Lehrman American Studies Center

A colleague alerted me to Mark Taylor's piece in the NY Times, "End the University as We Know It," and I think it worth considering here.

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities.

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LASC Summer Institute teaching faculty member, Michael Burlingame, considers Obama's similarities to Lincoln in Going In, A Lot Like Lincoln.

Both Lincoln and Obama assumed office in the midst of a great national crisis. Lincoln had to deal with secession; in the period between his election and inauguration, seven states in the Deep South pulled out of the Union. As he carefully prepared his inaugural address, he sought to be conciliatory enough to prevent the eight other slave states from seceding; while at the same time he sought to remain true to the Republican Party platform, which condemned slavery and pledged to keep it from spreading into the western territories. His inaugural managed to do both…

The day after his inauguration, however, that plan collapsed as Lincoln discovered that the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor would soon run out of food.…

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