A couple pieces lamenting the state on modern university education. First, Wendell Berry gave the commencement address at Bellarmine University this past May (HT Patrick Deneen). Berry states:
And yet by all this fuss we are promoting a debased commodity [i.e. higher education] paid for by the people, sanctioned by the government, for the benefit of the corporations. For the most part, its purpose is now defined by the great and the would-be-great “research universities.” These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the “industrial model,” no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity. They have repudiated their old obligation to pass on to students at least something of their cultural inheritance. The ideal graduate no longer is to have a mind well-equipped to serve others, or to judge competently the purposes for which it may be used.
Now, according to those institutions of the “cutting edge,” the purpose of education is unabashedly utilitarian. Their interest is almost exclusively centered in the technical courses called, with typical ostentation of corporate jargon, STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.
Victor Davis Hanson's (HT Julie Ponzi) critique of the university is that it no longer teaches truth, choosing to offer students a panoply of politically correct by educationally suspect courses at the expense of a classic humanities education.
Sometime in the 1960s—perhaps due to frustration over the Vietnam War, perhaps as a manifestation of the cultural transformations of the age—the university jettisoned the classical approach and adopted the therapeutic.
Many educators and students believed that America was hopelessly corrupt and incorrigible. The church, government, military, schools, and family stifled the individual and perpetuated a capitalist, male hierarchy that had warped Western society. So if, for a mere four years, the university could educate students to counter these much larger sinister forces, the nation itself could be changed for the better. Colleges could serve as a counterweight to the insidious prejudices embedded in the core of America.
I have blogged on this subject before, so I will not go into detail, but there is a question of what is the proper education for a free person. Berry argues that it is not a technical or vocational education, as that simply turns one into a consumer without feeding one's soul. Hanson argues that the modern university is not really interested in the free person; it is instead interested in indoctrination and using power to shape young souls in the direction preferred by the "tenured radicals" who don't really believe in such thing as a truly free person.
Let me suggest that the change in the university over the last, say 50 years, has something to do with factors beyond the shift towards professional training or the curse left-wing political correctness, however true those may be. The democratization of higher education (or, perhaps more accurately, "further training") certainly had a significant impact on the university. Instead of a student body made up of elites (of wealth or intelligence), the university student body now comprises over half of all high-school graduates, very few of whom are interested in a classic liberal education. Most are more interested in a credential that they can use to get a higher paying job. This is also how parents and administrators see university education. Not surprisingly, parents want to know what kind of job their kid will get once he graduates from college. The administrator measures success based on how many graduates get job placements, not on whether their souls have been fed. If one looks at education on an economic model, the education consumer has changed over time and desires different services from universities. The universities have then changed so as to accommodate. I suggest my conservative friends who decry the state of higher education (so called) take a look at Herbert Storing's essay "Liberal Education And The Common Man" and ponder whether classic liberal education is for everyone.
The problem is not that most students get a professional rather than liberal education. It is that there are precious few places to go where liberal education is still valued, leaving those who do care about the soul with places to go to have it fed. But as Wendell Berry points out, those who are interested in a classic liberal education do have a handful of choices left (and please don't be fooled by schools that claim to believe in liberal education; most of them are fudging). Berry is also correct that students are more likely (but not guaranteed) to get a sound education at smaller colleges than at the major research universities.
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