Arts degree chic

 public debate, universities  No Responses »
Jul 042012
 

boy leaping
Again we read of deep cuts to a Faculty of Humanities, this time at La Trobe University. And again we read (Ken Gelder, in The Age yesterday) that the university does not sufficiently value the humanities, does not understand their worth, cannot comprehend why a large number of smaller subjects is better than a smaller number with large enrolments.

There is another way to see what is happening at places like La Trobe. Some startling enrolment figures came my way recently. They show that two out of every three students of the humanities here in Victoria are enrolled at Melbourne University. The other third is distributed amongst six other universities.

The cut-off ATAR score for Melbourne’s Arts Faculty is over 90. It follows that two thirds of the arts/humanities students in Victoria’s universities are drawn from the top 10% of the academic cohort. The old conception of an arts degree as a last resort for those who can’t get into more desirable courses is clearly false: it is now becoming a degree for the (academic) elite.

There are of course arts/humanities courses available with much lower, with very low ATAR scores. These are concentrated in the three smaller and more recently-created universities, but the numbers enrolled are so small that their disappearance would make little difference to the wider picture. A graph of student enrolments against entrance scores would no longer be anything like a normal curve; instead it would climb steeply, skewed towards the higher scores.

Startling, I said, and startled I remain. There are various explanations for the very large numbers at Melbourne, amongst them the new ‘Melbourne’ model whereby everyone must take one of six undergraduate degrees before taking up a professional course. So amongst these high-fliers some will take up law, for example. It is not as if we shall have a flood of unemployed university wits on our hands, as in the late 16th century. (Many of them went into the theatre . . . ) But how many, I wonder, will take up teaching, where the entrance scores are too low for comfort?

A prophetic voice

 politics, public debate, universities  1 Response »
Apr 182009
 

Date the following passage.

In the past, a rising class was aware of something valuable enjoyed by others which it wished to share; but this is not so today. The leaders of the rising class are consumed with a contempt for everything which does not spring from their own desires, they are convinced in advance that they have nothing to learn and everything to teach, and consequently their aim is loot?to appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes. The problem of the universities today is how to avoid destruction at the hands of men who have no use for their characteristic virtues, men who are convinced only that ‘knowledge is power.’

If you said 1969 you have everything on your side except the facts. These are: that the author is Michael Oakeshott, writing in The Cambridge Magazine and that he wrote this passage in 1949.

Updated genes

 public debate  No Responses »
Mar 082009
 

The gene arguments are moving too fast for amateur observers. The Wordability consultant on these matters is the learned Dr Strabismus, who writes:

Don’t kid yourself that the decoded genome will provide a comprehensive explanation of human behavior any time soon. We’ll probably see more and more linkages to some big time mental illnesses – e.g. schizophrenia, bipolar depression etc. But except for a few major standouts (e.g. Huntington’s chorea), the degree of gene-disease correlation looks pretty disappointing so far.
More and more, we are seeing the importance of epigenetics i.e. the modification of gene activity by “experience”. Several genes are switched on by exposure to chemical toxins, and some fascinating new data demonstrates that emotional trauma in childhood can up- or down-regulate genes in various parts of the brain (e.g. in the hippocampus, where memories are processed).
Nor does the brand-new babe start off as a tabula rasa. Now comes evidence that modulation of some genes can be transmitted over one or more generations. Lamarck and Lysenko may not have been completely off-base, after all.

Convergent, divergent, bricks

 public debate  1 Response »
Mar 052009
 

Playing a hunch, I asked number 2 son how many uses he could think of for a housebrick. ‘You could slice it’ he said ‘and cook the slices.’

The question, which has haunted me for years, comes from a test devised by psychologist Liam Hudson, who drew on the work of J.P. Guilford. It appears from such tests that people tend to favour one of two styles of thinking, which Guilford called convergent and divergent production.

Divergent production: The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity.

Convergent production: The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving.

_ Wikipedia art: J. P. Guilford

Hudson’s work demonstrated that people (at least, English schoolboys – but he has studied other groups) tend to favour one style over another, and to exhibit different mixtures of the two. There is no such thing as a pure divergent thinker – such a person would not be able to solve the simplest problem – or a pure convergent thinker, one unable to get past the literal. Continue reading »

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