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[费希]最后一个教授

[费希]最后一个教授

[光明译丛]最后一个教授

斯坦利·费希 著 吴万伟 译

光明网  刊发时间:2009-02-25 12:10:00 光明网-光明观察




  我在从前的专栏和最近一本书中已经指出,正确理解的高等教育的典型特征是在其学习活动和对世界产生的可以测量的影响之间缺乏直接和确定的关系。

  这是一个时常被周期性重新表述的古老观念。哲学家迈克尔·欧克肖特(Michael Oakeshott)的观点可以被看作典型代表,“两种学习之间存在重要的差别,前者关心的是在实际上运用技能所需要的理解,后者则集中在理解和解释本身。”
理解和解释什么呢?只要这种训练不是为了干预当时的社会和政治要求,也就是说只要学习活动不被认为是达到比学习本身价值更大的目标的工具,理解和解释什么东西都行。

  这种把高等教育的特征归纳为无实际用途的看法常常受到挑战,支持这种观点的人和主张大学应该更加贴近现实生活的人之间永远都在进行激烈的辩论。这种辩论所回避的一个问题是欧克肖特的理想(在他之前的鼓吹者有亚里士多德、康德、马克斯·韦伯等人)在当今教育背景下能还能繁荣起来吗?称赞高等教育的价值(正如我曾经做的)当然很有意思,但这种论调可能只会出现在学术界而已,(这里学术具有贬义),很可能在他们故意保持距离的现实世界中找不到支持者。在今天的气候下,大学还有机会吗?

  我从前的一个学生弗兰克·多纳休(Frank Donoghue)在他的新书《最后一个教授:公司型大学和人文科学的命运》中提出了这个问题,而且给出了否定的回答。

  多纳休首先挑战了不断重复的观点,即教育或者更准确地说文科遭遇到危机,这个词暗示正常状态被打破,隐含着恢复自然秩序的可能性。

  多纳休说“这种恢复稳定性的观点是个幻想”,因为许多人在寻求的恢复原来稳定性的条件已经大部分消失了。原来欣欣向荣的文科院系,获得终身教授岗位的教师主体、与世隔绝的环境、充满羡慕眼神的学生、书本知识传授等都已消失。除了个别富裕的私立大学(几乎充当博物馆的作用)外,根本不考虑实际意义,为了知识本身而求索的高调已经成为历史。多纳休预测“在过两三代人,文科教授将成为美国教授群体中无足轻重的少数古董而已。”

  这到底是怎么发生的?按照多纳休的说法,这种情况早就出现了至少在1891年就出现了,当时安德鲁·卡耐基祝贺皮尔斯商学院的毕业生是“完全掌握速记和打字知识的人才”而不是把时间浪费在“死知识”上的呆子。

  工业家理查德·特勒·克莱恩(Richard Teller Crane)在1911年更加明确地指出文科教授所说的“思想生活”是骗人的鬼话。“爱好文学的人不可能幸福”,因为“唯一有资格幸福的人是有用的人。”

  持这种观点的人和马修·阿诺德(Matthew Arnold)的用诗歌来拯救人的信徒之间的对立非常明显,但多纳休安慰我们不要认为这两种观点的斗争结果是不确定的。他明确指出,扎根于“生产性伦理”和效率的观点已经取得了胜利。证据就是在本来鼓吹思想生活的大学里文科教授的物质条件是由嘲笑它的商业模式配制的。

  最好的证据是终身教授和进入终身教授系列的老师人数占教工总人数比例的下降,而兼职教师和临时老师的比例却在增加,这些老师更像到处流动找工作的工人而不是长期在某个单位工作的专业人才。

  文科教授喜欢认为这是暂时的不平衡,他们在讨论如何返回从前的美好时光,但多纳休坚持认为这种发展趋势不是哪个人计划的结果,而且已经推进到这样的程度,根本已经无力回天了。他解释说随着大学面临的经济压力越来越大,它们已经“不再聘用最有经验的老师,而是聘用最便宜的老师。”终身教授或者进入终身教授系列的老师现在只占授课教师总人数的35%,而且这个比例“还在一直下降”。

  一旦聘用兼职教师来对付规模不断扩大而增加的课时任务(学校一直在扩招),编制预算者很难再取消已经形成依赖的节省开支措施。“因此,不管兼职教师群体最初是多么渺小,现在它已经发展壮大为大学里非常重要的组成部分。”

  在口头上还吆喝重视文科教育的传统大学现在已经采取赤裸裸的营利政策,撕掉了从前尊重“高等教育”价值的伪装。给我们带来凤凰大学群体的创立者约翰·斯伯林(John Sperling)直言不讳地说“到我们这里来并不标志人生新阶段的转折,我们并不宣传试图培养你的价值观或者‘扩展你的思想’等屁话。”

  以营利为目的的大学是教育模式转变在逻辑上的必然结果。从前是以个别教授传播灵感和洞察力为核心的模式,现在则从头到尾都是服从于为了找到工作而需要传授信息和技能的命令。

  在这后一种模式中,磁带、电脑屏幕、影碟设备等传播手段都不重要,只要传达了信息就行。只要画面上有老师在讲授就行,至于他们的资历和著作(如果有的话)如何,学生才不关心呢,因为老师不过是“信息传播者”。

  斯伯林明白他的教育集团作为“在800年之久(很大程度上是宗教性)的教育传统的捍卫者和建立在市场观念---比如透明、效率、生产性、和责任追究等基础上的革新者之间的文化战争”的代理人的处境是非常困难的。

  革新者的观念已经取得胜利(卡耐基和克莱恩是胜利者),多纳休的结论是这个改革让“所有被认为没有实用价值的领域,如哲学、历史、文学因此都面临存在价值不断遭到质疑的挑战。”作为必然的结果,“教授将逐渐被人(学术界除外)看作养不起的怪物。”

  多纳休在序言中告诉我们他“对所描述的问题提不出任何解决办法,”但在最后还是忍不住给文科教授了一些建议,提醒他们“充分认识大学是怎么运作的”,因为“只有通过弄清学术研究、教授岗位、学术地位、不断变化的大学课程的机构历史,才能为自己的未来做好准备。”

  值得肯定的是,他不抱有丝毫的希望,即我们可能逐渐理解的未来会不会给我们留下安身立命之所。

  人们往往相信自己生不逢时,要么出生太早,要么出生太晚。在读了多纳休的书后,我倒觉得幸亏自己出生得早。如果我晚出生50年的话,我经历的职业生涯恐怕是根本无法享受的美梦了,我真是太幸运了,不是吗?

  译自:The Last Professor by Stanley Fish

  http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/

  作者简介:斯坦利·费希(Stanley Fish)是迈阿密弗罗里达国际大学法学教授和Davidson-Kahn 杰出教授,是位于芝加哥的伊利诺斯大学文学院院长。

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January 18, 2009, 10:00 pm
The Last Professor
In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it’s been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being “ fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting” rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.”

Industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful.”

The opposition between this view and the view held by the heirs of Matthew Arnold’s conviction that poetry will save us could not be more stark. But Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions are locked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted in an “ethic of productivity” and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.

The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals.

Humanities professors like to think that this is a temporary imbalance and talk about ways of redressing it, but Donoghue insists that this development, planned by no one but now well under way, cannot be reversed. Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not “hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and “this number is steadily falling.”

Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and “as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life.”

What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.

The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.

In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs. Insofar as there are real-life faculty in the picture, their credentials and publications (if they have any) are beside the point, for they are just “delivery people.”

Sperling understands the difficulty of achieving accreditation for his institution as a proxy “for cultural battles between defenders of 800 years of educational (and largely religious) traditions, and innovation that was based on the ideas of the marketplace – transparency, efficiency, productivity and accountability.”

Those ideas have now triumphed (Carnegie and Crane are victorious), and this means, Donoghue concludes, “that all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.” And as a corollary “professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.”

In his preface, Donoghue tells us that he will “offer nothing in the way of uplifting solutions to the problems [he] describes.” In the end, however, he can’t resist recommending something and he advises humanists to acquire “a thorough familiarity with how the university works,” for “only by studying the institutional histories of scholarly research, of tenure, of academic status, and . . . of the ever-changing college curriculum, can we prepare ourselves for the future.”

But – and this is to his credit – he doesn’t hold out the slightest hope that this future we may come to understand will have a place in it for us.

People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early. After reading Donoghue’s book, I feel that I have timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess.

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