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How to Transform a College with One Uniform Curriculum into a University

[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Courses” _builder_version=”3.22″ custom_padding=”0px|0px|100px|0px”][et_pb_row column_structure=”3_4,1_4″ _builder_version=”4.5.6″ _module_preset=”default” custom_padding=”46px|||||”][et_pb_column type=”3_4″ _builder_version=”4.5.6″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″]CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT, The Elective System, 1885

How to transform a college with one uniform curriculum into a university without any prescribed course of study at all is a problem which more and more claims the attention of all thoughtful friends of American learning and education. To-night I hope to convince you that a university of liberal arts and sciences must give its students three things: (1) Freedom in choice of studies, (2) Opportunity to win academic distinction in single subjects or special lines of study, (3) A Discipline which distinctly imposes on each individual the responsibility of forming his own habits and guiding his own conduct. These three subjects I shall take up in succession, the first of them taking the greater part of the time allotted me. 1. Of freedom in choice of studies. Let me first present what I may call a mechanical argument on this subject. A college with a prescribed curriculum must provide, say, sixteen hours a week of instruction for each class, or sixty-four hours a week in all for the four classes, without allowing for repetitions of lectures or lessons. Six or eight teachers can easily give all the instruction needed in such a college, if no repetitions are necessary. If the classes are so large that they need to be divided into two or more sections, more teachers must be employed. If a few extra or optional studies, outside of the curriculum, are provided, a further addition to the number of teachers must be made. Twenty teachers would, however, be a liberal allowance for any college of this type; and accordingly there are hundreds of American colleges at this moment with less than twenty teachers all told. Under the prescribed system it would be impossible for such a college to find work for more teachers, if it had them. Now there are eighty teachers employed this year in Harvard College, exclusive of laboratory assistants; and these eighty teachers give about four hundred and twenty-five hours of public instruction a week without any repetitions, not counting the very important instruction which many of them give in laboratories. It is impossible for any undergraduate in his four years to take more than a tenth part of the instruction given by the College; and since four fifth of this instruction is of a higher grade than any which can be given in a college with a prescribed curriculum, a diligent student would need about forty years to cover the present field; and during those years the field would enlarge quite beyond his powers of occupation. Since the student cannot take the whole of the instruction offered, it seems to be necessary to allow him to take a part. A college must either limit closely its teaching, or provide some mode of selecting studies for the individual student. The limitation of teaching is an intolerable alternative for any institution which aspires to become a university; for a university must try to teach every subject, above the grade of its admission requirements, for which there is any demand; and to teach it thoroughly enough to carry the advanced student to the confines of present knowledge, and make him capable of original research. These are the only limits which a university can properly set to its instruction-except indeed those rigorous limits which poverty imposes. The other alternative is selection or election of studies. The elective system at Harvard has been sixty years in developing, and during fourteen of these years-from 1846 to 1860-the presidents and the majority of the faculty were not in favor of it; but they could find no way of escape from the dilemma which I have set before you. They could not deliberately reduce the amount of instruction offered, and election of studies in some degree was the inevitable alternative. The practical question then is, At what age, and at what stage of his educational progress, can an American boy be offered free choice of studies? Or, in other words, At what age can an American boy best go to a free university? Before answering this question I will ask your attention to four preliminary observations. The European boy goes to free universities at various ages from seventeen to twenty; and the American boy is decidedly more mature and more capable of taking care of himself than the European boy of like age. The change from school to university ought to be made as soon as it would be better for the youth to associate with older students under a discipline suited to their age, than with younger pupils under a discipline suited to theirs-as soon, in short, as it would be better for the youth to be the youngest student in a university than the oldest boy in a school. The school might still do much for the youth; the university may as yet be somewhat too free for him: there must be a balancing of advantages against disadvantages; but the wise decision is to withdraw him betimes from a discipline which he is outgrowing, and put him under a discipline which he is to grow up to. When we think of putting boy into college, our imaginations are apt to dwell upon the occasional and exceptional evil influences to which his new freedom will expose him, more than upon those habitual and prevailing influences of college companionship which will nourish his manliness and develop his virtue; just as we are apt to think of heredity chiefly as a means of transmitting vices and diseases, whereas it is normally the means of transmitting and accumulating infinitely various virtues and serviceable capacities. A young man is much affected by the expectations which his elders entertain of him. If they expect him to behave like a child, his lingering childishness will oftener rule his actions; if they expect him to behave like a man, his incipient manhood will oftener assert itself. The pretended parental or sham monastic regime of the common American college seems to me to bring out the childishness rather than the manliness of the average student; as it evidenced by the pranks he plays, the secret societies in which he rejoices, and the barbarous or silly customs which he accepts and transmits. The conservative argument is: a college must deal with the student as he is; he will be what he has been, namely, a thoughtless, aimless, lazy, and possibly vicious boy; therefore a policy which gives him liberty is impracticable. The progressive argument is: adapt college policy to the best students, and not to the worst; improve the policy, and in time the evil fruits of a mistaken policy will disappear. I would only urge at this point that a far-seeing educational policy must be based upon potentialities as well as actualities, upon things which may be reasonably hoped for, planned, and aimed at, as well as upon things which are. The condition of secondary education is an important factor in our problem. It is desirable that the young men who are to enjoy university freedom should have already received at school a substantial training, in which the four great subdivisions of elementary knowledge-languages, history, mathematics, and natural science-were all adequately represented; but it must be admitted that this desirable training is now given in very few schools, and that in many parts of the country there are not secondary schools enough of even tolerable quality. For this condition of secondary education the colleges are in part responsible; for they have produced few good teachers, except for the ancient languages; and they have required for admission to college hardly anything but the elements of Greek, Latin, and mathematics. But how should this condition of things affect the policy of an institution which sees its way to obtain a reasonable number of tolerably prepared students: Shall we stop trying to create a university because the condition of secondary education in the country at large is unsatisfactory? The difficulty with that policy of inaction is that the reform and development of secondary education depend upon the right organization and conduct of universities. It is the old problem: Which was first created, an egg or a hen? In considering the relation of college life to school life, many people are confused by a misleading metaphor-that of a building. They say to themselves: on weak foundations no strong superstructure can be built; schools lay the foundations on which the university must build; therefore, if preparatory schools fail to do good work, no proper university work can subsequently be done. The analogy seems perfect, but has this fatal defect: education is a vital process, not a mechanical one. Let us, therefore, use an illustration drawn from a vital function, that of nutrition. A child has had poor milk as an infant, and is not well developed; therefore, when its teeth are cut, and it is ready for bread, meat, and oatmeal, you are to hold back this substantial diet, and give it the sweetened milk and water, and Mellin’s Food, which would have suited it when a baby. The mental food of a boy has not been as nourishing and abundant as it should have been at school; therefore when he goes to college or university his diet must be that which he should have had at school, but missed. Education involves growth or development from within in every part; and metaphors drawn from the process of laying one stone upon another are not useful in educational discussions. Harvard College now finds itself able to get nearly three hundred tolerably prepared students every year from one hundred or more schools and private tutors scattered over the country; and she is only just beginning to reap the fruit of the changes in her own policy and discipline which the past eighteen years have wrought. Schools follow universities, and will be what universities make them. With these preliminary suggestions I proceed to answer the question, At what age can an American boy best go to a university where choice of studies is free? and to defend my answer. I believe the normal age under reasonably favorable conditions to be eighteen. In the first place, I hold that the temperament, physical constitution, mental aptitudes, and moral quality of a boy are all well determined by the time he is eighteen years old. The potential man is already revealed. His capacities and incapacities will be perfectly visible to his teacher, or to any observant and intimate friend, provided that his studies at school have been fairly representative. If his historical studies have been limited to primers of Greek, Roman, and American history, his taste and capacity for historical study will not be known either to his teacher or to himself; if he has had no opportunity to study natural science, his powers in that direction will be quite unproved; but if the school course has been reasonably comprehensive, there need be no doubt as to the most profitable direction of his subsequent studies. The boys future will depend greatly upon the influences, happy or unhappy, to which he is subjected; but given all favorable influences, his possibilities are essentially determined. The most fortunate intellectual influences will be within his reach, if he has liberty to choose the mental food which he can best assimilate. Secondly, at eighteen the American boy has passed the age when a compulsory external discipline is useful. Motives and inducements may be set vividly before him; he may be told that he must do so and so in order to win something which he desires or values; prizes and rewards near or remote may be held out to him; but he cannot be driven to any useful exercise of his mind. Thirdly, a well-instructed youth of eighteen can select for himself-not for any other boy, or for the fictitious universal boy but for himself alone-a better course of study than any college faculty, or any wise man who does not know him and his ancestors and his previous life, can possibly select for him. In choosing his course he will naturally seek aid from teachers and friends who have intimate knowledge of him, and he will act under the dominion of that intense conservatism which fortunately actuates civilized man in the whole matter of education, and under various other safeguards which nature and not arbitrary regulation provides. When a young man whom I never saw before asks me what studies he had better take in college, I am quite helpless, until he tells me what he likes and what he dislikes to study, what kinds of exertion are pleasurable to him, what sports he cares for, what reading interests him, what his parents and grandparents were in the world, and what he means to be. In short, I can only show him how to think out the problem for himself with such lights as he has and nobody else can have. The proposition that a boy of eighteen can choose his own studies, with the natural helps, more satisfactorily than anybody else can choose them for him, seems at first sight absurd; but I believe it to be founded upon the nature of things, and it is also for me a clear result of observation. I will state first the argument from the nature of things, and then describe my own observations. Every youth of eighteen is an infinitely complex organization, the duplicate of which neither does nor ever will exist. His inherited traits are different from those of every other human being; his environment has been different from that of every other child; his passions, emotions, hopes, and desires were never before associated in any other creature just as they are in him; and his will-force is aroused, stimulated, exerted, and exhausted in ways wholly his own. The infinite variety of form and feature, which we know human bodies to be capable of, presents but a faint image of the vastly deeper diversities of the minds and characters which are lodged in these unlike shells. To discern and take due account of these diversities no human insight or wisdom is sufficient, unless the spontaneous inclinations, natural preferences, and easiest habitual activities of each individual are given play. It is for the happiness of the individual and the benefit of society alike that these mental diversities should be cultivated, not suppressed. The individual enjoys most that intellectual labor for which he is most fit; and society is best served when every man’s peculiar skill, faculty, or aptitude is developed and utilized to the highest possible degree. The presumption is, therefore, against uniformity in education, and in favor of diversity at the earliest possible moment. What determines that moment? To my thinking, the limit of compulsory uniform instruction should be determined by the elementary quality and recognized universal utility of the subjects of such instruction. For instance, it is unquestionable that every child needs to know how to read, write, and, to a moderate extent, cipher. Therefore primary schools may have a uniform programme. One might naturally suppose that careful study of the mother-tongue and its literature would be considered a uniform need for all youth; but as a matter of fact there is no agreement to this effect. The English language and literature have hardly yet won a place for themselves in American schools. Only the elements of two foreign languages and the elements of algebra and geometry can be said to be generally recognized as indispensable to the proper training of all young people who are privileged to study beyond their seventeenth year. There is no consent as to the uniform desirableness of the elements of natural science, and there is much difference of opinion about the selection of the two foreign languages, the majority of educated people supposing two dead languages to be preferable, a minority thinking that living languages are permissible. The limit of that elementary knowledge, of which by common consent all persons who are to be highly educated stand in need, is therefore a narrow one, easily to be reached and passed, under respectable instruction, by any youth of fair ability before he is eighteen years old. There, at least, ceases justifiable uniformity in education. There, at least, election of studies should begin; and the safest guides to a wise choice will be the taste, inclination, and special capacity of each individual. When it comes to the choice of a profession, everybody knows that the only wisdom is to follow inclination. In my view, the only wisdom in determining those liberal studies which may be most profitably pursued after eighteen is to follow inclination. Hence it is only the individual youth who can select that course of study which will most profit him, because it will most interest him. The very fact of choice goes far to secure the cooperation of his will. I have already intimated that there exist certain natural guides and safeguards for every youth who is called upon in a free university to choose his own studies. Let us see what these natural aids are. In the first place, he cannot help taking up a subject which he has already studied about where he left it off, and every new subject at the beginning and not at the middle. Secondly, many subjects taught at the university involve other subjects, which must therefore be studied first. Thus, no one can get far in physics without being familiar with trigonometry and analytic geometry; chemical analysis presupposes acquaintance with general chemistry, and paleontology acquaintance with botany and zoology; no one can study German philosophy to advantage unless he can read German, and no student can profitably discuss practical economic problems until he has mastered the elementary principles of political economy. Every advanced course, whether in language, philosophy, history, mathematics, or science, presupposes acquaintance with some elementary course or courses. Thirdly, there is a prevailing tendency on the part of every competent student to carry far any congenial subject once entered upon. To repress this most fortunate tendency is to make real scholarship impossible. So effective are these natural safeguards against fickleness and inconsecutiveness in the choice of studies, that artificial regulation is superfluous. I give, in the next place, some results of my own observation upon the working of an elective system; and that you may have my credentials before you I will describe briefly my opportunities of observation. I had experience as an undergraduate of a college course almost wholly required; for I happened upon nearly the lowest stage to which the elective system in Harvard College ever fell, after its initiation in 1825. During the nine years from 1854 to 1863 I became intimately acquainted with the working of this mainly prescribed curriculum from the point of view of a tutor and assistant professor who had a liking for administrative details. After a separation from the University of six years, two of which were spent in Europe as a student and four at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor, I went back as president in 1869 to find a tolerably broad elective system already under way. The wishes of the governing boards and external circumstances all favoring it, the system was rapidly developed. Required studies were gradually abolished or pushed back; so that first the Senior year was made completely elective, then the Junior, then the Sophomore, and finally in June last the Freshman year was made chiefly elective. No required studies now remain except the writing of English, the elements of either French or German (one of these two languages being required for admission), and a few lectures on chemistry and physics. None of the former exclusive staples, Greek, Latin, mathematics, logic, and metaphysics, are required, and no particular combinations or selections of courses are recommended by the faculty. I have therefore had ample opportunity to observe at Harvard the working of almost complete prescription, of almost complete freedom, and of all intermediate methods. In Europe I studied the free university method; and at the Institute of Technology I saw the system-excellent for technical schools-of several well-defined courses branching from a common stock of uniformly prescribed studies. The briefest form in which I can express the general result of my observation is this: I have never known a student of any capacity to select for himself a set of studies covering four years which did not apparently possess more theoretical and practical merit for his case than the required curriculum of my college days. Every prescribed curriculum is necessarily elementary from beginning to end, and very heterogeneous. Such is the press of subjects that no one subject can possibly be carried beyond its elements; no teacher, however learned and enthusiastic, can have any advanced pupils; and no scholar, however competent and eager, can make serious attainments in any single subject. Under an elective system the great majority of students use their liberty to pursue some subject or subjects with a reasonable degree of thoroughness. This concentration upon single lines develops advanced teaching, and results in a general raising of the level of instruction. Students who have decided taste for any particular subject wisely devote a large part of their time to that subject and its congeners. Those who have already decided upon their profession wisely choose subjects which are related to, or underlie, their future professional studies; thus, the future physician will advantageously give a large share of his college course to French, German, chemistry, physics, and biology; while the future lawyer will study logic, ethics, history, political economy, and the use of English in argumentative writing and speaking. Among the thousands of individual college courses determined by the choice of the student in four successive years, which the records of Harvard College now preserve, it is rare to find one which does not exhibit an intelligible sequence of studies. It should be understood in this connection that all the studies which are allowed to count toward the A.B. at Harvard are liberal or pure, no technical or professional studies being admissible. Having said thus much about the way in which an American student will use freedom in the choice of studies, I desire to point out that a young American must enjoy the privileges of university life between eighteen and twenty-two, if at all. From two thirds to three fourths of college graduates go into professions or employments which require of them elaborate special preparation. The medical student needs four years of professional training, the law student at least three, the good teacher and the skilful architect quite as much. Those who enter the service of business corporations, or go into business for themselves, have the business to learn-a process which ordinarily takes several years. If a young man takes his A.B. at twenty-two, he can hardly hope to begin the practice of his profession before he is twenty-six. That is quite late enough. It is clearly impossible, therefore, that the American university should be constructed on top of the old-fashioned American college. The average Freshman at Harvard is eighteen and two thirds years old when he enters, and at the majority of colleges he is older still. For the next three or four years he must have freedom to choose among liberal studies, if he is ever to enjoy that inestimable privilege. Two common objections to an elective system shall next have our attention. The first is often put in the form of a query. Election of studies may be all very well for conscientious or ambitious students, or for those who have a strong taste for certain studies; but what becomes under such a system, of the careless, indifferent, lazy boys who have no bent or intellectual ambition of any sort? I answer with a similar query: What became of such boys under the uniform compulsory system? Did they get any profit to speak of under that regime? Not within my observation. It really does not make much difference what these unawakened minds dawdle with. There is, however, much more chance that such young men will get aroused from their lethargy under an elective system than under a required. When they follow such faint promptings of desire as they feel, they at least escape the sense of grievance and repugnance which an arbitrary assignment to certain teachers and certain studies often creates. An elective system does not mean liberty to do nothing. The most indifferent student must pass a certain number of examinations every year. He selects perhaps those subjects in which he thinks he can pass the best examinations within the smallest amount of labor; but in those very subjects the instruction will be on a higher plane than it can ever reach under a compulsory system, and he will get more benefit from them than he would from other subjects upon which he put the same amount of labor but attained less success. It is an important principle in education, from primary school to university, that the greater the visible attainment for a given amount of labor the better; and this rule applies quite forcibly to a weak student as to a strong one. Feeble or inert students are considerably influenced in choosing their studies by the supposed quality of the teachers whom they will meet. As a rule they select the very teachers who are likely to have the most influence with them, being guided by traditions received from older students of their sort. It is the unanimous opinion of the teachers at Cambridge that more and better work is got from this class of students under the elective system than was under the required. Having said thus much about the effects of free choice of studies upon the unpromising student, I must add that the policy of an institution of education, of whatever grade, ought never to be determined by the needs of the least capable students; and that a university should aim at meeting the wants of the best students at any rate, and the wants of inferior students only so far as it can meet them without impairing the privileges of the best. A uniform curriculum, by enacting superficiality and prohibiting thoroughness, distinctly sacrifices the best scholars to the average. Free choice of studies gives the young genius the fullest scope without impairing the chances of the drone and the dullard. The second objection with which I wish to deal is this: free choice implies that there are no studies which are recognized as of supreme merit, so that every young man unquestionably ought to pursue them, Can this be? Is it possible that the accumulated wisdom of the race cannot prescribe with certainty the studies which will best develop the human mind in general between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two? At first it certainly seems strange that we have to answer no; but when we reflect how very brief the acquaintance of the race has been with the great majority of the subjects which are now taught in a university the negative answer seems less surprising. Out of the two hundred courses of instruction which stand on the list of Harvard University this year it would be difficult to select twenty which could have been given at the beginning of this century with the illustrations, materials, and methods now considered essential to the educational quality of the course. One realizes more easily this absence of accumulated experience on considering that all the natural sciences, with comparative philology, political economy, and history, are practically new subjects, that all mathematics is new except the elements of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, that the recent additions to ethics and metaphysics are of vast extent, and that the literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have great importance in several European languages. The materials and methods of university education always have been, and always will be, changing from generation to generation. We think, perhaps with truth, that the nineteenth century has been a period of unprecedented growth and progress; but every century has probably witnessed an unprecedented advance in civilization, simply because the process is cumulative, if no catastrophes arrest it. It is one of the most important functions of universities to store up the accumulated knowledge of the race, and so to use these stores that each successive generation of youth shall start with all the advantages which their predecessors have won. Therefore a university, while not neglecting the ancient treasures of learning, has to keep a watchful eye upon the new fields of discovery, and has to invite its students to walk in new-made as well as in long-trodden paths. Concerning the direct educational influence of all these new subjects the race cannot be said to have much accumulated wisdom. One presumption of considerable scope may, however, be said to be established by experience. In every new field of knowledge the mental powers of the adventurers and discoverers found full play and fruitful exercise. Some rare human mind or minds must have laboriously developed each new subject of study. It may fairly be presumed that the youth will find some strenuous exercise of his faculties in following the masters into any field which it taxed their utmost powers to explore and describe. To study the conquests of great minds in any field of knowledge must be good training for young minds of kindred tastes and powers. That all branches of sound knowledge are of equal dignity and equal educational value for mature students is the only hopeful and tenable view in our day. Long ago it became quite impossible for one mind to compass more than an insignificant fraction of the great sum of acquired knowledge. Before I leave the subject of election of studies, let me point out that there is not a university of competent resources upon the continent of Europe in which complete freedom of studies has not long prevailed; and that Oxford and Cambridge have recently provided an almost complete liberty for their students. In our own country respectable colleges now offer a considerable proportion of elective studies, and as a rule the greater their resources in teachers, collections, and money, the more liberal their application of the elective principle. Many colleges, however, still seem to have but a halting faith in the efficacy of the principle, and our educated public has but just begun to appreciate its importance. So fast as American institutions acquire the resources and powers of European universities, they will adopt the methods proper to universities wherever situate. At present our best colleges fall very far short of European standards in respect to number of teachers, and consequently to amplitude of teaching. As yet we have no university in America-only aspirants to that eminence. All the more important is it that we should understand the conditions under which a university can be developed-the most indispensable of which is freedom in choice of studies. 2. A university must give its students opportunity to win distinction in special subjects or lines of study. The uniform curriculum led to a uniform degree, the first scholar and the last receiving the same diploma. A university cannot be developed on that plan. It must provide academic honors at graduation for distinguished attainments in single subjects. These honors encourage students to push far on single lines; whence arises a demand for advanced instruction in all departments in which honors can be won, and this demand, taken in connection with the competition which naturally springs up between different departments, stimulates the teachers, who in turn stimulate their pupils. The elaborate directions given by each department to candidates for honors are so many definite pieces of advice to students who wish to specialize their work. It is an incidental advantage of the system that the organization of departments of instruction is promoted by it. The teachers of Latin, of history, or of philosophy, find it necessary to arrange their courses in orderly sequence, to compare their methods and their results, and to enrich and diversify as much as possible the instruction which they collectively offer. Many European universities, but especially the English, offer honors, or prizes, or both of these inducements, for distinguished merit in specialties; and the highly valued degree of Ph.D. in Germany is a degree given for large attainments in one or two branches of knowledge, with mention of the specialty. The Harvard faculty announced their system of honors in 1866-67, and they certainly never passed a more effective piece of legislation. In 1879 they devised a lesser distinction at graduation called honorable mention, which has also worked very well. To get honors in any department ordinarily requires a solid year and a half’s work; to get honorable mention requires about half that time. The important function of all such devices is to promote specialization of work and therefore to develop advanced instruction. It is unnecessary to point out how absolutely opposed to such a policy the uniform prescription of a considerable body of elementary studies must be. 3. A university must permit its students, in the main, to govern themselves. It must have a large body of students, else many of the numerous courses of highly specialized instruction will find no hearers, and the students themselves will not feel that very wholesome influence which comes from observation of and contact with large numbers of young men from different nations, States, schools, families, sects, parties, and condition of life. In these days a university is best placed in or near the seat of a considerable population; so that its officers and students can always enjoy the various refined pleasures, and feel alike the incitements and the restraints, of a highly cultivated society. The universities of Rome, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Leipsic, Christiania, Madrid, and Edinburgh forcible illustrate both of these advantages. These conditions make it practically impossible for a university to deal with its students on any principle of seclusion, either in a village or behind walls and bars. Fifteen hundred able-bodied young men living in buildings whose doors stand open night and day, or in scattered lodging-houses, cannot be mechanically protected from temptations at the university any more than at the homes from which they came. Their protection must be within them. They must find it in memory of home, in pure companionship, in hard work, in intellectual ambition, religious sentiment, and moral purpose. A sense of personal freedom and responsibility reinforces these protecting influences, which the existence of a supervising authority claiming large powers which it has no effective means of exercising weakens them. The in loco parentis theory is an ancient fiction which ought no longer to deceive anybody. No American college, wherever situated, possesses any method of discipline which avails for the suppression or exclusion of vice. The vicious student can find all means of indulgence in the smallest village, and the worst vices are the stillest. It is a distinct advantage of the genuine university method that it does not pretend to maintain any parental or monastic discipline over its students, but frankly tells them that they must govern themselves. The moral purpose of a university’s policy should be to train young men to self-control and self-reliance through liberty. It is not the business of a university to train men for those functions in which implicit obedience is of the first importance. On the contrary, it should train men for those occupations in which self-government, independence, and originating power are preeminently needed. Let no one imagine that a young man is in peculiar moral danger at an active and interesting university. Far from it. Such a university is the safest place in the world for young men who have anything in them-far safer than counting-room, shop, factory, farm, barrack, forecastle, or ranch. The student lives in a bracing atmosphere; books engage him; good companionships invite him; good occupations defend him; helpful friends surround him; pure ideals are held up before him; ambition spur him; honor beckons him.

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Why study the humanities?

[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section][et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ admin_label=”Courses” _builder_version=”3.22″ custom_padding=”0px|0px|100px|0px”][et_pb_row column_structure=”3_4,1_4″ _builder_version=”4.5.6″ _module_preset=”default” custom_padding=”46px|||||”][et_pb_column type=”3_4″ _builder_version=”4.5.6″ _module_preset=”default”][et_pb_text _builder_version=”4.6.0″ _module_preset=”default” hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″]To Reclaim a Legacy
A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education

Walter Lippmann, 1941

One reason I want to make the gift (was) to remind young people that the liberal arts are still the traditional highway to great thinking and the organization of a life.

James Michener, appearing on the Sept. 26, 1984, CBS Morning News on the occasion of his $2 million gift to Swarthmore College.

Foreward

In March 1984 I invited 31 prominent teachers, scholars, administrators, and authorities on higher education to join a Study Group on the State of Learning in the Humanities in Higher Education. The study group held three public meetings during the spring and summer to seek answers to three questions: What is the condition of learning in humanities; why is it as it is; and what, if anything, should be done about it? Our discussion centered on the teaching and learning of the humanities at the baccalaureate level, but we also considered how secondary and graduate education have affected undergraduate education and been affected by it.

The study group was charged with assessing only the state of the humanities, not that of other subjects taught at the college level or higher education generally. That this report does not discuss these other subjects — notably mathematics, the sciences, and social sciences — is in no way a commentary on their importance. They, too, are essential to an educated person but lie outside the mandate of our group.

The members of the study group came from research universities, land grant colleges, co-educational liberal arts colleges, women’s colleges, historically black colleges, two-year colleges, and secondary schools. They included presidents, vice presidents, deans, and professors, as well as officials of educational and scholarly associations, a journalist, a foundation officer, and a school principal. They were, in sum, as diverse as the enterprise of education itself.

As one would expect from such a heterogeneous group of capable, experienced individuals, there was often lively discussion, sometimes debate. Despite our different backgrounds and perspectives, however, we found common ground on a number of important points. The study group’s discussions were aided by four kinds of information:

• Detailed descriptions of graduation requirements at 15 colleges and universities representative of a diversity of institutions.

• Reports prepared by study group members on the humanities in secondary education, two-year colleges, and graduate schools.

• Papers written by individual members of the study group recommending ways to improve teaching and learning in the humanities.

• Data from several national studies and surveys pertaining to undergraduate education and to the humanities in general.

In this report I offer my assessment, based on these meetings, of the state of learning in the humanities in higher education. Although the report is informed to no small degree by the work of the study group, the responsibility for authorship belongs to me. Members of the group were shown a draft of the report and asked to comment on it. From their responses, it is clear that they concur with the report’s general thrust and with its particular points.

The study group was convened at this particular moment because the time is right for constructive reform of American education. Over the past two years, most of the national attention has been directed to elementary and secondary education. This scrutiny, epitomized by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, has contributed to a number of long overdue changes, with state and local governments leading the way. Higher education has largely escaped the public’s eye except for the National Commission on Student Financial Assistance and occasional studies, commissions, and appeals by higher education specialists. This situation should and will change. Indeed, it has already begun to change with the recent publication of the report from the National Institute of Education’s Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education and forthcoming report of the Association of American Colleges on the quality of the baccalaureate degree. With more than half of all high school graduates now going on to some form of postsecondary education, the public — parents, employers, alumni, and the students themselves — is beginning to ask, and has the right to ask, whether today’s colleges and universities are offering to America’s youth an education worthy of our heritage.

This report has five sections. The first, “Why study the humanities?,” explores briefly the question of what the humanities are and why they are important to an educated person. The second section, “How should the humanities be taught and learned?,” offers the study group’s and my thoughts on what constitutes an appropriate education in the humanities. The third section, “How well are the humanities being taught and learned on the nation’s campuses?,” compares the achievable to the actual, again drawing heavily from the study group’s discussions. The fourth section, “The challenge to academic leadership,” discusses the role of college presidents and other academic officials in strengthening the place of the humanities. The fifth and final section offers some thoughts on how colleges and universities might do a better job in transmitting the accumulated wisdom of our civilization.

I want to thank the members of the study group for their hard work, their inspired discussions at our meetings, the thoughtful papers they submitted for consideration and discussion, and their helpful suggestions in reviewing a draft of this report. I especially want to thank Daniel Schecter of the Endowment for heading up the staff effort on this project.

Introduction

Although more than 50 percent of America’s high school graduates continue their education at American colleges and universities, few of them can be said to receive there an adequate education in the culture and civilization of which they are members. Most of our college graduates remain short changed in the humanities — history, literature, philosophy, and the ideals and practices of the past that have shaped the society they enter. The fault lies principally with those of us whose business it is to educate the students. We have blamed others, but the responsibility is ours. Not by our words but by our actions, by our indifference, and by our intellectual diffidence we have brought about this condition. It is we the educators — not scientists, business people, or the general public — who too often have given up the great task of transmitting a culture to its rightful heirs. Thus, what we have on many of our campuses is an unclaimed legacy, a course of studies in which the humanities have been syphoned off, diluted, or so adulterated that the students graduate knowing little of their heritage.

In particular, the study group was disturbed by a number of trends and developments and higher education:

• Many of our colleges and universities have lost a clear sense of the importance of the humanities and the purpose of education, allowing the thickness of their catalogs to substitute for vision and a philosophy of education.

• The humanities, and particularly the study of Western civilization, have lost their central place in the undergraduate curriculum. At best, they are but one subject among many that students might be exposed to before graduating. At worst, and too often, the humanities are virtually absent.

• A student can obtain a bachelor’s degree from 75 percent of all American colleges and universities without having studied European history, from 72 percent without having studied American literature or history, and from 86 percent without having studied the civilizations of classical Greece and Rome.

• Fewer than half of all colleges and universities now require foreign language study for the bachelor’s degree, down from nearly 90 percent in 1966.

• The sole acquaintance with the humanities for many undergraduates comes during their first two years of college, often in ways that discourage further study.

• The number of students choosing majors in the humanities has plummeted. Since 1970 the number of majors in English has declined by 57 percent, in philosophy by 41 percent, in history by 62 percent, and in modern languages by 50 percent.

• Too many students are graduating from American colleges and universities lacking even the most rudimentary knowledge about the history, literature, art, and philosophical foundations of their nation and their civilization.

• The decline in learning in the humanities was caused in part by a failure of nerve and faith on the part of many college faculties and administrators, and persists because of a vacuum in educational leadership. A recent study of college presidents found that only two percent are active in their institutions’ academic affairs.

In order to reverse the decline, the study group recommended:

• The nation’ s colleges and universities must reshape their undergraduate curricula based on a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, regardless of major, and on the study of history, philosophy, languages, and literature.

• College and university presidents must take responsibility for the educational needs of all students in their institutions by making plain what the institution stands for and what knowledge it regards as essential to a good education.

• Colleges and universities must reward excellent teaching in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.

• Faculties must put aside narrow departmentalism and instead work with administrators to shape a challenging curriculum with a core of common studies.

• Study of the humanities and Western civilization must take its place at the heart of the college curriculum.

Why study the humanities?

The federal legislation that established the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 defined humanities as specific disciplines: “language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology: comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts”; and “those aspects of the social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods.” But to define humanities by itemizing the academic fields they embrace is to overlook the qualities that make them uniquely important and worth studying. Expanding upon a phrase from Matthew Arnold, I would describe the humanities as the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about human experience. The humanities tell us how men and women of our own and other civilizations have grappled with life’s enduring, fundamental questions: What is justice? What should be loved? What deserves to be defended? What is courage? What is noble? What is base? Why do civilizations flourish? Why do they decline?

Kant defined the essence of the humanities in four questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for? What is man? These questions are not simply diversions for intellectuals or playthings for the idle. As a result of the ways in which these questions have been answered, civilizations have emerged, nations have developed, wars have been fought, and people have lived contendedly or miserably.

If ideas are important, it surely follows that learning and life are poorer without the humanities. Montaigne wrote:

A pupil should be taught what it means to know something, and what it means not to know it; what should be the design and end of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are, the difference between ambition and greed, loyalty and servitude, liberty and license; and the marks of true and solid contentment.

Further, the humanities can contribute to an informed sense of community by enabling us to learn about and become participants in a common culture, shareholders in our civilization. But our goal should be more than just a common culture — even television and comics can give us that. We should, instead, want all students to know a common culture rooted in civilization’s lasting vision, its highest shared ideals and aspirations, and its heritage. Professor E. D. Hirsch of the University of Virginia calls the beginning of this achievement “cultural literacy” and reminds us that “no culture exists that is ignorant of its own traditions.” As the late philosopher Charles Frankel once said, it is through the humanities that a civilized society talks to itself about things that matter most.

How should the humanities be taught and learned?

Mankind’s answers to compelling questions are available to us through the written and spoken word — books, manuscripts, letters, plays, and oral traditions — and also in non-literary forms, which John Ruskin called the book of art. Within them art expressions of human greatness and of path those and tragedy. In order to tap the consciousness and memory of civilization one must confront these texts and works of art.

The members of the study group discussed at length the most effective ways to teach the humanities to undergraduates. Our discussion returned continually to two basic prerequisites for learning in the humanities: good teaching and a good curriculum.

Good teaching

Good teaching is at least as essential in humanities as in other fields of learning. In this connection, it is critical to point out that of all undergraduate credit hours taken in the humanities, 87 percent are taken in the freshman and sophomore years. Because non-humanities majors account for the largest part of these credit hours, courses taken at the introductory level are the first and only collegiate exposure to the humanities for many students. Therefore, we should want to extend to these students the most attractive invitation to the humanities possible. This requires teachers who can make the humanities live and who can guide students through the landscape of human thought.

Just as students can be drawn to the humanities by good teachers, they can be chased off by poor ones. “Students come to learning through their teachers,” wrote Oberlin College Dean Robert Longsworth, “and no list of great works nor any set of curricular requirements can do the work of a good teacher.” Although it can take many forms, we all know what poor teaching is. It can be lifeless or tendentious, mechanical or ideological. It can be lacking in conviction. Perhaps most commonly, it can fail to have a sense of the significance of the material it purports to study and teach. It can bore and deaden where it means to quicken and elevate. Giving one example, Harvard Professor David Riesman pointed out that poor teaching can masquerade as good teaching when it “invites students to join a club of sophisticated cynics who are witty, abrasive, and sometimes engrossing; many teachers in the humanities parade and glorify their eccentricities, and only on reflection and at some distance does one realize that they are really lifeless.”

What characterizes good teaching in humanities? First, and foremost, a teacher must have achieved mastery of the material. But this is not enough; there must also be engagement. Professor William Arrowsmith of Emory University describe good teachers as “committed to teaching what they have learned to love.” In one crucial way, good teachers cannot be dispassionate. They cannot be dispassionate about the works they teach — assuming that they are teaching important works. This does not mean that they advocate each idea of every author, but rather that they are moved and are seen to be moved by the power of the works and are able to convey that power to their students. Just as good scholarship is inspired, so must good teaching be.

A good curriculum

If the teacher is the guide, the curriculum is the path. A good curriculum marks the points of significance so that the student does not wander aimlessly over the terrain, dependent solely on chance to discover the landmarks of human achievement.

Colleges and universities have a responsibility to design general education curricula that identify these landmarks. David Savage of the Los Angeles Times expressed the consensus of the study group when he said: “Most students enter college expecting that the university and its leaders have a clear vision of what is worth knowing and what is important in our heritage that all educated persons should know. They also have a right to expect that the university sees itself as more than a catalog of courses.”

Although the study group embraced the principle that all institutions should accept responsibility for deciding what their graduates should know, most members believed that no single curriculum could be appropriate in all places. The study group recognized the diverse nature of higher education under whose umbrella are institutions with different histories, philosophies, educational purposes, student body characteristics, and religious and cultural traditions. Each institution must decide for itself what it considers an educated person to be and what knowledge that person should possess. While doing so, no institution need act as if it were operating in a vacuum. There are standards of judgment: Some things are more important know than others.

The choices a college or university makes for its common curriculum should be rooted firmly in its institutional identity and educational purpose. In successful institutions, an awareness of what the college or university is trying to do acts as unifying principle, a thread that runs through and ties together the faculty, the curriculum, the students, and the administration. If an institution has no clearly conceived and articulated sense of itself, its efforts to design a curriculum will result in little more than an educational garage sale, possibly satisfying most campus factions but serving no real purpose and adding up to nothing of significance. Developing a common curriculum with the humanities at the core is no easy task. In some institutions, it will be difficult to attain. But merely being exposed to a variety of subjects and points of view is not enough. Learning to think critically and skeptically is not enough. Being well-rounded is not enough if, after all the sharp edges have been filed down, discernment is blunted and the graduate is left to believe without judgment, to decide without wisdom, or to act without standards.

The study group identified several features common to any good curriculum, regardless of institutional particulars:

(1) Balance between breadth and depth. A good curriculum should embody both wide reading and close reading. Students should study a number of important texts and subjects with thoroughness and care. They should also become acquainted with other texts and subjects capable of giving them a broader view, a context for understanding what they know well. Excessive concentration in one area, however, often abetted by narrow departmentalism, can promote provincialism and pendantry. Conversely, as William Arrowsmith warned, going too far toward breadth could make the curriculum a mere “bus trip of the West” characterized by “shallow generalization and stereotypes.”

(2) Original texts. Most members of the study group believed that the curriculum should be based on original literary, historical, and philosophical texts rather than on secondary works or textbooks. By reading such works, reflecting on them, discussing them, and writing about them, students will come to understand the power of ideas.

(3) Continuity. The undergraduate’s study of the humanities should not be limited to the freshman and sophomore years. Rather, it should extend throughout the undergraduate career so that continuing engagement with the humanities will complement and add perspective to courses in the major field as well as contribute to students’ increasing intellectual maturity as juniors and seniors. Professor Linda Spoerl of Highline Community College said: “The idea that general education requirements should be satisfied as quickly is possible before the student goes onto the ‘real’ part of education does everyone a disservice.”

(4) Faculty strength. Because a good curriculum must rest on a firm foundation of good teaching, it follows that the nature of that curriculum should respect areas of faculty competence and expertise. As David Riesman pointed out, it does little good to require study of Shakespeare if there are no scholars on the faculty who can teach Shakespeare with insight and contagious appreciation. On the other hand, any institution that lacks faculty expertise in the basic fields and work of the humanities should take immediate steps to fill those gaps or to develop such competence in existing faculty.

(5) Conviction about the centrality of the humanities. Finally, the humanities must not be argued for as something that will make our students refined, nor should the humanities be presented as a non-rigorous interlude where the young can chew over their feelings, emote, or rehash their opinions. The humanities are not educational luxury, and they are not just for majors. They are a body of knowledge and a means of inquiry that convey serious truths, defensible judgments, and significant ideas. Properly taught, the humanities bring together the perennial questions of human life with the greatest works of history, literature, philosophy, and art. Unless the humanities are taught and studied in this way, there is little reason to offer them.

Based on our discussions, we recommend the following knowledge in the humanities as essential to a college education:

• Because our society is the product and we the inheritors of Western civilization, American students need an understanding of its origins and development, from its roots in antiquity to the present. This understanding should include a grasp of the major trends in society, religion, art, literature, and politics, as well as a knowledge of basic chronology.

• A careful reading of several masterworks of English, American, and European literature.

• An understanding of the most significant ideas and debates in the history of philosophy.

• Demonstrable proficiency in foreign language (either modern or classical) and the ability to view that language as an avenue into another culture.

In addition to these areas of fundamental knowledge, study group members recommended that undergraduates have some familiarity with the history, literature, religion, and philosophy of at least one non-Western culture or civilization. We think it better to have a deeper understanding of a single non-Western culture than a superficial taste of many. Finally, the study group thought that all students should study the history of science and technology.

What should be read?

A curriculum is rarely much stronger than the syllabi of its courses, the arrays of text singled out for careful reading in discussion. The syllabi should reflect the college’s best judgment concerning specific texts which in educated person should be familiar and should include texts within the competence and interest of its faculty.

Study group members agreed that an institution’s syllabi should not be set in stone; indeed, the syllabi should change from time to time to take into account the expertise of available faculty and the result of continuing scrutiny and refinement. The task, however, is not to take faculty beyond their competence and training, nor to displace students’ individual interests and career planning, but to reach and inhabit common ground for while.

We frequently hear that is no longer possible to reach consensus on the most significant thinkers, the most compelling ideas, and the books all students should read. Contemporary American culture, the argument goes, has become too fragmented and too pluralistic to justify a belief in common learning. Although it is easier (and more fashionable) to doubt than to believe, it is a grave error to base a college curriculum on such doubt. Also, I have long suspected that there is more consensus on what the important books are than many people have been willing to admit.

In order to test this proposition and to learn what the American public thinks are the most significant works, I recently invited several hundred educational and cultural leaders to recommend ten books that any high school graduate should have read. The general public was also invited in newspaper column by George F. Will to send me their lists. I received recommendations for more than 500 individuals. They listed hundreds of different texts and offers, yet four — Shakespeare’s plays, American historical documents (the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Federalist Papers), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the Bible — were cited at least 50 percent of the time.

I have not done the comparable survey on what college graduates should read, but the point to be made is clear: Many people do believe that some books are more important than others, and there is broader agreement on what those books are then many have supposed. Each college’ s list will vary somewhat, reflecting the character of the institution and other factors. But there would be, and should be, significant overlap.

I am often asked what I believe to be the most significant works in humanities. This is an important question, too important to avoid. Some works and their authors have profoundly influenced my life, and it is plain that the same works have influenced the lives of many others as well. In providing a list of these works and authors, it is not my intention (nor is it my right) to dictate anyone’s curriculum. My purpose is not to prescribe a course of studies but to answer, as candidly as I can, an oft-asked question.

The works and authors I mention virtually define the development of the Western mind. There are, at a number of institutions, strong introductory courses already in place whose syllabi include such works. These institutions do not expect undergraduates to read most of the major works of these authors. They have learned, however, that is not unreasonable to expect students to read works by some of them and to know who the others were and why they are important.

The works and authors I have in mind include, but are not limited to, the following: from classical antiquity — Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil; from medieval, Renaissance, and 17th-century Europe — Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Milton, and Locke; from 18th- through 20th-century Europe — Swift, Rousseau, Austin, Wordsworth, Tocqueville, Dickens, Marx, George Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Mann, T. S. Eliot; from American literature and historical documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and “I have a dream…” speech, and such authors as Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner. Finally, I must mention the Bible, which is the basis for so much subsequent history, literature, and philosophy. At a college or university, what weight is given to which authors must of course depend on faculty competence and interest. But, should not every humanities faculty possess some members qualified to teach at least something of these authors?

Why these particular books and these particular authors? Because an important part of education is learning to read, and highest purpose of reading is to be in the company of great souls. There are, to be sure, many fine books and important authors not included in the list, and they too deserve the student’ s time and attention. But to pass up the opportunity to spend time with this company is to miss a fundamental experience of higher education.

Great souls do not express themselves by the written word only; they also paint, sculpt, build, and compose. An educated person should be able not only to recognize some of their works, but also to understand why they embody the best in our culture. Should we be satisfied if the graduates of our colleges in universities know nothing of the Parthenon’s timeless classical proportions, the textbook in medieval faith and philosophy that is Chartres cathedral, of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, or the music of Bach and Mozart?

How well are the humanities being taught and learned on the nation’s campuses?

Our experience in higher education and study of empirical data convince us that the humanities are being taught and learned with uneven success. Some institutions into an outstanding job, some a poor one. At most colleges and universities, the humanities are taught both well and poorly, with inspiration in one classroom, excruciating dullness and pendantry in another. Overall, however, both teaching and learning in the humanities are not what they should be or can be, and they are neither taught as well nor studied as carefully as they deserve to be.

Evidence for this decline is compelling. Preliminary findings from a 1984-85 survey by the American Council on Education indicate that a student can obtain a bachelor’s degree from 75 percent of all American colleges and universities without having studied European history, from 72 percent without having studied American literature or history, and from 86 percent without having studied the civilizations of classical Greece and Rome. The Modern Language Association reports that both entrance and graduation requirements in foreign languages have been weakened significantly since 1966. In that year, 33 percent of all colleges and universities required some foreign language study for admission. By 1975, only 18 percent required foreign language, and by 1983 only 14 percent. The picture is similar for graduation requirements. In 1966, 89 percent of all institutions required foreign language study for the bachelor’s degree, dropping to 53 percent in 1975 and 47 percent in 1983.

Conventional wisdom attributes the steep drop in the number of students who major in the humanities to a concern for finding good-paying jobs after college. Although there is some truth in this, we believe that there is another, equally important reason — namely, that we in the academy have failed to bring the humanities to life and to insist on their value. For 1970 to 1982, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in all fields increased by 11 percent from 846,110 to 952,998. But during the same period, degrees in English dropped not by a few percentage points, but by 57 percent, in philosophy by 41 percent, in history by 62 percent, and in modern languages by 50 percent. Indications are that the decline is continuing. For 1975 to 1983, the number of high school seniors who took the SAT exam and specified an intended college major rose by 14 percent. Over the same eight-year period, a number who planned to major in the humanities fell by 42 percent. Perspective history majors decreased by 60 percent.

If further evidence of students’ estrangement from the humanities is required, one need only refer to the American Council on Education’s 1983 survey of academic deans at colleges and universities. Two-thirds of those surveyed indicated that the most able entering undergraduates were turning away from the humanities to other fields, mainly professional and technical. This is not merely a rejection of a career in humanities, but a rejection of the humanities themselves. The former is not a cause for alarm; the latter is.

Impressionistic or anecdotal evidence for the decline of the humanities surfaces every time I talk to college professors, academic officers, and students. Such evidence is familiar: students who graduate from college unable to write lucidly or reason clearly and rigorously; students who are preoccupied (even obsessed) with vocational goals at the expense of broadening the intellect; students who are ignorant of philosophy and literature and know and care little about the history of their nation and their culture. For example, I know of one university philosophy professor who administers a simple test to his students at the beginning of classes each year to determine how much prior knowledge he can presume. The test consists of identifying 20 important names and events from history (such as Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Beethoven, the Protestant Reformation, and Rembrandt). On the most recent test, his students — mainly sophomores and juniors — correctly identified an average of only six of the 20.

I must emphasize here that our aim is not to argue for more majors in the humanities, but to state as emphatically as we can that the humanities should have a place in the education of all. Our nation is significantly enriched by the breadth and diversity of its professions and occupations and the interests of its citizens. Our universities should continue to encourage instruction in a full variety of fields and careers. But we do argue that, whatever endeavors our students ultimately choose, some substantial quality instruction in the humanities should be an integral part of everyone’s collegiate education. The study of the humanities in no way detracts from the career interests of students. Properly taught, they will enrich all.

The state of teaching in humanities

If learning in humanities is in decline, at least some of the blame must be assigned to those who teach the humanities and to academic administrators who determine the allocation of institutional resources. The study group criticized some universities for surrendering the teaching of introductory and lower division courses to graduate assistants or adjunct, part-time faculty. In making these criticisms, the study group recognized the classes taught by adjunct faculty and graduate students allow the institution to serve more students per faculty salary dollar, and that it is necessary to give future professors experience in the classroom. Nevertheless, the study group was concerned that such persons are not, as a group, the best teachers — the most experienced, most accomplished, and most intellectually mature. They are not capable of extending the most attractive invitation to the humanities to those lower division students who account for nearly 90 percent of all humanities credit hours taken. If students do not experience the best the humanities have to offer early in their undergraduate careers, they are unlikely to come back for more. University of Chicago Professor Wayne Booth said in his 1982 presidential address to the Modern Language Association:

We have chosen — no one required it of us — to say to the world, almost in so many words, that we do not care who teaches the non-majors or under what conditions, so long as the troublesome hordes move on and out: forced in by requirements, forced out by discouragement, or by disgust, or by literal failure. The great public fears or despises us because we hire a vast army of underpaid flunkies to teach the so-called service courses, so that we can gladly teach, in our advanced courses, those precious souls who survive the gauntlet. Give us lovers and we will love them, but do not expect us to study courtship. If we had decided to run up a flag on the quad saying that we care not a whit whether our society consists of people who practice critical understanding, so long as we are left free to teach advanced courses, we could not have given a clearer message.

And Frank Vandiver, president of Texas A&M; University, recently analyzed the problem this way: “the liberal arts… have allowed this to happen to themselves. They have allowed themselves to sit behind ivy-covered walls and say, ‘We are the liberal arts and to hell with you.’”

The problem is more than just who does the teaching; it is also how the humanities are taught. Too often introductory humanities courses are taught as if they were initial preparation for majors rather than as general education for all students. This often contributes to a fragmented, compartmentalized curriculum instead of an integrated, coherent one. When humanities are presented as a series of isolated disciplinary packages, students cannot possibly see the interrelatedness of great works, ideas, and minds.

The study group was alarmed by the tendency of some humanities professors to present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner. Sometimes the humanities are used as if they were the handmaiden of ideology, subordinated to particular prejudices and valued or rejected on the basis of the relation to a certain social stance.

At the other extreme, the humanities are declared to have no inherent meaning because all meaning is subjective and relative to one’s own perspective. There is no longer agreement on the value of historical facts, empirical evidence, or even rationality itself.

Both these tendencies developed in the hope that we will again show students the relevance of our subjects. Instead of demonstrating relevance, however, they condemn the humanities to irrelevance — the first, by subordinating our studies to contemporary prejudices; the second, by implying that the great works no longer had anything to teach us about ourselves or about life. As David Riesman said, some students are captivated by these approaches and think them modern or sophisticated. But the vast majority of students have correctly thought otherwise and have chosen to vote with their feet, stampeding out of the humanities departments. We cannot blame this on an insufficient number of students, or on the quality of students, or even on the career aspirations of students. We must blame ourselves for our failure to protect and transmit a legacy our students deserve to know.

Effects of graduate education on teaching

Instead of aiming at turning out men and women of broad knowledge and lively intellect, our graduate schools produce too many narrow specialists whose teaching is often lifeless, stilted, and pedestrian. In his recent lecture to the American Council of Learned Societies, Yale Professor Maynard Mack took graduate schools to task for failing to educate broadly:

When one reads thoughtfully in the works by Darwin, Marx, and Freud, what one finds most impressive is not the competence they show in the studies we associate them with, though that is of course impressive, but the range of what they knew, the staggering breadth of that reading which they had made their own and without which, one comes to understand, they could never have achieved the insights in their own areas that we honor them for. Today, it seems to me, we are still moving mostly in the opposite direction, despite here and there a reassuring revolt. We are narrowing, not enlarging our horizons. We are shucking, not assuming our responsibilities. And we communicate with fewer and fewer because it is easier to jabber in a jargon than to explain complicated matters in the real language of men. How long can a democratic nation afford to support a narcissistic minority so transfixed by its own image?

University of Oregon Dean Robert Berdahl described the problem as one of acculturation and unrealistic expectations. Dean Berdahl observed that most of today’s college faculty were trained during the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of rapid growth in the academic sector and increasing private and government support for research. As a result, they are oriented more toward research, publication, and teaching graduate students than toward educating nonmajors and generalists. “The successful career to which one is taught to aspire,” wrote Dean Berdahl, “is to end up at an institution like that at which one received one’s doctorate, where the ‘real work’ of the profession takes place and where, if one must teach undergraduates, one need only deal with majors or very bright students.”

When these former graduate students secure jobs in our college classrooms, they find themselves poorly equipped to teach undergraduates. Again, Robert Berdahl:

English professors insist that they are not able to teach composition, so that must be left to graduate students or a growing group of underpaid itinerant instructors. Historians who used to be responsible for teaching the entire sweep of Western civilization or the Survey of American History now insist on teaching only that portion of it that corresponds to their specialties. Foreign literature specialists consider it a waste of their talent to teach foreign language classes. Lower division, general education courses are thus often conceptually no different from the upper division courses offered for majors and graduate students; they are only broader. Instead of asking: “What should a student learn from this ‘Civ’ class or ‘Intro to Lit’ class if this is the only history or literature class he or she will take in four years?”, we ask: “What will best prepare the student to take advanced literature or history classes?”

Graduate education’s tendencies toward what Mellon Foundation President John Sawyer called “hyper-specialization and self-isolating vocabularies” often result in a faculty that, even after several years of advanced study, are no better educated than the undergraduates. John Silber, president of Boston University, wrote in a letter to me:

The Ph.D. is no longer a guarantee that its holder is truly educated. Everyone has seen the consequences of this: how frequently we now meet Ph.D.’s who are incapable of writing correctly or speaking effectively; who are so narrow in their interests that the civilizing effect of the humanities appears to have been entirely lost upon them; who are so jejune in their research interests as to call into question the entire scholarly enterprise.

In a recent article, Harvard Professor Walter Jackson Bate warned that “the humanities are not merely entering, they are plunging into their worst state of crisis since the modern university was formed a century ago in the 1880s.” Professor Bate went on to exhort graduate humanities departments to examine their priorities:

The subject matter — the world’s great literature — is unrivaled. All we need is the chance and the imagination to help it work upon the minds and characters of the millions of students to whom we are responsible. Ask that the people you are now breeding up in departments, and to whom you now give tenure appointments, be capable of this.

Training good researchers is vital to the humanities and to the mission of every graduate school. But many graduate schools have become so preoccupied with training narrow research specialists that they no longer address adequately the more pressing need of higher education for good teachers, broadly versed in their fields, inspired by the power of their subjects, and committed to making those subjects speak to the undergraduate. Unless our graduate schools reexamine this misplaced emphasis, much of our teaching will remain mediocre and our students indifferent.

This state of the humanities curriculum

The past twenty years have seen a steady erosion in the place of the humanities in the undergraduate curriculum and in the coherence of the curriculum generally. So serious has this erosion become that Mark Curtis, president of the Association of American Colleges, wrote: “The chaotic state of the baccalaureate curriculum may be the most urgent and troubling problem of higher education in the final years of the 20th-century.” Clark Kerr has called the undergraduate curriculum “a disaster area,” and Professor Frederick Rudolph of Williams college has written:

… when the professors abandoned a curriculum that they thought students needed, they substituted for it one that, instead, catered either to what the professors needed or what the students wanted. The results confirmed the authority of professors and students but they robbed the curriculum of any authority at all. The reaction of students to all this activity in the curriculum was brilliant. They concluded that the curriculum really didn’t matter.

A collective loss of nerve and faith on the part of both faculty and academic administrators during the late 1960s and early 1970s was undeniably destructive of the curriculum. When students demanded a greater role in setting their own educational agendas, we responded by abandoning course requirements of any kind and with them the intellectual authority to say to students what the outcome of a college education ought to be. With intellectual authority relinquished, we found that we did not need to worry about what was worth knowing, worth defending, worth believing. The curriculum was no longer a statement about what knowledge mattered; instead, it became the product of a political compromise among competing schools and departments overlaid by marketing considerations. In a recent article, Frederick Rudolph likened the curriculum to “a bazaar and students [to] tourists looking for cheap bargains.”

Once the curriculum was dissolved, colleges and universities found it difficult to reconstruct because of the pressures of the marketplace. All but the most selective institutions must now compete for scarce financial resources — students’ tuition and enrollment-driven state subsidies. As a consequence, many are reluctant to reinstate meaningful course requirements for fear of frightening away prospective applicants. (I believe such a fear is misplaced, but more on this later.)

Intellectual authority came to be replaced by intellectual relativism as a guiding principle of the curriculum. Because colleges and universities believed they no longer could or should assert the primacy of one fact or one book over another, all knowledge came to be seen as relative in importance, relative to consumer or faculty interest. This loss was accompanied by a shift in language. The desired ends of education changed from knowledge to “inquiry,” from content to “skills.” We began to see colleges listing their objectives as teaching such skills as reading, critical thinking, and awareness of other points a view. These are undeniably essential ends to a college education, but they are not sufficient. One study group member said, “What good is knowing how to write if you are ignorant of the finest examples of the language?” Failure to address content allows colleges and universities to beg the question of what an educated man or woman in the 1980s needs to know. The willingness of too many colleges to act as if all learning is relative is a self-inflicted wound that has impaired our ability to defend our subjects as necessary for learning or important for life.

Effects of the curriculum on secondary education

It is not surprising that once colleges and universities decided the curriculum did not have to represent a vision of an educated person, the secondary schools (and their students) took a cue and reached the same conclusion. Vanderbilt University Professor Chester Finn pointed out that college entrance requirements constitute de facto high school exit requirements for high school graduates — now nearly six of every 10 — who seek postsecondary education. With exit requirements relaxed, college-bound students no longer perceived need to take electives in English and history, let alone foreign languages. Instead, they choose courses thought to offer immediate vocational payoff. Clifford Adelman described research for the National Commission on Excellence in Education that dramatically illustrates this trend. From 1969 to 1981, the humanities declined as a percentage of total high school credits taken, a decline parallel to that in the colleges. Credits in Western civilization are down 50 percent, in U.S. history down twenty percent and in U.S. government down 70 percent. My own experience attests to the woeful state of high school curriculum. Recently I met with 70 high school student leaders — all excellent students — from all over the country. When I ask them how many had heard of the Federalist Papers, only seven raised their hands.

As enrollments in basic high school humanities courses fell off, it became more difficult for the schools to justify keeping them. Therefore, many schools dropped humanities courses from the curriculum. When high school graduates enter college, they are poorly prepared in basic knowledge of the humanities as well as in such essential skills as reading and writing. The remedial courses needed by these students cut into the college curriculum, effectively reducing the amount of actual college level course work they can take.

Twenty years ago, William Arrowsmith wrote: “Our entire educational enterprise is… founded upon the wholly false premise that at some prior stage the essential educational work has been done.” Sadly, this is still true today. The humanities must be put back into the high school curriculum, but this is unlikely to happen unless they are first restored in the colleges. If colleges take the lead in reinstating humanities course requirements, the high schools will surely respond. Evidence of this was related by Professor Noel Reynolds of Brigham Young University, who described how college preparatory course enrollments in Utah’s high schools rose after an announcement by the state’s two largest universities that preference for admission would be given to students who had completed college preparatory, including humanities, courses. Some Utah secondary schools reported an increase in foreign language enrollments of as much as 200 percent, and only slightly less dramatic increases in English and history.

Bright spots in the curriculum

The study group examined in depth the graduation requirements of numerous colleges and universities. The group found enormous variety, ranging from no course requirements of any kind to sequences of highly prescriptive core courses. Types of curricula did not seem to be associated with types of institutions. Some of the least coherent curricula were those of nationally prestigious, highly selective institutions, while some of the most carefully defined were found at less selective local or regional institutions. The most common type of curriculum was the “distribution requirements” model, in which students selected courses from a limited list of regular departmental offerings within a few broad interdepartmental clusters. Often the humanities requirements can be satisfied by taking such courses as speech, remedial writing, or performing arts. Even in institutions where the humanities are defined more rigorously, distribution requirements rarely guarantee that a student will master an explicit body of knowledge or confront a series of important original texts.

A few colleges and universities have rejected this model in favor of a course of studies in which all students share carefully designed learning experience. Some colleges and universities have been doing this for a long time and have remained steadfast in their commitment. Others have moved in recent years to restore a sound common curriculum. Two of the latter capture the attention of the study group: Brooklyn College and St. Joseph’s College.

Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York system, has about 14,000 undergraduates, many of whom our recent immigrants. Most major and professional fields such as pre-law, accounting, and communications. Yet, since 1981 all bachelor’s degree candidates, regardless of major, have taken a sequence of ten core courses, seven of which are in the humanities. Many of the courses emphasize original texts. For example, Core Studies 1, “Classical Origins of Western Culture,” requires readings in homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Virgil, and other writers of classical antiquity. Brooklyn’s success with the core curriculum has surpassed all expectations. The college reports that its faculty (50 percent of whom teach in the core) are enlightened intellectually by teaching the core courses and that students’ writing has improved considerably as result of a “Writing across the Core” program. Students, too, are excited by the new curriculum. They say they are able to see relationships among fields, and they talk about a renewed sense of the community of learning, a community that includes faculty, students, and administrators. The administration’s commitment to the curriculum can be seen in the fact that both the president and provost teach core courses.

Although it is a very different kind of institution, St. Joseph’s College in Indiana has developed a similar curriculum with equally good results. St. Joseph’s is a Catholic school of about 1000 students. Business, finance, and computer science are popular majors. Like Brooklyn College, St. Joseph’s requires a sequence of ten core courses. St. Joseph’s differs from Brooklyn in distributing these courses over all four years, whereas Brooklyn’s core courses are concentrated in the first two. The Brooklyn and St. Joseph’s cores also share curricular coherence in the way courses are arranged in logical progression, each course building upon the previous one. All core courses at St. Joseph’s involve the humanities. There is tremendous enthusiasm for the core approach among faculty, two-thirds of whom teach core courses. Even more telling is the enthusiasm of St. Joseph’s alumni, who frequently write faculty to praise the core as an outstanding feature of their college career.

Among two-year colleges, where vocational training is so important to the institutional mission, some schools have recognized the need for a strong common curriculum in the humanities. Kirkwood Community College in Iowa is a noteworthy example. Kirkwood serves about 6000 students, half of whom are enrolled in a liberal arts degree programs. In 1979, several faculty and administrators formed a Humanities Committee to review the humanities curriculum and recommend improvements. The committee developed and obtained approval for a new twenty-hour humanities core requirement. Candidates for the Associate of Arts degree now select from a very limited list of challenging academic courses — in literature, history, philosophy, and languages — which concentrate on reading primary texts and require extensive student writing.

The experience of Brooklyn College, St. Joseph’s College, and Kirkwood Community College proves that the drift toward curricular disintegration can be reversed, that colleges and universities — not just the elite ones — can become true communities of learning, and that it is possible even in this age of skepticism to educate students on the principle that certain areas of knowledge are essential for every college graduate. Their experience also belies the oft-heard fear that students will reject or avoid such a structured curriculum. Intellectually challenging, well-taught courses, whether required or not, will attract good students, and any college that offers a curriculum of such courses will not lack applicants.

The challenge to academic leadership

Revitalizing an educational institution is not easy. Usually it requires uncommon courage and discernment on the part of a few and a shared vision of what can and ought to be on the part of many. Higher education may now being more receptive to decisive leadership that it has been for some time. As University of Puget Sound President Philip Phibbs observed, most colleges and universities sense a crisis on the way and are concerned about the future. Administrators and faculty alike are beginning to perceive that what has traditionally been good for this or that department, one school or another, may be harmful to the institution as a whole and to its overall educational mission.

Recently, educational researchers sought to determine those factors that make some elementary and secondary schools more successful than others. Among the most important was strong leadership from the school principal. Although colleges and universities are more complex institutions than secondary schools, with far stronger fragmenting tendencies, leadership plays the same crucial role.

Curricular reform must begin with the president. Clark Kerr and David Riesman found that only 2 percent of the more than 700 college and university presidents interviewed described themselves as playing a major role in academic affairs. This is an alarming finding. A president should be the chief academic officer of the institution, not just the chief administrative, recruitment, or fund-raising officer. The president and other principal academic officers (provosts, deans, vice presidents for academic affairs) are solely accountable for all its parts and the needs of all its students. They are ultimately responsible for the quality of the education these students receive.

Members of the study group — which included several deans and presidents — believed strongly that presidents can be an effective force for curricular change only if they define their role accordingly. Bucknell University’s Frances Fergusson said that a president’s role is to “define, articulate, and defend institutional goals and to redirect the energy to the faculty towards these broader concerns.” David Riesman characterized a good president as having “a combination of persuasiveness, patience, ingenuity, even stubbornness.” Philip Phibbs said a president must “have the courage to state and insist upon important, and often uncomfortable, if not initially unacceptable, ideas.”

There are a number of concrete steps presidents can take to strengthen the humanities within their institutions. Roland Dille, president of Moorhead State College, said that “in the dozens of speeches that a president makes there ought to be some sign of his having been touched by the humanities. “Beyond this, he can set standards for excellence in undergraduate teaching and see that they are met by hiring deans, provosts, and faculty who are committed to those standards. President Hannah Gray of the University Chicago urged her fellow presidents to “insist on certain qualities” and to “raise certain questions and insist that they be answered.” Donald Stewart, president of Spelman College, showed that a president who views himself as an academic leader can make a real difference. From the beginning of his presidency at Spelman, Stewart sought to cut through the prevalent vocational orientation by stating openly and repeatedly that the humanities are basic to Spelman’s mission, and, in so doing, set a new intellectual tone for the institution. Such statements by institutional leaders must, of course, be accompanied by actions. Among these, and not the least important, is rewarding good teaching in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.

But as Frederick Rudolph has frequently pointed out, the curriculum cannot be reformed without the enthusiastic support of the faculty. Institutions such as Brooklyn College, St. Joseph’s College, and Kirkwood Community College were able to implement strong curricula because their administrators and faculty worked together toward a common goal, not in opposition to one another or to protect departmental turf. Philip Phibbs called upon humanities faculty to recognize their common interests:

Leadership… must also come from the humanities faculty itself. This group must assert itself aggressively within the larger faculty and make its case with competence and

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