Academic Smorgasbord
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Perspectives ACADEMIC SMORGASBORD BY JOHN P. ROCHE A NUMBER of professors from New England colleges and universities happened to be present at a social function I recently attended. Inevitably...
...They live in what might be called different educational universes...
...The average university thus resembles medieval Germany, dotted with feudal kingdoms, duchies, baronies, and the like...
...The faculties have retired from the battlefield, and administrators have perfected the technique of preemptive capitulation to student demands...
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...If you throw in the movement toward abolishing the grading system, a college or university has lost whatever educational structure it may have had...
...Surprisingly, there was general agreement that the best institutions now have student bodies which are in fact (to borrow a term from Benjamin Disraeli) "Two Nations"—that is, two student subcultures inhabiting the same turf...
...While freshman English, for example, never guaranteed literacy, it did make an ascertainable dent in illiteracy...
...Today even freshman English seems to be on the skids...
...Similarly, the serious departments have adopted an enclave strategy...
...At the same time, perhaps confronting young people with the necessity for choice, however painful it may be, is an invaluable contribution to their real education...
...For one who believes that a university should be more than a smorgasbord, the present mode of operation is depressing...
...And out there in the woods someplace are the soft baronies, most notably sociology...
...Technically all are undergraduates at Harvard, MIT, Brandeis, Williams, or X, but in reality they travel in different orbits, have little intercommunication and take radically different courses...
...A professor who gives a four-point course in economics, and takes his work seriously, is matched by another who offers "astrology" for the same four-point return...
...To graduate, he must accumulate a certain number of points and all points are equal...
...When a freshman enters college, then, he finds himself a citizen of Libertyville...
...This was brought out, interestingly enough, by a student who came up to tell me the latest "in" joke: "Sociology should be legalized only among consenting adults...
...History, economics and political science are usually well dug in and fortified...
...Inevitably the conversation turned to the situation on campus, the impact of the Washington demonstrations, and the financial malaise that permeates higher education...
...It was abolished at one university on the ground that it reinforced "white chauvinism," and the faculty refused to substitute a literacy test because such an act would smack of "racism...
...Of course, there have always been easy schools and gut departments in good schools...
...A large number of students who go to college still want to learn something...
...The most massive feudality, the Prussia of this medieval map, tends to be the hard sciences...
...So, in effect, they set up their own standards and little by little form a self-propelled academic subculture that demands excellence and has only contempt for the fellows who have come to play...
...In general, required courses are a thing of the past, and even distribution requirements (two courses in the humanities, two in the natural sciences, two in the social sciences, etc., selected from a broad panel of General Education offerings) are rapidly going down the drain...
...In the old days, though, even the most dedicated fraternity loafer or football player got trapped into taking a certain number of required courses...
...It puts a tremendous burden on the student...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
