How to get a college education - Back to School

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by Jeffrey Hart

It can be done, even in the Ivy League, if you keep your eye on the goal of education.

IT WAS in the fall term of 1988 that the truth burst in upon me that something had gone terribly wrong in higher education. It was like the anecdote in Auden where the guest at a garden party, sensing something amiss, suddenly realizes that there is a corpse on the tennis court.

As a professor at Dartmouth, my hours had been taken up with my own writing, and with teaching a variety of courses -- a yearly seminar, a yearly freshman composition course (which -- some good news -- all senior professors in the Dartmouth English Department are required to teach), and courses in my eighteenth-century specialty. Oh, I knew that the larger curriculum lacked shape and purpose, that something was amiss; but I deferred thinking about it.

Yet there does come that moment.

It came for me in the freshman composition course. The students were required to write essays based upon assigned reading -- in this case, some Frost poems, Hemingway's In Our Time, Hamlet. Then, almost on a whim, I assigned the first half of Allan Bloom's new surprise best-seller The Closing of the American Mind.

When the time came to discuss the Bloom book, I asked them what they thought of it.

They hated it.

Oh, yes, they understood perfectly well what Bloom was saying: that they were ignorant, that they believed in cliches, that their education so far had been dangerous piffle and that what they were about to receive was not likely to be any better.

No wonder they hated it. After all, they were the best and the brightest, Ivy Leaguers with stratospheric SAT scores, the Masters of the Universe. Who is Bloom? What is the University of Chicago, anyway? So I launched into an impromptu oral quiz.

Could anyone (in that class of 25 students) say anything about the Mayflower Compact? Complete silence.

John Locke? Nope.

James Madison? Silentia.

Magna Carta? The Spanish Armada? The Battle of Yorktown? The Bull Moose party? Don Giovanni? William James? The Tenth Amendment? Zero. Zilch. Forget it.

The embarrassment was acute, but some good came of it. The better students, ashamed that their first 12 years of schooling had mostly been wasted (even if they had gone to Choate or Exeter), asked me to recommend some books. I offered such solid things as Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the United States, Max Farrand's The Framing of the Constitution, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Several students asked for an informal discussion group, and so we started reading a couple of Dante's Cantos per week, Dante being an especially useful author because he casts his net so widely -- the ancient world, the (his) modern world, theology, history, ethics.

I quickly became aware of the utter bewilderment of entering freshmen. They emerge from the near-nullity of K - 12 and stroll into the chaos of the Dartmouth curriculum, which is embodied in a course catalogue about as large as a telephone directory.

Sir, what courses should I take? A college like Dartmouth -- or Harvard, Princeton, etc. -- has requirements so broadly defined that almost anything goes for degree credit. Of course, freshmen are assigned faculty "advisors," but most of them would rather return to the library or the Bunsen burner.

Thus it developed that I began giving an annual lecture to incoming freshmen on the subject, "What Is a College Education? And How to Get One, Even at Dartmouth."

One long-term reason why the undergraduate curriculum at Dartmouth and all comparable institutions is in chaos is specialization. Since World War II, success as a professor has depended increasingly on specialized publication. The ambitious and talented professor is not eager to give introductory or general courses. Indeed, his work has little or nothing to do with undergraduate teaching. Neither Socrates nor Jesus, who published nothing, could possibly receive tenure at a first-line university today.

But in addition to specialization, recent intellectual fads have done extraordinary damage, viz.: -- So-called Post-Modernist thought ("deconstruction," etc.) asserts that one "text" is as much worth analyzing as any other, whether it be a movie, a comic book, or Homer. The lack of a "canon" of important works leads to course offerings in, literally, anything.

-- "Affirmative Action" is not just a matter of skewed admissions and hiring, but also a mentality or ethos. That is, if diversity is more important than quality in admissions and hiring, why should it not be so in the curriculum? Hence the courses in things like Nicaraguan Lesbian Poetry.

-- Concomitantly, ideology has been imposed on the curriculum to a startling degree. In part this represents a sentimental attempt to resuscitate Marxism, with assorted Victim Groups standing in for the old Proletariat; in part it is a new Identity Politics in which being Black, Lesbian, Latino, Homosexual, Radical Feminist, and so forth takes precedence over any scholarly pursuit. These Victimologies are usually presented as "Studies" programs outside the regular departments, so as to avoid the usual academic standards. Yet their course offerings carry degree credit.