the idea of the university

[white picket fence]

suggest quality reads:

devolution of humanities into osbcure turfwar bullshit
institutionalization of science/philosophy of science
how accreditation systems are devolving into profit machines,
new forms of peer evaluation, (degrees are bullshit and unrelated to competence)
history of educational institutions, other types, academies,
philosophy of knowledge/pedagogy

suggest anything goooood or just discuss ideas people blah.


edit*
Bill Evans, "The University in Ruins"
Smolin, Lee, "The Trouble with Physics"

[white picket fence]

I like the idea of this book "the curiosity of school" by zander sherman.

It takes a materialistic approach to the history of public education institutions, the history of the militarization of education in the states, the history of accreditation (think guilds) and odd things like the maclean's university rankings and how they affect perception of public vs private universities. he goes deep into the ranking systems and the logic behind university selection (social class not aptitude) and what the ranking systems are based on (personal opinion of maclean's ceos get undue weight in the ranking algorithms)

there isn't the kind of thoroughness and depth as i'd like and he doesn't really get very far into the kinds of deterioration that has occurred in specific faculties (science, humanities, etc.) obviously the author has never actually been formally enrolled at a university, and is fairly young so he is left dealing with alot of external issues and "symptoms" (of capitalism)

[Comrade #138672]

Why refuse to learn from children? Children can be very creative and insightful.

[white picket fence]

bcuz children are scum

[white picket fence]

bill readings' "the university in ruins"

Quotes from an amazon review:

"What it is not is what the title implies: a culture-war polemic. This is a heavily theorized account of the state of higher education. Moving from Kant, though the German Idealists and Humboldt, Readings traces the notion of a university anchored in rationality to one anchored in culture, in particular the culture of the nation-state, which the university is to inculcate in its students. In Germany this happens through philosophy, in England through English literature. Now, with the decline of the nation-state because of the triumph of transnational capitalism, there is, in effect, no nation state with a culture to inculcate. Hence, we have the university of `excellence', a nonreferential term that can mean anything. Under the administrative logic of corporate management, The institution is restructured under the goals of “excellence” excellence, in a sense so detached from any concrete form with a relationship to actual scholarly or practical engagement, as to rely heavily upon the use of arbitrary, superficial metrics.

Since this `excellence' subsumes everything previously considered counter-cultural, it turns all to a marketable commodity. (You want radical professors? You want radical cultural studies? Come to Old Siwash. Ours are Excellent. Just like our excellent dormitories and excellent exercise facilities.)

...What is interesting about Readings' critique is the fact that he acknowledges that multiculturalism and postmodernism (feminism, structuralism, marxist\historicist literary studies) have helped to create the `university of excellence'. They are causes as well as symptoms.

Ultimately this is an assault on the technocratic/bureaucratized/commercialized modern university, which measures all with quantifiable `metrics', accountability always being equatable with accounting, but what Readings offers in its place is somewhat vague, highly theoretical, unintelligible to bureaucrats and unlikely to ever happen: a community of `dissensus' rather than a search (as with the Germans) for not just the truth but its underlying unity."