Another argument for a "liberal education"

 

"'There's Nothing Liberal About Specializing in Philosophy'"

by

Nick Romeo

May 9th, 2014

The Atlantic

Online courses and crushing student debt are contemporary phenomena, but the arguments they inspire are often variations on older debates. Attacking and defending a liberal-arts education is an old American tradition, one that dates back to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. In a new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, traces the history of these debates in American culture. We spoke recently about how history can clarify contemporary questions about the future of higher education in America.

If you could drop Thomas Jefferson into today’s educational landscape, what would he think about rising student loan costs and an increasingly vocational approach to higher education?

Jefferson would be appalled by the retreat from public responsibility for higher education. He tried to pass taxes to support people without money receiving an education, and he failed. At the same time, he would probably say it’s predictable. This is how wealthy people protect their advantages: by limiting access to higher education to their own children. This creates what Jefferson called an “unnatural aristocracy,” people who have unearned privileges. He would think it’s very sad that people are going into debt to finance educational exploration. He would worry about the possibility that talented people without financial means would be left out of higher education. In terms of a vocational approach, Jefferson was a great believer in studying things that didn’t seem to be immediately profitable.

Ben Franklin criticized the elitism of higher education. He described Harvard as a finishing school where the rich learn obsolete skills and knowledge. What do you think Ben Franklin would make of the current debates about higher education?

Franklin probably would have had more sympathy for the anti-college groups today saying, “You don’t need colleges. Go off and learn stuff on your own. You want to be a programmer; you can do that on your own. You want to start a company, you can do that in all these other ways.” Someone with a lot of smarts and chutzpah who goes off and educates himself in his own way—Franklin would admire that. But he was also someone who found narrowness appalling. Someone like Peter Thiel, who is asking kids to leave college for a hundred thousand dollar fellowship, is encouraging them to become ever more narrow, so that they can develop an app to order pizza more quickly or access pornography more easily. All this talent driven into narrower and narrower spheres—Franklin would have found it depressing. Increasing specialization makes us less capable citizens and less able to adjust to changes in the marketplace. Many studies show students choose schools based on their selectivity, the prestige factor. And the vanity of prestige, just wanting to be better than someone else, he hated that.

Many kids in the freshman class at elite schools are from families in higher tax brackets. Are we still rewarding unearned privilege rather than merit?

I think this is a huge problem. A lot of the indices we use for admission favor the wealthy, but we are looking at changing that. We’d like not to favor people who have been trained through expensive classes to do well on testing day, but rather to find people with authentic potential. We try to spend a lot of time finding students who might not find us because they think we are too expensive. Often these students could come here for free and graduate with no loans and do just as well as someone who had all the advantages. We’re also trying to expand our reach with [online courses], and with this platform we’ve reached over 600,000 students in just a year and a half. In the previous hundred years we haven’t offered content to that many people.

Why should a student attend a brick-and-mortar school if they can get similar knowledge at a lower cost from online courses and other online resources?

I think it’s to work and live and play beside other people who are also going through a similar process of learning. Being surrounded by other students and professors who are engaged in research is a hothouse environment for expanding your cultural and intellectual horizons. I’m not naive enough to deny that people also like to be on residential campuses because they often have nice amenities. Taken to an extreme, that’s a real problem. Schools that are trying to entice students with swimming pools and rock bands, I hope they lose their customers. What they’re offering students is a taste of luxury before they have to start working. I think in the future more people will get online credit and certification before coming to a place like Wesleyan for a few semesters rather than four years. Multiplying access points is crucial as long as you’re providing access to a broadening rather than a narrowing of the mind.

So many brochures are full of bromides about the power of a liberal-arts education to expand horizons and transform worldviews. How would you define these intangible benefits?

Well, there are so many bromides, and I think that’s because we are trying to describe something that’s not immediately transferable into cash or some other quantitative measure. I like to say to students that I hope that in college they find out what they really love to do. It’s important not only that they discover what they love to do but also that they develop their skills in that area. This should be measurable. You should see your skills grow in ways that matter not only to professors, but also people who are off-campus. I do think there should be some practical payoff to a broad education, and that’s why I call what I’m describing in the book a pragmatic liberal education. I don’t think it’s just about having a wonderful mind that you explore on Sundays by yourself. It’s also important to become more productive at things that other people recognize as valuable.

A standard defense of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you to succeed in any number of domains because you gain the critical thinking skills to succeed in a range of disciplines. What do you think of this defense of liberal arts?

Well that's key. But you can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you're studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what's valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can't explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don't think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don't think there's anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor.

W.E.B. Dubois thought only the “talented tenth” should receive liberal education. Is only a minority of the population sufficiently gifted to benefit from a liberal education?

Increasing the Value of a Liberal Education

It’s a big question. I think the American response since Jefferson and Franklin is that it may be the case that not everyone has the intellectual capacity to benefit from it, but everyone should have access to it because it’s very hard to predict who would benefit from it. It’s very easy to predict that people with power and money will try to restrict access so as to protect their own power and money. Broadening access will create some inefficiency. Some people may not get much out of it and will move toward technical training, but others who you might not have expected to benefit will flourish. Giving people access to a liberal education is really essential for citizenship, and that should start before college. Learning critical thinking so people can’t just pull the wool over your eyes should be part of everyone’s education.

Aristotle suggests in The Politics that every subject can be approached from either a liberal or a vocational standpoint. What matters is why you study something, not what you study. So you could study finance in a liberal spirit, or you could study English literature in a purely vocational one. Would you agree with this?

Absolutely. I have some fights with my colleagues because they want to protect certain disciplines and not others. I come to this from Dewey, but it’s in Aristotle too. It’s not the discipline that makes it part of liberal education, it’s the way you approach it. A liberal arts school is not about having lots of classics professors and no economics professors. It’s about teaching the subject in such a way that it broadens students’ perspectives rather than closing them down into specialization. At Wesleyan, for example, I’ve been trying to bring in engineering as a way of thinking and problem solving. Not just as a trade school. I’ve met with some real resistance, but you can teach engineering as part of a liberal education, just as you can teach it as part of technical training.

Education in past centuries was often influenced by religious and civic ideas of virtue. Schools tried to create better people. Is character formation still a legitimate aspiration for a liberal arts college?

It’s a really important part of the college experience. That’s why, when schools try to appeal to the desire for luxury, it’s an educational failing as well as a moral one. I’ve always worked at small institutions, and you can see characters being formed. You can watch students become selfish, narcissistic, narrow people, or you can try to open them up to service, cooperation, and leadership. When things go wrong, when there are instances of dishonesty or violence within the campus community, these are moments to talk to students about their responsibility for one another. If they take responsibility for making their environment a better place to live, that will become part of their lives after they graduate. It’s also important for students to learn how to fail. Often students at elite schools have never had the experience of failing, and that’s a deprivation. These are things that are hard to learn online. 

In praise of a "liberal education"

"The Tyranny of the College Major"

Colleges should require students to take more courses outside of their discipline.

by

J.W. Powell

January 24th, 2014

 
The Atlantic

The American bachelor's degree has over the last 150 years become centered on specializations, majors, each student's home department.  General Education, the classes each student must take outside of the major, is still part of every degree—but it has become weaker and unfocused, disrespected and eroded.  The degree has not gotten tougher as the world has gotten tougher. Instead, legislators and administrators have simplified the degree into lists of outcomes, efficiency initiatives, graduation targets, and courses that can double count for more than one requirement.

It is past time we re-examine, strengthen, and add to the bachelor’s degree.  General Education could and should do so much more than it does.  The California State University is fairly typical in its General Education program in requiring that students take the equivalent of about a year and a half of work in various categories at basic and advanced levels.  Students choose among the offerings from various departments at the university.  At the level of basic skills in written and oral communication and critical thinking, the choices are fewer, but then after those three courses, choices are numerous enough that, for instance, a student’s friends are unlikely to have taken similar courses in social sciences or in humanities or in sciences.  It is common to refer to this approach as a smorgasbord approach, as choices have taken the place of a common core of courses for all.

Several functions of General Education are missing from this approach.  General Education could serve an anti-provincialism function.  It could and should provide a basic two-year sequence in intellectual history including many of the best ideas human beings have had and the attacks against those ideas.  It could get students to step outside their major disciplines to do a minor (the equivalent of a half a year work) in a social science, a minor in a science, a minor in one of the humanities.  It should should equip a graduate to deal with complex and urgent issues, which are not all addressed by their majors.

Expanding General Education will not be easy.  As a philosophy professor at Humboldt State University, I have had administrators earnestly tell me we need to get the almost half a million California State University students through college more quickly because they are using up taxpayers' resources.  In fact, educated people generate more taxpayer resources.  All studies over the past few decades, supported by census figures on incomes of college graduates, document the increased prosperity to graduates and to the surrounding culture from higher education. These administrators seem to think that result is due to possession of a piece of paper.  When I ask for evidence it is the degree and not the years of study that produces the benefits of education, I get no answer because there is no answer.

I wrote a review four years ago for The Journal of General Education of a report by the Center for the Study of Higher Education at UC Berkeley.  Here are some of its lessons: Foundations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on General Education reform and have begun backing away from financing attempts at changes.  The current near-consensus smorgasbord approach to General Education–one course of this, a salad of that–is ineffective, and attempts at reform flounder on the shoals of majors and departments and feckless administrators.  The report catalogues successes and failures and reasons for failures. Successes, according to the report, are pathetically small. Most attempts at reform are pathetically small.

Majors are not likely to give up their powerful central position now.  Departments, colleges, textbooks, and conferences are all organized within the boundaries set around majors. By now, we should not even ask—even though institutions who get along without them or who call glorified General Education programs majors are as good or better at preparing students for the world, based on their reputations among colleges and universities (Columbia, St. John’s and other Great Books programs, Oxbridge’s Greats).  It is not uncommon to find universities containing general honors colleges, Great Books programs, Humanities programs, or Liberal Arts programs in which admission to those programs excuses students from the General Education requirements.

Let's put some teeth, finally, again, into General Education.  Here’s how that General Ed part of the bachelor’s could look, with one of its aims being to increase the degree to which graduates in Fisheries and Business and Classics and Social Work and School Education have common ground, common background (plug your hardest-to-conceive in here: Mineralogy, Dadaism, Music Theory, Cosmology, Nuclear Engineering). Start with a two-year upper-division series on intellectual history of the world, stressing the best ideas humans have had and the attacks against them. We could thus anchor the General Education program and provide context to the rest of the degree.  Then add a requirement of three minors—one in science, one in social science, one in humanities—each minor a full half a year of work, in fields with no departmental overlap with the major. Such minors would increase the breadth of learning and the sense of belonging to the same intellectual community.  Those would combat provincialism.  Conversations at parties might get better. 

Stepping back to consider the degree and what it’s for might help us see that it needs to be given renewed power, that it takes more time than we have been giving it, that high-impact and demanding General Education curriculum is at its heart and, even, that the people who teach it should have room and time to use their skills and do it right.  I am retirement age, and I suppose I will be glad to get away. But I may still have a conflict of interest in that I want my children and grandchildren and my students' children to get not simply a degree, but a basic and substantive education. They are growing fast, and this rehabilitation is long past due.

The way universities used to be

"Polytechnic Utiliversity"

Putting the universal back in university.

by

Reinhard Hütter

First Things

University education delivers goods that are seen as commodities, as purchasable means to satisfy individual desires and solve collective problems. The knowledge it offers is a production, a techne that is a means to an end extrinsic to it. All academic disciplines in the late-modern research university have become servile arts, and the university an accidental agglomeration of advanced research competencies gathered in one facility for the sake of managerial and logistical convenience.

The ideal of a liberal education that carries its end in its very practice has been supplanted by an efficiency-driven program of knowledge making and a respective training in the communicative, mathematical, and scientific skills necessary for contributing to this knowledge making and applying it to ends dictated by individual and collective desires. The university has morphed into a polytechnicum with a functionalized, propaedeutic liberal arts appendix, a community college on steroids, with undergraduate training subdivided into functionalized pre-med, pre-law, pre-engineering training and the “salad bar” consumer curriculum in the humanities.

Let me call this the Baconian university, named after its spiritus rector, Francis Bacon. The American Association of Universities, the exclusive club of the nation’s leading research universities, characterizes a research university as an institution that instills command for real-world problems. The research university combines cutting-edge research with training that is a preparation for the graduate work of highly specialized research programs. John Henry Newman had this model very much on his mind when he delivered his classic set of discourses on the “scope and nature of university education,” delivered in 1852 to the Catholic intelligentsia in Dublin: “I cannot deny [that Bacon] has abundantly achieved what he proposed. His is simply a Method whereby bodily discomforts and temporal wants are to be most effectually removed from the greatest number.”

This university is, of course, a thoroughly secular affair. As Brad Gregory aptly put it in The Unintended Reformation: “Regardless of the academic discipline, knowledge in the Western world today is considered secular by definition. Its assumptions, methods, content, and truth claims are and can only be secular, framed not only by the logical demand of rational coherence, but also by the methodological postulate of naturalism and its epistemological correlate, evidentiary empiricism.”

Why should we care? Our late-modern society needs scholars, technicians, and experts to address the social, political, and environmental problems it has created, and the late-modern research university is able to deliver. The very success of the Baconian university carries in itself the seed of its own destruction. For if the current trend should come to its logical term—if indeed each of the advanced research competencies of the university could be located elsewhere, linked directly to companies and state labs—then the university in any substantive sense will have disappeared. To call the result of this transmutation a university would simply be an equivocation, undoubtedly useful for reasons of branding and marketing, but hardly for reasons of substance.

The university was once a unity per se that carried its end in its very practices of education and inquiry. It is now a unity per accidens, a contingent conglomeration of means that serve changing extrinsic ends, a knowledge corporation that sells goods of “know-how” in the service of ends determined by advanced techno-capitalist societies. The philosopher Benedict Ashley, educated in the early years of the University of Chicago’s remarkable undergraduate program, writes in his magnum opus, The Way toward Wisdom: “The very term ‘university’ means many-looking-toward-one, and is related to the term ‘universe,’ the whole of reality. Thus, the name no longer seems appropriate to such a fragmented modern institution whose unity is provided only by a financial administration and perhaps a sports team.”

This is where Newman’s importance becomes most clear. His prophetic provocation offered a compelling account of the university as a unity per se—and with it a most timely appeal to theology’s indispensability for the maintenance of this unity. He was a prophetic voice, a thorn in the flesh of the twentieth-century attempts at functionalizing the university to the ends of the modern bureaucratic nation-state, the communist program, the fascist state organization of the superior race and its will to power, or the desires of individual consumers in a permissive society.

Newman holds university education to be essentially liberal education—that is, education that carries its end in itself. While not necessarily embracing all or even most fields of knowledge—an obvious impossibility for quite a while now—liberal education is essentially philosophical in the sense that it fosters reflection upon one’s knowledge in relationship to other fields of knowledge and in relationship to the whole. This makes liberal education a potentially universal education.

But such universal education requires a horizon of transcendence, where knowledge can be conceived as an interconnected whole with coherence. “Religious truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short . . . of unraveling the web of University Teaching. It is, according to the Greek proverb, to take the Spring from out of the year, it is to imitate the preposterous proceeding of those tragedians who represented a drama with the omission of its principal part.”
I would like to take a closer look at Newman’s prophetic provocation by attending to three questions. First, what exactly does he mean by theology in the context of a university education? Second, why does he think theology to be indispensable for university education? And third, what might it mean to take his proposal seriously?

First, as to Newman’s understanding of theo­logy and university education: The term “university,” he notes, is essentially related to “universe” and as “to the range of University teaching, certainly the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions of any kind. . . . A University should teach universal knowledge.” No subject matter that conveys knowledge is to be excluded from university teaching. If a university excludes the subject of religion, either “the province of religion is very barren of real knowledge” or “one special and important branch of knowledge is omitted.” Anyone advocating such an institution “must own, either that little or nothing is known about the Supreme Being, or that his seat of learning calls itself what it is not.”

The secular university by and large insists upon the first alternative, that little or nothing is known about what Newman has called the “Supreme Being,” if such a supreme being exists at all. Ideas about a supreme being might be studied, ideas that pertain to the anthropological phenomenon called “religion,” a knowledge making that belongs to departments of religion. While Newman did not oppose empirical and historical study of the world’s religions, he has something categorically different in mind when he speaks of “theology.” By “theology” he means “the Science of God, or the truths we know about God put into system; just as we have a science of the stars, and call it astronomy, or the crust of the earth, and call it geology.”

In short, when he invokes “theology” in the context of his university lectures he has in mind what classical Catholic theology calls the “preambles of faith,” a scientific knowledge of God that belongs to metaphysics: a discourse with its inquiries, a knowledge of God that does not depend on revelation but that can be greatly enhanced, deepened, and corrected by revelation. If we asked Newman to point out some contemporary practitioners of this science in the English-speaking world, he would most likely point us to Richard Swinburne, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, John Haldane, David Braine, Peter Geach, Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, Benedict Ashley, Ralph McInerny, and others.

Aware that his position was already in the 1850s controversial in the English-speaking university world outside Oxford and Cambridge, Newman makes it explicit that “University Teaching without Theology is simply unphilosophical. Theology has at least as good a right to claim a place there as Astronomy.” In this telling statement, he gives us a key for understanding his overall—ever pertinent—understanding of the proprium of a university education. If university teaching without theology is unphilosophical, what then would it mean for a university education to be philosophical? Does the addition of theology alone make it philosophical?

Newman gives us a clue in his sixth discourse, where he states that “the true and adequate end of intellectual training and of a University is not Learning or Acquirement, but rather, is Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge, or what may be called Philosophy.” What differentiates a proper university education from training in a polytechnicum is thought exercised upon knowledge and upon the inter­relationship of sciences.

Newman states as much quite explicitly: “The comprehension of the bearings of one science upon another, and the use of each to each, and the location and limitation and adjustment and due appreciation of them all, one with another, this belongs, I conceive, to a sort of science distinct from all of them, and in some sense a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy, in the true sense of the word, and of a philosophical habit of mind.” What he has in mind here was traditionally called “first philosophy,” prima philosophia.

Excluding theology from the university would require a metaphysical warrant that is, of course, impossible when metaphysics has been excluded along with natural theology, as the two are of one cloth. By establishing secularism as a normative criterion for admittance to the university, Newman observes, the university becomes unable to reflect philosophically on its secularist commitments.

Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, as well as their modern disciples and twentieth-century scientists like the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and the chemist Michael Polanyi, knew that any truly philosophical form of critical reflection presupposes a horizon that genuinely transcends and thereby enables such critical reflection. But Newman, together with all who are engaged in natural theology, knew that there are great disagreements inside this discipline and that it faces challenges no other science does because it deals with a subject that transcends all genera of academic subjects.

However, Newman would ask, why should these circumstances disqualify first philosophy and its acme, natural theology, as sciences? The fact that paleoanthropology lives more by hypotheses than by evidences, that neuroscience cannot fully account for human volition, that there is no cogent ontogenesis so far for the unique reality of “life,” and that contemporary physics cannot reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity does not prove that these inquiries lack the characteristics of a proper science and must therefore be excluded from the secular university’s curriculum and research program. Newman holds that the science of theology is analogous to such sciences with one important difference: Its subject is related to the whole cosmos and to the totality of all facts and relations as cause is to effect.

Let me now turn to Newman’s argument for the indispensability of theology for a proper university education, an argument with which he moves beyond the observation that by excluding theology from its curriculum the secular modern university betrays how unphilosophical it is—something most secular universities by now could not care less about.

Newman rightly assumes religious truth to surpass the knowledge available to the natural theo­logy of first philosophy. For, after all, the divine perfection investigated by natural theology entails the perfection that intentional, personal agency represents. But the only way to grasp fully this divine perfection—the providence of the Creator—is by way of attending to the surplus of religious truth embedded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: “Admit a God,” he writes, “and you introduce among the subjects of your knowledge, a fact encompassing, closing in upon, absorbing, every other fact conceivable. How can we investigate any part of any order of Knowledge, and stop short of that which enters into every order? All true principles run over with it, all phenomena converge to it; it is truly the First and the Last. . . . You will soon break up into fragments the whole circle of secular knowledge, if you begin the mutilation with divine.”

But he goes further and makes the bold claim that “Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short . . . of unraveling the web of University Teaching.” He makes good on this claim by constructing a reductio ad absurdum argument by way of an a fortiori analogy.

First, he establishes the fundamental relationship between objective truth and scientific inquiry. “Truth is the object of Knowledge of whatever kind; and when we inquire what is meant by Truth, I suppose it is right to answer that Truth means facts and their relations. . . . All that exists, as contemplated by the human mind, forms one large system or complex fact.” The subject matter of theology allows the ­understanding of the rest of reality as a whole, or universe, and consequently of all knowledge that can be gained as essentially interrelated, as an integral component of universal knowledge.

Second, Newman develops the first part of an analogy that in an uncanny way anticipates current initiatives to recast the curriculum in light of a normative evolutionary naturalism (though not necessarily materialism). As such, reason, volition, freedom, and spirit must be studied as, at best, aspects of the phenomenon of “consciousness” that emerges from or is a mere epiphenomenon to physical, chemical, and biological processes in light of which they must ultimately be accountable, and possibly predictable. As Newman states it: “Physical and mechanical causes are exclusively to be treated of; volition is a forbidden subject. A prospectus is put out, with a list of sciences, we will say, Astronomy, Optics, Hydrostatics, Galvanism, Pneumatics, Statics, Dynamics, Pure Mathematics, Geology, Botany, Physiology, Anatomy, and so forth; but not a word about the mind and its powers, except what is said in explanation of the omission.”

History, political science, economics, literature and language, art history, musical theory, and last but not least, philosophy (insofar as it transcends logical positivism and the foundation of mathematics) can happily be eliminated from the curriculum. Because, Newman writes, “the moral and mental sciences” are “simply left as a matter of private judgment, which each individual may carry out as he will.”

Newman writes of the professor who “ascribes every work, every external act of man, to the innate force or soul of the physical universe. . . . Human exploits, human devices, human deeds, human productions, all that comes under the scholastic terms of ‘genius’ and ‘art,’ and the metaphysical ideas of ‘duty,’ ‘right,’ and ‘heroism,’ it is his office to contemplate all these merely in their place in the eternal system of physical cause and effect. At length he shows how the whole fabric of material civilization has arisen from the constructive powers of physical elements and physical laws.” Replace the physical-mechanistic framework with a biological-evolutionary one in Newman’s illustration, and matters sound all too familiar.

Third, Newman completes his analogy with an a fortiori conclusion. Ignoring the reality of human reason and volition as proper motive causes would issue into “a radically false view of the things which he [the professor] discussed.” If this is true, dismissing from the list of university subjects a reality infinitely superior to human reason and volition as a motive cause would have much graver distortive consequences. “Worse incomparably, for the idea of God, if there be a God, is infinitely higher than the idea of man, if there be man. If to blot out man’s agency is to deface the book of knowledge, on the supposition of that agency existing, what must it be, supposing it exists, to blot out the agency of God?”

In the current situation, as far as I can see, one could make a case that the faculties of the secular university are divided roughly along the lines of the Kantian antinomy between determinism and freedom. Predictably, the proponents of determinism are by and large at home in the hard sciences, the defenders of freedom by and large in the humanities.

The proponents of determinism are increasingly embracing a posthumanist outlook (especially in the biological sciences) in that they see the human being as a highly developed animal bent on maximizing the success of its species (an endeavor driven primarily by the study and technical application of the natural sciences). The proponents of freedom are increasingly embracing a transhumanist outlook by epitomizing freedom in the existentialist sense of freely designing one’s own essence with the assistance of biotech­nology. Thus, human beings become their own designer choices. Human nature is subjected to techne, a Promethean liberation from our own nature—an exercise of a most radical freedom.

And here the extremes meet. For transhumanism is nothing but the most consistent instantiation of posthumanism, especially when the design is collectively applied and socially enforced. (My university has at least four genome centers, and the driving force behind them, including the financing, is of not a Platonic but a Baconian nature.) It is a dire picture, which also Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, Hans Jonas in The Imperative of Responsibility, Jürgen Habermas in The Future of Human Nature, and Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae have warned against.

For in the case of the posthumanist program, as well as in the case of the transhumanist program, university education loses its character as liberal education and turns into something completely different. It becomes a training in the servile arts—that is, in the kinds of expertise required for technical or managerial species optimization or for individually desired, technical, operative, or genetic-design features.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his very late notebooks, seems to have anticipated both the posthumanist and the transhumanist implications of a purely secular utilitarian knowledge production: “There exists neither spirit, nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use.” Knowledge, he continues, “works as a tool of power” and, “as in the case of ‘good’ or ‘beautiful,’ the concept is to be regarded in a strict and narrow anthropocentric and biological sense. In order for a particular species to maintain itself and increase its power, its conception of reality must comprehend enough of the calculable and constant for it to base a scheme of behavior on it. The utility of preservation—not some abstract-theoretical need to be deceived—stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observations suffice for our preservation.”
His conclusion is stark: “In other words: the measure of the desire for knowledge depends upon the measure to which the will to power grows in a species: a species grasps a certain amount of reality in order to become master of it, in order to press it into service.”

What Nietzsche predicts is the species-relevant polytechnicum. This is the posthumanist program. And when we include in the reality to be mastered human nature itself, we have the transhumanist program. Newman very ably perceived the radical implications hidden in the Baconian university that Nietzsche would lay bare a few decades later. The university as a humanist enterprise of education in universal knowledge is obviously passé. Francis Bacon, a longtime university tenant, has quietly opened the back door and beckoned Friedrich Nietzsche to enter.

Newman’s prophecy is to the same degree utopian as the idea of the university itself is utopian. It might best be received as a norm, an ideal that serves as a criterion against which to assess the operative beliefs of late-modern research universities and their feeder institutions, the colleges. If Newman is right, a facile rejection of the critical norm that his Idea of a University advances might come with a high price: namely, living out the dystopian future of the comprehensive functionalization and commodification of the university and of university education.

If Newman indeed is right, the university resembles an arch: Its capstone stabilizes the whole edifice; remove it, and the arch collapses. All stones are still there in their distinct integrity, but now lie in a heap. While each stone has its integrity, the relationship between all of them is utterly unclear (excepting, of course, sub-coherences between mathematics and the natural sciences and among the natural sciences).

In this situation of a curricular and disciplinary heterogeneity and even confusion, several disciplines are advancing themselves as capstones or as a multidisciplinary capstone-configuration for the construction of a new arch. The strongest contender is probably an evolutionary materialism, or at least naturalism, that would stretch from astrophysics via biochemistry to neuroscience and a sociobiology extending itself into the humanities, to a naturalist philosophy of science. With such a configuration, the size of the arch shrinks considerably, as many of the stones of the former arch could not be integrated.

And the new structure would be haunted by the specter of Nietzsche. Instead of a proper methodological naturalism, now an unwarranted metaphysical naturalism would define the scope of this new arch. The knowledge making of the advanced animal Homo sapiens would then turn out to be nothing but a highly advanced form of tool making and tool using.

And consequently, in light of the newly imposed horizon of metaphysical naturalism, the most advanced university training would be nothing but a training in the servile arts, in a highly advanced “tool knowledge” of a technical or managerial sort in order to fix those kinds of things that can be fixed with the help of tools. Newman’s warning consists simply in the reminder that the only thing that can save the university from the reductive distortions of metaphysical naturalism is the discipline that allows for the widest possible scope of truth. Only with theology as the capstone of the arch could the arch achieve this widest possible scope, could the university remain open to a maximum of interrelated and complementary sciences, could a university education remain in all areas of knowledge essentially philosophical, and could universal knowledge as an end in and of itself be secured.

In the end, I fear, we must choose one of two prophets, one proposing an all-too-unlikely utopia, the other announcing an all-too-likely dystopia. We may either struggle with Newman upstream toward the “idea” of a university or drift with Nietzsche downstream, allow ourselves to be carried away by the dominant currents, and resign ourselves to the “polytechnic utiliversity.”

One thing is clear beyond doubt, though: Wherever theology, natural and revealed, is permitted to make its distinct contribution to universal education, it will without fail help us grasp the intrinsic value of the arduous journey upstream so that we may contemplate the source of all things. For, as the Second Vatican Council fathers wrote, “When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible.”

[Reinhard Hütter is professor of Christian theology at Duke Divinity School.]

Ban double majors...is this really an issue?

"Should Colleges Ban Double Majors?"

by

Kayla Webley

January 31st, 2013

Time

Tucked in a list of suggested reforms issued last week for how U.S. colleges could increase graduation rates is a recommendation that schools “narrow student choice” in order to promote completion. It’s an interesting idea — one that seems to go against the notion of college as a place to explore options and experiment with courses in divergent fields — that is all the more curious since it is included in an open letter from the nation’s six leading higher-education organizations.

“Sometimes we create a culture of dancing for more years than you have to, rather than getting out the door,” said Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University and chairman of the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment, which issued the Jan. 24 letter. ”I think institutions have a responsibility to reset that balance.”

The recommendation, along with the commission’s less surprising exhortations to create more flexible schedules and make it easier for students to transfer credits from one institution to another, is being put forth in an effort to improve the country’s dismally low college completion rate: just 58% of students who enroll in bachelor’s degree programs at four-year institutions graduate within six years and only 30% of students who enroll in certificate or associate’s degree programs at two-year institutions complete their degree within three years. But are double majors or an overabundance of academic options a big reason why so many students are getting off track?

The commission’s letter highlights a recommendation made by a task force at the University of Texas at Austin to bar students there from majoring in two subjects unless they can complete all the coursework requirements in four years. A second example cited in the letter details how Tennessee’s state technical schools are giving students fewer choices about which classes they can take to get a particular degree. The technical schools also mandated that students finish their degree within a fixed period of time. With these changes in place, many more students ended up completing degrees and in much less time, which is why the state board of regents has decided to bring the model to Tennessee’s 19 community colleges as well.

“We are hoping to achieve a sea change in our student culture (from “more is more” to “on time”),” the task force UT-Austin said in a report issued last February. “Students who do not complete a bachelor’s degree by the beginning of their ninth long semester will be ineligible for dual degree, double major, or certificate programs: Only one degree (and one major) will be awarded — even if the student successfully completes the requirements for additional degrees, majors, programs.”

UT-Austin has not yet restricted double majors, but the mere suggestion is noteworthy at a time when it is increasingly common for students to pursue multiple majors. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the percentage of students who double-major jumped 96% between 2000 and 2008, the most recent year for which data is available. And although the total number of double majors is still small, accounting for only 5.5% of all undergrads in 2008, as many as 40% of students at some colleges are pursuing more than one major, according to a forthcoming report titled Double Majors: Influences, Identities & Impacts from the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. The trend is particularly evident at selective schools. “Students are seeking a competitive advantage in the job market,” said Steven Tepper, associate director of the Curb Center and co-author of the study. “Many double-major students feel it is not enough to have a college degree — they need to further distinguish and differentiate themselves.”

Whether a second major actually makes a student more attractive to an employer is unclear — little data exists on the subject — but either way, some in the higher-education community are beginning to question whether schools ought to push students in a different direction. “I don’t know if I would go as far as to say we should restrict students, but I think there has to be some work at the institutional level to make sure students understand why they plan on double-majoring and whether it’s really a smart idea,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, which was not one of the organizations that signed the open letter. “They might not understand that it may delay graduation, may cost additional money and may give them an extra heavy course load. We need to make sure someone in the institution has had a conversation with them to make sure they understand the pros and cons.”

Even Tepper, who says double-majoring has a “huge positive impact” for some students, thinks college administrators need to be more involved. “Universities allow double majors to happen and have stood by while this trend has,” he said. “Institutions should help their graduates be more intentional about their choices.”

At the same time, however, Tepper says his research does not suggest that students who double-major are more likely to drop out of college. He also found that having an additional major increases the time it takes to earn a degree only slightly, if at all. Of the 1,700 students surveyed for the report, 14% of double majors who were currently in their fourth year of college said they planned to be enrolled the following year compared to 12% of single majors. “[Many students] have been packing their resumes since eighth grade and so they know how to balance multiple commitments,” Tepper said. At UT-Austin, where the suggestion was made to eliminate double majors, students with an additional major are actually more likely to graduate. The task force report showed 69% of students with double majors graduate in four years as opposed to 60% of single majors. (To be sure, this does not suggest colleges should push more students into a second major as a way to increase college completion, but rather that those students who choose to double-major may be more motivated to begin with.) Either way, the task force noted, “Taking a double major does not slow time-to-degree.”

So why, then, are prominent figures in the higher-education community promoting the idea of narrowing student choice?

“I’m not sure that the word ‘narrow’ is quite the right word, it’s clarity that we’re really trying to achieve,” said Gee after embarking on a media tour to promote the letter. “I believe very strongly in the liberal arts education. We don’t want to take away those options. We want to provide clarity to students for how they can get through the system much faster — that would be the way that I would put it.”

"Academics for all" poll

Do you believe that a college education is for everyone?

Yes--2 [40%]
No-3 [60%]

This reads like a mythical entitlement program...much like home owner ship. Over 40 years ago I saw the same thing...the baby boomers were hitting the college circuit. Why? Many reasons...and still valid today. High school was ending and eyes were on colleges and universities. It was what everyone was doing. It made no difference what the interest was...all were entitled to a higher education...it was the thing to do. Within two years of undergraduate work I began to see what some were doing: Away from home and party time, fraternities and sororities, family pressures, false expectations, misunderstanding of what a higher education at that time meant. The second part here deals with "dumbing down the academics". Many universities are closing the humanities...the fulcrum of academics for most universities and concentrating on the sciences and technology fields. Colleges and universities have catered to vocational interests better served by vocational and proprietary schools. Frankly those schools could care less about literature, history, philosophy and that's fine for they are oriented towards careers in the technical and service industry. Those schools don't even provide basic English courses. A pity. Communication skills are essential. Those that are better served by vocational and proprietary schools should stay clear of academic institutions for they do not cater to their specific needs of obtaining a trade. Those students do poorly in the humanities and struggle to keep their grades up.


Academics--not for everyone

Art of essays--T. H. Huxley

Bertrand Russell...critical thinker

College beyond the reach of some?

Higher education--costly

Higher education--not for all

Liberal arts...going?

Liberal education may be dying

The disadvantaged

Universities and umbrella majors

"YouTube"...venue for instruction and knowledge?

Higher education--not for all

Well, it looks like I am not the only one questioning higher education for all.

"College is not a must"

Mandated college-prep classes inhibit high-schoolers' futures.

by

Walt Gardner

September 3rd, 2008

The Christian Science Monitor

Fall classes are barely under way and already guidance counselors across the country are conferring with students about the courses they need for their high school diplomas. In the process, more than 90 percent will be steered toward a college-prep curriculum, according to the Alfred P. Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development. This, however, is not as laudable as it seems.

The reasons serve as a cautionary tale that the US ignores at its peril. Despite what the public is willing to acknowledge, the importance of a bachelor's degree has been wildly oversold. In 2007, for example, about 67 percent of high school graduates went directly to college, compared with just under half in 1972.

The usual argument put forth in defense of a four-year degree is that it contains a decided wage premium. Studies have consistently found that those who have a degree on average earn more than those who don't. . But all these studies were conducted before the new global economy fully emerged. Its presence calls into question long-held assumptions.

If Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, is correct, the only jobs that will be secure in the next decade will those that cannot be sent abroad electronically. That means plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics, for example, will be working steadily while many of their degreed classmates will be collecting unemployment checks.

Moreover, since wages vary within any occupation, degree holders who are still employed will not necessarily be earning top salaries. The same holds true for non-degree-holders, of course, but at least they will be in far greater demand because their skills cannot be offshored. As a result, they will be in a position to command wages at the top of their respective brackets.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that some unionized craft workers already earn more than the average college graduate – and do so without carrying the heavy burden of student debt. The demand for this skilled labor is expected to intensify in the coming years as more workers retire and the economy revives.

All of the preceding assumes, of course, that students in high school actually receive their diplomas. In order to earn them, however, students in many states have no choice but to take a rigidly prescribed sequence of courses that too often are not in line with their needs and interests. At the top of the list is the growing requisite of Algebra 1.

California is experiencing the harm done by this requirement. At present, just more than half of the state's eighth-graders are taking Algebra 1 as part of the new policy mandating the course for all within three years.

Yet already, the requirement has singularly resulted in an increase in the dropout rate beyond the 24.2 percent in the 2006-07 school year. Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell has warned that the requirement sets every school in the state up for failure.

For schools serving large numbers of poor and minority students, the results are expected to be disproportionately felt. That's because career and technical education, which has proved instrumental in the past in boosting graduation rates for these students, will lose more funding to accommodate the Algebra 1 mandate.

Even if the funding were somehow to materialize, however, tens of thousands of students will not be allowed to enroll in vocational electives in middle school if they haven't mastered Algebra 1. This unintended consequence has become so threatening that the presidents of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association and the State Building and Construction Trades have jointly denounced the requirement.

The total damage inflicted on students by the college-is-for-everyone mentality is incalculable. Students who cannot measure up to the demands for a college curriculum are made to feel like failures.

Our competitors abroad have long understood and accepted the fact that students can have a productive and gratifying career even when they do not go on to some form of tertiary education. They grant equal respect to these students, rather than regard them as second-class.

But their realistic attitude goes against the romantic notion that unfortunately prevails in this country. What Americans ultimately need to learn is that college is merely the most convenient place to learn how to learn. It is not an absolute determinant.

[Walt Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education.]


Academics--not for everyone

Universities and umbrella majors

"Nationally, the most popular major chosen by college students is business, according to statistics compiled in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Education."

Is this really the material for higher education and better suited for specialized institutions. What happened to the sciences and hard academics?

"Undergraduates all business in picking major"

by

Mark Arsenault

September 2nd, 2008

The Providence Journal

College students are making their annual migration back to Rhode Island campuses for the beginning of the fall semester. After the U-Hauls are unpacked and the goodbyes are said, there’s the nettlesome little matter of deciding what to study, a decision that can shape the rest of a student's life.

Incoming freshmen are faced with a dizzying number of choices in majors and courses, many of which were not available in high school. Brown University, for example, offers 95 majors [which Brown calls "concentrations"], said Katherine Bergeron, dean of the college.

Nationally, the most popular major chosen by college students is business, according to statistics compiled in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Education. The next most popular major is social science and history, then: education, psychology, visual and performing arts, and majors related to "health professions and clinical sciences."

Thirty-five years ago, in the 1970-71 school year, education was the most popular major, followed by social sciences and history. Business was third, English, fourth, and engineering, fifth.

By 1980-81, business was the top major, and has maintained that spot for 25 years, according to the Department of Education figures.

Christopher Lydon, associate vice president for admission and enrollment planning at Providence College, said the most popular majors at PC are, in order: biology, finance, management, political science, psychology, elementary/special education and marketing. Trends in popularity from year to year can be subtle, he said.

"We’re a little lighter on English majors this year," he said. "We're seeing a growth in science programs." Why? Maybe it's because the school recently overhauled its science labs, which prospective students are visiting on their college tours. "That science growth may be specific to us," he said.

Generally, students are required to pick a major within their first three semesters.

PC has seen the number of students enrolling as undeclared majors drop from 55 percent seven years ago to 42 percent this year, said Lydon. "The freshmen coming in have a better sense of what they want to study," he said.

At Brown, biological sciences is the most popular concentration, as it was 10 years ago, according to 2007 statistics from Brown. The next three most popular are history, international relations and literatures in English –– the same order as in 1998. But in the past few years, there has been a subtle shift from the humanities –– which includes English literature, philosophy and religious studies –– toward the social sciences, which include economics, international relations and political science, said Bergeron.

Enrollment in economic courses is currently high, she says, which is part of a national trend. A new concentration at Brown –– commerce, organizations and entrepreneurship –– is proving popular. Contemporary students have shown curiosity at how global economic systems work, she said.

At the University of Rhode Island, nursing was the top major in 2007, followed by: communication studies, psychology, pharmacy, and physical education, according to statistics provided by URI. Nursing’s popularity has jumped dramatically in just the past few years: it was the fifth most popular major 10 years ago, and was still fifth just five years ago. Bobbi Koppel, director of career services at URI, says it’s impossible to know exactly what motivates students to choose a major. "Sometimes they get into a class and they love the instructor and the instructor inspires them" to stay with the course of study, she said.

Why so many more nursing majors? Koppel offered a hypothesis: health care is a growing field with many job opportunities, nurses can work flexible hours, nursing is seen as a "giving" career, and the status of nursing as a profession has increased.

World events, the economy and even popular culture seem to affect which majors are the most popular, Lydon said.

"We all remember the L.A. Law pre-law phenomenon in the 1980s," he said, referring to the snappily-written television drama about beautiful lawyers tackling life-and-death cases in a fictitious Los Angeles law firm. After the show gained popularity, colleges around the country noticed an increase in the number of pre-law students, he said. Next came the ER phenomenon, from the hospital-based drama that began its television run in 1994. The show appeared to increase the number of students enrolling in pre-med programs, he said.

Currently, schools with forensic science programs are experiencing a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation effect — an increase in students interested in the forensic sciences — he said. And since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, "More students have expressed interest in government service."

Free digital texts...a start

Well, it is a start. Despite the expense of the books and the fact that something is being done to assist students with the texts, it is still cool to have a real book at hand.

"Free digital texts begin to challenge costly college textbooks in California"

by

Gale Holland

August 18th, 2008

The Los Angeles Times

The annual college textbook rush starts this month, a time of reckoning for many students who will struggle to cover eye-popping costs of $128, $156, even $198 a volume.

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

"I was disappointed in the uptake," McAfee said recently at an outdoor campus cafe. "But I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200."

McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts.

Thus far, their quest has been largely quixotic, but that could be changing. Public colleges and universities in California this past year backed several initiatives to promote online course materials, and publishers and entrepreneurs are stepping up release of electronic textbooks, which typically sell at reduced prices.

McAfee is a leader in his academic field, a featured speaker at the Yahoo Big Thinkers India conference in March. Tall and genial, he dresses in khakis, a polo shirt and geeky river sandals. A coauthor of the best-selling book "Freakonomics," Steven D. Levitt, has described him as brilliant. What McAfee is not is anti-capitalist.

"I'm a right-wing economist, so they can't call me a communist," McAfee said.

Yet he turned down $100,000 to turn over his open-source textbook "Introduction to Economic Analysis" to a commercial publisher.

"What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do," he said. "Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."

McAfee said he wrote his open-source book because the traditional textbook market is broken. Textbook and college supply prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, an audit by the federal Government Accountability Office found in 2005. With costs continuing to climb, it would be "reasonable to conclude that [individual student] expenditures can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today even after supplies are subtracted," the congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance said in a 2007 report.

"Publishers have broken an implicit contract with academics, in which we gave our time and they weren't too greedy," McAfee wrote on the web page for his book. McAfee said many publishers, going for the lowest common denominator, were making some books too simple.

Representatives of the textbook industry say they have invested in new products because instructors have demanded it.

"Do you think all these PhDs are so lazy, so stupid they buy junk?" asked Bruce Hildebrand, the Assn. of American Publishers' executive director for higher education. "God bless anybody who has got the energy and commitment to put three, four, five years of labor in on a book and then give it away."

Just mention textbook prices to university students and the response is outrage and a willingness to switch to online readings.

"I spent definitely over a grand on textbooks last year, and I did buy [used] off Amazon.com," said Matt Shiu, 18, a business economics major at UC Irvine.

"I'd rather do my reading on the computer," said engineering major Weheb Waheb, 20.

But sales of all electronic college materials -- CD-ROMs, e-books and online courses -- represented only $241 million of $3.5 billion in U.S. sales by major publishers in 2007, despite the fact that they typically sell at a discount, according to the Assn. of American Publishers. Free and open-source digital texts left too small a footprint to measure, experts said.

"For all its popularity in the press and on blogs, [online textbooks are] all very marginal now," said Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart, a commercial e-book company.

Open educational resources is an amorphous category for publishers, but basically it includes e-textbooks, courses, videos, taped lectures, tests, software and other materials released online free to the public without restriction on use.

Universities for more than a decade have experimented with open-source educational sites and online libraries as a way to spread knowledge more equitably. Some seek to change the nature of the textbook by offering "chunks" of instruction that professors can mix and match to create their own content "collections."

California State University runs Merlot, a searchable collection of peer-reviewed, online multimedia materials. Connexions, from Rice University in Houston, stores free, open-licensed educational materials in fields such as music, electrical engineering and psychology.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare has placed virtually its entire curricula online -- video lectures, problems sets and exams for more than 1,800 courses in 33 disciplines.

Other open-source textbook projects have a subversive edge. Founders or advocates refer to themselves as "co-conspirators," profess a do-it-yourself ethic and declare an intent to overthrow the textbook industry.

Wikibooks, a collection of textbooks "anyone can edit," is based on the popular Wikipedia model, which invites users to make and correct entries.

In one inmates-take-over-the-asylum scenario, Old Dominion College in Virginia had students compete to write chapters in a wikibook on the "Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education." Students voted for their favorites, and faculty chose the best versions.

More recently, academics have started embracing open- source resources as a way to reduce students' textbook bills. More than 1,400 faculty last year signed on to a pledge drive supporting open educational resources. (The drive was organized by Public Interest Research Groups from about 20 states.)

California State University is developing what it calls the Digital Marketplace, a website for selecting, comparing, sharing, approving and distributing both open-source and commercial online educational materials.

One of the biggest pushes for open educational resources has come from California community colleges, where students devoted nearly 60% of their education spending in 2007-08 to textbooks, according to a California State Auditor's report released last week.

The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in the Silicon Valley has teamed with the state's other two-year colleges to encourage faculty to create, use and select digital textbooks. The California Community Colleges Board of Governors voted in May to back open educational resources.

"One of the most heartbreaking things you can see is a student in the bookstore with a course catalog in one hand looking at the book prices to see what courses he can afford to take," said Hal Plotkin, a Foothill-De Anza trustee who was instrumental in the drive.

Several experts said a strong shift by California's public universities to open-source textbooks could be the jolt that brings them into wider use.

But the open-book movement will face competition from commercial e-book publishers, including CourseSmart, which this fall will begin offering digital versions of 4,300 widely adopted textbooks at half the price of print editions. Flat World Knowledge, a new company, plans to subsidize free digital titles starting next year, with sales of other materials and printed editions.

Diane Harley, principal researcher at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, said professors weren't going to embrace digital course materials unless they were high quality and tailored to their often unique scholarship.

"Faculty are independent, they love their fields, and they hand-craft their courses," she said.

McAfee has high hopes for an enhanced version of his book that FlatWorld Knowledge plans to release this year.

"A whole bunch of people don't have access to knowledge. The knowledge in college textbooks, thousands of people hold that knowledge, those skills," he said. "And there's no reason for a small amount of money they couldn't produce books that are pretty good, and provided for free."


Higher education and the science textbook issue

Academics--not for everyone

I knew that this perspective would emerge soon. A colleague recently sent me an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal that basically challenges the "myth" that college, rather scholarly academic work, is suitable for everyone. And the author is correct that "For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time" but it has become so ingrained in American culture that we begin to truly believe that a university education applies to all much like the myth that all people should own a house for which now we are seeing that home ownership is not for everyone simply because it is not affordable in purchasing and maintaining that has been exacerbated by greedy and creative money lenders in an economy where the ratio of a non-incremental wage is disproportional to inflation or price indexes of a bloated commodity's value. I began to see this over 40 years ago when I discovered that the academics and learning value [a "liberal education" if you like] became diluted by a huge influx of students that struggled to stay afloat and understand that a higher education was more than receiving a piece of paper that declared a BA, MA, or Ph.D. A higher degree to many meant better jobs and more money and not the balance of knowledge and scholarship. Many who had those degrees had no knowledge of ancient literature or even construct a decent sentence. Communication skills were poor. Many students then and especially now would be better off attending separate entities of vocational or proprietary educational sources where a skill is pursued. Just look at the television programs from ABC to XYZ Universities offering degrees in paralegal services, nursing, or business administration. Those establishments are interested in providing real skills for the students and make money. The traditional university still maintain academic standards but they too are interested in making money. Some accomplish this through high entrance fees, government and private grants of research [usually scientific with the ultimate goal of technology in mind], and athletics. It is a pity to see students and families become financially in debt from university education expenses when alternatives are available and to realize that not all students are university material.

"For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time"

by

Charles Murray

August 13th, 2008

The Wall Street Journal

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

Finding a better way should be easy. The BA acquired its current inflated status by accident. Advanced skills for people with brains really did get more valuable over the course of the 20th century, but the acquisition of those skills got conflated with the existing system of colleges, which had evolved the BA for completely different purposes.

Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough -- four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics -- and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?

Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.

Certification tests will not get rid of the problems associated with differences in intellectual ability: People with high intellectual ability will still have an edge. Graduates of prestigious colleges will still, on average, have higher certification scores than people who have taken online courses -- just because prestigious colleges attract intellectually talented applicants.

But that's irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.

The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.

Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.

An educational world based on certification tests would be a better place in many ways, but the overarching benefit is that the line between college and noncollege competencies would be blurred. Hardly any jobs would still have the BA as a requirement for a shot at being hired. Opportunities would be wider and fairer, and the stigma of not having a BA would diminish.

Most important in an increasingly class-riven America: The demonstration of competency in business administration or European history would, appropriately, take on similarities to the demonstration of competency in cooking or welding. Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.

Here's the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence -- treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone -- is one way to help us to recognize that common bond.

[Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, "Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality" (Crown Forum).]

Thanks to stringer Tim for the article.