I might be on my way to college, and rightfully unexcited about it. Seems less like a real opportunity to me now then a doctored certificate of my ‘education.’
In academia, in short, no less than in other privileged corners of American life, money is being funneled into the hands of a relative few. Once-shabby college towns have become boom towns where old dives remembered fondly by alumni are now upscale restaurants to which today’s students bring their high-limit credit cards, and parking lots are crowded with student SUVs.
Amid these troubling developments, one hopeful sign is the growing public debate over who should go to college and how they should be paid for. Yet one hears comparatively little discussion of what students ought to learn once they get there and why they are going at all. Over my own nearly quarter-century as a faculty member (four years at Harvard, nineteen years at Columbia), I have discovered that the question of what undergraduate education should be all about is almost taboo.
College has come from times in which it served to develop strong moral character, pronounced christian faith, to become an engine of elitist intellectuals. As the university system grew and sophisticated, the chief incentive for professors to uproot themselves to another institution would be the lessening of their teaching burden.
At exactly the time when the struggle to get into our leading universities has reached a point of “insane intensity” (James Fallows’s apt phrase), undergraduate education has been reduced to a distinctly subsidiary activity.
The history of American higher education amounts to a three-phase story: in the colonial period, colleges promoted belief at a time of established (or quasi-established) religion; in the nineteenth century, they retained something of their distinctive creeds while multiplying under the protection of an increasingly liberal, tolerationist state; in the twentieth century, they became essentially indistinguishable from one another (except in degrees of wealth and prestige), by turning into miniature liberal states themselves—prescribing nothing and allowing virtually everything.