TEACHING COLLEGES A LESSON
Kaus, Robert M.
Teaching Colleges A Lesson by Robert M. Kaus Two months ago we published anarticle by Peter Engel criticizing the new “core curriculum” of Harvard College. We ran the piece not only because...
...John’s, or Conant of Harvard...
...Then they would go on to law school if and onlyif they wanted to become lawyers, not because they needed to learn how to think...
...But the more the ideal of universal college education is achieved, the more the competition for credentials shifts to the postcollegiate arena of professional and graduate schools...
...It hasn’t worked out because the ascendance of the college diploma as the universal credential, while it has undoubtedly provided an escape route for many an individual trapped in poverty, has also had the effect of placing another barrier between the poor and their potential jobs...
...It is not an ability, however, that can be taught only in a course on Torts, Corporations, or Constitutional Law, or only to students who have already spent almost half a decade in college...
...Let the high-school graduate who wants to become a lawyer go ahead and learn how to be a lawyer-that’s how they do it in Britain, and I’ve never heard anyone claim that British solicitors or barristers are hopelessly handicapped by their lack of a BA...
...Increasingly, we find that the leaders of higher education are fund-raisers, grantgetters, or interest-brokers instead of scholars with a coherent plan for teaching- a reality we tend to contrast with the lingering fantasy of the faculty as a sort of collective Mr...
...Even writing, the one skill that colleges are universally expected to impart, could undoubtedly be taught more effectively than bya four-year program costing upwards of $50,000 per pupil...
...STUDENTS WHO WANT TO STUDY For most of this century, American colleges have managed to associate the goal of universal higher education with the ideals of equal opportunity and economic equality...
...Yet in 1949, at the end of this period of unprecedented material growth, the rate of inflation was minus 1.8 per cent...
...As James Fallows points out in this issue, we have given our colleges a lot of power to decide who in our society ends up where...
...Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Luther, Goethe, Descartes, Kant, Dickens, Rousseau, Locke, Smith, Bentham, Mill, Marx, Tolstoy...
...This means, first, filling them with students who come to college because they want to learn...
...It is virtually impossible, for instance, to reach a sensible decision on most political questions today without at least a rudimentary knowledge of the way the economic marketplace is supposed to work (and the ways it doesn’t...
...That doesn’t mean we must give up the enterprise, any more than we should refuse to build a building because we disagreed as to the exact number of windows we wanted...
...We must move up another notch in abstraction to find their proper place-to the goal, quite simply, of making us better human beings...
...The principles of finance come out, but in the context of a real problem and a real attempt by someone to deal with it...
...Today, the pendulum is supposed to be swinging back-away from the “do-yourown- thing,’’ toward “a solid and shared base” of knowledge...
...Let the Congress establish a mechanism, in the spirit of the GI bill, to cover the cost of a “fundamentalist” college education for every citizen...
...If he then impresses his departmental peers, he has a shot at tenure...
...This repayment feature alone should ensure that students who signed up for a loan would at least think carefully about whether they were ready to study...
...In that, too, Stanford followed Columbia-where, as a professor told our reporter two months ago, “The first thing you try to do when you get tenure is to ‘liberate’ yourself from teaching C.C...
...Leaving the decision up to the faculty is like leaving the size and distribution of the federal budget up to a committee composed of the 50 most powerful lobbyists in Washington...
...It wouldn’t take a tremendous feat of the professorial imagination to make undergraduate subjects relevant in the same way to the future lives of students...
...Students do not have the choice of rejecting a college, the argument goes, because an impressive college diploma is a necessary (if insufficient) condition for getting a good job...
...Teaching Colleges A Lesson by Robert M. Kaus Two months ago we published anarticle by Peter Engel criticizing the new “core curriculum” of Harvard College...
...Like the peep show patron who is told he must buy a second ticket if he wants to get in the room with the really dirty films, the BA discovers that his degree doesn’t carry him as far as he thought it would...
...And because they pull together a variety of historical examples, they steer the student away from an antiquarian interest in the study of those events for their own sake, and toward the common problem they raise...
...Did its strategy work...
...away from jobs, toward “values...
...The people turned out by that process are often egotistical, contentious paranoids...
...But combine “the lessons of Vietnam” with “the lessons of Munich” and you have also raised the persistent dilemma of appeasement, and with it the question of how the U.S...
...What, you may have asked, had these kids been doing for four years of undergraduate instruction if not learning to think...
...If there is a legitimate excuse for the infiltration of lawyers into all levels of state and corporate government, it is this critical ability...
...Similarly, it helps to know how our ancestors tried to solve the problems they faced, and how well they fared...
...It’s a willingness that is surprisingly rare in the mannered fellowship-of-scholars ambience of academe...
...For some other possible “cases” in other areas, see the box on page 56...
...It would be better both for our colleges and for the ideal of equal opportunity if we severed the artificial link between a liberal arts education and “getting a good job...
...Because they present a true riddle, they suppress the temptation to grasp simple solutions on the basis of a single event...
...There have been many books published since 1945, truebut do we stand immobile in front of the shelves because we can’t decide which of the thousands of titles to pluck first...
...In terms of brute economic power, that should not be impossible...
...Like the down payment on a house, this requirement would demonstrate that a student was willing to invest something in his choice-and it would encourage him to spend a bit of time outside of school earning the money to get back in...
...Once colleges have set themselves up as the central ticket-issuers of society, then even if you only want to go as far as Cleveland you are expected to brandish the full fouryear pass...
...What rot...
...What should it have done...
...Board of Education doesn’t have to stretch to see why what he’s studying is important to him...
...Let the would-be engineer learn engineering...
...But it hasn’t always been so...
...Agrowing number of college teachers realize this, and are struggling to push courses on “Critical Thinking” or “Informal Logic” through their turf-obsessed faculties...
...That takes care of Aristotle, Smith, and Morison...
...A case method is a powerful means of making this connection when it focuses on past attempts to resolve the dilemmas that still confound us...
...But these complaints assume that the role of college is to prepare people forjobs, a task that colleges perform particularly poorly...
...And let’s not get carried away with the difficulties of drawing up reading lists...
...For the period from 1940 to 1950, however, we managed to do just that...
...the required freshman course on Contemporary Civilization...
...Even in a state system like the University of California, it is the professors, and not the college administrators, who decide what courses are offered and which, if any, required...
...Stanford, which recently decided to adopt a mild version of the Columbia approach, found it could offer only a handful of “Western Culture” seminars due to lack of interested faculty...
...John’s) a mere shadow of their former selves even at the original institutions...
...In response, of course, the colleges and their lobbyists argue that, if only more money were available for scholarships, then at last every youth could have his opportunity to win their seal of approval...
...away from specialization, toward “general education...
...This system of university government has come to parody the worst excesses of parochialism that are now universally descried in the national government...
...The bulk of the “great books” that were chosen by the postwar reformers were the works that people throughout history have found useful in answering that question...
...The justification for having the physicist read Aristotle, Adam Smith, or Samuel Eliot Morison is that, while not all citizens are physicists, all physicists are citizens...
...Conant’s “general education” formula was widely adopted at campuses across the land, but it dissolved in the liberalization wave of the early sixties...
...should behave in the world today, and in the future...
...The three fundamentalist assaults on the skeptical fortress-Columbia’s in the twenties, St...
...No number of great books, good teachers, or well-chosen “cases” will make a deep impression on an adolescent who finds himself in college because he was told he had to get a diploma before daring to tackle the “real world...
...We used to teach these broad survey courses,’’ Rosovsky noted recently...
...Such an education need by no means consume a full four years, but however long it takes, let it be financed in full by the government...
...At others, including Yale, Berkeley, and Princeton, more significant reforms never got past the faculty...
...The first is the “libertarian” objection: the complaint that, by requiring specific courses, colleges are telling students what to read...
...The third aspect is revealed in the striking fact that two of the three “general education” movements have followed major wars...
...But even the prospect of a future debt probably wouldn’t prevent many high school graduates from marching straight through college simply because they dared not interrupt the parabolic trajectory of their careers with a descent into the world...
...In this system, a college degree would be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of a successful, prosperous career for the vast majority of students...
...Yet there they were, in record numbers this past decade, signing up for an extra three-year tour of duty-not necessarily out of a burning desire to join the bar, but because they felt they had to get rid of what John Houseman in The Paper Chase called their “skulls full of mush...
...Because, while not all citizens are physicists, all physicists are citizens...
...It hasn’t worked out that way, of course...
...We have a plan to fulfill both these aims...
...What colleges do well has less to do with particular job skills, and more to do with our universal attributes as citizens and human beings...
...We can’t force them, but we can give them the chance...
...If you study only the Vietnam war-the archetypal object of sixties “relevance”-it is easy to steep yourself in the comfortable condemnation of America’s imperialist excesses...
...Yes, I used the word “relevant...
...The first five years of prosperity were fueled by wartime spending...
...I Why make a physicist read Aristotle...
...When American University professor Alan Lichtman proposed to teach a course on “How to Think,” an angry colleague asked him “Why don’t you teach them how to breathe next?’) But if colleges were really doing their jobs, the students’ critical faculties would be honed in every course-be it Renaissance Art, American History, or Economics...
...an engineer how to design a bridge that won’t collapse...
...The first is the premium they place on critical thinking, on the willingness to seek out and probe the sore points of an argument...
...There are a number of objections to their approach, of course, aside from Rosovskian apologism...
...It has little to do with respect for students’ freedom of choice...
...A second set of objections stresses the links between college and the job market...
...Does anybody, even Rosovsky himself, really subscribe to this paralyzing relativism...
...We want engineers-and bank clerks as well-who have read and understood Plato and Dante...
...Today’s undergraduates are taught what they are taught because the faculties don’t want to teach anything else-and the faculties, almost without exception, run our colleges...
...Unlike the GI bill, however, the costs of the plan should be borne, not by the taxpayers, but by the contributions of the students themselves...
...Most of the great innovations in American higher education have come through the efforts of visionary administrators-men like Robert Hutchins of Chicago, Scott Buchanan of St...
...The first-year student poring over Brown vs...
...This “knowledge explosion” is the official explanation f o r why “core curricula” like Harvard’s aren’t core curricula at all, but loose grab bags of specialized courses from which the undergraduate is forced to choose...
...It is also why the best business schools, where cases and precedent have no special technical significance, also employ a version of the case method...
...If every child, rich or poor, could only spend four years getting this mobility certificate before he was forced out into the working world, the riches of capitalism would be distributed fairly...
...It’s a spectacle that led us to think about what steps, beyond curricular gimmickry, would be necessary to restore the college experience as a vital and valuable part of our, and our children’s, lives A Fundamentalist Revival The battle lines of “higher education,”at least in this century, have been drawn between two opposing camps: those who advocated a rigorous program of required courses, in a sort of academic fundamentalism, and those who would have agreed with Harvard president Charles W. EIiot, the 19th-century pioneer of the “elective” system, when he proclaimed himself, “a complete skeptic as to the necessity of any subject whatever as an element in the education of a gentleman and a scholar...
...It has not, however, been much of a battle-it’s been a rout...
...Instead of plowing over an abstract text setting forth the principles of finance or inventory control, the classes at these schools discuss concrete problems: Company X was faced in 1967 with depleted capital, excessive inventory in product A, and an inefficient plant in product B. What did it do...
...But they have also been trained to think about the implications of what they are saying, to pick out unsubstantiated links in an argument, to recognize phony invocations of authority...
...Second, the ideal of universal access to higher education could be revived, freed from the expectation that it will guarantee equality in the contest for jobs...
...A list of the 100 greatest works of literature might generate some controversy over whether, say, The Red and the Black should be number 35, 83, or left off the charts entirely...
...The point is not to ask less of them...
...But at no major American university of which we are aware have any but the most preliminary steps been taken in the direction of guaranteeing every student the basic knowledge and experience that a liberal education is supposed to provide...
...John’s and Chicago’s in the thirties, and Harvard’s under James Conant in the forties-have left few traces we can discern today...
...We ran the piece not only because Harvard’s heralded reform has turned out to be a flop, even a fraud, but because the reasons it turned out that way lie at the heart of what is wrong with our colleges...
...Instead, universal education is desirable precisely because it speaks to our universal qualities as citizens and human beings, not to our individual merits as breadwinners...
...It was a valid vision for the time, but the world has changed-there is just too much information...
...Harvard’s dean Henry Rosovsky, the Lee lacocca of this slumping educational establishment, has already pronounced his stern judgment on the idea of required courses in the “great works” of Western thought, art, and literature...
...But let both of them get their jobs by proving their legal or engineering skills, not by writing term papers on Homer...
...Attempting to account for this achievement would make the theories of Smith and Keynes, Samuelson and Galbraith, come to life...
...But the true genius of the system is that the things the college degree represents-a chance to become a better citizen and person-have only a vague connection with actual performance in actual jobs...
...There are, it seems to me, at least three main ways a classical liberal arts program can help us achieve this end...
...That, I think, would be all to thegood...
...More recently, college BAS have been flocking to the business schools, as well as the law schools, in their attempts to cure this defect.These people aren’t crazy...
...That either of them has read Moby Dick is at best a secondary qualification...
...A college diploma, at the least, should mean coming to grips with these efforts...
...The limit could be set so that the contributions of the highearners would offset the meager repayments of the low-earners...
...Soon it will be frozen...
...In this vision of things, the baccalaureate is seen as something like a Eurailpass, a go-anywhere ticket to the career market...
...Here the connection with citizenship is vague at best-neither the physicist nor the physicistlcitizen needs Flaubert or Melville...
...The Columbia and Chicago programs never caught on nationally, and they are (with the isolated exception of St...
...Quite true...
...As a result, when some brave soul proposes a modest plan for “general education” that would require professors to spend time teaching outside their specialties (to undergraduates, yet) the faculty will either vote it down (Yale, Princeton), water it down (Harvard, Amherst, Berkeley) or simply refuse to teach it...
...Faculty prerogatives became entrenched during the fifties and sixties, when professors were in demand and enrollments were growing...
...But it pervades the confrontational atmosphere that marks a typical law or business school class...
...In the same manner, we might learn from failure, by contrasting, for example, the relative success of the West German and Japanese auto and steel industries with the decline of our own...
...It is a coincidence that another famous doctor might have explained by drawing a parallel between war and hanging...
...At each stage, his loyalties are directed, not to the students whom he is supposed to be teaching, or to the institution that pays his salary, but to his department and the discipline it represents...
...Such requirements do not eliminate student choice, they merely shift the moment of choice from the filling-out of the course card to the decision on whether or not to go to a particular college...
...Thinking Try and recall all the young people you know who graduated from fancy colleges and then went on to law school in order, they said, to “hone their minds,” to “learn how to think...
...But it isn’t happening...
...Or were the fundamentalists, unlike Dean Rosovsky, simply willing to decide what was important and make sure that their students learned it...
...From the day he enters graduate school, the aspiring professor is taught that his future lies with his specialty...
...It is to ask more: that the fundamental lessons of our civilization be taught to students eager to study them by teachers eager to teach them, and applied with critical skill to the problems that confront us...
...Such contrasts-between success and failure, war and peace, theory and practice- serve a dual function...
...By taking away some of our universities’ life-determining power, we can open up our society again-and we can open up our colleges as well, to do the job they should be doing...
...Since the poor inevitably find themselves unable to chase after this talisman with the same ease as the rich, they drop out, or go to two-year schools-and the degree that was supposed to be their ticket to success becomes the ticket they haven’t got...
...Real Problems This is the second great virtue of the law and business schools-their use of the “case method...
...If he stakes out an obscure corner of his field and produces a bit of original research, he may impress his department and land a job as an assistant professor...
...today, enrollment is plummeting and each faculty vacancy attracts hundreds of applicants...
...To pick one example, I doubt that anyone familiar with the history of the Dred Scott decision would put much stock in the ability of a carefully tailored judicial compromise to lay to rest a powerful moral issue like abortion...
...But not the boom from 1945-1950, during which defense spending sank rapidly...
...Was their value destroyed in some post-industrial “knowledge explosion...
...On the contrary, the best students are likely to be those who have had a taste of “real world” experience, who realize, for example, that the conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza aren’t merely amusing passages, but examples of the running tension between idealism and a comfortable life that most of us face, every day...
...The focus on a particular problem crystallizes the abstract theories under discussion, in a way that engages his attention and emotions- which is why an average law school class is considerably more entertaining than all but the most spectacular college lecture...
...A glance at the Columbia catalog from 1930, or a “general education” reading list from 1947, is a breath of fresh air...
...Once tenured, he can move to a bigger, more prestigious university, again by catching the eye of his fellow specialists...
...When it comes to fillingjob slots, as James Fallows argues on page 9, there are better, and fairer, ways to do it than by requiring a show of baccalaureates...
...And isn’t it ridiculous to force the budding physicist, who may be a few years away from a contribution to science or industry, to sweat through Adam Smith or Madame Bovary...
...If they did the job well, 67 per cent of our BAS wouldn’t need to go on to professional schools to learn a marketable skill...
...Nor, as Fallows has argued (“The President and The Press,” The Washington Monthly, October 1979) would the press have reacted so hysterically to Carter’s dismissal of four cabinet secretaries if it had recognized the numerous instances in our history when similar firings had occurred without noticeable damage to the republic...
...The first is through the pure aesthetic pleasure of being able to enjoy a great work of literature, a great painting, a great piece of music...
...Usually, we’ve done it in a search for equality and efficiencybut that hasn’t been the result...
...The ruling faculties are formally organized by specialty into powerful lobbies, called departments...
...It’s not because any “knowledge explosion” has made it impossible to draw up a reading list...
...To prevent students, particularly the affluent, from taking their grants for granted, the government should require a down payment, equal to the remaining 15 per cent of tuition, and payable only from the studentS own accumulated earnings...
...I do it with some fear, because in the sixties, when “relevance” was used to justify courses on everything from “medical ethics” to “auto mechanics,” the concept got a bad name...
...In wartime, people begin to think seriously about dying, and they naturally tend to ask themselves whatfor...
...The fundamentalists, after nursing their discontent with the “permissiveness” of the sixties, arrived at their historical moment and promptly surrendered...
...To cover roughly 85 per cent of his tuition, let the student take out a loan to be repaid by a fixed percentage tithe on his future earnings, up to a limit...
...A decision may be difficult...
...Teachers Who Teach It is no secret why a mandatory, basic curriculum doesn’t exist except at a few holdout colleges...
...There is only one solution to this problem: It is to break the power of the faculties...
...my list of readings will differ from yours...
...They are the unquestioned monuments of thought and art that each succeeding generation has read and responded to...
...Only when we have removed the fouryear BA as the sine qua non of real-world success can we free the colleges to do what they do best...
...But no longer...
...We need to put those among us with equal vision in charge of what gets taught in our colleges...
...But what about Madame Bovary and Moby Dick...
...The more important problem may be that decreased faculty power means increased administrator power-and college administrators, for good reason, have a bad reputation...
...Many have opted for a version of the Harvard solution, though on a smaller public relations budget...
...That is why you will repeatedly meet college professors who claim that the post- World War I1 generation of students, which entered college on the GI Bill after having been thrust for a few years into a very “real” world, was the best they ever taught...
...It won’t...
...There are, however, two or three dozen books that would make everybody’s list...
...But colleges impose requirements every day, from the rule that students must learn how to write, to the vague “distribution” quotas that pass for “general education” programs on nearly all American campuses...
...By “relevance” I mean not bowing to passing fads, or substituting application for theory, but replacing the typical “welcome to my specialty” atmosphere of college courses with a recognition that knowledge is important only if it helps us solve the problems we face...
...Chips...
...A veritable landslide of learning has tripped the circuits, and reasonable men, college professors included, are simply incapable of distinguishing the essential from the merely useful...
...As late as 1945, according to this official version, teachers might have been able to agree on which subjects were important because there was so little knowledge around for them to choose from...
...So the first step toward revitalizing our colleges is to admit that the fundamentalists, with their lists of “Great Books” and courses on “Western Thought,” had the right idea...
...The best law and business schools do seem to offer at least two things, aside from another credential, that colleges don’t...
...Harvard may be more prone than most schools to stentorian self-congratulation in the wake of failure (“The first successful effort in 20 years to establish a new consensus on general education priorities” was how one Harvard dean described the new curriculum...
...The second is the way shared readings enrich our common language, our ability to refer to Sisyphus or Doctor Pangloss and instantly have many minds know what is being discussed...
...The pendulum carves out tinier and tinier arcs...
...A heart surgeon needs to know how to cut people open...
...As a lawyer, and as a citizen, he is bound to confront the aftershocks of that decision and the monumental social problem it tried to solve...
...Our society has not yet discovered, for example, the way to achieve a growing economy, full employment, and a moderate inflation rate...
Vol. 12 • March 1980 • No. 1
