I teach at Duke University, probably one of the best private institutions of higher education in the United States. Regardless of Duke’s exalted reputation, now elevated
ALSO SEE:
Colloquy: Join an online discussion about whether colleges do enough to promote intellectual life among undergraduates.
another notch by its third national basketball championship, the quality of the undergraduate education that my colleagues and I provide isn’t nearly as good as it could be.
No one can say that Duke is a bad place for undergraduates. Our students are smarter than those at the average institution, and the university gives them the resources to get a damned good education. But getting a good education is only optional here, as it is at most institutions, and many Duke students only go through the motions academically.
As we at Duke teach our classes, we sometimes think with envy of the few institutions that have a critical mass of energetic and intellectual students. Duke, unfortunately, is like most colleges and universities in that it principally provides social and economic credentials for its students.
Institutions with undergraduates who have a high level of intellectual commitment are mostly elite liberal-arts colleges. About 20 universities and colleges in the United States have managed to hold the high ground in the battle between customer satisfaction and education. They have the kind of intellectual ambience that we at Duke crave. In the 1990’s, Duke underwent much soul-searching about its lack of academic intensity, and for the past seven years, my university has tried to emulate those magical 20 institutions. Our efforts haven’t worked. Our failures point to the difficulty of achieving such a well-meaning transition.
Some of our efforts have ultimately been a waste of time. We’ve tried to severely restrict alcohol use, mostly for reasons of personal safety, but also in the hope that a less frequently hung-over student will also be more likely to attend and be engaged in class. Predictably, our restrictions have had very little, if any, impact on alcohol consumption.
We completely overhauled our undergraduate curriculum, giving it the exalted title Curriculum 2000. But a curriculum change says nothing about the level of intellectual engagement by students. It’s simply a way to organize and code classes. In this case, the rearrangement and coding were so complicated and poorly designed that the new curriculum has been unofficially renamed Ridiculum 2000.
Many other efforts -- for instance, creating a campus for freshmen only, to foster a feeling of community -- have produced incremental improvements. Another positive change has resulted from the expansion of our Focus Program, an assortment of integrated, seminar-based courses for first-semester freshmen.
Despite those efforts, many of our students remain intellectually disengaged. The hardest thing for students at Duke -- and at most elite institutions -- is getting in. Once admitted, a smart student can coast, drink far too much beer, and still maintain a B+ average.
It’s a funny thing, the battle between what we are and what many of us want to be. Our students like that Duke isn’t intellectually demanding. We are known for our unique combination of laid-back academic standards, very tough admissions requirements (except for legacies, children of wealthy families, and athletes), significant Greek life, and top-notch basketball. That’s why most students come here. Our typical student is bright, personable, and focused on a career in business, law, or medicine.
But there are problems with that niche. It’s pleasant for the type of students we attract, but is making students comfortable what education is about? The students at academically focused institutions are similar in social and political attitudes, academic ability, economic background, and career aspirations to Duke students. But the atmosphere at their institutions is far more conducive to learning and intellectual discovery.
Recently, I toured college campuses in my new role as the parent of a college-bound kid (my daughter). Most of the places I visited have the reputation for intellectual intensity to which Duke aspires. Unlike Duke, they had no televisions in their cafeterias. I spent a Sunday morning at Wesleyan University, and I found the library jammed with students studying. At breakfast, I overheard students’ conversations about the dangers of the global marketplace and the importance of improvisation in 17thcentury church music.
OK, I know that I am falling prey to the grass-is-greener syndrome. But those places were greener. And it is not likely that Duke will ever match their level of intellectual intensity -- to do so would involve making changes so radical that they are simply not feasible.
For example, the institutions that I visited with my daughter had at most a few small fraternities and sororities. We know that an active fraternity scene is antithetical to having a serious campus. Sure, drunkenness and debauchery exist on campuses without significant Greek life. That kind of behavior (in which I fully admit to have been an active participant as an undergraduate) is part of the fabric of college. But fraternities and sororities push it to dangerous extremes.
We can continue to try to control the havoc that fraternities wreak. But what is really necessary is to restrict Greek life severely, or ban it altogether -- and that is difficult to achieve. Dartmouth, a college similar to Duke in its student profile, has tried to severely restrict fraternity life over the past two years. Outraged alumni and students have thus far repelled that effort.
Another example is sports. All but one of the colleges and universities that my daughter and I visited didn’t have big-time basketball or football. At Duke, we’ve consciously decided to limit the corrupting influence of big-time sports by making only a nominal effort to pursue football. It’s wonderful that Duke has made that choice -- most institutions could not. But our basketball program is bad enough. Don’t get me wrong. I love to watch our Blue Devils play. But I don’t like to have students in my classes whose primary motivation for coming to Duke is to participate vicariously in the success of the men’s basketball team. I don’t like to hear about basketball players suspended for failing classes or for cheating. College sports have mutated into a multibillion-dollar industry, and the money has, not surprisingly, resulted in a serious decline in academic standards and graduation rates for athletes in footballand basketball-crazed Division I institutions. Serious colleges and universities don’t have big-time sports. I don’t know of any institution that is an exception to this rule.
There are other significant differences between Duke and major intellectual institutions for undergraduates. They admit far fewer legacies and children of wealthy families. Duke currently admits 50 percent of its legacy applicants, and reserves 5 to 6 percent of each class for noncompetitive applicants from wealthy or legacy families. Add in athletes, and you have a student body of which roughly 20 percent were admitted for nonacademic reasons.
But the most significant difference between Duke and intellectual institutions is that the latter have consistently high standards in the classroom. Duke attracts some of the smartest, most academically talented students in the world. Why shouldn’t we challenge them? In general, we don’t (I know that there are many exceptions). But it is irresponsible for professors not to try to make their students grow intellectually.
Many colleges and universities may be too addicted to fraternity life, big-time sports, and donations from undergraduates’ parents to make the substantive changes necessary to become intellectual institutions. Individuals on the campuses, however, can take some action. I’ve decided to do my tiny bit to improve the undergraduate experience.
Four years ago, Duke administrators -- like most administrators who have learned to use spreadsheets, they have become obsessed with tracking the number of students taught in every department -- demanded that my department, the Division of Earth and Ocean Sciences, increase enrollments by 25 percent. In an attempt to attract more students, I felt compelled to become the purveyor of easy, and easily graded, courses. I succeeded in increasing my enrollments, and the scores on my teacher evaluations moved decidedly upward, but the courses don’t satisfy me intellectually or emotionally.
I’ve decided to challenge my students again. I’m going to put back the difficult material that I dropped along the way. I’m going to spend less time telling jokes and stories that have nothing to do with the class material. Yes, I’m going back to giving A’s only to students who are truly a cut above the rest.
I cordially invite other instructors at Duke and elsewhere to do the same. Who knows? Maybe it is possible to collectively raise our classroom standards that way. Somehow we must move in a direction where intellectual achievement is not an option, but is required of our undergraduates.
Stuart Rojstaczer is an associate professor of hydrology at Duke University and the author of Gone for Good: Tales of University Life After the Golden Age (Oxford University Press, 1999).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B5