Catch this cheap shot by U. of Ill. speaker

If it wern't posted right here on a University of Illinois-Champaign campus event calendar, this might seem like an Onion spoof headline. [[Either way, not funny.)

Is Graduate Education the Detroit of Higher Learning?

Yup, that's the topic of "a special presentation" for two hours this Friday [[9/25) by Carol Van Hartesveldt, a National Science Foundation program director for Integrative Graduate Education and Research. Her special presentation and panel discussion with 3 faculty members is sponsored by the campus' Graduate College and Office of the Vice Chancellor.

Sure, kick away . . . it's just an American city.

Plus, as a Facebook friend wondered today: What does that even mean?
Oh please, let it NOT be a ghetto allusion . . . p l e a s e.

The lecturer's publicly posted office email address, on the chance anyone wants to send a polite note [[really - you represent Detroit), is: cvanhart@nsf.gov

[ Hat tip: Jim McFarlin ]

Given that there's absolutely no indication of the intent or content of the presentation why are you leaping to the conclusion that it's a cheap shot?

Right. He could be using "Detroit" to call to mind a wondrous land of fully functioning civic life. Erm, or maybe not. ;)

Grad School = Detroit = requires flexibility, hard work, perseverance, with little income, and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Apparently there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times back in April with the title " End the University as We Know It. The opening line is the basis of the above topic. From what I can make out, he is referring to the auto industry as 'Detroit' not the city itself.

Quote:

---

End the University as We Know It

By MARK C. TAYLOR
Published: April 26, 2009
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. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

---

Continued at link

NYT Article

Thanks, lilpup. I am now officially stepping off of the conclusion I had jumped onto. :o