The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation

by Bruce Wilshire

Book Overview

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Introduction

Part One: The Academic Professional: Problems of Self-Knowledge and Education

I. Alienation

II. What is the Educating Act?

III. Crisis of Authority and Identity: The Inevitability of Professionalism

IV. The Professionalization of the University

Part Two: Academic Professionalism and Identity: Rites of Purification and Exclusion

V. A Specimen...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791401979
• ISBN13: 9780791401972
• Release Date: April 1990
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Personal essay perspective; An interesting work well worth reading, particularly if you are a profes

As a philosopher and an educator, I enjoyed Wilshire's book. Quite a number of his experiences parallel my own with regards to teaching and the self-reflective processing and mulling over the 'educational act'. I felt very at home with a number of his statements, like "we arrive at the capital feature of the educating act: self-awareness, or self-reflexivity" (Wilshire, 1990, p.27), or my favorite, "The ultimate educating force is _who_I_am_" (p.31 - underline mine). These two statements are old-hat for Waldorf teachers (of which I am one), and I found most of what Wilshire brought in regards to his educational analysis familiar territory -- but this is a good thing, as the educational philosophy behind Waldorf education is to educate the whole child. Much modern education lacks an awareness of the importance of consciously developing not only an open face-to-face relationship with one's students, but also -- going much further than Wilshire -- developing an open _spiritual_ relationship as well, through contemplative practices. And of course we should also play with the above statements by Wilshire in a cybernetic context: the educating act calls forth self-reflexivity through its realization, while self-reflexivity opens vast arenas of potential educability. Likewise, the force of education helps make us who we are, and who we are as educators. I am grateful that Wilshire so adroitly points out the various cultural forces that worked to create the over-professionalization we have today -- recognizing these causes is both enlightening and freeing. I especially appreciate his remark that "the organizing center of the university ought to be the organizing center of the developing human person" (p.85). In other words, I see Wilshire calling for the re-humanization of education, the recognition that education is not about _knowledge_, but about the development of human beings (Wilshire speaks of the returning the university to the "human scale" (p. 226)). In this way, Wilshire parallels Rudolf Steiner's view (as the originator of Waldorf education) that education is for the soul what medicine is for the body: a bringing to harmonic wholeness of diverse aspects. We are presently suffering from an overdevelopment -- using the body metaphor that Wilshire favors -- of the head. Specifically, we have brought education out of the realm of the heart and the hands, which have become atrophied, almost useless remnants when forced to squeeze themselves through the tight gates of academia. Education, to be a source of life, of passion, of deep inquiry and engagement, _must_ explicitly and integrally include what in the body manifest as the rhythmic and metabolic realms. The techniques of much of modern education (I'm thinking here of grades, testing, quantitative reductionism, departmentalization, and so forth), from an alchemical perspective, are too heavy on the salt and too light on the sulfur, with almost NO mercury to be found. I won't go on about the