Prof. Howard Doughty
Seneca College
---------------------------------------------
Corporate control of academic publications (at prices too high for libraries, never mind students and scholars), predatory publishers exploiting desperate faculty members, Wiki substituting for research and Google filtering, ordering and directing resources are all parts of what some otherwise intelligent people are celebrating as the "new illiteracy."
Add to this the pressure to inflate grades, provide a "fun" experience, judge academic quality by market share and make faculty evaluation a matter of popularity contests, and to normalize the withdrawal of public funds for education and research in deference to "partnerships" with business and industry that allow private sector firms to use institutions of higher education as their primary research facilities and job-training/indoctrination centers, and we find a reason to rehearse a line from Leonard Cohen. In 1989, the poet/musician said that he watched the Berlin Wall coming down and said to himself: "This can't be all good." Sometimes "disruptive innovation" just breaks stuff. The notion (not so much invented, but popularized by "business thinker" and self-promoter Clayton Christensen) has deep and tangled roots: at least back to Joseph Schumpeter's idea of "creative destruction" (1943), which extended the musings of Werner Sombart and his concept of "Spätkapitalismus" which, in turn, depended in Marx's analysis in "The Communist Manifesto" (1848), "The Grundrisse" (1857) and "Theories of Surplus Value" (1863). "Disruptive innovation" is not an significant, but should not be accorded unearned respect or assumed to be either necessary, irreversible or innately progressive. Many a worthy institution, organization or whole society has been hobbled or destroyed by naive enthusiasm for the "new big thing," oblivious to the harm that is done.
A wise man once said that "every change involves a loss." It is folly to think that the balance is always on the side of change - particularly when it is guided by technophiles and philistines, wealth and power and people indifferent to values other than the merry jingle of the cash register or, to be fashionably up-to-date, the pixelized commercial and financial transactions in which funds can be transferred or obliterated with the press of a computer key and critical thought and historical coherence can be "trumped" (so to speak) by buffoons, charlatans and villains of all sorts.
------------------------------
EDUCATE, EMPOWER, ELEVATE
Prof. Bholanath Dutta
Founder & President
MTC Global: A Global Think Tank in
Higher Education, ISO 9001: 2008
Partner: UN Global Compact I UN Academic Impact
Cell: +91 96323 18178 / +91 9964660759
The views expressed are individual and not necessarily MTC Global also share the same views. To unsubscribe from the group , please send an email to join_mtc@googlegroups.com and write the heading as 'Unsubscribe'. Immediate action will be taken.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Management Teachers Consortium, Global" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to join_mtc+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment