterproductive. They most definitely reinforce the paradigm of education as fast food described in this essay by Doug Mann.

Mann's article contains some cringeworthy anecdotes and makes some good points. I have a couple minor objections. His opening, the exchange between Professor Lovechild and Dr. Sunshine, strikes me as reactionary drug scapegoating. Here the culprit is LSD and pot brownies. I have heard one tale from a now retired professor of LSD use in the classroom back in the 1960s. It occurred in a graduate seminar on Melville. LSD was still legal and the prof ordered the drug from a company advertising in a psychology journal. Memebers of the seminar who chose to do so dosed before a discussion of Moby Dick. According to this professor, the seminar discussion was the most intense and rigorous he'd attending.

But I digress. My point is not to advocate (or condemn) psychotropic drug use in conjunction with literature courses. Rather, I think Mann's target should not be the 'hippie freak' professors he's conjured into existence, but rather the corporate-minded administrators who, in my experience, are the ones that envision higher ed as yet another commodity to be bought and sold at a negotiable (relative to market fluctuations) price.

This brings me to my second reservation about the article: Mann's use of postmodern as a modifier for students who appear to be lazy, arrogant, unmotivated, rude, etc. What needs to be stressed is that the students' disgegard for higher learning is not some inexplicable phenomenon unique to this generation. Rather the tendency to treat a college degree as but another commodity to be aquired in the pursuit of capital is symptomatic of what Fredric Jameson refers to as the "cultural logic of late capitalism." The logic is promoted by the Bush Administration, which continues to cut federal funds for higher education, paraticularly programs designed to help students from lower-income families adjust to college and university life.