As an undergraduate, I quickly polished off most of the requirements for an international studies degree and ended up with a double major in religion has a result, mostly by taking classes from an -- we'll just say associate -- of Taylor. And, of course, I had the chance to read a handful of his books (in addition to hearing some interesting stories about him). And there's a certain page in Hiding that I'll never, ever forget.

He manifests performance art as text. That's both good and bad, by the by. It certainly makes him hard to read (and, I imagine, listen to). But it doesn't invalidate him any more than any other well-done piece.

Having said that, I think he's having a hard time being as literal as an op-ed requires, but he's giving it a shot. His recommendations aren't totally off-base even if they are radical (and, as Dan points out, unattainable in the short term).

Minus the regulation piece, he's actually talking about trends acknowledged by no less than ACE. His exact manifestation of each point is, umm, flawed, but this general points aren't.

However, he's missing a point that most people do when they pontificate about higher education: the narrow view that elite institutions define the landscape is simply wrong. Not just incoherent, wrong. You see headlines about Harvard curriculum changes, but they don't actually matter. Tier 2 and 3 publics and privates -- along with community colleges -- actually define higher education as a whole. They're strapped for cash, dependent on state funding (if public; if private, tuition), increasingly reliant on non-tenured faculty, and unable to think grand thoughts about the nature of higher education and its purpose.

Taylors points, one by one:

1. The curriculum is already being restructured. Curriculum has to be driven by enrollment, especially if an institution has little to no endowment. Higher education -- as a whole, again -- is a market-driven endeavour.

2. OK, abolishing departments is silly. You lose the management structure if nothing else. But there is a substantial increase in interdisciplinarity already at work and the trend is towards an increase in the future.

3. Taylor puts this poorly at best, and perhaps I'm being too generous, but he identifies a trend here that has nothing to do with technology: specialization. And if I'm right about his general point, he's right too. Schools that teach a handful of things well are doing better than schools that teach lots of thing moderately (or even poorly). Is this a decline in traditional liberal arts curriculum? Yes. And it makes me sad too. But it's real and happening due to the competitive nature of the market.

4. Ridiculous, but it keeps with Taylor's own definition of productive scholarship as performance art. (For the record, said associate of Taylor required papers. And graded them sufficiently harshly. He also incorporated media into courses in other ways.)

5. Taylor is misstating a well documented problem: too many people go through academic grad school, which creates a glut on the academic market. However, academic graduate programs do not sufficiently prepare students to do anything but continue in academia. This drives wages down for adjuncts and allows a very easy decision for institutions to (see below) move away from tenure. His solution is vague, but some sort of solution (whether it be closing graduate departments nationwide or focussing more on preparing grad students to do non-academic work) is needed.

6. And watch the AAUP go apeshit. But even then, the decline of tenure is happening. the AAUP -- finally -- is addressing adjuncts as peers to tenured professors. The academic workforce is largely shifting to lower-wage less-protected professionals already and not acknowledging that fact is silly. Granted, thinking that institutions have an market incentive structure to in turn incentivize specific functions other than teaching increasing numbers of students is also a bit daft, but the overall point isn't wrong.

And so that's that. The fact that the NYT published this thing is... odd. But Taylor isn't totally off base.

I'm not clear why it's unfathomable to you that a doctoral student could accumulate $100,000 in debt. Is $20,000 a year over five years really beyond the pale? In D.C. one can spend $20,000 a year on housing alone. Then there is food, health insurance, transportation, utilities, cell phone/cable bills, gym memberships, textbooks, drinking money (don't roll your eyes), etc. If you have a girlfriend, kids, or an ailing family member, forget it. Even if your single and your stipend covered housing, simply living in an expensive city could easily cost you 20K. I'm sure there are some tight-wadded grad students that have proved me wrong, but they are the exception. The average person could very easily accumulate said debt -- without said gambling or drug addiction.

On the issue of curriculum, Professor Drezner has a point on the undergraduate portion. It is very fluid. What happens is if you take extra classes, the personnel you meet with to verify you have met your field's graduation requirements will say "BTW, you amassed ... minors". It is more than fluid within individual Universities.

I have reflected on the issue of higher education much lately, as a part time SAHM soon to return full time to the work force. Universities seem to struggle more than my parent's generation's apprenticed programs to give specialized training that meets the market's needs. It seems Universities will not be able to do this on their own. The local market never lacked nurses when there was a specialized academy that produced nurses in the amount of demand of the local hospitals it worked with. Student's entered knowing at the other end, they had an assured job if they passed. Since it was closed, we have had to rely on immigration of qualified people to fill the demand.

The same is true in higher technology and teachers. I believe that University system is too separated from the job market to allow it to be the only interface of a developing work force. Now that job training of nearly all sort that used to occur in house, has transfered to Universities and Colleges, there needs to be a new coordination system between them. Some teaching systems that are less popular have started recruiting by getting paraprofessionals then referring them to the teaching program when they know an opening is coming. That has kept them from having to recruit from other areas when they cannot afford to offer relocation packages.

Next, is Universities have not adjusted well to the mobility of our society. Every time a student moves, he or she will stand to lose half his/her earned credits and double the length of time to finish a program, because one U teaches a class different than another. I think if there is a curriculum change it should not be to develop some core curriculum programs that those who know they have to pick up with their family and move every couple years can choose and eventually enter the workforce. Fluidity seems to be lacking.

I think too often we forget the skills given by higher education. Of course there is a specialization, but there is more to it than just knowing a field. Should attain good analytical and deductive thinking skills so that their ability to continue to process knowledge does not stop the minute a professor is not in front of them to teach it. Especially, if they are to be professors themselves. So that one should have the skills to read a book and gain knowledge from it. Let's face it, if a grad student passes a defense and thesis process, and they cannot pick up a book and read it analytically and critically, then the University failed to educate that student. We don't need more special titles to say someone knows how to acquire and produce knowledge, that is supposed to be the end product of a graduate education. Too often the little titles given are inhibitors, not enablers.

Last, I don't think we need to transform dissertations. But, I was not fond of the defense process. Maybe it was days on end of morning sickness such that I did not think I would make it through without having to leave or use the garbage pail in the corner, but I felt it overly masculine, like a male hazing process. At that point, I was very cognitive of the fact I am not male.

You makes some good points, but are not right on debt, not all graduate students get graduate assistantships or GA stipends and some are in programs that are not fully funded, and those who are funded may live in expensive places or not be single and have to take on student loans to make ends meet. In that sense, it is possible to run up debt as a graduate student. This can be avoided through thrift and hardship, but is not always done so. There are really graduate students in debt. Fortunately I am not one of the people in debt, but various people around me are because of the lack of institutional resources, the expensive nature of living in this area, the existence of families and spouses without the ability to pull in good paying jobs, and various lifestyle choices.

I have a six-figure student loan, and I didn't get it gambling or using illegal drugs (a certain, modest amount of boozing may have been involved, but not to the point that I was seriously taken off track). I would also add that I ONLY took out loans to pay for my PhD coursework.

The problem was that, like many in doctoral training, I had to work while writing my dissertation, which took me about three years longer than I would have liked. The student loan industry, in the meantime, lobbied up to the university financial aid directors and got them to artificially reduce the amount of time for deferments, and the student loan providers then got to capitalize my loans every three months. Meaning that by the time I got a job in academia paying a salary sufficient to meet my student loan obligations, I had a loan roughly four times larger than what I actually received in aid.

And that, long story short, is how you rack up a six-figure student loan debt. To my mind, I wasn't irresponsible, nor am I (strictly speaking) a victim; I knew what I was doing when I took out the loans. I was single, didn't particularly value money, and thought that I wouldn't really get into a particularly materialistic lifestyle (owning a home, for example). Now I'm married, have a mortgage payment in a addition to my student loan debt (which is larger than my mortgage), and I have a grandchild via my wife's son. And my ability to provide for those that I love is seriously eroded by the predatory loan policies of the... got to think up a good phrase like "military-industrial complex" to describe what the student financial aid sector has become. Any ideas?

In short, I think that allowing the financial sector to profit off student loans has massively expanded the cost of higher education to no discernable good effect. Private provision of financial aid hasn't been particularly efficient in its distribution of aid, as witnessed by the recent constriction of availability due to the subprime collapse, and it is clearly raising the costs of higher education for middle-class Americans. Why throw good money after bad?