ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education, by C. J. Sykes, Regency Gateway, Washington, D. C., 1988. 304 pages.
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Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 7/28/00

"… In recent years, dozens of commissions, foundations, and free-lance pathologists have conducted endless post-mortems on higher education: the decline of humanities, the fragmentation of the curriculum, the pathetic state of teaching, and the boggling price tag on the universities' tapestry of failure. … The modern professoriate bears little resemblance to the rumpled, forgetful, impractical academics of popular imagination. In the years since World War II, the profession has changed radically. The modern academic is mobile, self-interested, and without loyalty to institutions or the values of liberal education. … They are politicians and entrepreneurs who fiercely protect their turf and shrewdly hustle research cash while they peddle their talents to rival universities, businesses, foundations, or government. … Yet the impact of their scam on their customers has been devastating.

• For students, it has meant watered-down courses; unqualified instructors; a bachelor's degree of dubious value; and an outrageous bill …
• For parents…, it meant one of the biggest cons in history.
• For American Business, it has meant hiring a generation of college graduates who are often unable to write a coherent sentence, analyze even simple problems, or …
• And for American society…, it has meant the realization that we are not discernibly more literate, more competent, more economically secure, safer, wiser, or saner than we were before spending untold billions on this embarrassment of academic riches."

"… The disciplines can be thought of as academic villages, complete with elders, wise men, and elaborate rituals of initiation and ostracism. They communicate through journals, conferences, books, papers, monographs, as well as through paper review committees, professional organizations, and the formal reviews of grant applications. … Ultimately it is the villages that decide who will practice scholarship at the pinnacles of prestige - Berkeley or Yale or Michigan - and who will nurse their disgrace in the teachers' colleges of western Colorado. From the perspective of a single campus, the influence of the villages is nearly invisible, but their control over the universities is absolute, unchallenged, and often ruthlessly enforced."

"… By 1947, government spending for research at colleges and universities was three times the combined income of all institutions of higher education in 1941. … The federal money that flowed into academia was like radical shock therapy, jump-starting the academic enterprise from its dormancy. The prestige that accompanied the traditional sciences now not only meant money, it meant advancement, security, and a kind of celebrity never before dreamed of by the cloistered academic. ... Professors who once had been content to preside over sleepy seminars now found themselves at the head of research institutes with dozens of younger scientists and graduate students on bended knee. The new cash meant laboratories, assistants, sabbaticals, research grants, leaves of absence. … But it also set the scene for one of history's more poignant and tragic ironies. The nation thought that changes in universities were democratizing higher education, but it did not understand the opportunism of the professoriate. …"

"The upward pressure of smaller schools struggling toward the light of academic prestige meant that even in schools like the University of Wisconsin's poor relation, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, one professor in the business school taught only four hours a week … At the highly ranked University of Michigan, some top-salaried professors teach so few classes that … they are paid nearly $1,000 an hour for their contact with students. … Not surprisingly, the flight has had dramatic ramifications for the way undergraduates are taught. …"

"While they continue to publicly boast about the quality of their faculties, universities have filled the breach with a combination of graduate students … part-timers and so-called gypsies, professors hired on a year-to-year basis who are, in effect, the coolies of the academic work force. … Many of the teaching assistants are drawn from the ranks of foreign graduate students whether or not they can speak understandable English. … The teaching assistants, part-timers, and temporaries serve to demonstrate one the iron laws of the university. The groups that are most integrally associated with teaching are invariably outcasts, with a status so low they fail even to show up on academia's normal scales of prestige. … The academic establishment insists that only professors who do research can be good teachers, so they need to spend most of their time outside of the classroom; and because they are off researching … they are replaced by part-timers or temporaries who may do little or no research at all. Academia has an almost infinite capacity for ignoring such contradictions, especially when the payoff is so high."

"… At the heart of the system are the academic departments and their power over the system of tenure. … Although university administrators often have the final say, the tenure system in controlled by the professors themselves. … Once a positive recommendation is made, some schools will appoint a panel of outside scholars - usually chosen for their eminence within their respective academic villages - to evaluate the candidate's scholarship. … The evaluations are inevitably subjective. Some tenure candidates have gone down to defeat as a result not of criticism but of faint praise. … The final decision on tenure is often made by the university's president, who usually ratifies the faculty recommendations. …"

"The treatment of teachers indicates academia's indifference to teaching, but it only hints at how deeply the contempt for it is ingrained within the academic culture. … The indifference of the academic villages to teaching is readily understandable, given their commitment to research. …"

"The system seems to breed incompetence in the classrooms. … The neglect of teaching can be divided roughly into five major categories, with considerable overlap, Professors can:

1. Merely regurgitate the textbook.
2. Rely on notes prepared when they were younger, more ambitious, and without tenure.
3. Dwell on their own specialties…
4. Turn their classes into rap sessions…
5. Fail to prepare at all…"

"'When you hire these stars,' one Berkeley professor told Newsweek on Campus, 'in effect, you're saying to the rest of the department: "You are doing the dishes." And in the American universities of the 1980's 'doing dishes' means teaching."

"The problem of the university curriculum is no longer merely that there is no central body of shared knowledge at the heart of the university education - certain books that all educated men and women presumably would read. … Somewhere in the professoriate's endless curricular shell game, the universities lost track of the need to teach critical thinking, writing skills, or even basic knowledge about the world."

"… Because students are essentially hostages held by the universities to ensure society's continued good will … an elaborate numbers game colors the entire academic landscape. … The politics of this numbers game, particularly when money is tight, virtually dictates the destruction of traditional standards of performance and intellectual integrity. … The numbers game also virtually dictated the collapse of standards within the classroom itself. … Perhaps the clearest evidence of the extent to which the bargain came to dominate undergraduate education was the inflation of grades that accompanied the rise of the new professoriate. At Harvard in 1978, 78 percent of the student body made it onto the dean's list, compared with 20 percent in the 1920's and 26 percent in the 1930's…"

"All the academic maneuvering and posturing over the curriculum conceals one of the academic culture's most brazen coups: a startling translation that has not only made mediocrity a way of life but something of an official ideology. … The key was use of the words 'diversity' and 'pluralism,' with their impeccable democratic credentials. … If curricular gibberish was now 'diversity,' then the traditional standards must be elitism, and anyone who advocated even a modicum of rationality in the curriculum must not only be anti-democratic, but potentially even fascistic. … The lack of meaningful standards in schools of education seems to act like a magnet for some of the lowest achieving students in higher education. The schools then make the very least of this material by creating an environment where the emphasis is on 'language arts' rather than literature, 'value clarification' rather than the study of philosophy or ethics; … It is hard to avoid the conclusion that despite its thinly veiled contempt for the lower level schools, the university is, in fact, the home office of educational mediocrity in America."

"THE debate over higher education often pits teaching versus research. … What is not in question is the importance research has in the academic culture. … Research is, above all, the ticket to academic riches - publications, tenure, promotion, research grants, sabbaticals, consultant-ships, and lately even a piece of the action in related businesses. …"

"… The slavish use of obscure jargon, convoluted syntax, and the symbols and trappings of mathematics are essential for any academic because:

1. They can make even the most trivial subject sound impressive and the most commonplace observations immeasurably profound, even it the subject is utterly insignificant.
2. They make it much easier to avoid having to say anything directly or even anything at all. And, most important,
3. It is easier than real thought or originality."

"If academia revolves around research, then research revolves around the process of academic publishing, particularly in learned journals. By one estimate, academics in the sciences turn out articles for their 40,000 separate journals at the rate of two every minute. … That is more than a million a year… And this does not include the acres of prose turned out by economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, or literary critics for their own learned journals. There are 142 journals in sociology and 71 in philosophy alone. … A book known as the Social Science Citation Index, for example, keeps track of which scholars are being cited in the all-important footnotes by other scholars. … Through the footnotes, the journals create a vast network of cross-validation - the academic equivalent of I'm OK, You're OK. … The system naturally has its own side-effects: It encourages generous self-citations … and network of back-scratching mutual-citers. Thus, the most trivial or obscure point can find itself rushing through the academic village within months of its birth."

"REFORM may be the most popular leisure activity of the American university. … This is because the pressure for reform is a constant: Every few years the failures of academia - teachers who don't teach, students who don't learn, overcrowded classrooms, lousy instruction, the hyperspecialization of the faculty, and the incoherence and narrowness of the curriculum - become too flagrant for the public to ignore. … In the end, after all the dust has settled, the academic villages are stronger than ever and the autonomy of the professors untouched. …"

"What is happening in the sciences? … In a culture where research is everything, teaching - not to mention teaching well - is almost nothing. In some departments … there are more professors than majors… Given their villages' emphasis on specialization, the academic scientists generally make few concessions to those students who are not yet dazzled by the prospect of a life spent studying the mating habits of lower crustaceans. … The result is the increasingly rapid spiral of decline: shrinking number of American students who are in turn replaced by foreign students who become T.A.s, who in turn manage to frustrate and discourage even more undergraduates from pursuing a career in the sciences."

"… The impact of the commercialization of science was twofold: It dramatically skewed the attention and resources of whole departments toward the immediate commercial interests of the grantors; and second, the free flow of information that had been crucial for the development of the sciences was radically curtailed. … In their scramble for the pot of riches at the end of the commercial rainbow, the professors were also fully prepared to scrap, in turn, their research agendas, their obligations to their graduate students, and even the need of their disciplines. … In the long run, however, private industry itself may be the biggest loser, because it has not yet fully realized the nature of the academic personality."

"No one knows for sure how widespread outright fraud is in academia. … But the evidence is not reassuring. … The combination of indifference, denial, and cynicism within the academy has meant that most academics have been conditioned simply to look the other way. … The pressures on ambitious scientists to maximize their rates of publication and citation … had also led to the nigh-on universal practice of co-authoring. Academics believe instinctively that there is safety in numbers. This translates into research papers garlanded with four, five, and even more scientists listed as the 'authors.' …"

"What, then, can be done to save our universities? The key elements … will entail:

• Puncturing the Research Myth. At best, only one academic in ten produces original research of any value. … As many as three-fourth of the journals would … be vaporized. Unread, unreadable, and unused except to bulk up academic resumes, the vast majority of the learned journals could disappear tomorrow…
• Abolish tenure. …
• Requiring teachers to teach. …
• Insisting on truth-in-advertising. …
• Restoring the curriculum and the cannon. …
• Trustees, who must realize that they are not merely ornamental fixtures of the university. …
• Legislators, who should demand accountability for the tax dollars they send down…
• Congress, foundations, and research grantors, all of which have been sugar daddies of the academic culture. … Why can't the grantors tie their gifts to specific reforms in undergraduate instruction? …
• Students, who are under no obligation to tolerate the arrogance or the abject neglect of the professoriate. …
• Parents, who can assure themselves of the attention of university administrators by threatening to take their tuition money elsewhere. …
• The professors, among whose number are those few hardy souls who have kept the spirit of genuine intellectual commitment alive. …"

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