[lit-ideas] Re: State of university education/educators
- From: "aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 20:42:59 -0500
I'm assuming "privileged students" means the George W. Bush's who drink and
party their way through college. These students are as much scholastic
nonentities as privileged. My understanding of rich kids at prep schools
is that prep schools are essentially high class boarding schools, where
kids are dumped by their families and the weaker beat up the stronger. The
point of privilege is eventual networking and affiliation with class. The
education might be good, but the "privilege" is rather in the eye of the
beholder rather than in the life of the student, deferred into post
graduation life.
> [Original Message]
> From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 2/23/05 4:36:05 PM
> Subject: [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.
> ------------------------------------
> 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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