Holes in the Story

So another article about Perry's higher education reforms came out in the statesman this week. This article conveniently avoids, over the course of two pages, any meaningful analysis, preferring to quote back and forth between government reformers and the academics who are resistant to the particular reforms suggested. Absent in the article are any meaningful facts to help us decide whether the reforms are good or not, and also absent are the actual reforms. What is present is the somewhat unidentified conflict between 'market driven' and 'not market driven.' A cursory look at the comments section below the article verifies this; the discussion is not about what the suggestions are, they are about whether or not a it is appropriate for a university to treat its students as 'customers'.

[Always, always, always absent is any discussion of what an education is about. Granted, that is outside the scope of the article, but it is ignored as a rule...or rather, never even conceived of. One might suppose that the market-like university advocates would say that their 'customers' would decide what an education should consist of, but that just brings up more questions and I don't want to put words in their mouths]

So, I had to do some footwork, but I did manage to find the list of the "Seven Breakthrough Solutions" within the framework of UTs anti-7 solutions protest site. So far I have not found a source for the raw suggestions, so hopefully those wily UT professors and deans haven't stripped them of necessary detail.

I will maybe go into these suggestions myself later, but needless to say, the first article I posted up there (and most of the articles I have found are more or less the same) is a good example of bad journalism. It quotes people from 'both sides of the story' without actually going in any depth to explain both sides. It creates public interest but does little to promote anything beyond the ideological debate between market-fundamentalists and everybody else.

Certainly it got me to go out and seek the answers as to whats going on, but 1)I'm better than everybody else in that way, and 2) At the length of the article, it could have been much more concise and informative than it was. It basically rehashes the same thought over and over.