Speranza
In "Who Killed the Liberal Arts? And why we should care" (The Weekly Standard, Vol. 18), J.
Epstein writes:
"When asked what he thought
about the cultural wars, I. Kristol is said to have replied."
"“They’re over."
"Adding, “We lost.”"
"If Kristol was correct, one of the decisive battles in that
war may have been over "the liberal arts" in education, which we also lost."
"In
a loose definition, the “liberal arts” [after Marziano Capella] denote
college study anchored in
preponderantly Western literature,
PHILOSOPHY, and history, with science,
mathematics, and
foreign languages playing a substantial, though less central,
role."
"In more recent times, the social science
subjects — psychology, sociology,
political science —
have also sometimes been included."
"The "liberal arts" have
always been distinguished from
more specialized, usually vocational training."
"For the ancient Greeks, the
liberal arts [ARTES LIBERALES] were the
subjects thought necessary for
a "free" [LIBERUS]
man to study."
"If he is to _remain_ free [LIBERUS], in this view,
he must acquire
knowledge of the best
thought of THE PAST [antico], which will
cultivate in him the
intellectual depth
and critical spirit required to live
in an informed and
reasonable
way in the present [moderno]."
"For many years, the "liberal arts" were my
second religion."
"I worshipped their content, I believed in their significance, I
fought for them against the philistines of our age as Samson fought against the
Philistines of his—though in my case, I kept my hair and brought down no
pillars."
"As currently practiced, however, it is becoming more
and more difficult
to defend "the liberal arts"."
"Their content has been drastically changed, their
significance is in doubt, and defending them
in the condition in which they
linger
on scarcely seems worth the struggle."
"The loss of prestige of "the
liberal arts" is part of the
general crisis of higher education in the United
States."
"The crisis begins in economics."
"Larger numbers of Americans start
college, but roughly a third never finish
— more women finish, interestingly, than
do men."
"With the economic slump of recent years, benefactions to colleges are
down,
as are federal and state grants, thus forcing tuition costs up, in
public
as well as in private institutions."
"Inflation is greater in the realm of higher
education than
in any other public sphere."
"Complaints about the high cost of
education at private colleges
—fees of $50,000 and $55,000 a year
are commonly
mentioned—are heard everywhere."
"A great number of students leave college with
enormous student-loan debt, which is higher than either national credit card or
automobile credit debt."
"Because of the expense of traditional "liberal arts " colleges, greater numbers of the young go to one or another form of commuter
college, usually for
vocational training."
"Although it is common knowledge
that a person with a
college degree will earn a great deal more than a person
without one—roughly a million dollars more over a lifetime is the frequently
cited figure—today, students with
college degrees are finding it tough to get
decent jobs."
"People are beginning to wonder if college, at its currently
extravagant price, is worth it."
"Is higher education, like tech stocks and real
estate, the next big bubble to burst?"
"A great deal of evidence for the crisis
in American higher education is set out in an essay.
"College: What It Was, Is, and Should
Be" Its author, Andrew DELBANCO, the biographer of H. Melville, is a staunch
defender of "liberal arts", as he himself studied them as an undergraduate at
Harvard and as he teaches them currently at Columbia."
"The continuing diminution
of the "liberal arts" worries DELBLANCO."
"Some 18 million people in the United States are
now enrolled in one or another kind of undergraduate institution of higher
learning — but fewer than 100,000 are enrolled in "liberal arts" colleges."
"At the
same time, for that small number of elite "liberal arts" colleges — Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago, and a few
others — applications continue to rise, despite higher and higher tuition fees. "
"The ardor to get into these schools — for economic, social, and snobbish
reasons — has brought about an examination culture, at least among the children of
the well-to-do, who from preschool on are relentlessly trained to take the
examinations that will get them into the better grade schools, high schools,
colleges, and, finally, professional schools."
"DELBANCO is opposed to
the economic unfairness behind these arrangements, believing, rightly, that as a
result,
“the obstacles [to getting into the elite "liberal arts" colleges] that bright
low-income students face today are more insidious than the frank exclusionary
practices that once prevailed.”"
"Whether students today, despite all their
special tutoring and testing, are any better than those of earlier generations
is far from clear."
"Trained almost from the cradle to smash the SATs and any
other examination that stands in their way, the privileged among them may take
examinations better, but it is doubtful if their learning and intellectual
understanding are any greater."
"Usually propelled by the desires of their
parents, they form a meritocracy that, in DELBANCO’s view, as in that of the
English sociologist Michael Young whom he quotes, comprises a dystopia of sorts,
peopled by young men and women driven by high, but empty, ambition."
"“Are these
really the people we want running the world?” Delbanco asks."
"Unfortunately, they
already are."
"I am not the only one, surely, to have noticed that some of the
worst people in this country — names on request — are graduates of the Harvard and
Yale law schools."
"Attending one of a limited number of elite "liberal arts" colleges
continues to yield wide opportunities for graduates, but fewer and fewer people
any longer believe that someone who has finished college is necessarily all that
much smarter than someone who hasn’t."
"With standards lowered, hours of study
shortened, reports appearing about how many "liberal arts" college graduates can no longer be
depended upon to know how to write or to grasp rudimentary intellectual
concepts, having gone to college seems to have less and less bearing on a
person’s intelligence."
"Studies cited by Delbanco in his footnotes claim an
increase among "liberal arts" college students in cheating, drinking, and depression."
"In their
book "Academically Adrift", Richard Arum and Josipa Roska argue that the gain in
critical thinking and complex reasoning among the majority of students during
college years is very low, if not minimal."
"In an article in the Chronicle of
Higher Education drawn from their book, Arum and Roska
write:"
"Parents — although somewhat disgruntled about increasing costs — want
colleges to provide a safe environment where their children can mature, gain
independence, and attain a credential that will help them be successful as
adults."
"Students in general seek to enjoy the benefits of a full collegiate
experience that is focused as much on social life as on academic pursuits, while
earning high marks in their courses with relatively little investment of effort. "
"Professors are eager to find time to concentrate on their scholarship and
professional interests."
"Administrators have been asked to focus largely on
external institutional rankings and the financial bottom line."
"Government
funding agencies are primarily interested in the development of new scientific
knowledge."
"No actors in the system are primarily interested in
undergraduates’ academic growth, although many are interested in student
retention and persistence."
"What savvy employers are likely to conclude is
that those who graduate from college are probably more conformist, and therefore
likely to be more dependable, than those who do not."
"Paul Goodman, one of the
now-forgotten gurus of the 1960s, used to argue that what finishing college
really meant is that one was willing to do anything to succeed in a capitalist
society."
"In getting a college degree, Goodman held, one was in effect saying, I
want in on the game, deal me a hand, I want desperately to play."
"Education,
meanwhile, didn’t have a lot to do with it."
"Not everywhere in higher
education have standards slipped."
"One assumes that in engineering and within the
sciences they have been maintained, and in some ways, owing to computer
technology, perhaps improved."
"Relatively new fields of learning, computer
science chief among them, have not been around long enough to have lost their
way."
"Medical and legal education are probably not greatly different than they
have traditionally been."
"Chiefly in the "LIBERAL ARTS" subjects do standards seem
most radically to have slipped."
"Early in the 19th century, Sydney Smith,
one
of the founders of the Edinburgh Review,
remarked that if we had made the same
progress in the
culinary arts as we have made in education, we should
still be
eating soup with our hands."
"Apart from eliminating corporal punishment and
widening the educational franchise, we can’t be sure if, over the centuries, we
have made much progress in education."
"At the moment there is great enthusiasm
about “advances” in education owing to the Internet."
"Two teachers at Stanford,
for example, put their course on Artificial Intelligence
online and drew an
audience of 160,000 students from all
around the world."
"But science, which deals
in one
right answer, is more easily taught without a physical
presence in the
room, and probably works better online than humanities courses, whose questions
usually have many answers, few of them permanently right."
"The Washington
Monthly, in its May-June issue, has a special section called “The Next Wave of
School Reform,” a wave that, in the words of the editor, aims to “improve
students’ ability to think critically and independently, solve complex problems,
apply knowledge to novel situations, work in teams and communicate effectively.” "
"The problem with these waves of school reform, of course, is that a new one is
always needed because the last one turns out to have tossed up more detritus on
the shore than was expected."
"The fact is that we still don’t know how to
assess teaching — trial by student test scores, except in rudimentary subjects,
isn’t very helpful — and we remain ignorant about the true nature of the
transaction between teacher and student that goes by the name of learning."
"In
undergraduate education, we may even have retreated a step or two through the
phenomenon known as grade inflation and through the politicization of
curricula."
"The division between vocational and "liberal arts" education, which
began during the 19th century with the advent of the land-grant state
universities in the United States, is today tilting further and further in favor
of the vocational."
"Even within the "liberal arts", more and more students are, in
DELBANCO’s words, “fleeing from ‘useless’ subjects to ‘marketable’ subjects such
as economics,” in the hope that this will lend them the practical credentials
and cachets that might impress prospective employers."
"DELBANCO reminds us of
Max Weber’s distinction between
“soul-saving” and “skill-acquiring” education. "
"The liberal arts, in their task to develop a certain roundedness in those who
study them and their function, in Delbanco’s phrase,
“as a hedge against
UTILITARIAN values,” are (or at least were meant to be) soul-saving."
"Whether, in
the majority of students who undertook to study the "liberal arts", they truly
were or not may be open to question, but what isn’t open to question is that
today, the "liberal arts" have lost interest in their primary mission."
"That
mission, as Delbanco has it, is that of “attaining and sustaining curiosity and
humility,” while “engaging in some serious self-examination.”"
"A "liberal"
education, as he notes, quoting Cardinal Newman, “implies an action
upon our mental nature, and the formation of our character.”"
"DELBANCO warns
that it won’t do to posit some prelapsarian golden age when higher education
approached perfection."
"Surely DELBANCO is correct."
"A good deal of the old "liberal arts"
education was dreary."
"The profession of teaching, like that of clergyman and
psychiatrist, calls for a higher sense of vocation and talent than poor humanity
often seems capable of attaining."
"Yet there was a time when a "liberal arts" education held a much higher position in the world’s regard than it does today. "
"One of the chief reasons for its slippage, which DELBANCO fails directly to
confront, is that so many of its teachers themselves no longer believe in it
— about which more presently."
"I mentioned earlier that the "liberal arts"
were for a good while my second religion."
"Here let me add that I had never heard
of them until my own undergraduate education had begun."
"When I was about to
graduate from high school as an amiable screw-off, ranked barely above the lower
quarter of my class, my father, who had not gone to college, told me that if I
wished to go he would pay my way, but he encouraged me to consider whether my
going wouldn’t be a waste of time."
"My father personally thought I might make a hell of
a good salesman, which was a compliment, for he was himself a hell of a good
salesman, and a successful one."
"I eschewed his advice, not because it wasn’t
sound, but chiefly because I felt that, at 18, I wasn’t ready to go out in the
world to work."
"In those days, the University of Illinois was, at least for
residents of the state, an open-enrollment school."
"If you lived in Illinois, the
school had to take you, no matter how low in your high school class you
graduated."
"Lots of kids flunked out, and my own greatest fear on the train
headed from Chicago down to Champaign-Urbana, in white bucks and reading "The
Catcher in the Rye", was that I would be among them."
"Most of my friends,
Jewish boys from the rising lower-middle class, went to the University of
Illinois to major in business."
"“Business major” nicely rang the earnestness
gong."
"Yet the courses required of a business major struck me as heart-stoppingly
boring: accounting, economics, marketing, advertising, corporation finance, also
known as “corp fin,” which sounded to me like nothing so much as a chancy
seafood dish."
"I was especially nervous about accounting, for I had wretched
handwriting and a disorderly mind, which I viewed as two strikes against me
straightaway."
"Wasn’t there something else I might study instead of business?"
"A
fellow in the fraternity that was rushing me suggested "LIBERAL ARTS".
"This was
the first time I had heard the phrase “liberal arts.”"
"What it initially stood
for, in my mind, was no accounting."
"In my first year at the University of
Illinois, I had slightly above a B average."
"I attained this through sheer
memorization: of biological phyla, of French irregular verbs and vocabulary, of
17th-century poems."
"I also discovered, in a course called "Rhetoric 101", that I
had a minor skill at prose composition, a skill all the more remarkable for my
excluding all use of any punctuation trickier than commas or periods."
"After
this modest success, I decided that I was ready for a more exotic institution,
the University of Chicago, to which I applied during my second semester at
Illinois."
"What I didn’t know then, but have since discovered, was that my
demographic cohort, those people born toward the middle and end of the
Depression, were lucky when it came to college admission, for our small numbers
made colleges want us quite as much as we wanted them."
"In short, I was accepted
at the University of Chicago, though I would never have been accepted there
today, and that is where I spent the next, and final, three years of my formal
education."
"The University of Chicago had a reputation for great teachers, but
I managed, somehow, to avoid them."
"I never sat in a class conducted by Leo
Strauss, Joseph Schwab, Norman Maclean, David Greene, or Edward Shils."
"Of
course, great teachers, like great lovers, can sometimes be overrated."
"Later in
life, I met a few men and women reputed to be great teachers and found them
pompous and doltish, their minds spoiled by talking too long to children."
"I
attended a lecture by David Reisman, who was then Time magazine-cover famous,
and was impressed by what then seemed to me his intellectual suavity."
"I sat in
on a couple of classes taught by Richard Weaver, the author of "Ideas Have
Consequences", but left uninspired."
"I was most impressed by teachers from
Mittel-Europa, Hitler’s gift to America, whose culture seemed thicker than that
of the native-born teachers I encountered, and could not yet perceive the
commonplace mind that sometimes lurked behind an English accent."
"I took a
course from M. Zabel, who was the friend of Harriet Monroe, Marianne
Moore, and Edmund Wilson."
"Although not a great teacher, Zabel was an impressive
presence who gave off whiffs of what the literary life in the great world was
like."
"I took a summer course from the poet and critic E. Olson, who kept what
seemed a full-time precariously long ash on the end of his cigarette, and who,
after reading from "The Waste Land", ended by saying, “How beautiful this is. Too
bad I can’t believe a word of it.”"
"The students at the University of Chicago
were something else."
"In his book, DELBANCO, defending the small classroom,
refers to something he calls
“lateral learning,” which refers to what a college
student learns in class from his fellow students.
He cites Card. Newman and
John Dewey on this point, and quotes Nathaniel Hawthorne."
"It contributes
greatly to a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of
companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits,
and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate."
"A
great many of my fellow students in the College at the University of Chicago
seemed to come from New York City, several others from academic families."
"They
appeared to have been reading the Nation and the New Republic from the age of
11."
"Their families argued about Trotsky at the dinner table."
"A few among them
had the uncalled-for candor of psychoanalysands."
"I recall a girl sitting next to
me at a roundtable in Swift Hall volunteering her own menstrual experiences in
connection with a discussion of those of the Trobriand Islanders."
"Some among
these University of Chicago students had an impressive acquaintance with books."
"
One morning in E. Olson’s class in modern poetry, Olson began quoting
Baudelaire (mon semblable,—mon frère!) and a student next to me, named Martha
Silverman, joined him, in French, and together, in unison, the two of them
chanted the poem to its conclusion."
"This was one of those moments when I thought
it perhaps a good time to look into career opportunities at Jiffy Lube."
“I
invariably took the first rank in all discussions and exercises, whether public
or private, as not only my teachers testified, but also the printed
congratulations and carmina of my classmates."
"So wrote Leibniz about his own
classroom performance."
"Reverse everything Leibniz wrote and you have a fairly
accurate picture of my classroom performance at the University of Chicago."
"None
among my teachers there ever suggested that I had intellectual promise."
"Nor
should they have done, for I didn’t show any, not even to myself."
"I made no
“A”s."
" I wrote no brilliant papers."
"I didn’t do especially well on exams."
"I was
not quick in response in the classroom."
"Only years later did I realize that
quickness of response —on which 95 percent of education is based—is beside the
point, and is required only of politicians, emergency-room physicians, lawyers
in courtrooms, and salesmen."
"Serious intellectual effort requires slow, usually
painstaking thought, often with wrong roads taken along the way to the right
destination, if one is lucky enough to arrive there."
"One of the hallmarks of the
modern educational system, which is essentially an examination system, is that
so much of it is based on quick response solely."
"Give 6 reasons for the decline
of Athens, 8 for the emergence of the Renaissance, 12 for the importance of the
French Revolution. You have 20 minutes in which to do so."
"At the University
of Chicago I read many books, none of them trivial, for the school in those
years did not allow the work of second- or third-rate writers into its
curriculum."
"Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Jack Kerouac, Adrienne Rich, or their
equivalents of that day, did not come close to making the cut."
"No textbooks were
used."
"You didn’t read “Karl Marx postulated . . .”; you read Karl-bloody-Marx."
"The working assumption was that one’s time in college is limited, and mustn’t be
spent on anything other than the first-rate, or on learning acquired (as with
textbooks) at a second remove."
"Nor did Chicago offer any “soft” majors or
“lite” courses."
"I remember, in my final year, looking for such a course to fill
out a crowded schedule, and choosing one called History of Greek Philosophy."
"How
difficult, I thought, could this be?"
"Learn a few concepts of the pre-Socratics
(Thales believed this, Heraclitus that), acquire a few dates, and that would be
that."
"On the first day of class, the teacher, a trim little man named Warner
Arms Wick, announced that there was no substantial history of Greek philosophy,
so we shall instead be spending the quarter reading Aristotle and Plato
exclusively."
"How much of my reading did I retain?"
"How much does any 19- or
20-year-old boy, whose hormones have set him a very different agenda, retain of
serious intellectual matter?"
"How much more is less than fully available to him
owing to simple want of experience?"
"What I do remember is the feeling of
intellectual excitement while reading Plato and Thucydides and an almost
palpable physical pleasure turning the pages of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism as he made one dazzling intellectual connection
after another."
"I can also recall being plunged into a brief but genuine
depression reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents."
"The idea behind
the curriculum at the College of the University of Chicago was the Arnoldian
one, abbreviated to undergraduate years, of introducing students to the best
that was thought and said in the Western world."
"Mastery wasn’t in the picture."
"
At least, I never felt that I had mastered any subject, or even book, in any of
my courses there."
"What the school did give me was the confidence that I could
read serious books, and with it the assurance that I needed to return to them,
in some cases over and over, to claim anything like a genuine understanding of
them."
"I was never more than a peripheral character, rather more like a
tourist than a student, at the University of Chicago."
"Yet when I left the school
in 1959, I was a strikingly different person than the one who entered in 1956. "
"What had happened? My years there allowed me to consider other possibilities
than the one destiny would appear to have set in grooves for me."
"I felt less
locked into the social categories—Jewish, middle-class, Midwestern—in which I
had grown up, and yet, more appreciative of their significance in my own
development."
"I had had a glimpse—if not much more—of the higher things, and
longed for a more concentrated look."
"Had I not gone to the University of
Chicago, I have often wondered, what might my life be like? I suspect I would be
wealthier. But reading the books I did, and have continued to throughout my
life, has made it all but impossible to concentrate on moneymaking in the way
that is required to acquire significant wealth."
"Without the experience of the
University of Chicago, perhaps I would have been less critical of the world’s
institutions and the people who run them; I might even have been among those who
do run them. I might, who knows, have been happier, if only because less
introspective—nobody said the examined life is a lot of laughs—without the
changes wrought in me by my years at the University of Chicago."
"Yet I would not
trade in those three strange years for anything."
"I turned out to be a better
teacher than student. In fact I took to saying, toward the close of my 30-year
stint in the English department at Northwestern University, that teaching
provides a better education than does being a student. If he wishes to elude
boredom among his students and embarrassment for himself, a teacher will do all
he can to cultivate the art of lucid and interesting presentation and the habits
of thoroughness."
"Thereby, with a bit of luck, education may begin to kick
in."
"Yet even after completing three decades of teaching, I am less than sure
that what I did in the classroom was effective or, when it might have been
effective, why. Of the thousands of inane student evaluations I received—“This
guy knows his stuff” . . . “Nice bowties” . . . “Great jokes”—the only one
that stays in my mind read: “I did well in this course; I would have been
ashamed not to have done.” :How I wish I knew what it was that I did to induce
this useful shame in that student, so that I might have done it again and
again!"
"Student evaluations, set in place to give the impression to students
that they have an important say in their own education, are one of the useless
intrusions into university teaching by the political tumult of the 1960s. "
Teaching remains a mysterious, magical art. Anyone who claims he knows how it
works is a liar. No one tells you how to do it."
"You walk into a classroom and
try to remember what worked for the teachers who impressed you, or, later in the
game, what seemed to work best for you in the past. Otherwise, it is pure
improv, no matter how extensive one’s notes."
"As a testimony to the difficulty
of evaluating the quality of teaching, Professor Delbanco includes a devastating
footnote about student evaluations. One study found that students tend to give
good evaluations “to instructors who are easy graders or who are good looking,”
and to be hardest on women and foreign teachers; another, made at Ohio State
University, found “no correlation between professor evaluations and the learning
that is actually taking place.” As Delbanco notes, the main result of student
evaluations is to make it easier for students to avoid tough teachers or,
through harsh reviews, punish these teachers for holding to a high
standard."
"I was not myself regarded as a tough teacher, but I prefer to think
that I never fell below the line of the serious in what I taught or in what I
asked of my students. What I tried to convey about the writers on whom I gave
courses was, alongside the aesthetic pleasures they provided, their use as
guides, however incomplete, to understanding life. Reading Joseph Conrad, Henry
James, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Willa Cather, and other writers I taught
was important business—possibly, in the end, though I never said it straight
out, more important than getting into Harvard Law School or Stanford Business
School. When I taught courses on prose style, I stressed that correctness has
its own elegance, and that, in the use of language, unlike in horseshoes, close
isn’t good enough; precision was the minimal requirement, and it was
everything."
"How many students found helpful what I was trying to convey I
haven’t the least notion."
"If anything I said during the many hours we were
together mattered to them, I cannot know. Not a scholar myself, I never tried to
make scholars of my students. A small number of them went on to do intellectual
work, to become editors, critics, poets, novelists; a few became college
teachers. Did my example help push them in their decision not to go for the
money? Some of the brightest among them did go for the money, and have lived
honorable lives in pursuit of it, and that’s fine, too. A world filled with
people like me would be intolerable."
"When I taught, I was always conscious of
what I thought of as the guy in the next room: my fellow teachers."
"During my
teaching days (1973-2003), I could be fairly certain that the guy in the next
room was teaching something distinctly, even starkly, different from what I was
teaching."
"This was the age of deconstruction, academic feminism, historicism,
Marxism, early queer theory, and other, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, one-idea
lunacies."
"A bright young female graduate student one day came to ask me if I
thought David Copperfield a sexual criminal. “Why would I think that?” I asked.
"
“Professor X thinks it,” she said. “He claims that because of the death in
childbirth of David Copperfield’s wife, he, Copperfield, through making her
pregnant, committed a crime.”"
"All I could think to reply was, “I guess criticism
never sleeps.”"
"While not wishing to join the dirge-like chorus of those who
write about the fate of higher education in our day, Andrew Delbanco does not
shy from setting out much that has gone wrong with it. He highlights the
importance everywhere accorded to research over teaching among faculty. He notes
the preeminence of science over the humanities, due to the fact that science
deals with the provable and can also lead to technological advancement, and
hence pays off. (He mentions the sadly mistaken slavishness of the humanities in
attempting to imitate science, and cites the advent of something called the
“literature lab” as an example.)
"He brings up the corruption implicit in
university presidents sitting on corporate boards, the fraudulence of big-time
college athletics, some of whose football and basketball coaches earn more than
entire academic departments, and much more."
"Delbanco, a secular Jew and a
man of the Vietnam generation, is nonetheless ready to allow the pertinence of
the earlier Protestant view of higher education in "the liberal arts"".
The era
of spiritual authority belonging to college [when it was under religious
auspices] is long gone. And yet I have never encountered a better
formulation—“show me how to think and how to choose”—of what a college should
strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people
take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a
way that is true to themselves and responsible to others."
"College: What
It Was, Is, and Should Be gives a clear picture of all the forces, both within
and outside the university, working against the liberal arts. Yet Delbanco lets
off the hook the people who were in the best position to have helped save
them—the teachers, those “guys in the next room.” Much could be said about
teaching the liberal arts before the Vietnam generation came to prominence
(which is to say, tenure) in the colleges: that it could be arid, dull,
pedantic, astonishingly out of it. But it never quite achieved the tendentious
clownishness that went into effect when “the guys in the next room” took
over."
"Not that the ground hadn’t been nicely prepared for them."
"Universities
had long before opened themselves up to teaching books and entire subjects that
had no real place in higher education. Take journalism schools. Everyone who has
ever worked on a newspaper knows that what one learns in four years in
journalism school can be acquired in less than two months working on a
newspaper. But as journalism schools spread, it slowly became necessary to go
through one in order to get a job on a large metropolitan daily. Going to
“journ” school became a form of pledging the fraternity. Everyone else in the
business had pledged; who are you, pal, to think you can get in without also
pledging? And so journalism schools became mainstays of many
universities."
"Then there is the business school, especially in its MBA
version. Business schools are not about education at all, but about so-called
networking and establishing, for future employers, a credential demonstrating
that one will do anything to work for them—even give up two years of income and
pay high tuition fees for an MBA to do so. As with an American Express card, so
with an MBA, one daren’t leave home without one, at least if one is applying for
work at certain corporations. Some among these corporations, when it comes to
recruiting for jobs, only interview MBAs, and many restrict their candidate
pools to MBAs from only four or five select business schools. Pledging the
fraternity again."
"Soon, the guys in the next room, in their hunger for
relevance and their penchant for self-indulgence, began teaching books for
reasons external to their intrinsic beauty or importance, and attempted to
explain history before discovering what actually happened. They politicized
psychology and sociology, and allowed African-American studies an even higher
standing than Greek and Roman classics. They decided that the multicultural was
of greater import than Western culture. They put popular culture on the same
intellectual footing as high culture (Conrad or graphic novels, three hours
credit either way). And, finally, they determined that race, gender, and social
class were at the heart of all humanities and most social science subjects. With
that finishing touch, the game was up for the liberal arts."
"The contention in
favor of a "liberal arts" education was that contemplation of great books and
grand subjects would take students out of their parochial backgrounds and
elevate them into the realm of higher seriousness."
Disputes might arise from
professor to professor, or from school to school, about what constituted the
best that was thought and said—more Hobbes than Locke, more Yeats than Frost—but
a general consensus existed about what qualified to be taught to the young in
the brief span of their education. That consensus has split apart, and what gets
taught today is more and more that which interests professors."
"Columbia still
provides two years of traditional liberal arts for its undergraduates."
The
University of Chicago continues to struggle over assembling a core curriculum
based on the old Robert Hutchins College plan. St. John’s College, both in
Annapolis and in Santa Fe, has, from its founding, been devoted to the cult of
the liberal arts, even to the point of having its students study medieval
science. The hunger among students for the intellectual satisfaction that a
liberal arts education provides is not entirely dead. (At Northwestern, a course
in Russian novels taught by Gary Saul Morson attracts 600 students, second only
to the recently canceled notorious course in sex education offered by the
school.) But the remaining liberal arts programs begin to have the distinct feel
of rearguard actions.
"The death of "liberal arts" education would constitute a
serious subtraction."
"Without it, we shall no longer have a segment of the
population that has a proper standard with which to judge true intellectual
achievement. Without it, no one can have a genuine notion of what constitutes an
educated man or woman, or why one work of art is superior to another, or what in
life is serious and what is trivial."
"The loss of liberal arts education can only
result in replacing authoritative judgment with rivaling expert opinions, the
vaunting of the second- and third-rate in politics and art, the supremacy of the
faddish and the fashionable in all of life."
"Without that glimpse of the best
that "liberal art" education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst,
and never notice."
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
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