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Part B
Directions: The following paragraphs are given in a wrong
order. For questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs
into a coherent text by choosing from the list A-G and filling them into the
numbered boxes. Paraphrases F and G have
been correctly placed. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.（10 points）
[A] No disciplines have seized on
professionalism with as much enthusiasm as the humanities. You can, Mr. Menand
points out, became a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four. But
the regular time it takes to get a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine
years. Not surprisingly, up to half of all doctoral students in English drop
out before getting their degrees.
[B] His concern is mainly with the
humanities: Literature, languages, philosophy and so on. These are disciplines
that are going out of style: 22% of American college graduates now major in
business compared with only 2% in history and 4% in English. However, many
leading American universities want their undergraduates to have a grounding in
the basic canon of ideas that every educated person should posses. But most
find it difficult to agree on what a “general education” should look like. At
Harvard, Mr. Menand notes, “the great books are read because they have been
read”—they form a sort of social glue.
[C] Equally unsurprisingly, only
about half end up with professorships for which they entered graduate school.
There are simply too few posts. This is partly because universities continue to
produce ever more PhDs. But fewer students want to study humanities subjects:
English departments awarded more bachelor’s degrees in 1970—1971 than they did 20 years later. Fewer
students require fewer teachers. So, at the end of a decade of thesis-writing,
many humanities students leave the profession to do something for which they
have not been trained.
[D] One reason why it is hard to
design and teach such courses is that they can cut across the insistence by top
American universities that liberal-arts educations and professional education
should be kept separate, taught in different schools. Many students experience
both varieties. Although more than half of Harvard undergraduates end up in
law, medicine or business, future doctors and lawyers must study a
non-specialist liberal-arts degree before embarking on a professional
qualification.
[E] Besides professionalizing the
professions by this separation, top American universities have professionalised
the professor. The growth in public money for academic research has speeded the
process: federal research grants rose fourfold between 1960 and 1990, but
faculty teaching hours fell by half as research took its toll. Professionalism
has turned the acquisition of a doctoral degree into a prerequisite for a
successful academic career: as late as 1969 a third of American professors did
not possess one. But the key idea behind professionalisation, argues Mr.
Menand, is that “the knowledge and skills needed for a particular specialization
are transmissible but not transferable.” So disciplines acquire a monopoly not
just over the production of knowledge, but also over the production of the
producers of knowledge.
[F] The key to reforming higher
education, concludes Mr. Menand, is to alter the way in which “the producers of
knowledge are produced.” Otherwise, academics will continue to think
dangerously alike, increasingly detached from the societies which they study,
investigate and criticize. “Academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need
to become less exclusionary and more holistic.” Yet quite how that happens, Mr.
Menand does not say.
[G] The subtle and intelligent
little book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American
University should be read by every student thinking of applying to take a
doctoral degree. They may then decide to go elsewhere. For something curious
has been happening in American Universities, and Louis Menand, a professor of
English at Harvard University, captured it skillfully.
G → 41. → 42. → E → 43. →44. →
45.
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