The Rostrum

By BRUCE HAYWOOD, President, Monmouth College

The higher provincialism
Microscopic views in higher education

THE OCTOBER 1981 issue of Harpers magazine featured an article entitled "The Shame of the Professional Schools," a sharp attack upon our schools of medicine, law and business — those schools which were once "the nation's pride." Today, the author concludes, we can look upon them only with dismay.

Now the person bringing those charges is no Abbie Hoffmann or some such anti-establishment type. Indeed, one couldn't ask for a clearer-eyed, more sober-minded member of the establishment than Andrew Hacker, the author of this indictment. He is a professor in Queens University and a well-known member of educational panels, advisory groups and major committees. Given Professor Hacker's credentials, I, for one, am ready to pay attention when he declared that, "We are turning out professionals who tend to look on people as something of a bother."

Hacker's target is the system — the schools and their programs, but in particular those who compose the faculties. These faculty members, Hacker says emphatically, "care surprisingly little about the needs of their students or those of the larger society our professions supposedly serve." He finds the explanation for this careless indifference in the fact that faculty members receive their tenured appointments, not because they have successfully educated professional people, but for their accomplishments in research. It is to their private research that they remain devoted, scorning all else, and students are left to flounder, without guidance or challenging models. Little wonder then, that many become as self-indulgent as their teachers. What is more alarming, however, is that Hacker's criticisms have a familiar ring, even to those of us who are not involved with graduate professional schools. Hacker's analysis can be understood, in fact, as an extension into the highest levels of our system of the questions that some of us have asked about the undergraduate years: questions of a basic kind; questions about purpose, responsibility and moral direction. And the answers to those questions are even more disturbing than those that Hacker's questions yield. If we consider the situation throughout higher education in America today, we face this inescapable conclusion: higher education, from the freshman year upward, is built upon no discernible foundation.

This condition is a rather recent development, a departure from the unique roles which American colleges and universities have traditionally played in our society. It is true, of course, that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivies were at their founding no different from their European counterparts. They were created to train those who would serve a ruling monarch and an established religion. But after the Revolution they and all American colleges were transformed by the inspiring idea of a whole nation set free by its members growing in freedom towards a higher vision of themselves, a vision proposed and nurtured by higher education. The wisest of our founding fathers recognized that a political system can provide no more than the skeleton of a free society. Only an educated citizenry, living out its understanding, can give flesh and blood to the idea of freedom.

Speaking at Colby College on the role of higher education, Emerson quoted the Book of Proverbs: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." It was to our colleges that Emerson and all like him looked to provide the inspiring vision. To the colleges fell the task of producing men and women who would be neither rulers nor the agents of rulers, but who would think and act on behalf of their nation and their fellow citizens. Turn the pages of current catalogs from our liberal arts colleges, and in some of them you will still find echoes of the phrases which their founders used to describe the free Americans these institutions were to nurture. They were to be men and women of independent mind, of generous understanding, morally purposeful and soundly versed in their country's beliefs and traditions. They were to be thoughtful and imaginative, as concerned with their fellows' point of view as with their own, open to the new even while they were respectful of the time-honored.

For many generations, at least until World War II, that idea of "the good citizen" (how treacherously time has dealt with that epithet!), remained central to the work of our colleges. As higher education was made accessible to ever larger numbers of people, the more secure seemed American ideals which rested upon the foundation of a generously educated citizenry. Ideals of service inspired our professional schools as much as they did our undergraduate institutions. The hallmark of the best of American collegiate education was large-mindedness, and we can surely assert that large minds and generous spirits were nurtured by a course of study which was larger than individual interest, more generous than the concerns of single academic disciplines.

It is the destruction of that uniquely American idea of the purposefully educated citizen that the new critics are lamenting, all in their own ways. Each of them understands that since World War II that vision of the generously educated human being has been driven out of higher education, to be replaced by a model

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of a very different kind. Indeed, we have seen in the last 25 years the very word "educated" take on different meaning.

The source of our present crisis is in the 19th century German universities, which narrowed the focus of higher education and provided an unfortunate model for all modern universities. Now I must here make clear that my purpose is not to denounce research or the idea of specialized inquiry. These are altogether necessary; they are the proper activity of those who work at the highest levels in our universities. But what we have seen since World War II has been the movement of this emphasis into all levels of higher education, even the lowest! And the effect of that, I must underscore, is that the academic community has gradually come to give preference to microscopic vision. The microscope, everybody knows, affords us remarkable powers of observation and discrimination by its intensity of focus. This is very much what an academic discipline can do, each discipline being able to accomplish its particular focus. But the microscope performs its function in part by shutting off our vision of everything else. And so, when it is improperly understood, may the academic discipline. It seems to me undeniably the case that in recent decades faculty preference has been for the discipline as microscope, even in the freshman course. And it is to that faculty preference, not to a shift in student interests or in society's expectations, that we owe the transformation of higher education.

By now each discipline has become something akin to a secular religion, with its own linguistic code and its private symbols, demanding absolute devotion from its members, and insisting on its superiority to other religions. What each prizes above all else is its autonomy. What holds our universities together these days is not a common quest for understanding of the human condition, but a shared faculty wish for autonomy. Even as undergraduates, students, imitating their teachers, learn to identify themselves, not as members of the college, but as chemists, historians, economists, psychologists — yes, even as philosophers! To be "educated," it is clear, no longer means to be richly acquainted with the arts and sciences and to understand how they may illuminate human experience. To be "educated" today means to have been certified as more or less expert in a little world that has its own laws, its own language and its own people. And with this higher provincialism there goes an arrogant pride in being blind to everything else.

The inevitable consequence of making undergraduate education more specialized has been to move higher education away from our society's largest concerns and to divorce it from moral considerations. Value-free inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, as the university mode is usually called, rejects humane implications. Most of our institutions by now, in fact, make no pretensions to cultivating responsive, responsible citizens. They work, instead, to shape competent specialists, secure in their disciplines and related technologies. Students see education only as a choice of a purely vocational track — accounting, advertising, computer programming, journalism, nursing — or a departmental major defined like the rungs of a ladder which leads nowhere but to the graduate school.

And, alas, this is as true in most of our liberal arts colleges today as it is in the undergraduate divisions of our universities. (An English major is an English major is an English major, Gertrude Stein might say today, and it doesn't matter where.) For the collegiate idea of undergraduate education has been as much shattered in our colleges as it has at the university. Most colleges are really universities on a small scale, their departments as isolated from one another as are the university's, their faculty members locked into their solitary interests. How often have I heard faculty members explain their college's failure to develop a coherent undergraduate program by saying, "Oh, we can't agree on anything!" Just as much as the university, the colleges offer the model of early specialization at the expense of larger experience. Last year the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that a student had graduated from a well-known liberal arts college having earned 35 of the 36 credits required for graduation in the department of mathematics. At another small college English majors have their junior seminar on the theory of literature, a professional's interest, before they have even read English literature extensively. At a third college the librarian told me that a history major had asked for help in "researching" a paper he was doing on the sociology of French army officers in World War II. Everywhere one can find undergraduates occupied with topics that 20 years ago would have been thought esoteric even for graduate students.

Need I say what dangers these tendencies pose for our society? Far from providing an enlarging, uplifting, inspiring vision, most undergraduate education offers a reducing, dehumanizing experience. It argues for the acceptance of a new provincialism and persuades young people that the best interest is the selfish one. It is anything but an appropriate education for a free people and for life in a republic. Freedom means not only having choice; it means understanding and appreciating the alternatives between which one chooses. A form of training, calling itself education, which locks young people into a microscopic view, which shuts them off from seriously considering alternatives is not an education for freedom. Neither is it an education that will argue the legitimate interests of others and persuade people to accept responsibility for the welfare of their society. The fault, I say to those who accuse young people of selfishness, of apathy, of small-mindedness, is not in our students, but in us, their teachers. It is we who have failed them.□

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