At last week’s university convocation the charges for the year where laid out. The priorities for the 2010-11 academic year are increasing graduation rates and grant support. On a similar vein the nation’s politicos are pushing to increase graduation rates based on the presumed increased need for people with college degrees over the next 10-15 years. The logic appears to be that by the 2020s almost no one in the US will make anything or do any physical labor and we will all be in the knowledge business.
I am somewhat skeptical of this. As a society, we don’t appear to have realized yet that knowledge is fungible. Of course those working in the pharmaceutical industry recognize this already. The flat out replacement to a vertically integrated economy with monocultural knowledge economy has the potential to do the same thing for this country as happens in ecological monocultures. Assault by a single contagion can bring down an entire monoculture ecosystem. The closer we get to a pure knowledge economy the greater the peril we put our future in.
Aside from the idea that we will all be knowledge workers in another decade I am also concerned that in all the talk about granting more degrees and increasing graduation rates no speaker mentions educational quality. When the politicians and the university administration tell faculty that the two things they care most about are the graduation rate and external funding many faculty will listen to the demands of the student evaluation and let the grade float up to where all those paying the bills are happy.
When the knowledge bubble deflates, in part because the knowledge is not there, there will be tearing of hair and a search for someone to blame. So, in another ten years when the congressional hearings begin, someone please point out that we dug the holes our leaders demanded we dig.
T.S. Hall
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