Higher Miseducation

We Americans take pride in the fact that so many of us go to and graduate from college, and we brag about having thousands of colleges and universities. But a recent study by sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia reveals that we have absolutely nothing to brag about, because that's exactly what college students in America learn.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found that 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the ability to think critically or reason with or express in writing complex issues by the end of their sophomore years, and professors don't seem interested in getting more out of their students. Half of the students examined did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and a third didn't even take a single course that required at least 40 pages of reading per week. You can read more - if you're in a mood to have your morale lowered - in Arum and Roksa's book "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses."

I don't understand why this is even news, as most American colleges and universities have been academically deficient and intellectually suspect for decades. The American experience of higher education is quite different from higher education in the traditional sense, which involves the study of history, classical languages, philosophy, and literature. Such a curriculum encourages the deeper probing of complex and worldly ideas and cultivates the skill to question and be skeptical rather than taking things at face value. American - and, to some extent, global - higher learning increasingly can't be bothered with any of those things.

Many American colleges and universities adopted a more "contemporary" version of education that encourages not intellectual development but practical skills. Philosophy and classicism were subjects that discouraged enthusiastic activity in the American capitalist system, and so colleges and universities gravitated toward subjects such as business; Joseph Wharton set the standard in 1881 by founding the business school that bears his name at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite Wharton's own intellectual curiosity in the sciences, his name came to be associated with the pursuit of anti-intellectual, non-scientific goals. Thus, higher education became associated with preparing Americans to be dutiful workers in the corporate world. As Paul Fussell - who is from the University of Pennsylvania - noted in 1991, many American colleges and universities "create students who automatically join the labor force without the capacity to wonder what they're doing or whether their work is right or wrong, noble or demeaning." But then, Fussell also wrote that real education is inconsistent with "the American life of action, ambition, [and] acquisitiveness . . .. In fact, just the opposite: the development of the intellect led only to an un-American life of study and contemplation."

But there are several other developments in American higher education that have aided and abetted the current crisis it faces. First came the development of intercollegiate athletics, which led to a vast moneymaking enterprise for colleges and universities, opening these institutions to the influence of the almighty dollar (and to the various academic and bribery scandals involving athlete recruitment) and turning our college campuses into spas and sports complexes where literature and history are only occasionally studied. I'm going on record here as being opposed to Title IX, the clause in the federal education law that allows women equal access to scholastic sports programs, as it pertains to colleges - not because I'm opposed to women in college sports because I'm opposed to college sports! If you got rid of the stadiums, gyms, and swimming pools on college campuses, it would cost much less to run the campuses - elimination of overhead - and the savings could be passed on by lowering tuition fees. Without college sports, only the genuinely intelligent would bother with college. The athletic scholarship is an oxymoron. University of Southern California alumnus O.J. Simpson went to college on an athletic scholarship. The end.

A more recent development in American academia is the rise of ethnic and gender studies, which allows intellectually disinterested students - and faculty - to engage in academic pursuits that balkanize themselves according to race, creed, color or sex. "Separatism also insists," wrote James Howard Kunstler, "that for the purpose of promoting educational and economic advancement, people be treated strictly as members of groups, depriving them of their individuality, the most powerful means for true advancement, indeed the only means for achieving personhood." The concurrent rise of political correctness was also influential, which was, as Kunstler says, "induced by the wish among academic zealots to compel the toleration of 'diversity' (differences minus standards) - especially those forms of diversity officially sanctioned by the campus Thought Police." Rather than lead to a universal understanding of the campus as a place of the free exchange of ideas, political correctness led to conformity. And the left can hardly receive all the blame for this; consider the rise of conservative Christian colleges, where students are hardly encouraged to entertain ideas that contradict their faith.

Finally, there's the vast quantity of colleges and universities that exist mainly because of the elevation of many vocational schools and provincial theological seminaries to college and university status. Many of today's "colleges" are career training schools, while several "universities" started out as teacher's colleges that were better known for putatively efficient training programs than for the ability to give prospective schoolteachers any intellectual capabilities.

All of this fine with Americans, who, having taken higher education seriously enough in the 1960s to question the wisdom of our leaders and the soundness of our culture, have since reverted to conformity. Fussell noted that although this country "doesn't really want the higher learning - too difficult, too useless, too alienating - it must pretend to want it, for even a simulacrum of it is still excellent for prestige." Such prestige could be seriously challenged if colleges and universities were held accountable by the federal government for declining academic standards. Alas, an accompanying report argues against such an idea - and it's a proposal that has long been feared in American higher education.

I'm not surprised.