`Outstanding' Educator Offers Scholarly Advice

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 30, 1999 | by Stephen Goode

Intellectual historian Wilfred M. McClay, currently on his way to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, looks at higher education today and at the American tradition of federalism.

Anyone who came across Wilfred M. McClay's essay, "The Soul of Man Under Federalism," in the June/July 1996 issue of First Things or his recent "Is America An Experiment" in Vital Remnants: America's Founding and the Western Tradition thoughtful, conservative scholar this man is. McClay's The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America won the coveted 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history that year He was listed as one of America's outstanding educators in the Templeton Honor Rolls for 1997-98 and is among the speakers offered to college campuses by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

McClay is at work on a book about Harvard sociologist David Riesman, coauthor of the seminal study The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character (1950), and works on higher education, Insight spoke with McClay just before he assumed an endowed chair in humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

Insight: We hear a lot about a core curriculum as an answer to the academic woes of higher education.

Wilfred M. McClay: I have to say I'm suspicious of a lot of institutions when it comes to the subject of the core curriculum. I'm in favor of it in theory and against it in practice, because it's all in the doing. You can have a Great Books program that's terrible. The cafeteria arrangement for a bright kid who has some guidance in selecting the right courses may be a better option than a liberal-arts college experience in which the curriculum is "integrated" but in a way with which I would not be comfortable.

Insight: What do you mean?

WMM: It's what you see in a whole lot of places now: a movement away from the traditional disciplines and traditional-content areas toward a situation where the readings do not add up to anything. They're a mishmash of undigested and unrelated things, unfocused, with no avowed perspective. When I hear of such a curriculum, I'm on my guard. What's coming here? What's next?

Insight: What might be a change for the better for our colleges and universities?

WMM: We need to leave room for different kinds of institutions to be different. Does that mean it would be good to have an Afrocentric college? Maybe. But I think an all-white college would, for historical reasons, be unacceptable. I've always been at co-ed colleges, but I'm convinced that for certain people the all-male or all-female colleges are very good.

What's happened is that it has been made impossible for men to go to an all-male VMI [Virginia Military Institute]. And it's just a matter of time, if it already hasn't happened, before VMI is another place, something other than what it was by tradition and purpose.

Insight: There is a lot of dissatisfaction now with what colleges offer, isn't there?

WMM: I hear from people who feel they were cheated by their colleges because those schools didn't have more-stringent requirements, that they weren't pushed to do better. This is just as true of people in the elite schools as for people in the state universities.

Part of it is the call to victimization. "I was robbed! It's their fault that I didn't have a better education, that I can't write grammatically! It's somebody else's fault!" But part of the feeling of being cheated is valid and not part of a desire to be a victim, and I predict we are going to see more and more complaints about the lousy education I got at X University. Why? Because all the standards that once obtained were thrown out, basically because of the pressure of students. Education was made "relevant" and undemanding!

Insight: It hasn't only been pressure from students that led to undemanding colleges, has it?

WMM: Another problem that you have when you're trying to construct a system of higher education is that higher education today is entirely grounded in consumer choice. We've seen the transformation of higher education into a consumer marketplace.

Universities tend to put a lot of money into building nice athletic facilities for students, to satisfy the consumer. The idea that a consumer will pay for an education that is genuinely challenging doesn't really compute in the language of consumers.

Insight: The old truths such as honor and sacrifice don't compute in consumer language either, do they?

WMM: I think it shows our enormous arrogance that we see ourselves as living in an era of ultimate truth, one of the principles of which is the sufficiency of the self, which means we see all motives for human aspiration as reducible ultimately to psychological categories, that what lies behind altruism, nobility and sacrifice -- those things that were part of the way people talked about moral issues in the past -- is nothing but the desire for self-esteem and instinctual gratification, and other banalities like that.