Recommended - The Last Professor

I recommend the article The Last Professor by Stanley Fish in the Opinion page of yesterday's New York Times. The debate about whether knowledge is valuable for its own sake, or only for its utility in the real world has gone on for centuries, and will probably never be resolved. But there is a related question of whether the traditional ivy-covered-halls model of the university, with required courses not related to acquiring a salable skill, is still valuable in the world. Of course, there are other, subtle, things that go on in such universities, such as establishing membership in an exclusive in-group that may lead to career advancement later on in fields such as law or politics.

But there remains the issue. Undergraduate and graduate work that is required to enter the sciences or engineering or medicine or history or linguistics, for example, is clearly useful. But what about undergraduate or graduate work in, say, poetry or literary criticism? Are these courses just a playground for the idle rich, or do they have some real utility in the world?

Note that I'm not questioning the utility of poetry or literary criticism, just the utility of teaching about them in a university. It's not clear to me that any of the great poets would have been improved by taking such courses. And I'm not sure my own appreciate of poetry was improved by the one course I took in it -- I recall thinking at the time that the lecturer was probably finding in the poems far more symbolism than the poet ever intended, and that symbolism was probably drawn far more from the lecturer's own experience and psyche than the poet's. Perhaps this just reflects my own limitations, but it does make me wonder.......

Of course the traditional university education was long a status symbol, marking off the wealthy aristocracy from the common folk. And university-educated people could always reassert that status in any group by demonstrating that they had read the classics and could quote Greek philosophers. But that carries much less weight in today's world, which values far higher demonstrable achievement in fields such as business or science or politics, so perhaps it has become passe.