[lit-ideas] Re: State of university education/educators

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.
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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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