Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.Bob Dylan 1964
Among the many affectations that annoy so many people, the baby boomers in their devout narcissism, believed they had found a way to transcend generational change. The baby boomers were going to be young forever. Their demographic was the bulge in the python and therefore, they would determine, forever, what was cool and hip, and what was right and proper. The baby boomers persisted in defining the American zeitgeist in a way never seen before. America's obsession with youth meant that the baby boomers had to (appear to) be young forever. But, time has its own nature and the baby boomers are aging. Even in the greatest bastions of baby boomer liberalism, protest, and youth, the times they are a-changin'.
The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire
MADISON, Wis. — When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” in front of Columbia University’s library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born.
When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing.
Together, these Midwestern academics, one leaving the professoriate and another working her way up, are part of a vast generational change that is likely to profoundly alter the culture at American universities and colleges over the next decade.
This is change we can all hope for. The rest of the Times article, four pages in all, tries to maintain an even tone but laments the unhappy realities that have caused the younger generation of Professors to be more pragmatic and less ideological. I suppose one might conclude that the baby boomers who grew up at a time of tremendous increases in wealth in this country had the luxury (especially once they achieved tenure) of not worrying about making a living. When you have a sinecure, you can indulge in ideological posturing.
In an interesting coincidence, William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar discusses The Disadvantages of an Elite Education in its current issue. [HT: Siggy]
It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.
I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.
The article is a fascinating look at the insularity of our elite colleges and the resultant insularity of the elites which graduate from them. The change from a professoriate that sees its mission as primarily ideological indoctrination to a younger generation eager and willing to allow the ideological battles of the 60s to mercifully fade away, can only be a good thing for our next generation of leaders.
Another news story seems to be germane as well to the sense of a generational change and the sense of old structures failing. The LA Times once again is shrinking.
LA Times to cut 250 jobs, including 150 news jobs
The decline in advertising, fueled by a weak real estate market, has boosted the copy-to-ads ratio above the industry target of 50-50, giving readers more stories than they can digest, while the paper competes for attention with the Internet and TV, editor Russ Stanton said.
As a result, the paper will undergo a makeover by the fall that will cut pages by 15 percent per week, eliminate some sections and trim story length, Stanton said.
"The number one reason that people cancel the L.A. Times is, they tell us, they don't have enough time to read the paper that we give them every day," Stanton said. "We're going to be more picky about the stories we choose to write long and a lot more picky about the ones we write shorter."
While the editor strives mightily to convince himself the problem for the Times is too much content rather than the quality of the content, it is clear that the emerging 21st century information technologies are sounding the death knell for any legacy media that is unable to adapt. The LA Times has not yet adapted to the new environment. This is not any great revelation but the ramifications of the changing environment will surely surprise.
Young people coming of age in the 60s were taught to question authority. In universities and among the elites, they then became the authorities. Now, with increasing speed, the rules are changing and the next generation is coming of age in a much more uncertain world in which authority must be earned everyday rather than bestowed.
A journalism degree from an elite university is not worth what it once was and its value is diminishing by the day. If young professors do not adapt to the new environment, their students will begin to recognize that they are not being prepared for the world they are about to enter. Ideology, by its nature, constricts thinking within well defined limits. This is no longer a workable model. Our elite universities have done a poor job of teaching our children how to think "out of the box" though there are, thankfully, a great many young people whose native intelligence and curiosity keeps them from being thus confined. If enough people realize that current pedagogy is failing, the universities may find themselves facing straits similar to the media. (They will never go out of business; their endowments and political clout will see to their perpetuation in perpetuity. However, they will slowly become less and less relevant to the modern world.) Paradoxically, the best education for a bright young person entering a rapidly changing world is probably a more traditional education where he or she can learn from the brightest thinkers of the last two thousand years.
Wouldn't it be a fascinating turn of events if some of the next generation's most creative leaders were even now incubating in places other than our elite universities? I suspect a General Petraeus would make a better leader than any of our current political class, even the ones who went to Harvard. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to imagine that the military can better prepare a young person for the modern world than an elite university.
[Disclaimer: My oldest son just separated from the USAF and has entered the Reserves where he will gain additional training. His younger brother, after two years of enjoying college (ie, partying)and gaining good grades despite his active social life, decided to enter the Navy in September rather than go back to school. He believes, and I agree, that he will learn more in the Navy than he would at college. I suppose that makes me biased, but I believe people learn the most when they are motivated and the military has more motivation to get things right than most other areas in society.]
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