Branded Nation by James B. Twitchell

Author:James B. Twitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Last Thing a Good School Cares About Is…Teaching

From a branding point of view, what happens in the classroom is beside the point. I mean that literally. The old image of the classroom as Socratic ideal, with Mark Hopkins (future president of Williams) at one end of the log and the student at the other, is no longer even an invoked idea. Higher Ed, Inc., is more like a sawmill. A few years ago Harvard started a small department called the Instructional Computing Group, which employs several people to videotape about thirty courses a semester. Although it was intended for students who unavoidably missed class, it soon became a way of not attending class. Any enrolled student could attend class on the Web, fast-forwarding through the dull parts or not watching at all. And with grade inflation you can be comforted by the fact that it really makes no difference. This is “distance education” from a dorm room at an advertised $37,000 a year. The professors didn’t complain. From their point of view it’s okay: next semester, just cue the tape. Roll in a new log.

Elite schools are no longer in the diploma business; that’s for the convenience schools. And they are no longer in the cultural literacy department; that’s for the mass media. Higher education is in the sponsored research and edutainment business; what colleges and universities offer is just one more thing that you shop for, one more thing you consume, one more story you tell and are told. Not by happenstance do you hear students talking about how much the degree costs, how much it is worth, what a credit hour is going for, as if they were trying to decide between watching TV and going out to the movies. And that is very much how the schools themselves talk as they look for new sources of research or developmental funding.

In many schools there is even a period called shopping around in which the student attends as many classes as possible, looking for a “fit,” almost like channel surfing. Then there is a drop-add period, after which the student is locked into a schedule. But not to worry; in most schools you can drop a course with little effort, especially if you are not doing as well as you would like. What do you lose? Only your money, and as we have seen, at the prestige schools even that is not really your money.

So we “do college” as we do lunch or do shopping or do church. That’s because for most students in the upper-tier schools the real activity is getting in and then continuing on into the professional schools. No one cares what is taught in grades 13 to 16, certainly not the professorate or the students. Not by happenstance is one of the favorite words on any campus today “whatever,” usually delivered with a shrug. To some degree this observation is the result of an education that teaches the equality of not just points of view but subjects of study.

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