April 08, 2017

Michael Pakaluk, professor ad interim, business, published commentary on the love of learning in The Catholic Thing.

 

... The lesson I wish to draw is that colleges that have businessmen, or generally non-academics as leaders, are greatly hindered in passing on a genuine love of learning to the students. Also, if professors are not tenured, but are regarded as mere employees, they are, so far, “hired hands” who will be hindered in this task.

At least this much can be said for the much-maligned tenure system: it makes the faculty the college, and it makes it at least possible for the faculty to be like a stable “family,” which has its own life, and which the students enter into and share in. Some argue that tenure is incompatible with the “student as consumer.” Exactly.

Yes, there can be islands of love of learning, and individual savant-mentors, and Doktor-Vaters, at such places. But the institutional provisions that allow pathways for the “mysterious osmosis” I mentioned, simply will not exist. ...

Continue reading at The Catholic Thing.