siberianrose’s posterous

涌流，我在翻译或写日志时候的这种无以言说的快乐一定是涌流吧。沉浸其中的感觉、不论是做白日梦、看电视、做家务、工作，我最不陌生了。投入是唯一的付出。我喜欢这种感觉。要幸福哟~

在这个慌乱的时刻，还不断有翻译（不论是什么翻译）做，是我的幸运，也是上帝爱我的一种方式，不然我的心更无法安静了。

所以谢谢LZL，谢谢ALEX，还有下周的LN.

http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

23.

EDITORS' SELECTIONS (what's this?)

April 27, 2009 7:28 am

Link

Prof. Taylor's remarks do not accurately describe any graduate program I've been in, either as a graduate student or as a faculty member. Rather than looking inward as he claims we all do, my colleagues and I are constantly looking outward and building intellectual bridges and collaborations with colleagues in other departments. In my department's case, these other departments include Psychology, Computer Science, and Communication Disorders -- these collaborations not only cross department boundaries at my institution but college boundaries, too. Moreover, grants are increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary.

泰勒教授的发言并没有确切地描述我所参与的任何研究生课程，不论我是作为研究生还是作为老师。我们并没有象他所说的那样，只向内看，事实上，我和我的同事们不断向外看，与其他科系的同事共筑知识桥梁，共同合作。以我们系为例，这些其他部门包括心理学，计算机科学和沟通障碍——这些合作不仅跨越学内各科系，还跨越了校际边界。此外，拨款也越加具有合作性和跨学科性。

The interdisciplinary character of this work arose organically, as members of these various departments came to realize that it was fruitful to talk to one another and work together. It did not arise, as Prof. Taylor appears to want it to, by someone in authority deciding that we should all work on Water or some other topic important in their eyes.
随着各个科系的人员意识到彼此交谈共同合作颇有成效，这种工作的跨学科性有机地出现了，而并不象台了教授所希望的那样，由某位掌权人士决定我们都应该就水项目或他们认为重要的其他项目而工作。
Who, by the way, would decide what these important topics are? And what criteria would be used to make these decisions? If faculty members' contracts are limited to seven years, they would presumably not be in a position to make those decisions, and they would be left to administrators. And why should administrators' tenure at an institution be longer than that of the people who actually do the research and teaching?
另外，谁来决定这些重要课题是什么呢？做这些决策时，我们使用什么标准？如果教师的合同限制为7年，大概他们也并不处于做决策的位置，这些问题会留给管理人员。而为什么管理人员在学院的任期就应该比那些真正进行教学研究的人要长呢？

What Prof. Taylor also appears to miss is the benefits of the kind of close working relationship that develops among members of a department over a period of years. To be sure, some departments are dysfunctional, and some colleagues disinclined to be collegial, but more often than not, members of a department respect and support one another's scholarly efforts in essential ways. This kind of interaction is simply impossible unless the faculty can see one another casually and frequently and cannot be replicated with any foreseeable technology.

泰勒教授貌似忽略了数年来同系教师之间培养出的紧密工作关系所带来的好处。确实，有些系运作混乱，有些同事不愿意分权，但是通常，系里各成员都以必要的方式尊重支持彼此的学术成果。除非大家经常彼此私下交谈，否则这种互动根本不可能存在，而这也是任何可预见的技术无法复制的。

Finally, concerning the matter of training graduate students, my department and others I know of have always been very conscious of the limited number of positions available for our graduates. For this reason, we limit each year's class to a number that we can reasonably expect might be able to secure a job in 5 years time. In addition, we support all our students with a stipend they can live on, so they aren't saddled wiht overly burdensome debt after they complete their degrees.
最后，说到研究生培训，我们系以及我所知道的其他系对于研究生的有限职位非常清楚。为此，我们限制了每年的课程，我们理性期盼这些课程或许能保证学生在5年内找到工作。此外，我们给学生生活津贴，这样毕业后，他们不会承担过多债务。
In short, Prof. Taylor has tarred the entire system of graduate education in the US with a brush that may only be fairly applied to some departments and institutions. In my experience, they are not typical.

简言之，泰勒教授攻击了美国研究生教育的整体制度，而公平地说，这其实只能用于某些科系某些学院。以我的经验看，这些并不典型。

What HAS become all too frequent is relying on graduate students and temporary faculty to do much of the undergraduate teaching. But is this the fault of the faculty? I think not. Instead, it's a byproduct of administrators realizing that they can get that work done for less than what it costs to hire a tenure-track faculty member. Tenure-track faculty have repeatedly objected to this maneuver because they see it as motivated by nothing more than the desire to cut costs. If public universities like mine were adequately supported by their state legislatures, undergraduate students would still be taught primarily by tenure-track faculty. (For the record, I regularly teach a course of 200+ undergraduates, along with the courses I teach to majors and graduate students, so once again Prof. Taylor has overgeneralized.) Legislatures have instead cut their state universities again and again, while student bodies have not shrunk but grown. How are else are these institutions to provide the classes the students need to graduate? If there is a problem with higher education in the US, contrary to Prof. Taylor's assertions, it is not with how faculties do their jobs, but with the entirely inadequate and ever shrinking resources provided them to do so.

已经变得太频繁的是依靠研究生和临时教员进行大量本科生教学。但这是教师们的错误吗？我想不是。实际上，这是行政人员意识到不用花雇用终身任期教授所需的那么多钱也能把事情做好之后的副产品。终身任期教授不断反对这一举措，因为他们认为这完全是为了削减成本。如果类似我们这样的公立大学能够得到州立法机构的充分支持，研究生仍然会主要由终身制教师来教授。（为了记录在案，我通常一门课有200多名本科生，加上专业课和研究生课程，所以泰勒教授又一次过于笼统了。）立法机构不断地削减州立大学的费用，而学生人数不减反增。若不如此，这些学校如何为学生们提供毕业所需要的课程？如果美国高等教育存在问题，与泰勒教授的观点恰恰相反，这与教师们如何工作无关，而与提供给他们的完全不足甚至日益缩水的资源有关。


马萨诸塞大学阿姆赫斯特分校

语言学系

John Kingston教授

End the University as We Know It

终结现在的大学

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. 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 publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

研究生教育乃是高等学习的底特律。美国大学中，大多数研究生课程所生产的产品没有市场（教育岗位的候选人，可这些岗位纯属子虚乌有），培养的技能也需求递减（子领域的子领域研究，只能在寥寥无几志同道合的同事才阅读的期刊上发表杂志），而这一切的成本都在迅速增长（有时学生贷款超过10万美元）。

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.”

随处可见的招聘紧缩和裁员都使这些问题急剧凸显。但是，我们的研究生体制危机已经存在数十年了，而危机的种子则要追溯到现代大学形成之际。康德在其1798年的著作《学科之争》中写道，大学应该“通过大批生产来处理学习的全部内容，也就是说，通过分工，这样每个科学分支都有公共教师或教授作为其指定的代理人。”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion 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. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

不幸的是，这种大批量生产的大学模型在原本应有合作和不断增长的专业化领域中出现分离。以我自己所在的宗教系为例，我们有10名教师在8个子领域工作，彼此相互重叠之处甚少。随着各系的分离，研究和刊物越来越多地关注越来越少的内容。每个学者不是科学分支的代理人，而是与无关宏旨的有限知识的代理人。有位同仁最近向我吹嘘，他最得意的弟子正在就中世纪神学家Duns Scotus如何旁征博引做论文。

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.

强调片面的学问，也鼓励了教育体系走向克隆的过程。老师们培养学生时，将对方的未来当作自己过去的翻版，即使他们的任期会阻拦这些学生将来成为全职教授的道路。

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 adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

高等教育的肮脏秘密是没有报酬过低的研究生在实验室和教学方面帮忙，大学就无法进行研究，甚至指导人数日益增长的研究生。这就是我们还在鼓励人们申报博士学位的主要原因之一。给研究生提供微薄的薪水，给助手们提供一门课仅5000美元的报酬——不带任何福利，比聘用全职教授要廉价得多。

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

换言之，年轻人申报研究生课程，为糊口而努力工作，肩负巨大的债务，所有这些都是因为虚无缥缈的教师任命。但他们的经济现状加上不可妥协的终身任期，只能保证永远都是僧多粥少。

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, 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.

另一个有待改变的障碍是学院和大学都是自我管理，或用学术说法，由同侪审核来管理。虽然理论上，理事和行政人员有部分监督责任，但实际上，各系独立运作。为了使事情变得更错综复杂，一旦某位教师被授予了终身教授资格，他就自治了。许多呼吁金融市场管制的学者在自己的系里却反其道而行之。

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

如果美国高等教育想在21世纪兴旺繁荣，学院和大学，正如华尔街和底特律一样，必须严格加以管制，彻底重新改组。要想使高等学习更灵活、适应性更强、更具想象力，可以从六大步骤着手：

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

1. 重组课表，从研究生课程开始，然后尽快进入到本科课程。各系的分工模式已经过时，必须用网状或复杂的适应性网络课程结构取而代之。负责任的教育和知识必须跨学科跨文化。

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

几周前，我参加了一个政治科学家会议，大家一起讨论为什么国际关系理论没有考虑到宗教在社会中的角色。考虑到当今世界的现状，这是一个非常重大的疏忽。当学科彼此隔绝独立用作时，就无法充分理解我们所面对的最重要的问题。

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

让研究宗教、政治、历史、经济、人类学、社会学、文学、艺术、宗教和哲学的人聚集一起，参与共同问题的比较分析，会更有效。随着课表重组，问题领域和调查方法都将改变。

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

2. 取缔包括本科教育的永久科系，创建以解决问题为主的课程。这些不断进化的课程应有夕阳条款，每7年每个课程都应评估，或取缔，或继续或重大改变。可以想象围绕这些领域组织广泛的话题，如思想、身体、法律、信息、网络、语言、空间、时间、媒体、金钱、生命和水。

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

比如，考虑一个水项目。在未来数十年，水比油的问题更紧迫，水的数量、质量和分配将会形成严重的科学、技术和生态难题以及严肃的政治和经济挑战。若不考虑重要的哲学、宗教和道德问题，这些棘手的问题就无法得到充分解决。毕竟，信仰塑造惯例，正如同惯例塑造信仰。

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

水项目会将人文、艺术、社会和自然科学领域的人们以及来自医学、法律、商业、工程、社会工作、神学和建筑学等职业院校的代表汇集一堂。通过多视角多种方法的交集，培养新的理论认识，意想不到的实际解决方案会浮现。

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

3. 增加学员之间的合作。不是所有学校都需要面面俱到，科技使学校之间可以形成伙伴关系，共享师生。各院校在收缩的同时也能够扩展。比如，让一个学校有很强的法语系，另一个有很强的德语系；通过电话会议和互联网，在两个地方用一半人力就可以教授两门课。用这些工具，我已经在赫尔辛基和墨尔本大学以团队形式实时教授了一学期的课程。

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

4. 改造传统论文。在艺术和人文方面，即将来临的修剪破坏性最大，以注释比正文还多的中世纪论文为范本的书籍不再有市场。大学出版社的财务压力不断升级，论文发表连同其学术证明几乎都不可能了。（大学出版社发行的装订成册的论文数量不到500，而销售量通常更低。）多年来，我教授的本科课程中，学生们不再写传统论文，而是进行分析处理，格式从超文本和网站到电影和电玩都有。也应鼓励研究生以其他格式产生这些“论文”。

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

5. 扩大研究生的职业选择范围。大多数研究生永远都找不到专业对口的工作。因此，有必要帮助他们准备在高等教育以外的领域工作。接触新方法、不同的文化以及真正的生活问题会使学生为在商业和非营利组织中工作做好准备。此外，他们将要培养的知识和技能会促使他们适应不断变化的世界。

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

6. 执行强制性退休，取缔终身制。终身教授制原本是为了保护学术自由，可现在已蜕变成低产出行业，教授们墨守成规，拒绝变化。毕竟，一旦授予了终身制，就没有杠杆激励教授在职业方面继续发展，或要求他或她承担类似行政和学生顾问等责任。终身制应由7年合同取代，就象老师们教授的任何课程一样，可以终止或再续。这种政策可以促使学院和大学鼓励研究者、学者和老师继续进步，并在为有思想有技能的年轻人提供空间的同时，保持生产力。

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

历年来，我一直告诉学生，“不要做我所做的；用我能提供的做我无法想象的事情，然后回来告诉我。”我希望高校不再这般自满，而是将学术界推向一个我们无法设想的未来。

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.

Bertrand Russell

这句话说得真是妙啊！

其实，很笨的人不见得不撒谎啊，而真正聪明的人应该知道诚实才是捷径吧~

今天远方的一位朋友要来，迎来送往其实不是我所喜欢的，但既然答应了别人就应该做到。

尽管这个朋友我都不怎么认识，我也讨厌出门，尤其是在烈日下，但这是我的责任。我觉得很糟糕哟，把访客当做任务，但是我没有雀跃的心，也是事实。估计现在不论谁来，我都没有雀跃的心。我不是不能和别人交流，我只是讨厌舟车劳顿（晕车的我！），但又不是每位朋友都可以请到家里的。

说点高兴的。

昨天遇到在网上遇到一位很久没有联系的哥哥，也是位弟兄，我觉得很感恩呢。因为这样那样的原因，他离开了教会，大家似乎连他的手机号码都吝于告诉我，从前跟他很好的人，也都说不知道，多么冷漠的教会啊！估计大家也在想，这位弟兄都结婚了，你一个单身姐妹要他的电话做什么？可我们曾经是很好的朋友啊，而且我们是弟兄姐妹啊，为什么不可以呢？我要了那个号码，只是告诉他我到了新的城市，然后我压根就没有保存。昨天在网上他跟我打招呼（在我最想不到的时候，以最想不到的方式），彼此问候，他说，感谢神，很好。不论他在哪个教会，只要还在感谢神，就很好啊！为什么对那些离开教会的人都要讳莫如深呢？