I don’t believe universities (in their best form, at least) are easily replicated by technological means of information dissemination. But despite the advantages their physicality and tradition offers, many universities have tended to see themselves as simply the means to fill students up with information, stick an “approved” stamp on them, and send them out into the world.
I was surprised to read in the Chronicle of Higher Education that universities are still using Second Life, a “virtual worlds” system I honestly thought died in 2007. No one I know ever used it. Why is this, considering the people I know tend to be early adopters of pretty much everything technological?
UCSD is considering merging or partnering with California Western School of Law, but some are concerned that Cal Western is too focused on teaching to fit into a research university.
Reflecting on the release of Apple’s iPad, David Weinberger suggests that it is a device focused on consuming content and not producing it, and argues that the true future of reading is to become more social. Jim Milles questions scholars’ desire for this vision of the future.
There has been an ongoing discussion regarding the challenges facing higher education in the United States. These challenges are especially acute in the humanities, and of course a budget crisis and recession only magnifies existing problems.
Why are historians so obsessed with writing books?
Now that I’m on my second quarter of a PhD program in the History of Science, I am continuing to think about why I am doing this and what history (and History) has to offer, both to me and to the world at large. One concern I already have is with the apparent obsession with the book as the primary mechanism of disseminating the work of historians.
Dan Cohen gave an interesting talk at the American Historical Association meeting recently, where he discussed the benefits Google brings to historical research, as well as some pointed criticisms.
At least, don’t go to grad school in the humanities. That’s the message I’ve been hearing from a number of sources, including a recent article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
I’ve been debating this since I started a PhD program this fall. (I’m talking about the humanities and social sciences — I don’t know if this applies in other fields!) Granted, grad school is a huge amount of difficult and complex reading. Since it’s essentially professional training for academics, it also means learning a new working environment, a new kind of jargon, and a new bureaucracy. What it isn’t — and what law school is — is a whole new way of thinking about and approaching the world.
Robert Merton, in “The Normative Structure of Science” (from The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations), posits four sets of “institutional imperatives” that together “comprise the ethos of modern science”: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. How well do these four sets of imperatives describe the “ethos of modern law”?
Last May I finished my 3L year, and am now the proud possessor of a JD. On Thursday I began my first year program as a graduate student in the history of science. The experiences, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been strikingly different: law school is, ultimately, preparatory to practicing law as an attorney, and much of its emphasis is on tracking students in that direction. Graduate school in the humanities and social sciences, meanwhile, is about training future academics.
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