"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
27 July 2007Quote(s) of the weekWe begin with a notion by George Leef:
[R]ather than assuming that all professors have plenty of brilliant ideas in them that they will be able to research and write about when given a sufficiently light teaching load, the assumption should be that professors will devote their time to teaching unless an outside party thinks highly enough of some research proposal to buy their time from the university.
I have little truck with a large majority of what passes for the academic elite these days — and I'm especially scornful of the entire concept of collegiate tenure — but there is sufficient intellectual spark in the ashes of my brain to believe that the expansion of knowledge should not have to be commercially attractive in order for it to be nourished and nurtured.
Emphasis added. An example:
Imagine if Mozart had been a tenured professor of music at the University in Vienna — would you have insisted on him teaching freshmen students the principles of harmony and composition for three hours a day? And let's be honest again: brilliant people are often lousy teachers. Why burden them with a task which, in the end, benefits nobody?
I'm generally in favor of finding a decent compromise between two extremes; but in this case, between the extremes of "commercial appeal" and "academic navel-gazing", I'm tugged far more towards the latter than to the former. No matter how much the system is abused by the mediocre, the slothful and the incompetent. I admit to some reservations about this conclusion, perhaps informed by this scene from Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. Thomas Mortmain has just locked his father, a writer suffering seemingly-terminal block, in the old tower of the castle, and sister Cassandra takes exception to the idea:
"Personally," [said Thomas], "I think knowing he won't be let out until he's done some work is almost more important."
"That's nonsense," I said. "If it doesn't come right psychologically — from the depths of father — it won't come right at all. You can't trammel the creative mind." "Why not?" said Thomas. "His creative mind's been untrammelled for years without doing a hand's-turn. Let's see what trammelling does for it." And while the fact that I remember this passage after reading it forty or so years ago suggests that its premise has taken hold very deeply indeed, I would truly hate to be the administrative type who wound up trammelling a Mozart. Posted at 2:04 PM to QOTWI don't see Mozart as one who would accept trammelling. J.S. Bach, OTOH... Posted by: Old Grouch at 4:15 PM on 27 July 2007The flaw in Kim's argument is, colleges are there for teaching. If Mozart can't teach, don't put him on faculty in the first place. But if he can teach, and he's on faculty, he damn well ought to be teaching. Posted by: McGehee at 11:01 AM on 28 July 2007McG, Au contraire. Colleges are also research institutions, and not just degree mills. I wouldn't mind having a genius like Mozart on staff, even if he only taught one (postgrad) class a year. Of course, in today's environment, Mozart would never be allowed to be on staff, because he never had a college degree... but that's a topic for another time. Posted by: Kim du Toit at 2:57 PM on 30 July 2007 |