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Sunday, December 18, 2005
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A Reader… …kindly forwards a Boston Globe opinion piece written by former Harvard president Derek Bok. Its style is way too mealy-mouthed for UD - vague in its description of the problem at issue and smarmy in its reassurance that solving the problem will be fun all around. But under the platitudes there’s some stuff in the piece that’s worth mentioning and thinking about. Said problem is the one that’s all the rage in higher ed news lately -- the study showing that a lot of American college graduates are just as benighted after they graduate as they were when first they trod upon the quad. College is supposed to teach you, says Bok, “critical thinking, moral reasoning, quantitative literacy.” But, to take one instance, “most undergraduates leave college still inclined to approach unstructured ‘real life’ problems with a form of primitive relativism, believing that there are no firm grounds for preferring one conclusion over another.” This means in practice that if asked to think and argue critically about, say, the existence of Mormon men in the United States who marry rafts of thirteen year old girls, many American college graduates will say or write, “That’s their thing. It’s not my thing. But it’s their thing.” Derek Bok finds this unimpressive. Yet some professors teach primitive relativism; and even if they don’t, it’s encoded in the DNA of the cultural competence and diversity training fundamental to the environment of most American universities that even elementary acts of judgment and reasoned preference are abominations. Add to these influences the gelatinous mass that makes up the curriculum of many of our colleges, and you see why the reigning moral philosophy of some of our 21-year-olds is playdoh relativism. “Critics of American colleges,” Bok writes, “typically attribute the failings of undergraduate education to a tendency on the part of professors to neglect their teaching to concentrate on research. In fact, the evidence does not support this thesis, except perhaps in major research universities. Surveys show that most faculty members prefer teaching to research and spend much more time at it.” Yeah, but that’s a pretty big except. There are tons of major research universities out there, and most universities with which UD’s familiar are totally dedicated to making themselves bigtime research institutions if they’re not yet… It’s a little rich of Bok, who oversaw one of the most Darwinian of major research universities, to argue that American professors must now throw heart and soul into teaching… unless they’re at a major research or wannabe major research institution… Bok, whose main point is that our undergraduates will only improve when professors incorporate the results of studies on best teaching practices into their classroom performances, complains that “Freshly minted PhDs typically teach the way their favorite professors taught. This pattern introduces a strong conservative bias into college instruction, a bias reinforced by the tendency of many faculties to regard the choice of teaching methods as the exclusive prerogative of individual professors rather than a fit subject for collective deliberation.” Coupla things. What’s wrong with teaching the way the professors who inspired you taught? UD sees nothing retro in this. Perhaps Bok is arguing - as many restlessly innovating ed school people argue - that any established form, in this fast-paced ever-changing land of ours, is due for the dumpster. Bok dislikes lecturing, for instance, because our attention-deficient audiences can’t be expected to sit still and listen to extended arguments without bells and whistles. Better to get up there and bark like a dog. But you don’t teach college students by crawling into their world and trying to replicate it. You teach them by introducing them to new worlds. |