David Bell reviews Mark Taylor’s new book in TNR.
Mark C. Taylor’s unbelievably misguided book provides an almost textbook example. In April, 2009, he published an incendiary New York Times op-ed entitled “End the University as We Know It,” which denounced graduate education as the “Detroit of higher learning,” demanded the abolition of tenure, and called for the replacement of traditional academic departments by flexible, short-lived “problem-focused programs.” Widely criticized (by me, too, in this magazine), the piece stayed at the top of the Times’s “most e-mailed” list for a cyber-eternity of four days. Enter Alfred A. Knopf.
It gets worse. Via Leiter.
The Edge of the American West 
3 comments
September 20, 2010 at 9:41 am
Dave
Ronald Reagan led a charge with his ten most frightening words: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.” This led to where we are now politically. Now we hear the new scary ten words from Taylor: “I’m from the University and I’m here to educate you.” Where will this carnival ride leave us in 30 years?
September 21, 2010 at 6:22 am
JJO
From the article (Bell’s summary of Taylor’s anecdote about a student of his):
Her ideal program, she tells him, would draw eclectically from “religion, history, anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, and psychology” to illuminate “the impact religious specifics (texts, philosophies, rituals, etc.) have on the mind of the religious individual.” Except that “I still cannot find any advisor who studies something quite like this.”
Isn’t this exactly the type of thing that any reasonably sophisticated religion program would let you do? And why does she have to find an advisor who studies exactly what she wants to do? Taylor can’t be that stupid, so I’m assuming it’s either completely disingenuous or he’s so caught up in his own glibness he doesn’t even realize how dumb he sounds.
September 21, 2010 at 8:52 am
NM
Ayup. Sounds like what she needs to do is “original research” that involves contact with faculty in other departments, something that happens all the goddamned time. Off the top of my head I know of a bunch of grad students who had non-philosophers on their dissertation committees (e.g. from classics, psychology, linguistics, German…). The contemporary research university is really well situated to solve this problem because it has what Taylor wants to get rid of: specialization and tenure.