The end of the university as we know it?

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by me again, Apr 28, 2009.

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  1. me again

    me again Well-Known Member

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  2. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    What happened to students studying their subjects because they are interested in them? People often do things, sometimes at considerable effort and expense, for reasons of passion rather than purely for monetary gain.

    Advanced students are inevitably going to be addressing issues and problems that might prove to be of little interest to lay people. I'm sure that medieval scholars' commentaries on Aristotle didn't exactly excite village plowmen.

    That's the nature of higher education, it's socially isolating.

    Most of the doctoral programs that I've investigated offer their students financial support.

    It's students who keep professors in jobs. If the professors succeed dissuading all their students from continuing, then they'll be laid off themselves in short order and their departments closed.

    I've always thought that distance learning might be a way out of that trap, both for students and for professors. For students, DL opens up the possibility of pursuing advanced education part-time, avocationally, while holding down a day job. For professors, it increases demand for their services and keeps them employed.

    Unfortunately, trying to make that argument to professors is like spitting into the wind.

    There are many subfieds in every academic subject, and many research areas in each subfield. Undergraduate departments need to have enough breadth to cover the whole syllabus, but at the doctoral level they need to have enough depth to conduct original research. That means specialization. University graduate programs are typically going to be very strong in a few areas that are currently receiving active attention, and may be rather lacking in areas that aren't.

    That's why I've always thought that Degreeinfo is a little clueless when it treats graduate programs in a given subject as if they were equivalent and interchangeable, or tries to rank them based simply on general university prestige. Prospective students need to look at who is teaching in programs of interest to them and at what these people specialize in and are busy investigating.

    In this gentleman's subject of religion, it's hard to see how things could be otherwise. Religion takes in an awful lot of territory, so much that it's hard to imagine anyone being expert on religion, generally.

    Can we realistically expect a specialist on the Pali nikayas to simultaneously be an anthority on Asharite theology or the 14'th century Rhineland mystics?

    That sounds like a caricature to me. The student's real subject is probably the scope and breadth of Duns Scotus' reading and his use of his sources. That's important stuff in the history of ideas, tracing intellectual influences down through time.
     

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