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  3. Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House: univer

Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House: univer

游客2023-12-08  29
问题     Barack Obama invited a puzzling group of people into the White House: university presidents. What should one make of these strange creatures? Are they chief executives or labour leaders? Heads of pre-industrial guilds or champions of one of America’s most successful industries? Defenders of civilisation or merciless rack-renters?
    Whatever they might be, they are at the heart of a political firestorm. Anger about the cost of college extends from the preppiest of parents to the grungiest of Occupiers. Mr. Obama is trying to channel the anger, to avoid being sideswiped by it. The White House invitation complained that costs have trebled in the past three decades. Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, has urged universities to address costs with "much greater urgency".
    A sense of urgency is justified: ex-students have debts approaching $ 1 trillion. But calm reflection is needed too. America’s universities suffer from many maladies besides cost. And rising costs are often symptoms of much deeper problems: problems that were irritating during the years of affluence but which are cancerous in an age of austerity.
    The first problem is the inability to say "no". For decades American universities have been offering more of everything more courses for undergraduates, more research students for professors and more rock walls for everybody on the merry assumption that there would always be more money to pay for it all. The second is Ivy League envy. The vast majority of American universities are obsessed by rising up the academic hierarchy, becoming a bit less like Yokel-U and a bit more like Yale.
    Ivy League envy leads to an obsession with research. This can be a problem even in the best universities: students feel short-changed by professors fixated on crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass. At lower-level universities it causes dysfunction. American professors of literature crank out 70, 000 scholarly publications a year, compared with 13, 757 in 1959. Most of these simply moulder: Mark Bauerlein of Emory University points out that, of the 16 research papers produced in 2004 by the University of Vermont’s literature department, a fairly representative institution, 11 have since received between zero and two citations. The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching. In "Academically Adrift" Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argue that over a third of America’s students show no improvement in critical thinking or analytical reasoning after four years in college.
    Popular anger about universities’ costs is rising just as technology is shaking colleges to their foundations. The Internet is changing the rules. Star academics can lecture to millions online rather than the chosen few in person. Testing and marking can be automated. And for-profit companies such as the University of Phoenix are stripping out costs by concentrating on a handful of popular courses as well as making full use of the Internet. The Sloan Foundation reports that online enrolments grew by 10% in 2010, against 2% for the sector as a whole.
    Many universities’ first instinct will be to batten down the hatches and wait for this storm to pass. But the storm is not going to pass. The higher-education industry faces a stark choice: either adapt to a rapidly changing world or face a future of cheeseparing. It is surely better to rethink the career structure of your employees than to see it wither (the proportion of professors at four-year universities who are on track to win tenure fell from 50% in 1997 to 39% ten years later). And it is surely better to reform yourself than to have hostile politicians take you into receivership.
    A growing number of universities are beginning to recognise this. They understand that the beginning of wisdom in academia, as in business in general, is choosing what not to do. They are in recovery from their Ivy League envy. They are also striking up relations with private-sector organisations. And a growing number of foundations, such as the Kauffman Foundation, are doing their best to spread the gospel of reform and renewal. [br] The italicized "students feel short-changed by professors" (Para. 5) probably means
选项 A、students worry about what professors do research on.
B、students feel it doesn’t pay to study at university.
C、students are obsessed with too much research.
D、students suffer from different mental problems.
答案 B
解析 语义题。由题干直接定位至第五段。首句指出“Ivy League envy leads to an obsession with research．”，从第四段最后两句可以看出这是问题产生的根源之一。本题所在句子为“This can be a problem even in the best universities：students feel short—changed by professors fixated on crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass．”，结合本段倒数第二句“The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching．”可以判断，这里是说教授们把教学时间浪费在写那些没人会去看的文章上，让学生们颇有不值当的感觉，故[B]为答案。
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