Book review of "Palace of ashes: China and the decline of American higher education"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is a case study of higher education (HE) in the US, or rather two studies, as developments in the US are compared with developments in the HE sector in China.While the focus is mainly on the last 30 years the study goes back to the very beginnings of higher learning both in the West and in China, which helps one's understanding of the different roots and traditions of what much later became known as "higher education."Although he is no higher education researcher, the author is well qualified to undertake such a study as he is familiar with both countries, having taught and lived for several years in China (as well as South Korea), is familiar with the Chinese language, and has traveled widely in China as the director of the Chinese Exchange Program at Drake University.A professor of English, he currently holds a faculty position at the State University of New York.Ferrara's main argument is that, while China is massively investing in education and in universities in particular, universities in the US are losing their position as world-wide leaders in higher education due to major cuts of public budgets for higher education and, partly as a consequence, the adoption of a neoliberal agenda-i.e., of corporate values and organization.The list of Ferrara's complaints about the decline of US higher education is long and includes: the erosion of academic freedom through the loss of faculty governance; the disappearance of tenured professors and their replacement, on the one hand, by poorly paid and disposable lecturers, and, on the other, a growing class of overpaid administrators; and rising tuition, which makes higher education unaffordable for many students or puts them into debt for years after graduation.Similarly, the author bemoans the disappearance or significant reduction of the role of the liberal arts, and generally the "vocationalization" of higher education programs at the expense of the humanities and social studies.This list is neither new nor unfamiliar, since many books have been published over the last ten years or so in the US on the "crisis of the university," most of them written by faculty members like Ferrara or other university insiders (e.g.,
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".