There’s a sickness afflicting universities worldwide, a form of bipolar disorder where the student body’s collective mind is severely split. Oregon is by no means immune, and may be among the most afflicted by this seriously retarding condition.
This illness is partly the cause of the traditional teaching approach in higher education. For four years, most students are inundated with books and lectures that inevitably converge on a very particular (although unstated) political ideology — the one preferred by key members in the department in which the student is majoring. Such inundation must eventually affect the outlook of the student. Advertisers and Ivan Pavlov would surely agree to this. So would educators, whether they’ll admit to it or not.
While bipolar disorder is a hemispheric dysfunction, it has nothing to do with holistic verses linear differences in the brain. My position is “right”-wing faculties do little or nothing to ensure that their students are adequately exposed to ideas that critique certain aspects of business. Conversely, liberal arts schools tend to produce twisted forms of “left”-wing indoctrination that encourage an absurd bias against a vast array of mainstream concepts like the “corporate elite” and “globalization.”
In both cases, the so-called ideal of detached education becomes muddled with partisan propagation. Little wonder one half of the collective mind dismisses the other as a “bleeding heart” or “tree-hugger” while that side regards the former as “uninformed” and “self-centered.”
Thanks to bipolar disorder, we have legions of “practical” students coming out of business programs with no serious training in concepts like corporate stewardship, ethics or environmental concerns. This is dangerous for society and the planet. Likewise, many educated in liberal arts receive no appreciation of what good the free-market economy brings. Only after the university has pocketed all the student loan money do these “informed” types start really learning about things as basic and essential as compound interest, after they leave school.
This is something anyone in the education business should feel embarrassed about. But they’ll try to sell you the idea that nonengagement is really all about freedom of thought.
Yet bipolar disorder is ultimately imposed upon students via a collaboration between faculties and administrations — and these groups have nothing to lose from the ongoing mess they create. The party most responsible is the administration. They could do a lot more to ensure that your education dollars are better invested — if they had the balls to take a serious look at what’s actually being taught in classrooms and its residual effects.
Some quick remedies for BPD:
Make all students study business theory for at least one year. This should be essential because our cultural orientation is fundamentally rooted in free-market values.
Make all students explore the effects that politics has on the free market, from the microcosmic level of office politics on to the regional, national and international levels.
Finally, for every course that engages any sort of social commentary, let a professor holding the opposite view teach the last two classes of the course, alone. Then let there be a town hall debate with mandatory attendance. This will elevate the quality of teaching on all sides, as surely as it will expedite “real” learning.
Which is something bipolar disorder actually retards.