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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, February 21, 2005

CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DESIR

III


First, check the comment threads on CET OBSCUR I and II; they underline UD’s point that there’s a baffling and demoralizing disconnect between the enormous expense of college and the often pretty vacuous nature of the college experience itself, in terms of intellectual seriousness and curricular coherence.

One outcome of this is that, as KD points out in his/her comments, college becomes a comfortable haven for extremely wealthy students who don’t need to worry about expense or curriculum (they’ll do fine in life without college, and for that matter without brains), and an uncomfortable perch for middle class scholarship students who may wish to take college seriously as an intellectual, and not merely frivolous, or strictly vocational, experience, but who find a chaos of easy courses and little evidence of real thought.




In the March 2005 issue of The New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco makes the same points. “Colleges: An Endangered Species?” is the title of Part One of his review (also available online via Arts and Letters Daily) of a number of old and new books about what college is, what it should be, and where things have gone wrong. He notes that “one hears comparatively little discussion of what students ought to learn once they get [to college], and why they are going at all. … I have discovered that the question of what undergraduate education should be all about is almost taboo.”

Once students are admitted to a liberal arts college, Delbanco asks, “what do they get when they get there? The short answer is freedom to choose among subjects and teachers, and freedom to work out their own lives on campus. Intellectual, social, and sexual freedom of the sort that today’s students assume as an inalienable right is never cheaply won, and requires vigilant defense in academia as everywhere else. Yet there is something less than ennobling in the unearned freedom of privileged students in an age where even the most powerful institutions are loath to prescribe anything - except, of course, in the ‘hard’ sciences, where requirements and prerequisites remain stringent. One suspects that behind the commitment to student freedom is a certain institutional pusillanimity - a fear that to compel students to read, say, the major political and moral philosophers would be to risk a decline in applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (one of the statistics that counts in the US News and World Report college rankings closely watched by administrators). Nor, with a few exceptions, is there the slightest pressure from faculty, since there is no consensus among the teachers about what should be taught.”

This relative indifference to the very core of the undergraduate college experience -- what is taught, and who teaches it -- expresses itself, Delbanco notes, in the notorious dependence upon adjunct faculty even among the most expensive schools. New York University, for instance, uses adjuncts to teach 70 percent of its undergraduate courses. "The fact that these scandalously underpaid teachers must carry the teaching burden - not just at NYU, but at many other institutions - speaks not to their talent or dedication, but to the meagerness of the institution's commitment to the teaching mission." Doesn't it also eventually speak to the financially overwhelmed student, who wonders why her dearly bought freshman seminars and sophomore lectures are virtually all being taught by adjuncts?





Delbanco concludes his essay by characterizing American liberal arts colleges as “miniature liberal states … prescribing nothing and allowing virtually everything.”

The student who falls for the vapid liberalism of the very expensive American college, and who graduates from it unable to pull her thoughts together any better than she could when she started, is liable to feel both monetarily and existentially cheated.

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Later, that same day: Critical Mass also links to and talks about the Delbanco essay.