[lit-ideas] Re: State of university education/educators
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 13:06:35 -0800
Andrew Delbanco writes in the NYRB:
As for the relatively few students who still attend a traditional
liberal arts college—whether part of, or independent from, a
university—what do they get when they get there? The short answer is
freedom to choose among subjects and teachers, and freedom to work out
their own lives on campus. Intellectual, social, and sexual freedom of
the sort that today's students assume as an inalienable right is never
cheaply won, and requires vigilant defense in academia as everywhere
else. Yet there is something less than ennobling in the unearned freedom
of privileged students in an age when even the most powerful
institutions are loath to prescribe anything— except, of course, in the
"hard" sciences, where requirements and prerequisites remain stringent.
One suspects that behind the commitment to student freedom is a certain
institutional pusillanimity—a fear that to compel students to read, say,
the major political and moral philosophers would be to risk a decline in
applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (one of the statistics
that counts in the US News and World Report college rankings closely
watched by administrators). Nor, with a few exceptions, is there the
slightest pressure from faculty, since there is no consensus among the
teachers about what should be taught.
------------------------------------
Delbanco paints with rather broad, impressionist strokes (if that isn't
a stylistic oxymoron). He seems to be saying that because the various
freedoms today's students 'assume as an inalienable right' are 'never
cheaply won' that there is something ignoble about 'privileged students'
claiming them without having fought for them, or perhaps something wrong
with such students (what is a 'privileged student'?) having them at
all—it's hard to tell.
From some fuzzy talk about students' 'right' to choose subjects and
teachers and to work out their own lives in ways that their grandparents
no doubt could not, Delbanco wanders into an indictment of (apparently)
'traditional' liberal arts colleges for being too timid and permissive
as regards course requirements out of fear that 'to compel students to
read, say, the major political and moral philosophers' would be to risk
a decline in applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (something
noted in the over-hyped and idiotic US News & World Report college ratings).
I'm at a liberal arts college. It's a college that rates third out of
all colleges and university in the US in terms of the percentage of its
graduates go on to receive Ph.D.s after graduation in all
disciplines;first in the biological sciences;second in chemistry;second
in 'the humanities;—etc. The perception of Reed, satirized by the slogan
on T-shirts one can buy in the bookstore: 'Atheism, Communism,
Free-Love,' is that of a place where one can, well, hang out, smoke
dope, and generally do one's own thing, not like those stuffy places
where they make you read books, and, like, write papers, you know—?
The reality is a bit different. Every Reed student begins his or her
Reed career by taking a year-long course in the Humanities, taught by
people from many disciplines, which covers the history, art, drama,
philosophy, and social organization of Ancient Greece and Rome. Works,
e.g. Thucydides, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil—that
whole crowd—are read in translations of the original.
I'll skip over various other College, Department, and Division
requirements, and get to the point. At the end of one's sophomore year
at Reed one must decide on a major. At the end of one's junior year, one
must take a qualifying exam for admission to that major. It is possible
to fail this exam. If one passes the 'junior qual,' one is allowed to
write the thesis which is required of every Reed student in every major.
Most of these theses would have been acceptable as M.A. theses, when an
an M.A. thesis meant something.
It isn't always as easy as Delbanco thinks.
(If you want a real, Stover-at-Yale experience, Mutton College is always
there for you.)
Robert Paul
The Reed Institute
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