|
|
The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionals, Purity, and Alienationreviewed by David S. Webster - 1990 Title: The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionals, Purity, and Alienation Author(s): Bruce Wilshire Publisher: State University of New York Press, Albany ISBN: 0791401979, Pages: , Year: 1990 Search for book at Amazon.com In The Moral Collapse of the University, Bruce Wilshire, professor of philosophy at Rutgers, demonstrates to his own satisfaction that the modern American research university is in a state of “moral collapse” (p. 205). Some of the symptoms of this collapse are that the university is divided into academic departments, instead of being interdisciplinary; the faculty neglects undergraduates; the sciences receive more than their share of prestige, power, and resources to the detriment of the social sciences and, especially, the humanities; and faculty publication productivity is measured by quantity, not quality.
A major reason for the moral collapse of the university, according to Wilshire, was the hegemony of logical positivism from around 1930 to 1980. (Since 1980, he argues, as the influence of logical positivism has waned, the university’s morality has improved slightly.) Logical positivism, he believes, kept the university partitioned into academic departments and “annihilated” (p. 205) philosophy, reducing the... (preview truncated at 150 words.)To view the full-text for this article you must be signed-in with the appropriate membership. Please review your options below:
|
|
|
|
|
|