The death of the "liberal arts"

Technology, technology, technology. That's all is heard--the latest new gadget. Just design, draft, manufacture, and convince the populace that life would be miserable without the new gadget....that's all that matters--WRONG. Knowledge of the world and the ability to communicate [verbally and written] is just as important.

"Who Killed the Liberal Arts?"

And why we should care

by

Joseph Epstein

September 17th, 2012

the weekly Standard

When asked what he thought about the cultural wars, Irving 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” 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 were the subjects thought necessary for a free man to study. If he is to remain free, in this view, he must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in him the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present.

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 College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. Its author, Andrew Delbanco, the biographer of Herman 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 him. 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. Professor Delbanco is opposed to the economic unfairness behind these arrangements, believing, rightly, that as a result, “the obstacles [to getting into the elite 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 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 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 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 John Henry 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 he 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. He 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 dis- orderly 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 Morton Dauwen 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 Elder 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 Cardinal 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 Elder 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 arts education conveys, a nation might wake up living in the worst, and never notice.

[Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Essays in Biography.]

A culinary scam?

For the most part, for-profit educational institutions make huge promises, take your money, and give nothing. I have been good friends with a chef and restaurant owners and they say it is more than bending over a hot stove. The restaurant business is a tough business and demands 24 hour involvement. Sometimes the glamor isn't there.

"Top Chef Dreams: Are Cooking Schools a Rip-Off?"

by

Kayla Webley

July 27th, 2011

Time

The idea of becoming a gourmet chef and maybe even owning your own restaurant someday is one of those enduring fantasies that percolates through each generation. And today, with the popularity of star-making competition shows like Bravo's Top Chef and Food Network's Iron Chef the concept of cooking your way to a new career is even more alluring. So perhaps it's no surprise then that the bottom lines of for-profit education companies in the business of selling those chef's hat dreams are soaring.

As the economy continues to limp along, the drive to get a leg up in competitive fields like gourmet cooking is only increasing. Overall enrollment at for-profit trade schools, which includes culinary schools, has expanded by about 20% a year for the past two years, according to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. For example, one company, the Career Education Corporation which operates 17 culinary schools nationwide has seen their enrollment increase by more than 46% since 2008, according to company spokesman Mark Spencer.

And the students flocking to attend culinary schools are paying pretty penny. According to data recently released by the Department of Education, tuition at a culinary school can run students upward of $30,000. For example, the Le Cordon Bleu (LCB) branch in Orlando charges $35,130 for its 21-month associates degree in Culinary Arts. Thanks in part to that hefty price tag, LCB's parent company, the aforementioned Career Education Corporation, has seen their profits balloon. Last year the company reported a revenue of $1.84 billion, a 63% increase from 2007.

But the numbers aren't as good for students at culinary schools. Many enroll sold on the idea of being a chef, but wake up to the harsh reality of low-paying line cook jobs and mountains of debt upon graduation. About 800 current and former students are involved in a class action lawsuit in California that alleges the Le Cordon Bleu branch in Pasadena, formerly called the California School of Culinary Arts, "falsely led students to believe they would be able to obtain employment as chefs after graduation — and make a chef's salary thereby enabling them to pay off their loans within a reasonable period of time," according to Michael Louis Kelly, an attorney representing the students.

One of those students, Daniel Vasquez, says he has had difficulty finding work other than as a line cook — a lower paying job that he likely could have gotten without having footed the bill to attend culinary school. Vasquez became interested in the culinary institute after seeing a commercial on TV which he says led him to believe that if he went to the school he would become a chef. When he enrolled in 2005, he says he was told by an admissions officer that it would be "easy" for him to obtain a job as a Sous Chef (an apprentice chef) upon graduation where he could expect to start at $18/hour. Vasquez was so convinced that he took out $65,018 in loans to cover the tuition for the 18-month program ($45,148) as well as associated fees, supplies, his uniform and living expenses.

In the years since graduation, Vasquez, for the most part, has been unable to find culinary jobs that pay more than $10-12 an hour and as a result has been unable to make payments on his loans. And while the school changed its recruitment materials nationwide in July 2009 to make it clear students cannot expect to be chefs upon graduation — it now lists more realistic post-graduation career opportunities — that's cold comfort to Vasquez who is now nearly $80,000 in debt. "I'm not sure I will ever be able to pay it off," Vasquez told TIME. "I never would have borrowed the money if I knew I wouldn't be able to repay it. I went to this school so I could be ahead, jump start my future, but now, who knows."

That's the problem, says Eric Greenspan, rising Food Network star and head chef and owner of The Foundry on Melrose, a high-end restaurant in Los Angeles. He thinks students enroll in the programs hoping to skip to the head of the pack, only to find out that they still have to start on the bottom rung of the ladder. In entry level cooking jobs like a line cook or working with a caterer, a typical starting wage is $9-10/hour, Greenspan says. "These kids are paying law school prices and [culinary schools] are training them for minimum wage jobs," he adds. While instead, he says, students would be better off getting their foot in the door with a chef they admire and working very hard to climb their way to the top. "How do rock stars become famous? They work hard. They don't go to guitar schools," he says.

That argument taps into the perennial debate over the usefulness of higher education — whether creative careers like cooking, fashion design or even journalism are best learned by going to school or if it is best to get your foot in the door and learn on the job. One of the largest benefits of going to school is to make connections to people in the field. That was true for Jim Hanson, who graduated from Le Cordon Bleu's Minneapolis branch nine months ago. He says the $34,000 or so he paid for his associates degree in baking and pastry arts was worth the cost, even though he had to take out student loans, in large part because the school connected him to his current employer. While working as a student worker at the school while he attended classes, Hanson was introduced to the owner of Chez Arnaud, a French bakery in Minneapolis, where he now works as the head baker (and recently won a local award for "Best Baguette"). "It was all worth it," he told TIME. "Without [Le Cordon Bleu], I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near this job." Hanson, who estimates that he will be able to pay off his student loans in 5 to 10 years, said the cost of the program was intimidating at first since he would "be paying for this for a while," but ultimately he decided it was a financial risk he was willing to take. "This was an investment I wanted to make for myself," he says.

And it's true that the onus is on the students to make sure that their aspirations are realistic in relation to their budgets and their local job market. "Students are always making an informed decision and should fully understand what is involved," says Brian Moran, the interim president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, a group that represents for-profit schools nationwide. "If they are taking loans they need to understand their responsibilities — the total picture."

But as Greenspan notes, culinary schools do a very good job of tapping into the psyche of wannabe chefs. "Culinary schools sell people on their love of cooking," he says. "They're selling the dream." Indeed, a recent advertisement on Google for the Arizona Culinary Institute a private, for-profit culinary school that charges $25,990 for its nine month program, read: "Ready to follow your dream?" But if the number of competitors on Top Chef and The Next Iron Chef has proven anything, it's that while there are a lot of people who want to be chefs, far fewer see those dreams come true.

Jackson Pollock...physicist?

"Jackson Pollock, artist and physicist?"

June 28th, 2011

Harvard University

At a glance, a painting by Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956) can look deceptively accidental: just a quick flick of color on a canvas.

A quantitative analysis of Pollock's streams, drips, and coils, by Harvard mathematician L. Mahadevan and collaborators at Boston College, reveals, however, that the artist had to be slow—he had to be deliberate—to exploit fluid dynamics in the way that he did.

The finding, published in Physics Today, represents a rare collision between mathematics, physics, and art history, providing new insight into the artist's method and techniques—as well as his appreciation for the beauty of natural phenomena.

"Our article is mainly an invitation to think about some aspects of art from a scientific perspective," says Mahadevan, who is the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (OEB) and of Physics.

Crossovers between art and science are nothing new; consider, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's botanical sketches, proportional studies, and flying machines (or, for that matter, the culinary artistry of today's molecular gastronomists).

"My own interest," says Mahadevan, "is in the tension between the medium—the dynamics of the fluid, and the way it is applied (written, brushed, poured…)—and the message. While the latter will eventually transcend the former, the medium can be sometimes limiting and sometimes liberating."

Pollock's signature style involved laying a canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it in continuous, curving streams. Rather than pouring straight from the can, he applied paint from a stick or a trowel, waving his hand back and forth above the canvas and adjusting the height and angle of the trowel to make the stream of paint wider or thinner.

Simultaneously restricted and inspired by the laws of nature, Pollock took on the role of experimentalist, ceding a certain amount of control to physics in order to create new aesthetic effects.

Mahadevan, collaborating with art historian Claude Cernuschi and physicist Andrzej Herczyn'ski, both at nearby Boston College, took an interest in Pollock when his colleagues suggested that the artist may have exploited the same aspects of fluid dynamics that Mahadevan has studied in the past.

Instabilities in a free fluid jet can form in a few different ways: the jet can break into drops, it can splash upon impact with a surface, or it can fold and coil, as when a stream of honey lands on a slice of toast. The artist Robert Motherwell produced drips and splashes by flicking his brush; Pollock's technique, on the other hand, is defined by the way a relatively slow-moving stream of paint falls onto the canvas, producing trails and coils.

In a sense, the authors note, Pollock was learning and using physics, experimenting with coiling fluids quite a bit before the first scientific papers on the subject would appear in the late 1950s and '60s.

Quantitative explanations for what are now termed inertial, gravitational, and viscous coiling regimes are relatively recent findings, elucidated only within the last few decades. Mahadevan himself has studied the coiling of honey, nanofibers, and rope, and the behavior of a dripping faucet, among many other aspects of soft matter physics.

Mahadevan and his coauthors examined the black and red painting Untitled 1948-49 and demonstrated mathematically that the only way Pollock could create such tiny looping, meandering oscillations was to hold his brush or trowel high up off the canvas and let out a flow of paint that narrowed and sped up as it fell. To create tiny loops rather than waves, he likely moved his hand slowly, allowing physics to coauthor his art.

(This video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMYISqxS3K4 ) from the University of Toronto demonstrates how coiling motions can be predicted and manipulated when the "canvas" is the object in motion.)

The artist, of course, must have discovered the effects he could create through experimentation with various motions and types of paint, and perhaps some intuition and luck. But that, says Mahadevan, is the essence of science:

"We are all students of nature, and so was Pollock. Often, artists and artisans are far ahead, as they push boundaries in ways that are quite similar to, and yet different from, how scientists and engineers do the same."

Pollock's work and physicists' modern understanding of natural phenomena blur the line between art and science.

The authors wonder whether a quantitative understanding of fluid dynamics could inspire a new style of art that takes Pollock's medium a step further. Using a can of paint with a thin slit in one end, they suggest, an artist could paint with a film of pigment rather than a jet, creating new aesthetic effects.

"There are interesting quantitative questions everywhere in art," says Mahadevan. "One that currently fascinates me is inspired by the Chihuly exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, not only because of the beauty of the glass blowing forms, but also because it presents analogies to problems in biology and physics that span scales from the cell (in the context of cell shape) to the whole Earth (in the context of magma and lava flows)."

"Of course, another, much harder, problem," he adds, "is the notion of 'beauty' in art or science, which we all can recognize but find hard to quantify."

Function of a higher education?

Maybe the function of a university has been lost; that it is not necessarily to become proficient and make more money. Perhaps that should be left to vocational schools. I have maintained that a university was for a well-rounded education first and making bucks second...unless one was in law school, the school of education, or business administration.

"Live and Learn"

Why we have college.

by

Louis Menand

June 6th, 2011

The New Yorker

My first job as a professor was at an Ivy League university. The students were happy to be taught, and we, their teachers, were happy to be teaching them. Whatever portion of their time and energy was being eaten up by social commitments—which may have been huge, but about which I was ignorant—they seemed earnestly and unproblematically engaged with the academic experience. If I was naïve about this, they were gracious enough not to disabuse me. None of us ever questioned the importance of what we were doing.

At a certain appointed hour, the university decided to make its way in the world without me, and we parted company. I was assured that there were no hard feelings. I was fortunate to get a position in a public university system, at a college with an overworked faculty, an army of part-time instructors, and sixteen thousand students. Many of these students were the first in their families to attend college, and any distractions they had were not social. Many of them worked, and some had complicated family responsibilities.

I didn’t regard this as my business any more than I had the social lives of my Ivy League students. I assigned my new students the same readings I had assigned the old ones. I understood that the new students would not be as well prepared, but, out of faith or ego, I thought that I could tell them what they needed to know, and open up the texts for them. Soon after I started teaching there, someone raised his hand and asked, about a text I had assigned, “Why did we have to buy this book?”

I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” I could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted.

I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.” If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.

Society needs a mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones. Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.

College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is taking more or less the same test.

I could have answered the question in a different way. I could have said, “You’re reading these books because they teach you things about the world and yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to learn anywhere else.” This reflects a different theory of college, a theory that runs like this: In a society that encourages its members to pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know for success. They will have no incentive to acquire the knowledge and skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and culturally literate human being. College exposes future citizens to material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up choosing.

In performing this function, college also socializes. It takes people with disparate backgrounds and beliefs and brings them into line with mainstream norms of reason and taste. Independence of mind is tolerated in college, and even honored, but students have to master the accepted ways of doing things before they are permitted to deviate. Ideally, we want everyone to go to college, because college gets everyone on the same page. It’s a way of producing a society of like-minded grownups.

If you like the first theory, then it doesn’t matter which courses students take, or even what is taught in them, as long as they’re rigorous enough for the sorting mechanism to do its work. All that matters is the grades. If you prefer the second theory, then you might consider grades a useful instrument of positive or negative reinforcement, but the only thing that matters is what students actually learn. There is stuff that every adult ought to know, and college is the best delivery system for getting that stuff into people’s heads.

A lot of confusion is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been committed to both theories. The system is designed to be both meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional schools and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it passes into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the importance of college for everyone. We want higher education to be available to all Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive.

It wasn’t always like this. Before 1945, élite private colleges like Harvard and Yale were largely in the business of reproducing a privileged social class. Between 1906 and 1932, four hundred and five boys from Groton applied to Harvard. Four hundred and two were accepted. In 1932, Yale received thirteen hundred and thirty applications, and it admitted nine hundred and fifty-nine—an acceptance rate of seventy-two per cent. Almost a third of those who enrolled were sons of Yale graduates.

In 1948, through the exertions of people like James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, the Educational Testing Service went into business, and standardized testing (the S.A.T. and the A.C.T.) soon became the virtually universal method for picking out the most intelligent students in the high-school population, regardless of their family background, and getting them into the higher-education system. Conant regarded higher education as a limited social resource, and he wanted to make more strait the gate. Testing insured that only people who deserved to go to college did. The fact that Daddy went no longer sufficed. In 1940, the acceptance rate at Harvard was eighty-five per cent. By 1970, it was twenty per cent. Last year, thirty-five thousand students applied to Harvard, and the acceptance rate was six per cent.

Almost all the élite colleges saw a jump in applications this year, partly because they now recruit much more aggressively internationally, and acceptance rates were correspondingly lower. Columbia, Yale, and Stanford admitted less than eight per cent of their applicants. This degree of selectivity is radical. To put it in some perspective: the acceptance rate at Cambridge is twenty-one per cent, and at Oxford eighteen per cent.

But, as private colleges became more selective, public colleges became more accommodating. Proportionally, the growth in higher education since 1945 has been overwhelmingly in the public sector. In 1950, there were about 1.14 million students in public colleges and universities and about the same number in private ones. Today, public colleges enroll almost fifteen million students, private colleges fewer than six million.

There is now a seat for virtually anyone with a high-school diploma who wants to attend college. The City University of New York (my old employer) has two hundred and twenty-eight thousand undergraduates—more than four times as many as the entire Ivy League. The big enchilada of public higher education, the State of California, has ten university campuses, twenty-three state-college campuses, a hundred and twelve community-college campuses, and more than 3.3 million students. Six per cent of the American population is currently enrolled in college or graduate school. In Great Britain and France, the figure is about three per cent.

If you are a Theory 1 person, you worry that, with so many Americans going to college, the bachelor’s degree is losing its meaning, and soon it will no longer operate as a reliable marker of productive potential. Increasing public investment in higher education with the goal of college for everyone—in effect, taxpayer-subsidized social promotion—is thwarting the operation of the sorting mechanism. Education is about selection, not inclusion.

If you are friendly toward Theory 2, on the other hand, you worry that the competition for slots in top-tier colleges is warping educational priorities. You see academic tulip mania: students and their parents are overvaluing a commodity for which there are cheap and plentiful substitutes. The sticker price at Princeton or Stanford, including room and board, is upward of fifty thousand dollars a year. Public colleges are much less expensive—the average tuition is $7,605—and there are also many less selective private colleges where you can get a good education, and a lot more faculty face time, without having to spend every minute of high school sucking up to your teachers and reformatting your résumé. Education is about personal and intellectual growth, not about winning some race to the top.

It would be nice to conclude that, despite these anxieties, and given the somewhat contradictory goals that have been set for it, the American higher-education system is doing what Americans want it to do. College is broadly accessible: sixty-eight per cent of high-school graduates now go on to college (in 1980, only forty-nine per cent did), and employers continue to reward the credential, which means that there is still some selection going on. In 2008, the average income for someone with an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144; for someone with a bachelor’s degree, it was $58,613; for someone with only a high-school education, it was $31,283.

There is also increasing global demand for American-style higher education. Students all over the world want to come here, and some American universities, including N.Y.U. and Yale, are building campuses overseas. Higher education is widely regarded as the route to a better life. It is sometimes pointed out that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were college dropouts. It is unnecessary to point out that most of us are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything? Two recent books suggest that they are not. They suggest it pretty emphatically.

“Academically Adrift” (Chicago; $25) was written by two sociologists, Richard Arum (N.Y.U.) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia). Almost a third of it, sixty-eight pages, is a methodological appendix, which should give the general reader a clue to what to expect. “Academically Adrift” is not a diatribe based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data, which is what books critical of American higher education often are. It’s a social-scientific attempt to determine whether students are learning what colleges claim to be teaching them—specifically, “to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and communicate clearly.”

Arum and Roksa consider Theory 1 to be “overly cynical.” They believe that the job of the system is to teach people, not just to get them up the right educational ladders and down the right career chutes. They think that some people just aren’t capable of learning much at the college level. But they think that people who do go to college ought to be able to show something for the time and expense.

The authors decided that, despite a lot of rhetoric about accountability in higher education, no one seemed eager to carry out an assessment, so they did their own. They used a test known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or C.L.A. The test has three parts, though they use data from just one part, the “performance task.” Students are, for example, assigned to advise “an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed,” and are shown documents, such as news articles, an F.A.A. accident report, charts, and so on, and asked to write memos. The memos are graded for “critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing.”

The test was given to a group of more than two thousand freshmen in the fall of 2005, and again, to the same group, in the spring of 2007. Arum and Roksa say that forty-five per cent of the students showed no significant improvement, and they conclude that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”

The study design raises a lot of questions, from the reasonableness of assessing learning growth after only three full semesters of college to the reliability of the C.L.A. itself. The obvious initial inference to make about a test that does not pick up a difference where you expect one is that it is not a very good test. And, even if the test does measure some skills accurately, the results say nothing about whether students have acquired any knowledge, or socially desirable attitudes, that they didn’t have before they entered college.

There are other reasons for skepticism. It’s generally thought (by their professors, anyway) that students make a developmental leap after sophomore year—although Arum and Roksa, in a follow-up study completed after their book was finished, determined that, after four years, thirty-six per cent of students still did not show significant improvement on the C.L.A. But what counts as significant in a statistical analysis is a function of where you set the bar. Alexander Astin, the dean of modern higher-education research, who is now an emeritus professor at U.C.L.A., published a sharp attack on Arum and Roksa’s methodology in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and, in particular, on the statistical basis for the claim that forty-five per cent of college students do not improve.

Even leaving the C.L.A. results aside, though, “Academically Adrift” makes a case for concern. Arum and Roksa argue that many students today perceive college as fundamentally a social experience. Students spend less time studying than they used to, for example. In 1961, students reported studying for an average of twenty-five hours a week; the average is now twelve to thirteen hours. More than a third of the students in Arum and Roksa’s study reported that they spent less than five hours a week studying. In a University of California survey, students reported spending thirteen hours a week on schoolwork and forty-three hours socializing and pursuing various forms of entertainment.

Few people are fully reliable reporters of time use. But if students are studying less it may be because the demands on them are fewer. Half the students in the study said that they had not taken a single course in the previous semester requiring more than twenty pages of writing. A third said that they had not taken a course requiring more than forty pages of reading a week. Arum and Roksa point out that professors have little incentive to make their courses more rigorous. Professors say that the only aspect of their teaching that matters professionally is student course evaluations, since these can figure in tenure and promotion decisions. It’s in professors’ interest, therefore, for their classes to be entertaining and their assignments not too onerous. They are not deluded: a study carried out back in the nineteen-nineties (by Alexander Astin, as it happens) found that faculty commitment to teaching is negatively correlated with compensation.

Still, Arum and Roksa believe that some things do make a difference. First of all, students who are better prepared academically for college not only do better when they get to college; they improve more markedly while they’re there. And students who take courses requiring them to write more than twenty pages a semester and to read more than forty pages a week show greater improvement.

The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though. The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

Neither Theory 1 nor Theory 2 really explains how the educational system works for these non-liberal-arts students. For them, college is basically a supplier of vocational preparation and a credentialling service. The theory that fits their situation—Theory 3—is that advanced economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work.

Theory 3 explains the growth of the non-liberal education sector. As work becomes more high-tech, employers demand more people with specialized training. It also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs. There are now well over a hundred master’s degrees available, in fields from Avian Medicine to Web Design and Homeland Security. Close to fourteen times as many master’s degrees are given out every year as doctorates. When Barack Obama and Arne Duncan talk about how higher education is the key to the future of the American economy, this is the sector they have in mind. They are not talking about the liberal arts.

Still, students pursuing vocational degrees are almost always required to take some liberal-arts courses. Let’s say that you want a bachelor’s degree in Culinary Arts Management, with a Beverage Management major, from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. (Hmm. I might have taken a wrong turn in my education somewhere.) To get this degree, U.N.L.V. requires you to take two courses in English (Composition and World Literature), one course in philosophy, one course in either history or political science, courses in chemistry, mathematics, and economics, and two electives in the arts and humanities. If your professional goal is, let’s say, running the beverage service at the Bellagio, how much effort are you going to put into that class on World Literature?

This is where Professor X enters the picture. Professor X is the nom de guerre of a man who has spent more than ten years working evenings (his day job is with the government) as an adjunct instructor at “Pembrook,” a private four-year institution, and “Huron State,” a community college that is evidently public. The academic motivation of the students at these schools is utilitarian. Most of them are trying to get jobs—as registered nurses or state troopers, for example—that require a college degree, and they want one thing and one thing only from Professor X: a passing grade.

Professor X published an article in The Atlantic a few years ago about his experiences. David Brooks mentioned the piece in his Times column, and it provoked a small digital storm. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” (Viking; $25.95) is the book version. The author holds an M.F.A. in creative writing (he teaches composition and literature), and he writes in the style of mordant self-deprecation that is the approved M.F.A. mode for the memoir genre. He can be gratuitously snarky about his colleagues (though not about his students), but he’s smart and he’s generally good company. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” has the same kind of worm’s-eye charm as Stephen Akey’s “College” (1996), a story of undergraduate misadventures at Glassboro State College, though “College” is funnier.

Professor X has entwined his take on teaching with episodes in his personal life involving the purchase of a house he could not afford and subsequent marital tension. These parts of the book are too vague to be engaging. If you are going to go down the confessional path, you have to come across with the lurid details. We never find out where Professor X lives, what his wife does, what his kids are like, or much else about him. This is a writer who obviously enjoys the protection of a pseudonym. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is one of those books about higher education that are based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data (sort of like this review, actually), but the story is worth hearing.

Professor X thinks that most of the students he teaches are not qualified to attend college. He also thinks that, as far as writing and literature are concerned, they are unteachable. But the system keeps pushing them through the human-capital processor. They attend either because the degree is a job requirement or because they’ve been seduced by the siren song “college for everyone.” X considers the situation analogous to the real-estate bubble: Americans are being urged to invest in something they can’t afford and don’t need. Why should you have to pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper? To show that you can tough it out with Henry James? As Professor X sees it, this is a case of over-selection.

It’s also socially inefficient. The X-Man notes that half of all Americans who enter college never finish, that almost sixty per cent of students who enroll in two-year colleges need developmental (that is, remedial) courses, and that less than thirty per cent of faculty in American colleges are tenure-track. That last figure was supplied by the American Federation of Teachers, and it may be a little low, but it is undeniable that more than half the teaching in American colleges is done by contingent faculty (that is, adjuncts) like Professor X.

This does not mean, of course, that students would learn more if they were taught by tenured professors. Professor X is an adjunct, but he is also a dedicated teacher, and anyone reading his book will feel that his students respect this. He reprints a couple of course evaluations that sum up his situation in two nutshells:


Course was better than I thought. Before this I would of never voluntarily read a book. But now I almost have a desire to pick one up and read. I really like [Professor X], this is why I took the course because I saw he was teaching it. He’s kind of enthusiastic about things that probably aren’t that exciting to most people, which helps make the three hours go by quicker.

Professor X blames this state of affairs on what he calls “postmodern modes of thought,” and on the fact that there are more women teaching in college, which has had “a feminizing effect on the collective unconscious of faculty thought.” He also takes some shots at the academic field of composition and rhetoric, which he regards as low on rigor and high on consciousness-raising. This all seems beside the point. Professor X’s own pedagogy is old-fashioned and his grading is strict (he once failed nine students in a class of fifteen)—and he hasn’t had much luck with his students, either.

When he is not taking on trends in modern thought, Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like. Someone who has reached the age of eighteen or twenty and has never been a reader is not going to become a writer in fifteen weeks. On the other hand, it’s not a bad thing for such a person to see what caring about “things that probably aren’t that exciting to most people” looks like. A lot of teaching is modelling.

Professor X has published a follow-up essay, in The Atlantic, to promote the book. He’s on a mini-crusade to stem the flood of high-school graduates into colleges that require them to master a liberal-arts curriculum. He believes that students who aren’t ready for that kind of education should have the option of flat-out vocational training instead. They’re never going to know how to read Henry James; they’re never going to know how to write like Henry James. But why would they ever need to?

This is the tracking approach. You don’t wait twenty years for the system to sort people out, and you don’t waste resources on students who won’t benefit from an academically advanced curriculum. You make a judgment much earlier, as early as middle school, and designate certain students to follow an academic track, which gives them a liberal education, and the rest to follow a professional or vocational track. This is the way it was done for most of the history of higher education in the West. It is still the way it’s done in Britain, France, and Germany.

Until the twentieth century, that was the way it worked here, too. In the nineteenth century, a college degree was generally not required for admission to law school or medical school, and most law students and medical students did not bother to get one. Making college a prerequisite for professional school was possibly the most important reform ever made in American higher education. It raised the status of the professions, by making them harder to enter, and it saved the liberal-arts college from withering away. This is why liberal education is the élite type of college education: it’s the gateway to the high-status professions. And this is what people in other parts of the world mean when they say they want American-style higher education. They want the liberal arts and sciences.

Assuming that these new books are right (not a fully warranted assumption), and that many students are increasingly disengaged from the academic part of the college experience, it may be because the system has become too big and too heterogeneous to work equally well for all who are in it. The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus. This is what Arum and Roksa believe, anyway. Students at very selective colleges are still super-motivated—their motivation is one of the reasons they are selected—and most professors, since we are the sort of people who want a little gold star for everything we do, still want to make a difference to their students. But when motivation is missing, when people come into the system without believing that what goes on in it really matters, it’s hard to transform minds.

If there is a decline in motivation, it may mean that an exceptional phase in the history of American higher education is coming to an end. That phase began after the Second World War and lasted for fifty years. Large new populations kept entering the system. First, there were the veterans who attended on the G.I. Bill—2.2 million of them between 1944 and 1956. Then came the great expansion of the nineteen-sixties, when the baby boomers entered and enrollments doubled. Then came co-education, when virtually every all-male college, apart from the military academies, began accepting women. Finally, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was a period of remarkable racial and ethnic diversification.

These students did not regard college as a finishing school or a ticket punch. There was much more at stake for them than there had been for the Groton grads of an earlier day. (How many hours do you think they put in doing homework?) College was a gate through which, once, only the favored could pass. Suddenly, the door was open: to vets; to children of Depression-era parents who could not afford college; to women, who had been excluded from many of the top schools; to nonwhites, who had been segregated or under-represented; to the children of people who came to the United States precisely so that their children could go to college. For these groups, college was central to the experience of making it—not only financially but socially and personally. They were finally getting a bite at the apple. College was supposed to be hard. Its difficulty was a token of its transformational powers.

This is why “Why did we have to buy this book?” was such a great question. The student who asked it was not complaining. He was trying to understand how the magic worked. I (a Theory 2 person) wonder whether students at that college are still asking it.



Thanks to POSP stringer Tim for this article.

Analog to digital...about two years

It has been about two years since the switch from analog signals to digital signals. We were promised a lot and frankly have received little. The whole process, as I have discussed before, was questionable and basically a means for the Federal Government to make some bucks and it has somewhat backfired.

We were promised more channels and better quality...not always the case for us that use the convertor box. Substation transmissions yield a plethora of Public Broadcasting reruns, how to programs on gardening, home improvement, decorating, and crafts. There are the endless travel and culinary programs. Some stations offer a dedicated weather channel that supports commercials and infomercials. There are two movie channels dipping into the Columbia and MGM [United Artists, American International, independent productions] film libraries. But how much of the Three Stooges, Benny Hill, and "beach" movies can one absorb and the perpetual reruns of crappy "B" [or less] movies. And don't forget the hundreds of "Paid Programs" and no less than five religious stations.

The broadcast quality is a problem: Aspect ratios will differ from one channel to another...full screen to a CinemaScope ratio. And one is constantly doing what one did in the 1950s--adjusting the antenna.

Overall...a failure.