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Profscam

by Charles J. Sykes (Goodreads Author)

3.37 of 5 stars 3.37 · rating details · 27 ratings · 6 reviews

Profscam reveals the direct and ultimate reason for the collapse of higher education in the United States--the selfish, wayward, and corrupt American university professor. In this fiercely argued, often infuriating book, investigative journalist Charles J. Sykes charges that college teaching has become a lucrative racket, where the most important responsibility--undergradu...more

Paperback, 304 pages

Published December 15th 1989 by St. Martin's Griffin (first published 1988)

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Jan 01, 2008 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2008

There's a lot of indignant sputtering to be found in this book, an extended cry of "J'accuse!" leveled at U.S. universities. The author's main thesis is that the intense focus on research acts as a corrupting influence throughout the system. Overvaluation of research in the triad of teaching, research and administrative duties that comprises a faculty member's job responsibilities has diverse and far-reaching consequences, most of which the author views as negative.
• It creates an unhealthy syst...more There's a lot of indignant sputtering to be found in this book, an extended cry of "J'accuse!" leveled at U.S. universities. The author's main thesis is that the intense focus on research acts as a corrupting influence throughout the system. Overvaluation of research in the triad of teaching, research and administrative duties that comprises a faculty member's job responsibilities has diverse and far-reaching consequences, most of which the author views as negative.
• It creates an unhealthy system of incentives, whose main casualty is the quality of undergraduate education.
• As the number of highly talented researchers in any given field is necessarily finite, competition among universities for the same few 'stars' results in major distortion of salaries.
• This competition has also completely warped more traditional views of the appropriate role of the university within the broader society, so that now even land grant colleges have lost sight of their formerly clear mission of education, and strive to compete as research institutions with universities twenty times as well-endowed, in a senseless game they cannot hope to win.
• The ‘publish or perish’ criterion forces junior faculty to prioritize research above all else, but the inflexibility of the tenure clock almost ensures that the research will be excruciatingly narrow in its scope, incremental, and of interest to only a handful of academics. It is the rare junior academic who will take the risk of branching out in a completely new direction, which might prove to be a dead end, knowing that the primary metric used by tenure committees is the number of publications (quality is supposed to play a role, but can be difficult to assess, so all too often a simple count is the major determinant).
• As for tenure, Sykes finds it to be just one more mechanism which allows faculty to avoid accountability, instead of being the much-vaunted ‘protector of academic freedom’ the professoriat would have us believe. Within certain disciplines, in fact, true freedom of expression often seems threatened by a particularly virulent type of political correctness.

With chapter titles like “The Crucifixion of Teaching”, “The Weird World of Academic Journals”, “The Pseudo-Scientists: the Social Sciences”, Sykes leaves little doubt where he stands in this excoriation of the ‘professoriat’. He makes the point repeatedly, and convincingly, that the real casualty in today’s university is the quality of undergraduate teaching, and that today’s undergraduates (and their parents) are being asked to shell out more and more for less and less. In the book’s final chapter, he outlines the key components necessary to improve matters: puncturing the research myth, abolishing tenure, requiring professors to teach, restoring the curriculum and the canon, and enforcing ‘truth in advertising’, i.e. forcing colleges to provide accurate statistics on such questions as the actual number of hours spent by tenured faculty in teaching undergraduates.

I first read this book fifteen years ago, and found it to be a depressingly accurate account of third-level education in the U.S. Upon re-reading it this past weekend, I was cheered again by the brisk common sense of Sykes’s arguments – his broadsides retain their pungent relevance. The depressing thing, of course, is how little things appear to have changed in the interim, making this book as relevant today as when it was first published twenty years ago.
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Jul 16, 2011 Expose Austin Texas Duty To Care For Others rated it 5 of 5 stars

Excellent book about university corruption, fraud, and exploitation which is pervasive in the USA.

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May 10, 2012 Gina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: education-and-pedagogy

Dated and right wing-y, but interesting nonetheless.

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Mar 28, 2012 Marc rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: edu-factory

... review to come later.

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Apr 23, 2009 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excellent book!

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Aug 27, 2007 Wanda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I came to understand why most of my university classes were not much more insightful and had similar format to those in high school. Although they were supposedly more "advanced" they disappointed, failed to delve into real world issues and usually taught what one was to learn instead of inspiring questions and motivating the desire to seek answers.

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Nov 07, 2008 Kimberly rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Very cynical view of the American professoriate.

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May 10, 2013 Joebawden rated it 3 of 5 stars

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Jan 19, 2013 Fred Beshears rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: social-science

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Shelves: teaching-and-learning

Nov 20, 2012 Rory rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: education

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Shelves: engineering-education

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