It would be merely annoying if not for the fact that people develop a tolerance for it after a while and start seeing truly important issues as the next flavor of the week...but I'll stop there, lest I become guilty of my own sin.
At any rate, I found an interesting example of this sort of hysteria via...damn, I can't recall at this point, Sullivan or Yglesias, I think. Anyway, it's about "the Age of Commodified Intelligence"--essentially, as the writer puts it, "a time of conspicuously consumed high culture in which intellectual life is meticulously measured and branded." It's actually an interesting read, despite (because of?) such hilariously broad doozies as this:
Of course higher education has always meant a chance for greater economic success, and more careers now require such certification. But degrees are also more readily pursued as status symbols. We are not growing more intelligent, only more obsessed with its outward markers.
We engage in an elaborate credentials kabuki. Our graduate schools are filled with students forcing out narrow, irrelevant dissertations. They labour to be professors, not to spend lives devoted to their fields. Writers and librarians now seek graduate degrees to prepare for jobs that have existed for thousands of years without such hurdles. Even dogwalkers take classes for certification. We’ve become so reliant on checklists of accomplishment that we’ve lost our ability to make independent judgments. We no longer pursue passions or interests without quantifiable reward.
My first instinct would be to demand some kind of source for all of this doomsaying, especially the second two sentences of the second paragraph. Somehow, though, one senses that this was never meant to be taken as a measurable, provable, solvable phenomenon so much as savored in its all its elegant pessimism, given a pass for its stylish evocation of doom and gloom. After all, if it's bad news, it's probably true, right? Numbers? Proof? How dare you disturb my beautiful ennui!? Back off, my man, I have credentials kabuki! Credentials kabuki!
Perhaps the writer is intent on proving his point through example...
Is it really that bad, though? Dogwalker certification, huh? Sounds more like a growing service industry than the rotting of a society from within. Writers and librarians? Some jobs require certification, but the writer has conveniently neglected to mention just which ones you're talking about. Graduate schools? Perhaps you've been stuck in the humanities or social sciences cocoon a bit too long; I have a few aspiring scientist friends who would debate that point. Ah, but that's anecdotal, right. Lovely hiding places, anecdotes.
The writer ends thusly:
There is nothing innately wrong in gobbling up great art, important novels and educational credentials. Attending a performance of "The Rite of Spring" does no one harm. But if we fail to distinguish between attendance and appreciation, we may end up poorer for it, left with a corporate caricature of our cultural richness. The “intelligent” masses will work hard mining the store of culture artefacts, but will they read the texts and learn from them, or only use them as objects for trade?Eh, since when in history have the masses, "'intelligent'" or not, ever really improved themselves, ever truly changed, at least to the satisfaction of the elite of this or that cultural sphere? If they ever did, who would be the "masses"? Would we have only elites? Somehow I don't think it works that way, but I'm rambling.
If you ever feel that you have truly appreciated something or fully apprehend an experience like few others ever do, take a hint from that wording. For various reasons, you probably won't be able to spark a mass, deep--however you define that--appreciation for Rembrandt or Liszt. At least in ages past the elite didn't have to worry about hordes of unwashed poseurs pretending to appreciate...ah, but there I go again!
Hi Peter, the author here. My instinct would have been to provide cites for these trends, but the format of the publication wasn't really of that type. Google new york dog walkers certification, though, and you'll see evidence for this trend. Additionally, I have several friends who got library "science" degrees. They say the job market, down to middle/high schools and public libraries, is largely moving towards requiring advanced degrees for these positions. Maybe too anecdotal, but a quick look at lsjobs.com confirmed their stories. My point with the "credentials kabuki" is that, do we really need certificates and degrees to have competent librarians, let alone dogwalkers, or are the degrees just a form of kabuki that our society demands now in order to feel ok hiring people for these jobs? Seems to me that we've lost our ability to make decisions without the aid of manufactured credentials. For me, this over-reliance on a mostly empty credentialling process is evidence of how we think of intelligence/ability as a commodity that gets minted by universities and other educational outfits. Certainly some fields, like medicine or the social sciences, justifiably have very involved training processes. But dogwalking certification seems like an obsession with external measurement run amok.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it isn't really about the "masses" engaging with culture in the "right" way. It's more about a cultural shift towards looking at the fruits of human achievement as little pellets we can take to improve ourselves. The piece was a response to one on the age of "mass intelligence." Thus it went after societal tendencies in a mostly undifferentiated way.
Anyway, glad you (sort of) liked the piece. My main point was that all this achievement (exponential amounts of new phds, more museum visits) seems mostly illusory. Intelligence isn't reducible to numbers of degrees, classical music playlists, or copies of Ulysses bought.
Wow, thanks for the response! I'd love to engage with you further, but it'll have to wait till I get off work today.
ReplyDeleteOk. Understood about the format, that was probably a bit of an unfair charge to make on my part. You also make a fair rebuttal to the credentials argument, although "Our graduate schools are filled with students forcing out narrow, irrelevant dissertations" seems to me a bit of an exaggeration, and "They labour to be professors, not to spend lives devoted to their fields"--well, in many of these subjects, spending one's life devoted to one's field = teaching.
ReplyDeleteThe traditional argument goes that once a society gets large enough, credentials are a convenient shortcut that establishes a defined standard so that "you know what you're getting." Apart from the dog walking one, which MAY be meaningless (perhaps the dogs are exotic, or maybe it's simply a convenient way to keep things a few steps back from the street), I don't see how the process is particularly meaningless. Perhaps the job of maintaining and running a decent-sized public library has expanded to the point where having "library science" credentials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_science) really is a necessity? You seem to be making your assertions based purely on gut instinct and whatever "sounds ridiculous".
My main point, as I ended up delving into the credentials issue a little longer than I had originally intended, was that while I agree with you about the pervasive, conspicuous consumption of "intellectual" things--that is, that it exists as a real phenomenon--your tone seemed to imply that this was a new problem, of a piece with the forecasts of doom and societal decay so perennially popular with anyone who feels they haven't done their day's worrying. I'm not sure there was ever a cultural shift at all, simply that before, there were far fewer opportunities to be exposed to high culture and thus far fewer people who knew about it. It didn't used to be the "in" thing because it wasn't even a thing in many peoples' minds.
The more people that participate in something, the more diluted and meaningless a thing it will be to them simply because you will have exhausted the subgroup of people who are willing to/would find deep meaning in it. The wider the appeal, the shallower it will be, and as more and more people that pile on, the more you will see the most general, and therefore the shallowest, aspect of that thing emphasized. People are like that. This time, the "in" thing happens to be high culture.
I'll look up that original piece to which you were responding and see if I have any further thoughts at that point.
Hi Peter, perhaps my perspective is skewed by being in academia, but it's not really a love of teaching or a love of any particular field that I see drawing in many of the current crop of PhDs, but a desire to "be" a professor, to have a certain lifestyle, to acquire a certain social status. Now, I don't think there is anything morally wrong with these kind of choices or desires, but it has made graduate school (at least in the humanities and social sciences) something of a trade/professional school. The net effect on academia is a coarsening of the environment from one of purer learning/teaching/exploring to one of gamemanship for a limited number of tenure and adjunct positions. Everything is about finding an super-specialized niche, cranking out perfunctory-feeling papers, and focusing on networking. And there's a huge over-supply of people coming out of these disciplines making the "competitive" environment even more pronounced. Again, I don't think this is "objectively" wrong, but it does spell the death of the old order of doddering professors who fell in love with history or philosophy, spent their lives immersed in it, and didn't think of their own careers as the *most* important element of academia. These types would be weeded out now--not aggressive or micro-focused enough. If you choose to study an area of art history, say, that isn't hot right now or doesn't lend itself to paper topics likely to be picked for conferences, you'll be told it's unwise. And it is unwise! You won't get a job. So, the system is something of a self-reinforcing one. But our society encourages higher and higher education as an unalloyed good. I argue that something valuable is being lost in this transformation. In many ways, it seems like the central values of academia are being lost.
ReplyDeleteMany people wash into higher education now as sort of a default. Don't know what to do? Tread water and get another degree. This kind of attitude, which used to be more of the law/business school mentality, has taken root in every field I can think of.
Leaving the top sector of academia aside, I think library science is a good example of the downstream effects of the current transformation. You point out that running a library may have become a more complex job requiring more training than in the past. That's definitely true. What's less obvious is whether a 2 year program is the best way to do that training. More complex though the job has become, it isn't that demanding (according to friends who are librarians) and people still have to essentially learn how to do the job from scratch when they start. So while 2 years of studying "archiving" and "search" isn't harmful, it may not be terribly useful for running a middle school library, and probably only somewhat useful for working in a graduate library (where I can see *some* justification for maybe a 1 year style certification program). The real harm comes from the LibScience degree's effect on the job market. You simply aren't competitive without this kind of degree. Indeed, there are so many people going into library science now that a private middle school would have a hard time justifying to persnickety parents its decision to hire someone without that degree. So even if you would be an excellent librarian who would learn quickly on the job, you have to get the degree anyway just to get in the door. This looks like a massive diversion of time and resources into a mostly empty credentialing scheme. We can argue about whether graduate "research" librarians need advanced training, but sitting at the circulation desk of a community college probably doesn't, and become better at that job would probably be easier with 2 years on the job training than 2 years classroom time.
The trend is general. Check out ads for executive or administrative assistants. B.A required, M.A. preferred. These are secretarial jobs. An M.A. in English from Brown probably does signal a "smarter" person, but have we just lost all ability to make judgments about who can fill a secretarial position without extremely broad sorting devices like Masters degrees? As a society we are demanding that people invest so much more time and largely irrelevant energy (in the case of the admin assistant job) for pretty basic sorting needs.
As they say, the M.A. is the new high school diploma.
My general criticism is that fetishizing intelligence has created a pretty dumb world. The degree race is like the arms race--we just keep building and building up. America's always been a place that liked "extra"--the 6 bedroom home for the 3 person family, or the really big car "just in case." But the effects of this credential mill on academia and on social stratification are pretty bad.
The opera, art, culture stuff is just the real world manifestation of the quest for unending "betterment." What makes me sad is that this frenzy has edged out the old scholarly world of rumination and dialogue. A haughty world, I'm sure, to the modern mind, but one I respect. It's had a big effect on the radical fringes of culture too, though that's a long discussion for another time.
I don't think this problem is new. We're a consumerist and status oriented culture. But the cheery millennials (i'm barely outside of this generation) have embraced it wholeheartedly. Anyway, sorry if these thoughts seem scattered. I'm on the run today, but have enjoyed the discussion.
I'd like to say a few words about the purpose of advanced degrees in science and engineering. These words may apply to other fields as well, but S+E is what I know, and so that is that of which I will write. Note that I'm not necessarily arguing for or against any of the points discussed in the blog entry or in the dialogue in the comments section, just adding some more information.
ReplyDeleteFor S+E, college is spent learning facts and techniques clearly well above and beyond what one has acquired in high school, and which would be extraordinarily difficult to learn on one's own. For example, the only way to get familiar with taking an NMR is do take NMRs, and few people not in academia or industry have access to these hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars instruments. And while I could imagine learning philosophy by reading books and talking with other intelligent people, that would be nearly impossible for the sciences. I know plenty of self-taught historians, and no self-taught chemists. So college is very necessary for S+E careers. I also will add that for the sciences that I know (chemistry and physics), the undergraduate curricula are quite similar from institution to institution, so the undergraduate degree is a meaningful qualification.
As for graduate study, as far as I can tell a Master's is like another year or so of coursework to round out the undergraduate work or perhaps address a certain subfield of specialty.
A PhD is really an apprenticeship. The purpose of a PhD is not to learn material per se; it is to learn how to design and conduct independent research. Holding a PhD means that you can direct large-scale research, that you are qualified to decide which projects to pursue and how to approach them. Because of how central research is to S+E (in academia and industry alike), a PhD is very meaningful, and in many jobs there is a point beyond which one cannot be promoted without a PhD.
A PhD in S+E does not overqualify one for jobs outside of academia. As mentioned, plenty of jobs in industry require one -- both "require" in the sense of that a PhD is necessary to be hired, and in that the skills learned through obtaining a PhD are themselves necessary.
So in conclusion, in S+E all levels of higher education confer a distinct suite of knowledge or skills that are important to being a scientist/engineer and that are difficult, if not impossible, to acquire without the formal training.
--Eva
"Hi Peter, perhaps my perspective is skewed by being in academia, but it's not really a love of teaching or a love of any particular field that I see drawing in many of the current crop of PhDs, but a desire to "be" a professor, to have a certain lifestyle, to acquire a certain social status. Now, I don't think there is anything morally wrong with these kind of choices or desires, but it has made graduate school (at least in the humanities and social sciences) something of a trade/professional school. The net effect on academia is a coarsening of the environment from one of purer learning/teaching/exploring to one of gamemanship for a limited number of tenure and adjunct positions. Everything is about finding an super-specialized niche, cranking out perfunctory-feeling papers, and focusing on networking. And there's a huge over-supply of people coming out of these disciplines making the "competitive" environment even more pronounced. Again, I don't think this is "objectively" wrong, but it does spell the death of the old order of doddering professors who fell in love with history or philosophy, spent their lives immersed in it, and didn't think of their own careers as the *most* important element of academia. These types would be weeded out now--not aggressive or micro-focused enough. If you choose to study an area of art history, say, that isn't hot right now or doesn't lend itself to paper topics likely to be picked for conferences, you'll be told it's unwise. And it is unwise! You won't get a job. So, the system is something of a self-reinforcing one. But our society encourages higher and higher education as an unalloyed good. I argue that something valuable is being lost in this transformation. In many ways, it seems like the central values of academia are being lost.
ReplyDeleteMany people wash into higher education now as sort of a default. Don't know what to do? Tread water and get another degree. This kind of attitude, which used to be more of the law/business school mentality, has taken root in every field I can think of."
******
Unfortunately I can't speak on academia with the same authority, but I have definitely seen hints of these depressing problems, Eva's description of the sciences notwithstanding. And I've definitely seen this "higher education as default" mentality among my contemporaries.
******
"Leaving the top sector of academia aside, I think library science is a good example of the downstream effects of the current transformation. You point out that running a library may have become a more complex job requiring more training than in the past. That's definitely true. What's less obvious is whether a 2 year program is the best way to do that training. More complex though the job has become, it isn't that demanding (according to friends who are librarians) and people still have to essentially learn how to do the job from scratch when they start. So while 2 years of studying "archiving" and "search" isn't harmful, it may not be terribly useful for running a middle school library, and probably only somewhat useful for working in a graduate library (where I can see *some* justification for maybe a 1 year style certification program). The real harm comes from the LibScience degree's effect on the job market. You simply aren't competitive without this kind of degree. Indeed, there are so many people going into library science now that a private middle school would have a hard time justifying to persnickety parents its decision to hire someone without that degree. So even if you would be an excellent librarian who would learn quickly on the job, you have to get the degree anyway just to get in the door. This looks like a massive diversion of time and resources into a mostly empty credentialing scheme. We can argue about whether graduate "research" librarians need advanced training, but sitting at the circulation desk of a community college probably doesn't, and become better at that job would probably be easier with 2 years on the job training than 2 years classroom time."
******
One could argue that the market is simply adding more hoops through which prospective librarians must jump in order to make the supply more manageable by filtering out those who truly want to be library scientists. Unfortunately, this is massively unfair to people who happen to be less well off but no less intelligent.
******
"The trend is general. Check out ads for executive or administrative assistants. B.A required, M.A. preferred. These are secretarial jobs. An M.A. in English from Brown probably does signal a "smarter" person, but have we just lost all ability to make judgments about who can fill a secretarial position without extremely broad sorting devices like Masters degrees? As a society we are demanding that people invest so much more time and largely irrelevant energy (in the case of the admin assistant job) for pretty basic sorting needs.
As they say, the M.A. is the new high school diploma."
******
Same criticism as above, plus it's gotten ridiculous; who wants to be an executive assistant as their end goal? No one!
******
"My general criticism is that fetishizing intelligence has created a pretty dumb world. The degree race is like the arms race--we just keep building and building up. America's always been a place that liked "extra"--the 6 bedroom home for the 3 person family, or the really big car "just in case." But the effects of this credential mill on academia and on social stratification are pretty bad.
The opera, art, culture stuff is just the real world manifestation of the quest for unending "betterment." What makes me sad is that this frenzy has edged out the old scholarly world of rumination and dialogue. A haughty world, I'm sure, to the modern mind, but one I respect. It's had a big effect on the radical fringes of culture too, though that's a long discussion for another time.
I don't think this problem is new. We're a consumerist and status oriented culture. But the cheery millennials (i'm barely outside of this generation) have embraced it wholeheartedly. Anyway, sorry if these thoughts seem scattered. I'm on the run today, but have enjoyed the discussion."
******
I agree with your criticisms here and lament the intellectual commodification of our society and, as you point out, my generation. I guess your article really jumped out at me because there doesn't appear to be anything we can actually do about these issues, and god knows what exactly we should do, had we the power. I just felt frustrated that a problem over which we seem to have no control was being loudly lamented as though there might be something we could do to change things for the better, whatever or wherever that direction might be.
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/03/dont-try-to-dodge-the-recession-with-grad-school/
ReplyDeleteThe url describes the article fairly well.
-Eva