A Thought or Two about UVA

Happily, UVA's president, Teresa Sullivan, has been reinstated.

The thing is, the whole situation has left me saddened about the state of higher education and its businessification. It seems like the reversal of the UVA debacle is not some great victory, but rather a small victory in a much larger war, one that faculty are unlikely to win. 

On the one hand, clearly something has to be done about higher education: costs can't simply continue to rise at the rate of $1000 a year forever. It's a higher education bubble and it's got to pop.

On the other hand, higher education, or at least political theory, is not about making a list of outcomes nor about moving toward online education. Certainly there's a place for some of that, but it's not academia's main point. And some things can be taught online better than others.

I wonder if the problem isn't that vocational certification and liberal arts education are so closely tied together. When everyone gets a liberal education, then what it is can get watered down and lost in the rush to get a degree in mechanical engineering or nursing. Liberal arts education is, of course, useful, but when you focus on what it can be used for, you have to be careful or else you might lose it.

It's wonderful that Harvard is making some of its classes, including Michael Sandel's class on justice, available online; I think it could benefit really people around the world. However, political theory and college aren't just about viewing a set of lectures. If it were, then if you found the best professor to give the best political theory lectures ever, we would never need another political theory lecture again. We would just need a big screen and some headphones. (Of course, with that logic, couldn't we all just read Arisotle and pretend we were watching him on tv?)