Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised

A sad state of affairs at Cambridge University.

Seems standards and excellence are things of the past.

This from David Butterfield, (ex)professor of Latin at Cambridge 

Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it's precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left.

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For students, the risks have never been lower. Grade inflation is rampant in Cambridge, as elsewhere in the sector. A third-class performance, let alone a failure, is almost impossible in most subjects, as students can either intermit for the year and take the exams again, or avoid them on health grounds and be given an effective pass. When I came to Cambridge, students would be removed from the university for lack of attainment; it is now unheard of for students to be sent down for insufficient academic performance.

These changes reflect a bigger shift: for various reasons declarations of disability have spiked dramatically. Over the past 15 years, disability at Cambridge has increased more than fivefold, and is now declared by some 6,000 students (roughly one in four)[!]

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Many students are now excused from writing essays and permitted to submit bullet points; deadlines are extended, and regularly missed without penalty; extra time is given for all examinations.

The pace of change over the past decade has been astonishing, driven on by three forces: an administrative class that wants to minimise complaints, a subset of academics who actively resent the no-nonsense traditions of the university, and a proportion of students who will take the easiest path proffered. The result is a steady infantilisation of education, whereby challenging workloads are reduced, and robust criticism of bad writing and bad thinking is avoided.

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For those in the humanities and social sciences, there is a steady narrowing of knowledge and lowering of requirements. Set texts and supervision reading lists have been circumscribed: almost never are students tasked with reading a full book within the week. In some faculties abstract (and absurd) quotas of pages to be set for reading have been imposed. So-called 'content warnings' are mandated for courses: anything supposed to portend possible controversy, such as animal sacrifice in Homer's Iliad, or religious conflict in Late Antique Rome, needs explicit flagging in advance. And if someone says they don't want to confront such a topic, the department quietly excuses them. The net decline of standards cannot be ignored.

Read the whole article on The Spectator here:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/decline-and-fall-how-university-education-became-infantilised/

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