The Secret of University Success…

… is prestige.

This morning I met with one of my new graduate students. This being August, he’d only just arrived for yesterday’s orientation, and this wasn’t our first introduction, but it was our first advising meeting.

He was recounting what he’d learned from a famous and successful faculty member in our Schools of Engineering during his Teaching Assistant orientation the day before, which included this excerpt from a well-known and successful professor. My advisee dutifully wrote it down:

“Students are our product!” explained my faculty colleague.

What a dangerous bunch of nonsense that is.

Sir Ken Robinson explains the “factory” metaphor of education is motivated by the interests of industry, which demands a model of education that both serves its interests (the need for replaceable workers willing to conform to industrialized bureaucracy) and is designed in its image.

I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it.

I’ll give you a couple of examples.

Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines: ringing bells, separate…