David Randall | protect the campus
Traditionally-minded educational reformers who want to pass on to children a love of the ideals and institutions of the American Republic and the American nation need to create new programs and schools independent of the existing far-left monoculture in academia. One way he approaches this is by building a network of autonomous centers, like those set up in states like Arizona, Florida, and Ohio. Another option is to establish a similarly autonomous Department of General Studies, which would be responsible for teaching all courses that meet the general education requirements. Any effort will require staffing existing centers and schools and training a growing number of tradition-minded professors to staff new centers and schools.
Cultivating a tradition-oriented faculty in the humanities and social sciences who can teach Western civilization and American history and ideals must be a top priority. Far-left educational institutions have driven generations of dissenters out of academia, and America, the entire Western world, is desperately short of such professors. We need more tradition-minded students and tradition-minded K-12 teachers, but the biggest bottleneck is a shortage of professors. We must produce as much as possible as quickly as possible.
Graduate students typically spend at least five years researching and are required to perform a significant amount of original research. In most humanities and social sciences, this research takes the form of articles, and much of the content is required for books. Graduate students typically lose significant amounts of income and postpone the start of their actual careers. Nevertheless, universities must subsidize doctoral students. It can cost $250,000 to support one student for five years.
Fewer and fewer PhDs actually get tenure-track jobs. Nevertheless, many undergraduate teaching positions are filled by graduate students and adjunct doctoral students, and despite the scramble to secure a living wage, tenure positions are still being filled, although to a lesser extent in the sciences. Expectations remain that Professor Track will be in charge of undergraduate education. Each university's Ph.D. degree requires a significant investment of time and money from both the university and the Ph.D. candidate. Professors are very expensive and time-consuming to produce, making them a bottleneck for educational reform.
Professors who value tradition are even rarer than regular professors. Under the current system of academia, traditional American young people must spend five years or more to earn a Ph.D., and unless they hide their beliefs, they receive no support from universities during their education and are unable to graduate. It is unlikely that he will be able to secure a job later. Very few people take part in that gamble. In fact, there are so few centers left that even the few new centers struggle to find enough tradition-minded professors to staff them.
If these rare tradition-oriented professors find jobs at tradition-oriented universities, we must decide what to do with their teaching assignments. We must make wise choices about how to utilize the small number of existing tradition-oriented Ph.D.s to achieve our goals of lasting educational reform.
The best use of their time is to focus on graduate education, especially training doctoral students, but also master's students who become K-12 teachers and principals. . However, these professors must also devote significant time to undergraduate education. Undergraduate students should receive an education free from radical monoculture, and a supply of properly educated undergraduates is needed to accommodate new applicants who value tradition into graduate education. . We need to repurpose PhDs from graduate education to undergraduate education, even if it is a very inefficient use of a very rare PhD.
Or they must do so under the current university system, which limits undergraduate education to professors and graduate students pursuing Ph.D. Educational reformers who value tradition need to break out of that system. In order to increase the number of tradition-oriented professors as quickly as possible, reforms are needed that allow the small number of tradition-oriented doctoral degree holders to devote themselves to graduate school education.
I have written elsewhere that academia should generally adopt PhDs by publication, i.e. for a series of published papers rather than a dissertation. The results of this reform will be:
Universities should revise their requirements so that a master's degree and one published dissertation qualify a person to teach an introductory course, and two additional dissertations qualify a student to teach an advanced undergraduate course. A full doctoral degree with three additional theses qualifies you to teach capstone undergraduate seminars and graduate courses.
Although all academic communities will benefit from this, this reform is essential for tradition-oriented institutions that want to strengthen the supply of tradition-oriented professors. Traditionally minded PhD candidates can focus on the important tasks of graduate education. They must also continue the tradition of academic research, but for at least a generation, must focus their own efforts on training new colleagues. Traditionally oriented graduate students will obtain desirable jobs teaching undergraduates with less investment of time and less investment per student by their sponsoring institutions. With the security of a full-time income, a teaching master can gradually progress to a higher-paying doctoral program along with a published doctoral program if desired. Traditional-minded undergraduates will receive a better education from a dedicated career master's teacher than from a graduate assistant, and perhaps as good an education as they would receive from a doctoral program.
The Ohio State University's new Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society will employ five professors to teach classes and offer immediate options for a master's degree and a published doctoral degree starting with one published paper leading to the ability to teach. Let's say you offer a degree course. Undergraduate courses at Chase Center. During the first few years, five professors taught both undergraduate and graduate classes. However, after three to four years, the first graduating MAs with published papers will be able to begin teaching undergraduate classes. The Chase Center's doctoral professors will then be able to shift their focus to teaching graduate classes, training doctoral students both at the Chase Center and at other new institutions.
The new center should prioritize ensuring that papers that qualify for a PhD are of high quality so that one good paper can plausibly claim to be more important than a mediocre one. . If the center also ensures that its graduates are good teachers of undergraduate students, that excellent teaching will more than adequately answer criticisms of the center's research reputation.
For these new centers to reach their full potential, publishing and master's undergraduates converting to doctoral programs are essential. This reform will allow these centers to focus on their top priority: rapidly educating a new generation of tradition-minded PhDs and professors.
David Randall is the director of research at the National Association of Scholars.
This was originally published on Minding the Campus on March 26th.
Image: Spiro Inc. / Shutterstock
like university fix On facebook / Follow me on Twitter
