Cranky Is Out of The Office

But not on break, which is making her considerably tired. Still planning my rant on what happened in Kentucky, but a quick target tonight is easily this, from Inside Higher Ed:

Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads
March 18, 2009
Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged. “This is the real calamity of the research mandate -- 10,000 harried professors forced to labor on disregarded print, and 100,000 unwitting students missing out on rigorous face-to-face learning,” Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, writes in a new paper on relieving research expectations in the humanities.
“I think these two trends -- to do more and more research and less academic engagement on the freshman level -- are not unrelated,” Bauerlein said in an interview about “Professors on the Production Line, Students on their Own." The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research released the paper Tuesday.

Uh, help. This is a white paper ? A serious statement of the issue and policy recommendation ? Has no one told Mr. Bauerlein that a correlation does not, ispa re, prove cause and effect ? There are some very serious, thoughtful responses posted at Inside, unworthy of the alarmist provocation that inspired them. For heaven's sake, (CIA shouts to the rafters, the cats, the espresso machine), perhaps it IS related, Prof. Bauerlein, the other way around ? In all seriousness, student disengagement is a social phenomenom not reducible to this silly factor. Between Kentucky, Ink's post about children's books, and this, it is a very bad time in the history of serious thought. March Madness indeed. Of course, what might one expect from a paper originating from the American Enterprise Institute ? But an Emory professor ? For shame. Speaking of AEI and its philosophy, Stanley Fish would feel right at home. Maybe I am continuing my discussion of the decimation of KCTS after all.