Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed

[Igel]

29. Meh.

As usual, he tilts at his usual foes and forgets that those foes may like what they do but also have good reasons for what they do.

Large class size? In '77 I was in freshmen classes at a small 4-year school. My humanities class had 40 or 50. My freshmen classes otherwise had 350-400.

The sophomore classes had 40-50 or more. Some were in large lecture halls. What he's seeing is an elite school adopting non-elite practices, and he's noticing the change for the first time. (He does that in linguistics quite a bit. What doesn't fit doesn't exist; what isn't important to him isn't.)

But he's also missing the reason for the need for flexibility. That's this idea brought in by students and parents and politicians that the academy needs to be responsive to demands. Reduce the core courses--have more flexible requirements. Fads and trends make class sizes unpredictable, makes staffing levels in departments sometimes out of whack.

So in the late '80s and early '90s there was a huge demand for Russian courses. History, language, culture. The small program I was in went from having a TA for 1st year and a TA for second year, with a professor for 3rd and 4th year, to having 5 TAs for 1st year (and my 8 a.m. class had 35 students in it on the first day!). The following year there were 5 1st year TAs and 3 or 4 2nd year TAs. The Russian history prof taught not a general history intro class and 15 Russian history students but two sections of 80 or 90 students. Etc.

Five years later the school was down to 1 first year TA, 1 second year TA, and the Russian history prof was back to a general "European history" class and 10-15 students in his Russian history class.

A different school 5 years later saw the English dept. swamped. Average class size was huge. "My" dept. had an average class size of < 20, and that included averaging in a 150-student introduction to whatever class. Lots of classes with 5-10 students, and if you cancelled them the tenured faculty would have no courses. The administration was scavenging money to hire faculty, and that meant TAs and adjuncts. Why? They'd learned that if they hire tenured faculty demand would probably shift and they'd be stuck with another dept. with huge class sizes and two depts. with ridiculously small class sizes.

Having a required curriculum a la '50s and early '60s got around this problem. But lots of people wanted flexibility for their students, and that requires flexibility on the part of faculty and universities. They want their kids to get good grades and demand good grades, so faculty are stuck dealing with complaints and having the provost get involved and the "customer's always right." Parents want their kids to be job-ready when they graduate, and that means workplace skills. Critical thinking is hard and requires a lot of facts, a lot of training, and kids really can't learn it much in high school (requires too much background, overhead, self-inhibition) and don't have the factual background to learn it in college. (Or the self-discipline.)