Re: [MTC Global] [Power Read] Paradigm Shift in Higher Education~ Critics by Prof. Howard Doughty

It is a rather interesting critic. However, the change is also the law of nature. There is no proof that the old world paradigms of higher education were better than what we see today. The past always looks glorious when we are short changed by the present. To me, in the 1960s and 70s the public universities were as pathetic as they are today; may be, more. 


  Kuldeep Nagi, PhD
Bangkok, Thailand
66-846374466




From: join_mtc@googlegroups.com <join_mtc@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Prof. Bholanath Dutta <bnath.dutta@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2017 12:01 PM
To: join_mtc
Subject: [MTC Global] [Power Read] Paradigm Shift in Higher Education~ Critics by Prof. Howard Doughty
 
Prof. Howard Doughty
Seneca College
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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.
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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
 www.mtcglobal.org I

Email: president@mtcglobal.org
Cell: +91 96323 18178 / +91 9964660759

 

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