Killing the Spirit
O'Brien, Tom
REVIVING THE SPIRIT KILLING THE SPIRIT Higher Education in America Page Smith Viking, $19.95, 315 pp. Tom O'Brien Ironically, the diatribes of William Bennett, Allan Bloom (or Charles Sykes, in...
...teachers need stronger rewards for integrating disciplines and making them accessible to today's students...
...Exactly: present in body but not spirit...
...Research has a place, Smith says, but sees its sway as the academic tail wagging the dog...
...One example: a dean urging faculty to hunt up grants defines good teaching as "being there...
...Why push assistant professors to speak in the tongues of avant garde French theory if their students at community and state colleges (in preprofessional programs that account for most of the growth in higher education) think Shakespeare wrote in a foreign language...
...He has no nostalgia for bygone golden ages of revered professors patrolling halls of ivy filled with male students of one color...
...But some passages bite...
...His title has two meanings...
...He hits their targets, but lacks their sanguinary tone...
...He is critical of colleges, but humorous, fair-minded, and open to new developments (such as multiculturalism and women's studies...
...Talk of an "an academic community" is "absurd and self-defeating," he says...
...In teacher-training for general education, specialized research can't help, he says...
...Questions about teaching dominate the second half of Killing the Spirit, where he laments the death of cultivated exchange between faculty and students because of the discouragement, or lack of encouragement of good teaching...
...they have even managed to give reform a bad name...
...Still, he says, it seems pointless to debate general education in the liberal arts when "first and foremost, the universities' collective heart is not in the enterprise...
...Smith doesn't blame professors alone...
...Page Smith's Killing the Spirit offers something considerably different...
...Killing the Spirit meanders at times, and it never quite fuses its historical and contemporary concerns...
...Another reason, he claims, is that at least gurus teach with passion...
...young people, he points out, respond to that, regardless of the message being taught...
...As Smith says, the stakes are the future of the republic: an uneducated, (or rather, uncritical) populace is democracy's worst nightmare.s worst nightmare...
...He has a nuts-and-bolts sense of how best to serve students, not simply how to shake academic rafters...
...As Smith notes, one reason for the rise of cults has been the refusal of higher educators to engage young people on issues of spiritual and emotional importance to their lives: in his view, students do like the eternal questions, if asked...
...Still, he underplays the peril of current research, mostly in the liberal arts, where immersion in trendy jargon may hurt teaching...
...He doesn't overgeneralize about the problems of colleges, but finds "oases" in the higher education "desert" where good teaching still goes on and is still encouraged...
...A historian (author of a seven-volume Penguin history of the United States), a teacher (at UCLA), and administrator (provost at UC/Santa Cruz), Smith writes without the cultural, maybe racial, and certainly sexual biases of Bennett and Bloom...
...displacing teaching (or writing in a scholarly way) about religion quite another...
...and discouraging nonreli-gious moral ratiocination in education is even worse...
...many, he knows, believe in and practice good teaching, but are checked by administrators who define an institution's excellence by its external image...
...Granting exceptions, Smith disputes the claim that research always improves teaching...
...Smith's writing has warmth and humor, befitting his emphasis on such qualities in teaching...
...Smith strongly contributes to the current debate by focusing on issues with greater precision but less acrimony than the "neocons...
...Smith has a Churchillian explanation: never in the course of higher education has so much been taught so weakly to so many...
...There is no community at all, but only atomized individuals known as specialists who hardly talk to each other, let alone to their colleagues in other fields...
...The letter of faculty by-laws at most universities says teaching counts as much as scholarship in renewal and tenure...
...It's no recipe for headlines or best sellerdom, but may be what we need...
...A Christian, he is at pains to assure "academic fundamentalists" that he aches to burn no one at the stake...
...As Smith says (along with other reformers, like Kenneth Eble, 1988 AAUP Professor of the Year in his The Goals of College Teaching) this would not be so terrible if scholarship were widely defined, not reduced to research, with research further reduced to publishing specialized work for other specialists...
...His case could be even stronger...
...Tom O'Brien Ironically, the diatribes of William Bennett, Allan Bloom (or Charles Sykes, in the pungently titled Profscam), have done universities a big favor...
...he explains why the latter won, but wishes its triumph had been less total...
...But who would claim Americans are more educated, more culturally literate, or more capable of critical thought...
...Still, there are thematic links and pleasant surprises...
...The first involves protest against "academic fundamentalism," with its creation of an environment where "God is not a proper topic for discussion, but lesbian politics is...
...At academic conferences these days, speak in favor of core curriculums or refocusing on old ideals, and you are quickly painted in the colors of reaction...
...In Smith's view, it is no accident that students don't take these courses seriously when teachers don't...
...By overstating their case and indulging in jeremiad, these right-wing critics have provided higher educators with a strawman...
...Still, we are now granting more degrees or collegiate diplomas than ever...
...In his view, displacing religious teaching is one thing...
...the spirit of things, of course, is different, with scholarship dominant...
...The war of religion and science Smith reterms the clash of "Classical Christian Consciousness" and "Secular Democratic Consciousness...
...The first half of his book traces the historical roots for this, from the founding of the Ivy League and denominational schools, where religion played a key role, to the growth of secular state universities and research programs in the later nineteenth century...
...He just thinks colleges could be open to the spirit...
...He wants a "canon," but an inclusive one, with World Civilization its center, not just Western...
...Accordingly, Smith thinks the Bennett/Bloom fuss about the curriculum is overdone...
...The present trend of faculty training and development is to specialization, he says, and faculty are rewarded for publishing in their specialties, not teaching outside them...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 8
