"Deconstructing Academe": Do we need an entire FIELD for this?

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Well.

I think this will be the last post I make on this topic.

Read the article.  Lots of people have been worried about higher education, evidently starting in the 1990's (though you have to realize that people have been worrying about this as long as there has been higher education, and people to worry about it).  Let me make a list of things that worry me, personally, about this whole business.

• I too worry about labor conditions in universities.
• The main question is: does a university education truly work?
• A related question is: does a freshman know what he is going to get in a university?
• Academics are famously jealous of academic freedom.  This principle attempts to ensure that a professor is able to express views that differ from those of the home institution, without risking his employment.  But doesn't the institution have a right to control the curriculum?  Doesn't the instructor have a responsibility to coordinate his teaching with his colleagues, in such a way that it makes sense in a holistic point of view?  Is it right that the professor be the sole arbiter of the extent to which this obligation violates academic freedom?
• In practice, (or so at least many professors will claim,) professors work harmoniously with their colleagues so that students do receive a beautifully coordinated education, from the academic point of view.  However, in hard times, schools compete with each other to offer sexier programs that appeal to students and their gullible parents, such as Web Design, and Video Game Programming, and High Fashion Marketing, in other words, occupations related to the myriad ways in which students have wasted their time in high school.  (One can imagine a college major in Vampire Fiction for Teen Audiences, With A View to Getting A Movie Deal.)  Doesn't the interest of the institution in attracting students with such programs war with the interest of the faculty in providing a well-rounded education, and the interests of the government in supporting higher education that will create an educated and employable workforce and a knowledgeable citizenry?  (Conservatives have an easy answer to this: lower taxes, so that those who can afford it can get any education they damn well want, and just stop worrying about the citizenry, ok?  We're going to take our business overseas, anyway, and we're more worried that kids overseas have the education we need for our labor force.)
• Universities need young faculty, who can be underpaid and overworked.  Other universities are perfectly happy to provide these, but these people need PhD's.  But it is difficult to provide on-demand PhD's, because they have got to do what is called research.  Yet other universities are perfectly happy to provide graduates who have already done research in college.  This often means Googling a lot of stuff, and then verifying via library books a certain proportion of the information you have Googled.  For a PhD, however, every discipline makes its own rules; Googling is completely out (except for some young fields, where Googling is totally in, and which shall remain nameless).  All your research has to be original.  This means books are not much use, either, but research journals are ok.  But the best idea is to create a whole new field, such as Criticism of Higher Education.  A lot of these modern fields would seem to fulfill the need for providing a topic that someone can earn a PhD in, so that some school has one more young PhD that they can chain to the oars for a few years.

To summarize, I do believe that it is good to study education; there are huge problems with it.  Though it is possible that universities know the problems with higher education, but it is also possible that they are powerless to change matters from within the system.

University accrediting agencies are in somewhat a better position for steering the entire education industry (even though these agencies consist of members of universities).  At the moment they are more concerned with being a sort of Better Business Bureau for colleges and universities, which is certainly one important service they can provide the education consumer.  This document outlines their concerns for the last few years.  It does reveal some preoccupation with the minutiae of college governance, and less concern with some of the bigger questions that they presumably feel inadequate to address, or consider to be outside their mandate.

Kids have to learn some basic things that will enable them to function beyond the kid level: write grammatically, obtain information efficiently, understand people outside their immediate experience: foreigners, historical figures, people of different political views than themselves, people of different religions and philosophies, members of the opposite sex and/or differing sexual orientation, war veterans.  Kids need to practice complex reasoning, so that they can understand sophisticated arguments, and see through a certain amount of bullshit.  (Kids who can see through all bullshit might actually be dangerous.)  Kids need to know a little science, because they have to make up their minds about climate change, environmental pollution, and things that threaten the safety of their families and their community and themselves.  They need to appreciate art and music at a deeper level, because it helps preserve sanity, and binds one to one's fellow man (if you think that is a good thing).  But how to do this efficiently?  How can we organize education in such a way that it doesn't take up all our resources?  But do we need a new field to tell us what is wrong with what we have?

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