Ivy League envy

The Economist (10 December, 2011) suggests American universities should become more businesslike if they are to survive in the 21st century, and identifies "Ivy League envy" as a key distraction over the past few decades:

The first problem is the inability to say “no”. For decades American universities have been offering more of everything — more courses for undergraduates, more research students for professors and more rock walls for everybody — on the merry assumption that there would always be more money to pay for it all. The second is Ivy League envy. The vast majority of American universities are obsessed by rising up the academic hierarchy, becoming a bit less like Yokel-U and a bit more like Yale.

Ivy League envy leads to an obsession with research. This can be a problem even in the best universities: students feel short-changed by professors fixated on crawling along the frontiers of knowledge with a magnifying glass. At lower-level universities it causes dysfunction. American professors of literature crank out 70,000 scholarly publications a year, compared with 13,757 in 1959. Most of these simply moulder: Mark Bauerlein of Emory University points out that, of the 16 research papers produced in 2004 by the University of Vermont’s literature department, a fairly representative institution, 11 have since received between zero and two citations. The time wasted writing articles that will never be read cannot be spent teaching. In “Academically Adrift” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argue that over a third of America’s students show no improvement in critical thinking or analytical reasoning after four years in college.

The solution, The Economist suggests, is to embrace technology and move much teaching on-line:

The internet is changing the rules. Star academics can lecture to millions online rather than the chosen few in person. Testing and marking can be automated. [...] Professors decide what they want students to know and design tests to see whether they have learned it. But they buy teaching materials from independent publishers and employ “mentors” to guide students.

I think the article accurately identifies the problem, which must sound very familiar to many of us (top 20 by 2020, and "yes" to everything), but I am far from convinced by its proposed solution (outsource teaching to the internet). However, it constantly amazes me that institutes of higher learning are so silent about pedagogy: where are the academic studies that show that internet-based teaching is truly better than traditional lecturing? If it's true, I'll happily burn my lecture notes and "guide" my students remotely from my home office. But something tells me my students won't really get a better education this way, and that my job almost certainly will not be replaced when I retire.