Why higher education is neither - includes related article

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1989 by Jason DeParle, Liza Mundy, John Heilemann

The struggle over curriculum reform is not new in America but has been going on for more than 100 years; and it's one in which the good guys usually lose. The once-classical core began to fragment with the rise of electives in the 1870s, and with the rise of the Ph.D., which elevated specialization and began parceling universities into autonomous departments. By 1900, Harvard, for instance, had abolished every course requirement on campus, with the one exception of English composition. At Harvard and elsewhere, students were on their own.

The rebellion against this fragmentation began most notably perhaps at Columbia, where, by the 1930s, a Great Books course begun by John Erskine had expanded into the kind of core curriculum that still exists there today. Columbia's good fortune lay in having not only such a comprehensive curriculum but some of the country's best teachers to teach it, people like Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Jacques Barzun. the University of Chicago installed a similar regimen, under the leadership of Robert Maynard Hutchins as president; St. John's in Annapolis took the idea to an extreme, devoting its students' entire four years to the study of Great Books.

By the mid-forties, Harvard began taking note of these reforms, and of its own moth-eaten curriculum. The school's subsequent experience, on up to today, is useful to consider, since Harvard so often sets the tone for other universities. In 1945, James Bryant Conant, the university's president, issued a plan much like Columbia-s--a mandatory regimen of basics before moving on to a major and specialization. But the school's faculty rebelled, stalling efforts at reform, then as now.

Put yourself in a professor's shoes and the reasons aren't hard to imagine: By defining some things as "essential," the core would tacitly label others as inessential--and what faculty member wants his life's work thus labeled? What's more, if the core included, say, Shakespeare, it would strip the English department of its exclusive Shakespeare rights--a key way of attracting students into the department. Including Adam Smith would pose the same threat to Econ; Plato to Philosophy, Mozart to Music--they're ours, you can hear the department chairs growl. And what, perhaps, was more threatening still, someone would have to each these ambitious interdisciplinary courses: a laborious endeavor that would take faculty away from their narrow and secure specialities (and, hence, away from the assurance of publishing, the key to career advancement). Cutting Conant off, the faculty beat back the idea of a core and substituted a set of General Education choices instead--in effect, a set of distribution requirements.

The initial damage was limited. Students could choose between "The Social Inheritance of Western Civilization" (emphasizing events) or "Western Thought and Institutions" (emphasizing ideas), but they still wouldn't graduate without knowing the basic foundations of their civilization. While it's true that these offerings were more dominated by Western tradition than they should have been, still they demanded that the student master a broad intellectual framework.