On J. Carroll Moody’s criticism of criticisms of higher education contained in a recently published report of the “Committee on Scope, Structure, and Productivity of Illinois Higher Education:”

(Prof. Moody is executive secretary of the Unversity Council and was chairman of NIU’s History Department for 10 years.)

The good Professor Moody, in speaking for himself and fellow academics, is most revealing in his rebuttal where he says, “… it is particularly disappointing to see the overwhelming emphasis in the report on undergraduate education to the neglect of strong statements about research and graduate education.”

Excuse me, Professor Moody, but I thought NIU, and higher education in general, is mainly about educating undergrads. As a matter of fact, undergrads outnumber grads at NIU by more than three to one.

Moody and too many of his fellow Faculty Assembly types, dominated by tenured PhDs, show a disdain for the lowly undergrad.

Undergrads are seen as a necessary evil, an annoyance actually, to the “higher calling” of research and teaching graduate students. Some professors will do anything to avoid lowly undergrads. For these professors, teaching undergrads is seen as demeaning.

Parents send their students to NIU to get a foothold on a better life and expect it to be the first mission of the institution. But professors like Moody give undergrads short shrift and complain about being maligned for doing it.

Whether Moody and company know it, there is a national trend afoot. It has thoughtful parents looking for, searching out and enrolling their children in institutions that put undergrad teaching first, ahead of things like research, service and the teaching of grad students.

Schools that fail to heed the trend will be left holding the bag when they wake up to find they have no undergrads to bother with and don’t have the money the undergrads provide to keep their precious professors grinding out oftentimes meaningless research. But that’s another subject altogether.

Moody really underscores his scorn of undergrads when he says that the economy is enhanced as much by research as “preparation of the workforce.” (“Workforce,” that’s his poorly disguised, disdainful euphemism for the lowly undergrad, fodder for the “workforce.”)

Excuse me again, but I thought people, most particularly our young people—undergrads—were our most important resource.

As to some of the rest of Professor Moody’s tomb, like where he rails against criticism of waste and duplicaton at the state’s universities as though they don’t exist, calling on the Bard for help, “me thinks he doth protest too much.”

Jerry E. Thompson is the faculty adviser for The Northern Star. His opinion in no way reflects the opinion of the paper.