If you haven't already, read these first:
Stanley Fish on the turn of universities toward vocational training and against liberal arts.
And then another of Neil Scheurich's elegant posts responding to Fish.
I remember when I was in college and how much it mattered to me that I could sit down and talk about stuff -- sometimes relevant to the course, sometimes not -- with my professors. I was lucky because when I was at Duke, teaching undergraduates was a high priority and it was not surprising for a famous scholar to teach a section of freshmen. I was impossibly idealistic about the whole enterprise; I had expected to find a community of scholars and that is actually what I did find, to a greater extent than I probably should have expected. That time, and access to those minds, played a huge role in shaping my intellectual life and the way I think about my work and about the world even today, 40 years later.
One of the reasons I am not doing any adjunct teaching now is because I would want to teach the way I was taught and there is no room for that in the places near me where I could teach -- because their mission is to turn out people with degrees so they can get good jobs, not people who are able to think critically, engage in wrestling with meaning, or even to write well. I start to sound like an old fart whenever I talk about this stuff.
But it has seeped deep into my field as well. Take a look at the curriculum of clinical psychology programs. Not much there about depth psychology or psychoanalysis or humanistic ways of understanding the human condition and the ills which afflict us in our lives.
When I start to despair, I try to find hope in the fact that there are seekers like my son, people wanting to be therapists and who want to be challenged, who want to think deeply about meaning and about what is mental illness and how do we treat people who come to see us. The task people like us have is to keep alive this body of knowledge that was passed to us so that it remains available to those who come after us. And most days, I am hopeful.