"The End of the University as We Know It"

The New York Times, Op-Ed page, April 27, 2009

"Graduate education is the Detroit of higher education. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

"The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students (and adjunct faculty) to help with teaching, universities could not conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate programs. . . .It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course (maybe at Harvard, but the average is really about $3,000 a course)--with no benefits--than it is to hire full-time professors. (And, the administrators are laughing all the way to the bank!)

"If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities. like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured."

--by Mark C. Taylor, chairman of the Religion Department
Columbia University