Penn State, top party school, considers less student-centered policies

You have to feel sorry for Graham Spanier, president of America's top party school.

When Princeton Review named his school at the top of the list, it created a lot of publicity, but not the kind colleges crave. Students looking for a great place to party flocked to the place and that was good for admissions, but it hardly helps to attract the best qualified professors and administrators. Serious students also tended to stay away.

And like other top party schools from Florida to Arizona to UMass, Penn State is working overtime to prove to the world that it can do something else besides making Jello shots and taking unconscious students to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped.

Lots of people are offering him some assistance with his task, including Jeff Kern, a local columnist who offered this bit of advice.

Making colleges more "student-friendly" has been a tremendous disaster in the field of higher education. It's not that it's difficult to do. It's not. Dumb down the classes. Inflate the grades. Move the add / drop deadline to the end of the semester, fire teachers who want to maintain high standards, ignore any kind of alcohol rules, build a lot of water parks, climbing walls, luxury condos and gourmet dining courts. What you end up with isn't really a college any more but a kind of adolescent theme park. Exactly the kind of place that slackers want to stay for six years or so.

Bringing back 8 a.m. classes, requiring attendance, tossing out the binge drinkers, giving students the grades they really deserve, requiring students to go to class on Fridays instead of beginning the weekend on Thursday afternoon would piss students off to no end.

But in the end that may be exactly what we are going to have to do if colleges are ever going to be able to take themselves seriously again.

Comments

[veblen]

You got this thing wrong. It was Spanier, a few years ago, that suggested that the number of 8am classes be reduced. His disscussion of the ideas of increasing the number of 8am classes at the recent Faculty Senate meeting was in response to a op-ed piece in a local newspaper which was critical Spanier's intiative. And from the article you link to you can see that he's rejected the idea of increasing the number of 8am classes.

[Craig Brandon]

The above commnent is correct! Here is a link to the original commentary, which I have to entirely agree with!

http://www.centredaily.com/2010/03/15/1852990/psu-has-become-too-student-friendly.html

[Falcon Eddy]

Thank you for exposing the anti-intellectual climate that is so commonplace on campus today. I was your classic slacker. The only thing that saved me was timing. My undergraduate career at a public university spanned from 1979 to 1984. Tuition for my last semester was $540. I thus entered the real world with no marketable skills (surprise, surprise), but with less than $5,000 in student loan debt. My generation was probably the last generation that could make a mockery of higher education and still avoid penury. Keep up the good work. For the sake of our young people, the higher education bubble could not be burst soon enough.