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  3. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching position

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching position

admin2019-06-10  51
问题    Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publications in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues) , all at a rapidly rising cost.
   Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work "The Conflict of the Faculties," wrote that universities should "handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee."
   Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less.
   The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
   The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and teaching assistants with as little as $ 5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
   The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic terms, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure, he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.
The boldfaced phrase "less and less" (in Paragraph 3) refers to______.
选项 A、diminishing governmental support
B、publications in decreasing number
C、theories with growing intelligibility
D、increasingly specialized knowledge
答案D
解析 本题是推理题，考查第三段的第一句中的“ever-increasing specialization”与下文的联系。
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