The Slow Death of the University

  -Prepare lessons 
  -Answer student questions (during and) after class
  -Grade homework
  -Prepare, proctor, and grade examinations

I'd estimate that 1/4 to 1/2 of students will stay after for question time, or show up to office hours. Those few minutes are wildly different for a class of 10 vs a class of 100.

If you have a 50-minute class, and you choose to have a 45-minute lecture and 5 minutes of question time, you can spend 1 minute each with the 1/2 of your 10 students. With a class of 100, you can have a crowd of 50 where maybe 10% of them can get your attention.

Additionally, many lecturers have office hours - time specifically allotted to meet with students. If you kept 2 hours a week, you could give an additional 12 minutes to each of your 10 students a week. With a class of 100, you can hope that only 1/4 of your students show up.

Furthermore, in a lecture of 10, it's very easy to ask an incidental question and go onto a short educational tangent. In classes exceeding 25, it's very difficult to retain control of such a large body of people, and so the instructors work very hard to ignore such tangents and keep everyone on track.

Not to mention the order of magnitude difference in grading 100 assignments vs grading 10.

I'm less-convinced that instructor-time is a myth. But maybe I'm biased by experience.

Combined with engineering, there's some very interesting ways to do all those things. For example statistics on such a big scale were very hard until the internet became so widespread.

The folks who brag and tell you they make great money and don't do shit all - it's just ego tripping. Really, I've seen it a thousand times - somebody of moderate intelligence and no desire or ability to do anything creative or interesting, will sweat his/her way through university and then gloat over what an awesome position in company X he/she now has.

Really, it can be frustrating if you are in financial difficulty but rest assured, those who do the real work and are savvy enough to not get taken advantage of, will come out on top. The fella bragging about not doing much is going to continue not doing much and best case scenario - he/she cruises through life with a nice salary, having done the bare minimum.

Meh.

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> Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time

Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier..." is obviously written to be tongue-in-cheek.

A close reading (humanities skill!) of this article might highlight the following passage as the central thesis:

Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.

> Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.

Again, where in the article does the author suggest this course of action? If anything, he seems to be suggesting the opposite, that the humanities should be returned to their traditional place in the public square, questioning and criticizing the prevailing ideologies of the day:

It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny. What if the value of the humanities lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions, but in the fact that they don't?