Every now and then you read a book so simple in concept and so interesting in outcome that you kick yourself for not having come up with the idea. Many people have a sense that higher education has jumped the rails in a variety of ways, but mostly that sense gets fed by anecdote and rumor and clickbait. High-profile incidents get noticed, but few people look at the fine-grained work that colleges actually do. It is therefore with a mixture of joy and jealousy that I read Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation, written by Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan.
As goes Harvard, so goes American higher education. For all their talk about “critical thinking,” school administrators are hopeless parrots of their ranked superiors. In academic circles, “best practices” typically means “What is Harvard doing?” This is why President Trump’s war on Harvard ripples throughout the halls of higher learning: If Harvard can’t survive the attack, what hope do the rest of us who have nowhere near Harvard’s resources have? One can sense the panic in the ivory towers.
The story goes that when Eisenhower became president of Columbia University, he met with the faculty and ill-advisedly referred to them as “employees” of the school. An incensed Isidore Rabi stood and informed the general: “We are not employees of the university. We are the university.” Perhaps. What seems undeniable, however, is that in a happier time the faculty were regarded as the sole stewards of the central purpose of the university: the curriculum.
The word derives from the Latin verb currere, “to run.” It indicates the path or road one must run to reach the goal of becoming a well-rounded and well-mannered person. Faculty were to serve as both beacons and signposts, employing wisdom to direct students along that path toward the goal of florescence. Not only that: Such possession could only be determined by studying patterns of human excellence, of the structure and nature of reality and all the things in it, and the ways in which human beings searched for and discovered such things. Faculty operated as custodians of the incrementally and fitfully achieved efforts to shed more light on the world and our place in it.
Not much of this idea remains. Graduate schools encourage students to be specialists, not generalists, as the path to academic success. A typical Ph.D. in political science might be able to tell you an awful lot about the behavior of administrative districts in Botswana during the Khama regime but probably have little to say about why it matters. Specialization leads to publication, and publication to tenure. What difference does it make if one has no capacity to connect this research to issues of human flourishing? Graduate schools excel at narrowing the mind, at fragmenting knowledge and routinizing intellectual inquiry. Ph.D.s are often a mile deep and an inch wide.
Little wonder, then, that when they become professors they attempt to reshape the curriculum to avoid either embarrassment or extra work. It takes little effort and preparation to teach a class on one’s dissertation topic, but heaven forbid you have to teach a core curriculum class that requires you to know some things about a lot of things.
For that matter, what school even has a core curriculum any longer? A core curriculum assumes an agreed-upon set of standards, texts, ideas, beliefs, and goals that ensure that a graduate will receive a good education. Given the impossibility of faculty agreement on such matters, most schools moved from a “core curriculum” to a “general education” curriculum, the latter defined by a set of “distribution requirements” that allows the students “choices” in what their education looks like. No longer able to agree on the goals of education or any underlying values or beliefs, faculty resort to what they know: their area of specialization. The distribution requirements thus become a grab bag of highly specific faculty interests, which allows the faculty member to teach and publish simultaneously. It also protects departmental interests, and thus jobs. Nothing is more heated on a college campus than a revision of the core curriculum, all faculty jostling for a piece.
Back in 2005, in his book Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, Ross Douthat had already observed the chaotic state of Harvard’s curriculum. While it gave a lot of freedom to both faculty and students, it communicated no sense of purpose, and certainly no coherence. Perhaps the best word to describe such an education is indulgent. Passion, and not reason, sits in the driver’s seat. There is much talk on college campuses about students pursuing their passions and very little about developing their reason. Passion, however, proves an erratic driver, especially without a map.
Kissel and his co-authors demonstrate that not much has changed. As I said, the book’s conceit is simple: Look at what is required of students at the Ivy League universities. A well-constructed curriculum serviced by competent faculty means that students will get a good education. A curriculum erratically designed around distribution requirements that serve a faculty member’s interests means that students may get a good education but only if that student chooses carefully.
Lost is Saint Augustine’s admonition that “in the study of creature, one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity but ascend toward what is immortal and everlasting.” Alas, much of college education amounts to little more than mastery of vain and perishing curiosities. Everything tilts in that direction. Student evaluations provide immediate feedback as to whether a faculty member has stoked a passion but tell us nothing about the enduring value of such lessons. A good education shapes both the reason and the imagination in such a way that a student learns discernment, how to separate wheat and chaff. Life will come along and provide them with hard lessons; a good education prepares them for those lessons.
It also broadens their horizons. For all the talk about diversity, our colleges and universities have become boringly monolithic. A student who condemns George Washington and all he accomplished out of hand simply because he owned slaves is a student who has closed himself off to the complexity of the human condition and the often difficult choices people make. These young persons might be taught charity toward oppressed groups, especially when they have nothing at stake, but not charity toward persons who navigate perennial human problems, simply because they have the misfortune of being dead.
If a good education grapples with how these perennial problems manifest themselves in specific circumstances within the context of a coherent moral framework, then a bad education simply projects current prejudices as a way of buttressing a moral authority assumed but never demonstrated. Kissel and his coauthors show that this central pathology of modern education has reached its apogee at the Ivies.
The book has two audiences: putatively, students going to Ivy League colleges in an effort to help them navigate the confusing curriculum; secondarily, the general public, to help them see what students actually learn. Their opening salvo? “Don’t trust the Ivy League to produce well-educated students.”
Kissel et. al. review the general education of all eight Ivies, and the results are disheartening. They cleverly divide each chapter into two parts: how to graduate if you’re a slacker and how to graduate if you’re a serious student. An enterprising student in possession of this book could successfully find a narrow path to excellence amid all the brambles and briars that pass for education at the Ivies.
Higher education generates mountains of senseless jargon. Nowhere does that become more apparent than when discussing curricular issues. The book valuably exposes a whole range of assumptions that many faculty regard as so unassailable as not to require any contestation at all. Among those are that a general education must express “ways of knowing.” Likewise, many of the courses reviewed in the book emphasize the importance of the “lenses” through which the material will be viewed.
Behind all this is a kind of Nietzschean perspectivism, which faculty would realize had they any training or interest in philosophy (which is why philosophers and theologians, the only integrative disciplines, should always be in charge of a core curriculum). Another way to put it is that the modern curriculum operates on the principle of epistemological subjectivism, and this, too, serves the interests of faculty but not students, although students don’t realize it. In fact, they will readily embrace such language because it makes their opinions and judgments unassailable.
The problem goes deeper than that, however. A lens implies a lens maker, someone with vision perfect enough to justify correcting the vision of others. Thus much of higher education consists of professors “enlightening” students, offering course after course that “resists” colonialism or sexism or racism or capitalism or heteronormativity, all because the professor wears a socially acceptable set of lenses. The effect of such courses is to impress upon the student the sheer question-begging audacity of the whole enterprise. Students in those classes would never be allowed to address the premises from which the analysis, if it can be called that, proceeds.
I had initially marked the classes highlighted in the book I thought especially ridiculous, but I soon ran out of ink. One indicator that a class is badly designed is if it predetermines its outcome, insisting that as a result of taking the class students will engage the world in a particular way. Real inquiry, however, doesn’t presuppose its results. The professor’s wisdom results from study, experience, and openness—all anathema to the ideological closure that marks so much academic work. A professor leads as a lieutenant in a jungle, hacking a way forward, not as a marshal requiring lock-stepped following in a parade.
Kissel and his coauthors identify two redoubts, however: Columbia’s core curriculum, in existence for a hundred years, continues to operate as a sturdy framework for undergraduate education. They remind the reader that “educators created general education programs in reaction to the curricular fragmentations of, on the one hand, the disciplinary specializations built for the German-style research university and, on the other hand, the elective system built for Emersonian, Romantic-era self-discovery.” Columbia has maintained that balance, at least better than the other Ivies.
The other redoubt exists in the hard sciences, and this, too, poses an important lesson. The hard sciences can’t avoid their subject matter. Astronomers have to study stars, physicists particles, biologists plants and animals, chemists molecules. The object of investigation determines the mode. Piety to the object limits and restrains the enterprise, but in a productive way. The object of the search is part of the search. Scientists rightly spend little time talking of “ways of knowing.”
The social sciences are bad, as the authors demonstrate, but the humanities have largely given up on the idea that they possess an object of study. Instead, they substitute preferences or a political agenda, to tiresome effect. It’s hard to imagine how these classes could have any enduring value—better the student evaluations be handed out 10 years after graduation. All the chattering about power gives voice to the lie: It’s the obsession of faculties because it’s what they crave.
So what, the authors wonder, can we assume about someone who has graduated from an Ivy League university? “All that an observer should infer is that the graduate had been admitted, did not fail a specified number of courses, fulfilled other requirements … and showed enough good behavior over about four years that he or she was not expelled.” When balanced against the political outbursts on campuses, the ideological uniformity, and restrictions on free speech, one wonders whether the schools are worth the sticker price. They are, of course, if one aspires to being comfortably well off. How to live well in such comfort is, sadly for them, an entirely different question.
