Ten different schools of thought

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 8, 1997 | by Stephen Goode

During the last two decades, there has been no shortage of bad news coming out of academia. Stories about plummeting academic standards at even our best institutions, for example, and about soaring costs that threaten to put college out of the reach of many.

We hear of fully tenured professors who rarely teach or see undergraduates and of overworked and harried teaching assistants who carry the lion's share of teaching loads. And finally, and equally depressing, there are the stories about the inroads faddish academic trends such as multiculturalism, diversity and postmodernism have made at America's leading colleges and universities.

Make no mistake about it: These problems, and others, continue to plague our institutions of higher learning. But rather than dwell on them yet again, Insight has chosen to take another approach in this issue devoted to education. We have compiled a list of 10 colleges -- and an additional list of 15 others - that do not fit the all-too-familiar mold of schools that seem to be failing to educate their charges.

What has guided our choices? Insight set out to find colleges to which parents could get enthusiastic about sending their sons and daughters, that students might be eager to attend and that would provide a good education for those who sincerely want to be educated.

We describe the 25 schools we've selected as "politically incorrect." That doesn't mean necessarily that these schools don't subscribe to the liberalism that dominates most of academia these days, although some of them -- Hillsdale College, for one -- most certainly do not.

What it does mean is that Insight looked for colleges and universities that are true to themselves and haven't altered their traditions to fit academic fashions or fads -- schools such as Calvin College and Wheaton College, for example, that are faithful to their evangelical Christian heritage, or Franciscan University, a Catholic institution. Whatever the affiliation of the institutions we've chosen, they deliver quality education.

Part of the problem in college choice these days is that the schools regarded as America's best -- Harvard University, to name one, or Stanford University -- are those that have most altered their academic makeup to fit notions of what's fashionable in education.

"The elite and most prestigious institutions tend to be the worst, because they're the most faddish," Jerry L. Martin, president of the conservative and tradition-minded National Alumni Forum, tells Insight. "Academic reputations change all too slowly," says Martin. "We need to redefine what our truly elite institutions are."

Too frequently Americans genuflect before the aura of such names as Yale, Vassar, Mount Holyoke or Brown. Other schools should evoke equal or greater respect, and our list names a few

But not all. Insight emphasizes that it is not ranking schools according to quality. American institutions of higher learning are too varied to do that. A college where one student might flourish will be a school that is anathema to another and a place where he or she never would be content. America offers a wide variety of selection -- "There is school choice when it comes to higher education," Martin notes -- and young people and their parents in search' of a good college are wise to learn as much as possible about the variety of available schools, rather than be lured by a pretty face and a knockout reputation.

Take Northeast Missouri State University, one of our recommended schools. A smallish public institution located in the town of Kirksville, Northeast Missouri has made a name for itself as an academic innovator, reorganizing its curriculum based on guidelines set by a 1985 American Association of Colleges report that almost totally was ignored by fashionable American academics.

A maverick among state schools nationwide, Northeast Missouri boasts: "We continue to provide our students with a strong ... liberal-arts curriculum, taking care to avoid the educational fads and trendiness that often occur in response to highly publicized studies that recommend reform."

Insight is unabashedly impressed by colleges that educate the whole student. In his travels around the country to visit various campuses, National Alumni Forum's Martin encountered a young black student at Temple University who told him approvingly about his college: "They made me read the books I didn't know I wanted to read."

That sounds like the beginning of wisdom. A philosopher and mathematician put it a different way in his 1912 lecture on "The Aims of Education." Alfred North Whitehead said, "A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art."

Insight also is impressed by institutions that don't promise that education will be easy, because it isn't. The 19th-century English writer and Roman Catholic Cardinal John Henry Newman said it best in his The Idea of a University, one of the best books ever written about higher education. "Do not say, the people must be educated, when, after all, you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good humor, or kept from vicious excesses," he wrote.