It is agreed that all who can read and write and want to go to college should be able to. Lack of money should not be a hindrance. But as to what a college is, there is no agreement. It is not even discussed. Yet look at the facts. The undergraduate unit of a large Ivy League university with 40 majors and hundreds of electives differs widely from a liberal-arts college, and both differ from a small institution that started as a denominational college -- or from the typical Roman Catholic university. The college of a huge state university is another thing again, and so are the scattered parts of a state system that were originally teachers’ colleges or normal schools.
This variety, it is said, gives everybody a chance to find the place that suits his or her talents and tastes. That is pious nonsense. The young have no idea what they are getting into, and they often have no choice. Selection is determined by geography, cost, and the luck of admission or rejection.
What further complicates this catch-as-catch-can is the price of the longed-for boon of a “college experience.” The strain on the budget is notorious. If a family has more than one child to educate, the cost can be a quarter of a million dollars. To be sure, some students can qualify for scholarships or loans, but not all, and one who goes to graduate or professional school may enter the job market with a massive debt. Is anybody prepared to deny that this state of affairs, although tamely accepted, is sheer unreason? All to college, but the hurdles are a mile high.
This social lunacy makes up the first argument for rediscovering what a college is and for trimming today’s institutions to fit. The nature of education makes up the second. What is the basic college? History suggests some answers. When the cathedral school of the 12th century decided that more advanced teaching should be available, the medieval university was born. It took three directions, two of them professional: theology and law. The third was “letters,” the liberal arts that we call the humanities, with mathematics included. We have duly retained the term “liberal arts.” We even apply it to certain colleges. But the real thing is rarely found.
Two other models of the college developed next. First, the English universities at Oxford and Cambridge took the form of small colleges. Those were financed by royalty, prelates, and statesmen and specialized in the interests of their patrons. But all were intent on introducing the young to contemporary knowledge, rather than to a profession. And all were small enough to provide students the attention they needed to acquire that knowledge. The second model arose in the 16th century, when the Society of Jesus began to cover Europe with colleges designed to strengthen the Catholic faith as Protestantism grew. That goal was to be achieved by making well-educated minds. Proof of success: nearly all great European thinkers of the next two centuries, from Descartes to Voltaire, went to Jesuit colleges (and repaid their mentors by successfully combating religious dogma).
The Jesuit institutions, like the English and the Continental universities, taught the liberal arts and the numerical sciences. Certain subjects, such as logic and rhetoric, may no longer appeal to us, but the lesson for the present is that the core of an all-purpose higher education consists of these “arts.”
Even if, nowadays, students attend college who are older than was once the norm, the goals of college education remain the same. The arts are fit for all minds, endowing them with particular and general abilities: to think, to speak simply and clearly, to express views rationally, to own and use a body of facts and ideas that are widely known, to detect errors and fallacies, resolve intellectual problems, and possibly make discoveries in some branch of learning. To this armament of powers, the last five centuries have supplied new areas to exploit: history and the social sciences and the hugely expanded substance of the physical and life sciences. Those have broadened the curriculum of the basic college, but they do not change its character and role.
Nor does the deplorable state of American public schools justify fundamentally changing the core purpose of college, but the failure of high schools to impart the techniques of study and a modicum of subject matter does interfere with the integrity of college work by creating the necessity to make students go through remedial courses in reading, writing, grammar, mathematical reasoning, or other skills needed to go on in the liberal arts.
In these conditions, what must the college be and do? 1. Devote its energies and resources to the liberal arts as here defined. 2. Run remedial programs until no longer needed. 3. For health, safety, and recreation, provide modest facilities for physical exercise, intramural sports, and some extracurricular activities, as well for medical care. But if the extras are for “enrichment,” it is better to make sure there is something to enrich.
Nothing has been said so far about intercollegiate athletics. Nothing can abate the national passion for such sports. Yet, only some of the 3,500 institutions of higher learning in our country are truly burdened by the incubus. Let them call on their alumni to bear the cost; it is they who demand the sport.
For the college as such, concentrating on the liberal arts is not enough. They must be introduced as a required group, in the first two years of college. A free choice of electives may lead to four years of freshman work, which evades the purpose of an organized curriculum. In the last two years of college, a guided choice of courses in two or three subjects can then satisfy a student’s developing sense of direction. The young discover where their abilities lie rather than know their vocation as freshmen.
To be of any worth, the liberal arts must not only figure in the catalog, they must also be taught as arts, not as scholarly disciplines -- and that must be done by teachers. The present system, which favors faculty research over teaching, turns the liberal arts into professional subjects. Indeed, one may hear the teacher of an introductory course assert that he hopes to attract some students into his field. The course, thereby, ceases to be a college subject. “Liberal” in liberal arts means precisely “free” of professionalism and pedantry.
But what of the student whose interest lies in an area like film and theater, art and music, photography and television, and who wants to “qualify” for a job the day after graduation? Let there be a School of Applied Arts on campus or at the nearest university, similar to business and journalism schools. The applied arts are not college work; the very scheduling of long hours of practice makes for conflicts with other studies.
What, then, are college youths to carry away from their studies as they are swallowed up by career, parenthood, or civic obligations? Much will be buried, but the innumerable portions of purport, reasoning, and significance will still be there for instant recognition and application to the uses of life. It is this “apperceptive mass” that makes college graduates educated instead of ignorant.
Besides fulfilling its indicated purpose, the college so conceived would yield results measurable in money. First savings: The college offers only courses that serve the liberal arts. Like the catalog, the faculty is correspondingly small. By seeking teachers, the college need not pay an extraordinary sum to obtain the transcendent researcher for whom all are bidding. Limiting campus amenities within reason similarly disburdens the budget. The endowment might even begin to suffice.
Colleges will also save money by pruning the many offices that have grown up to oversee things that form no part of their role -- offices devoted to community service, mental health, development, government relations, public relations, and alumni affairs. Together, those have planted a bureaucracy at the heart of the institution. A college should not advertise: Prospective students cannot compare places until they have been on campus for a year. As for entertainment, students profit from providing it for themselves.
Students should also help teach one another. For that reason, the true college must remain of modest size; large numbers prevent familiar conversation, jollity, or camaraderie in anything but small cliques. College matures through the sense of belonging to a common society. That sense begins through the required core in the first two years; it is sustained by the unspecialized handling of all subjects, which leads to comparing notes and discussing matters with teachers. These, by the way, feel no need to seek popularity by inflating grades, the present counterpart of student cheating.
One last provision: Student aid is to free the recipient to be a student. He or she should not have to work for money, especially when classmates don’t. For one thing, it skews an individual’s academic record by handicapping the worker, who is also deprived of the leisure and the beneficial companionship just cited.
With the nature of a basic college understood and respected, the cost of tuition comes down to a point where those middle-class families now ineligible for help will not have to go heavily into debt. By the same economy, the full subsidy of the less well off becomes possible. Seeing reason return to the academy, many people whose exchequer is now drained by tuition will be grateful to give money for scholarships.
Of course, none of what has been described here is possible. Too many vested interests oppose any such sensible transformation of what we indiscriminately call colleges. The bureaucracy is entrenched on the campus as firmly as anywhere, and so is the faculty, with its specialist bent and overextended offerings. Very possibly, even the beneficiaries of the change -- hypnotized parents of the college-bound -- might shy away from supporting it, vaguely afraid of some unforeseen disaster. Let them start saving for college with the birth of each child (early marriage and childbearing is recommended), and with compound interest over 17 years, that quarter of a million dollars is not unattainable.
Jacques Barzun is university professor emeritus and former dean of the faculties and provost of Columbia University.
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