Much of the book revisits the same set of horror stories and PC atrocities some of them dating back to Profscam and Poisoned Ivy in the late 1980s. The author offers one recollection from his own college days (p. 317.)
I still remember the words of one of my major professors when I first started classes 1in 1962. He said, "This is not a vocational school. This university exists to form your mind and help you to become a fully literate and informed person. If you've come here for any other reason, then pick up your bags and leave now."University Diaries suggests that perspective has been lost, albeit for causes other than the triumph of the hippies. (The following is an extended excerpt from Easily Distracted.)
Those things get lost in the fallout from vocationalism (to get a job get a good education) and an obsession with productivity measured by things that can be measured (American Economic Review page equivalents for each professor comparable to output per worker hour: neither reveals much about the quality of other inputs.)What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives?
That can be about income. It can be about happiness or satisfaction. It can be about civic or political contribution to their communities. It can be about competence. It can be about imagination. Not all these things can be quantified, but all of them can or ought to be made as concrete as possible.
Many colleges and universities, public and private, have gotten lazy about this essential task. They’ve relied on evidence of the income gap, and on hazy assumptions about the interior impact of a college education on character, personality, and ability. We fall back on profiles of our accomplished alumni and so implicitly claim credit for their being what they now are—but our collective ability to account clearly for such particular results in terms of particular things we do is often far weaker than we let on. Truthfully, alumni for most colleges and universities do that job for their alma mater better than the alma mater can do for itself.
The interaction of student with student is a major part of the university's performance. University Diaries notes,
Hanging around with a bunch of smart peers and smart teachers in a materially bountiful environment might help most people to form and sharpen their intellects and skills, but I’m not entirely sure that most colleges and universities are entitled to strongly claim that the good results of that process systematically derive from the careful design of their four-year programs. Reading Walter Kirn’s “Lost in the Meritocracy” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly [for UD's take on this article, see UD, January 21, below], describing how in his years at Princeton he and his friends shammed their way through classes and began to have the terrible suspicion that the professors and administrators were shamming right along with them, my doubts redoubled.That interaction also provides a more effective counter to the freefall than many of the more organized efforts Mr Black hails yet again in his book. But when an insider -- Professor Burke is in the middle of the academic establishment -- begins to question the effectiveness of the enterprise,
perhaps the polemicists have a point.I sometimes think the nightmare scenario for American higher education would be if both parents and employers simultaneously came to the conclusion that the expense of a college education does not justify the return. If that gap not only stopped widening but started to close, the colleges and universities that passively have come to rely on the inevitability of young people seeking a bachelor’s degree would find themselves hard-pressed.
Having just been at the American Historical Association’s meetings, I couldn’t help but recall once again my worst interview experience, over ten years ago. I went to an interview with a tertiary public institution from a Midwestern state. Most of their students, by their own description, were local people and most of them were looking for a narrowly vocational degree of some kind. The historians interviewing me had joined in a sort of pact with several other departments in the humanities at their university to force a core curriculum requirement of several humanities courses on all the students. In the case of the historians, it was a Western Civ course. Had I been hired there, I would have taught a 4/4 load of Western Civ with class sizes around 200. No T.A.s. I must have looked pale as the chair leaned over and said, “Oh, don’t worry, all our tests are Scan-Tron”. You want a profscam? That’s a profscam. 200 person lecture courses on Western Civ with multiple choice questions foisted on people looking for some very particular professional or career training. Otherwise known as, “How to make people hate the liberal arts and see them as an obstacle”. You could do a better job wheeling in a television tuned to the History Channel.
Imagine if potential students not only recognized how pointless that kind of education is in terms of aiding with their life objectives but found that the society at large also recognized the same, and found other ways to train people and differentially search for good employees. It already happens here and there, in the software industry, for example.
Even at highly selective institutions, I don’t know that many faculty and administrators think very well or very systematically about whether the implicit guarantees about skills embedded in the degrees they confer are very well realized in the students that they graduate,
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