(Download) "Business and Educational Values (Forum on "Outcomes Assessment, Accountability, And Honors")" by Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Business and Educational Values (Forum on "Outcomes Assessment, Accountability, And Honors")
- Author : Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 201 KB
Description
In "Saving Honors in the Age of Standardization," Linda Frost astutely observes the confluence of two disturbing trends in higher education that are generating a current so deep and swift that one wonders if resistance is possible: the business model for education and the standardization of educational processes, especially through testing. Hardly an issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education appears without an article or discussion featuring business practices or business leaders dominating the landscape of this or that college or university. Rarely does a meeting with or missive from an administrator not include some element directly connected to one of these trends. Here in Georgia, the new Chancellor of the University System of Georgia is a business person and former CEO. My institution, Georgia Perimeter College--the third-largest school in the University System--has initiated a search for a new president, and the Chair of the Screening Committee is a business professor, as is another of only three total faculty on the committee. None are faculty members from the English Department, a humanities discipline, or one of the social sciences. What will be the background and passions of this new president is the obvious question, but the answers feel eerily preordained. Five to ten years ago, I recall, my somewhat reductive but comforting pat explanation for the hiring of business people as administrators at all levels of college and universities was that they seemed like people who were not smart or clever enough to make it in the business world. Outmaneuvering academics, however, was a game they could play, and we were fair and easy game. Moreover, everyone qualifies as an expert on education because all of us endured elementary, middle-school, high-school, and college classrooms for years. The situation has become more serious in recent years, and finding comfort in pat answers and reductionist barbs is not easy. I worry that the future of teaching is a race to retirement against the accelerating forces of standardization and business practices. Certainly that is not the epitaph I would like to read about my career in education, nor is it the environment I want my students to experience. I spent several years in New York City after I graduated from college and before deciding to attend graduate school to earn a doctorate in English Literature. I worked on Wall Street and at Rockefeller Center in what I call my Junior Businessman phase. There I learned several lessons. Clearly, those individuals who could communicate and write well and exhibited a flexible and critical mind were the ones who were prospering and moving up the proverbial ladder. This observation from the real world has metamorphosed into a mantra in my composition classes to encourage students to recognize that they are likely to find themselves needing to write well no matter what profession they pursue. One other object lesson from the Wall Street firm that seemed to have so little regard for my work and subsistence: about ten years after I left there, I learned that the principals had all been indicted and convicted of fraud. (Sometimes justice delayed is not justice denied; they were a sleazy bunch.) Certainly, I did not see in those New York City operations exemplars of business practices for the academy to emulate, and my confidence is not rising as I review the machinations of Enron, Ken Lay, and fellow travelers in the corporate world. Therein lies the problem. I am having a difficult time understanding what elements in the business world beckon as ones that the academy should embrace.