Heather MacDonald on The Teaching Company
Some Free-Market Fantasies

Well, there's this. MacDonald complains about the bizarre/loony types of courses that run rampant in today's universities--"regendering" this and than, deconstructing the other thing, and every kind of niche course about the holy trinity, race, class, "gender." That, she's right about. There is little doubt that there is entirely too much of that crap. It is also fairly well-known that the intellectual standards in such courses are fairly low, inherited from the quasi-philosophy that sprang up in LitCrit and similar areas.

Look, it's not that there aren't interesting questions about race, class and sex--there are. There are all sorts of interesting questions about them. But (a) they are currently radically over-emphasized in the academy, and (b) there is no excuse for the slack standards that prevail in their study.

So yes: one ought to be concerned about the proliferation of trendy, crappy, lefty courses in the academy.

However, MacDonald is simply wrong about the cause of this problem, and so about its solution. Yes, it's professors who bring this stuff to students...but students eat it up and seek it out. The problem is a certain free-market-ish approach higher education--that's not the solution. What do students want? All sorts of crap that's bad for them. Mindless lefty po-mo nonsense is fairly popular, as are vocational and business courses that teach students almost nothing, as are courses about sex, as are courses in which you get to watch a lot of movies. Easy courses that emphasize free-wheeling, emotional lectures with plenty of opportunities so "share your feelings," especially about the things 19-year-olds are interested in--i.e. sex--are always a hit. You want a free market approach to higher ed? That's what you're going to get. You really would not believe how many students have asked me "when am I ever going to have to know about statistics?" When indeed.

Perhaps demand would fall off a bit if certain areas of the humanities and social sciences were not pumping out profs who were pushing these things. But it wouldn't fall off a lot. Contra MacDonald, students are not clamoring for the history of Greece and Rome, but getting Regendering Greece and Rome instead. There's always a core of students who want, e.g., the history of Greece and Rome. But students with a scholarly bent are, sadly, a minority in the average contemporary university. Most of our students, for example, are primarily interested in vocational training and entertainment. If we left it entirely up to market forces, my bet is that we'd have more of the po-mo-y crap, not less. The most popular class would be something like An On-Line Introduction to Using Sex To Get Ahead In The Workplace Through Film.

Conservatives try to make the free market the solution to every problem, but it won't work here. Perhaps the older, wish-I'd-have-gone-to-college crowd that buys TLC tapes wants to learn about the great books--good on them if they do, and it suggests they've got better sense than the average privileged 19-year-old...but who would have thought otherwise? But in this case the conservative commitment to the classics is simply at odds with what the free market would select. The invisible hand will not do the trick here. And Perry-esque plans to make universities more like businesses will simply exacerbate the problem.