No more the professional scholar wandering through the system, accumulating degrees along the way. Farewell the politically incorrect administration that limits admission to engineering programs while fostering degrees in women s studies. The autonomous liberal-arts university is in its last days. Welcome the provincially controlled, market-sensitive, advanced polytechnic that will replace it. One sees, finally, the complete picture.
Policy is prejudice.
Mr. Harris and his advisors seek to fashion this new system less on statistics and research than on their own dispositions, their own experiences with the education system, their own mutually reinforcing attitudes about the role of education in preparing children for the job market. Don't bother to tell them they risk robbing our young of the mystery of self-discovery, which is what education is also about, that they are sacrificing our humanities programs on the alter of economic advantage, that we are surrendering our civilization to our economy. And do not trust this writer. His undergraduate degree was in English drama, he was mostly educated through late-night arguments over goulash and red wine in a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street, and the single most powerful piece of information imparted to him in a university classroom was that beauty is truth, truth beauty. He has his own prejudices.