Opinion piece on university departmental structure and education pipeline

Restructuring the University 167 Where is causation worried about? Nearly everywhere. Anyone in the social sciences or in any practical discipline worries about causation. So, should departments be organized around the twelve cognitive processes? Probably not. It would be difficult to do and everyone would be against it. It is difficult to change what has always been in place. But those who study diagnosis would benefit from being around others who were doing diagnosis all the time. And those who are worried about de- scriptions would do well to hang around others doing the same. But it doesn’t matter that much, really. In a research university, professors really just talk with people who are doing more or less exactly what they themselves are doing. Departmental seminars are social gather- ings more than intellectual meeting places, since a talk on one subspe- cialty rarely interests those who work in different subspecialties in the same department. But none of this really matters. Our research universities (of which there are maybe 50 in the United States) are doing very well, and my problem is not with them. It is with the institutions that claim to be educating our youth for the future and that employ professors who have a Ph.D. from a research university and who really wish they were still there. The research universities serve as professor training grounds that train many more professors who can do research than we pos- sibly could need. These people then become professors at institutions where hardly any student intends to get a Ph.D., but they continue to teach the same Ph.D. training curriculum that they studied. This has got to stop. The problem is not so much the universities as the high schools, of course. As long as college is seen as a professor training ground, then high school is seen as way to get into the profes- sor training ground, and a nonsensical system evolves that trains high school kids to study what professors need to know. This has to end. When students sign up for psychology at their university, they want to know what is wrong with them and their parents, and instead they study how to do experiments because that is what their profes- sors learned to do in graduate school. When students take computer science in college, they want to learn to use the computer, but instead they study the mathematics of computation because that is what their professor does. When kids study chemistry in college, they are doing it in order to become doctors for the most part, but instead of learning HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023907