Privileged Professors

In his letter "Pressure on academia" (Letters 7-18-14), correspondent Keith M. Parsons offers a stark contrast between the status quo in higher education that defends the tenure system that protects professors from any measurable standards of accountability, and those that challenge the status quo.

 

Parsons is unambiguously praiseful of that status quo, describing "an academic culture that is the product of a historical development that began with the founding of Plato’s Academy 2,400 years ago." 

 

He is equally disdainful of those that challenge the educational Establishment, describing reformers as "ideologues and politicians who want to impose a 'business model'."  He goes on to say many more critical things of a similar vein, and finishes by haughtily proclaiming that "students are not customers", and that professors "have the responsibility of telling people what they need to hear." 

 

In other words, you know nothing and we know what is good for you, so shut up and don't dare criticize us.

 

What goes unmentioned in Parson's diatribe is any acknowledgment of the dumbed-down curriculum or the berserk price increases that have plagued higher education for the past generation, leaving today's college graduates with an education measurably inferior to that of their parents, and mired in debt.

 

Meanwhile, throughout the land you hear barely a whisper from the professoriate acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, they are part of the problem.  So much for their devotion to dialectics, a method quite Platonic in its origins.  If as Parson's claims professors are in fact "a product of.....Plato’s Academy", they might try challenging the status quo just a little bit, and engage reformers in an actual debate instead of demonizing them. 
 

Pete Smith
Houston, TX