From: Lee Lady
Newsgroups: sci.psychology.psychotherapy
Subject: Re: Teaching and turn-offs (was Re: Support For ParaPros)
Date: 11 Oct 1996
Summary: Yes, I agree that universities are nurseries of orthodoxy.

In article <539o7u$4qu@news1.t1.usa.pipeline.com>, Leslie E. Packer, PhD <lpacker@nyc.pipeline.com> wrote:
> On Oct 03, 1996 09:23:55 Lee Lady wrote:
>> ........

>> Universities are nurseries of orthodoxy. The university, while offering
>> a nurturing environment, is not a creative one. It can't be. That isn't
>> the function of higher education. --- Rita Mae Brown
>
>
> Do you agree with the above?

Obviously when one grabs a three or four-line sentence from some book out of context to use as a slogan, it is likely to be somewhat simplistic. Furthermore, Rita Mae Brown, for all that she is a wonderful author and probably a great person, is hardly an expert on the academic world.

Nonetheless, yes, on the whole I do agree with this quote. That's why I chose it.

I realize that many in the academic world would stoutly deny that that world is a bastion of orthodoxy. On the contrary, they see themselves as militant challengers of orthodoxy. But what happens is that they simply promulgate a different orthodoxy than that of society as a whole.

There has certainly been lots of evidence of this in sci.psychology.psychotherapy, especially in the years gone by when it was merely sci.psychology and mostly populated by graduate students. (As we've gained a lot of practicing therapists who contribute, the attitudes have become much less rigid.)

Naturally, what first comes to my own mind is the arguments over NLP.

It doesn't bother me that academics have been skeptical of "fringe therapies" such as NLP. (The term "fringe therapy" is just a pejorative way of saying that they are outside the orthodoxy.) It is the job of academics to look at things critically, and they could certainly perform a useful service for such outlaw disciplines as NLP (and Scientology, and whatever) by subjecting them to a true critical investigation.

But what is bothersome (and, in my opinion, to a large extent discredits the academic orthodoxy), is that they have no interest in investigating things that come from outside the academic world. They don't see any need to even know about them. The argument given in sci.psychology many many times has been: It can't be any good, because there's no research on it.

Graduate students are in fact taught that the things worth knowing are to be found in journals. Anything else is dross. And it's not only in clinical psychology (admittedly somewhat of an academic toxic waste site) that one finds this attitude. There are examples of this same sort of attitude in mathematics (for instance the case of chaos theory, which has since become, of course, if anything somewhat over-trendy), and I am sure one could find them in most disciplines.

Academics are trained to write follow-up papers to follow-up papers. They're not taught to keep their ears tuned to the world as a whole.

In clinical psychology, this is especially unfortunate because what the academics are mostly trained in is empirical validation. As far as I can tell, there are very few if any courses taught to students in clinical psych which attempt to teach them about scientific thinking, how to do creative science, how to find new ideas and find the questions which are really worth investigating.

If a scientist has a lot of training in how to test hypotheses, but knows nothing about how to come up with worthwhile hypotheses in the first place, it's unlikely that he's going to be able to make much of a contribution to knowledge.

The irony is that the alternative approaches to psychotherapy have much better ideas, based on much stronger creativity and intuition, than the academics do. But the alternatives don't have the resources (and, for the most part, the training) to carefully validate their ideas, dotting all the i's and crossing the t's in a way that would make their findings palatable to the orthodoxy.

So we have two groups, which ideally should have a very beneficial symbiotic relationation, and instead only wage war on each other.

That's one half of my reply. Actually, Rita Mae Brown did not have in mind universities as research institutions, but rather as teaching institutions. And I think that what she said is equally valid when one considers university teaching.

I have a friend in the Philosophy Department here (Ken Kipnis) who likes to say that there are only three things a student needs to get an whatever grade s/he wants in any course. Namely, the student must 1) know the requirements of the course. 2) The student must be capable of fulfilling the requirements. And 3) the student must be willing to satisfy those requirements.

Ken then goes on to say that condition 1) is almost never the problem. (I partly disagree. I think that students are sometimes not clear on the requirements even when the professor believes that s/he has laid them out extremely clearly. For instance, I feel a need to emphatically remind my students in courses like calculus that doing the homework is not a requirement of the course. Doing homework is a means to an end, which I strongly recommend, but students should not feel that they have accomplished anything merely because they have completed a certain amount of homework. The only requirement in my calculus classes is that students be able to demonstrate proficiency on the written tests.)

Secondly, Ken states that condition 2) is seldom where the real problem lies. (In mathematics courses, I again have to disagree to some extent. Certain students are simply not capable of learning the material.)

I do agree that the most common reason that students do not do well in courses is because of condition 3).

If one thinks about it, Ken says, this means that what we are primarily grading students on is compliance. The university is fairly effective at turning out compliant students.

Furthermore, we are grading students on the basis of whether they meet our standards, our values. We are basically trying to train students to be like ourselves. (We ourselves are the only models of excellence we faculty know of.)

Faculty may sometimes think that they are teaching students rebellion. But, in my opinion, as long as students' grades depend on their pleasing their professors, I think it is fair to say, as Rita Mae Brown does (in a rather unorthodox book on creative writing) that universities are nurseries of orthodoxy.

--
Universities are nurseries of orthodoxy. The university, while offering a nurturing environment, is not a creative one. It can't be. That isn't the function of higher education. -- Rita Mae Brown
Lee Lady <http://www2.Hawaii.Edu/~lady/>