The Marketplace of Ideas (14 page)
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Authors: Louis Menand
THREE
of the chapters in this book originated as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, which I had the honor and pleasure of giving in February 2008. I am grateful to my excellent hosts in Virginia—Charles Mathewes, Tal Brewer, and Aaron Wall—and to the members of the university community who came to the talks, made challenging and useful interventions, and generally showed me a really good time. Chapter two was published, in a different form, as an occasional paper by the American Council of Learned Societies, through the kindness of the late John D’Arms; an earlier version appeared in
The New York Review of Books
. The Page-Barbour Lectures are by custom published by the University of Virginia Press. I thank the committee and the press for agreeing to let me have them published elsewhere. Elsewhere is W. W. Norton, and I am grateful to Roby Harrington and Robert Weil for their long-term interest in this project and for their editorial hands-on. And thanks to Skip Gates for making it all possible. I did some of the work on this book when I was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. The director of the center, Jean Strouse, and her staff provided an unusually collegial working environment.
I have been giving talks about and participating in conferences on higher education for many years, and a list of all the places where I have had a chance to share my ideas and to learn from colleagues in the academic world would be impractical. Academics love shoptalk at least as much as anyone else. I have visited dozens of schools and organizations, and I always found terrific people to talk to, but I do want to acknowledge several individuals who gave me special opportunities to speak, write, and learn about higher education and its problems: Jesse Ausubel, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation; Peter Brooks, of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale; William Kelly, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Alvin Kernan, of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Paul Kjellberg, of Whittier College; Gerald Marzorati, of
Harper’s
and the
New York Times Magazine
; Robert Orrill, of the College Board; Linda Ray Pratt, of the American Association of University Professors; Robert Scholes, of the Modern Language Association; David Wiggins and Alan Ryan, of New College, Oxford; and a longtime and generous interlocutor on academic life, Jeffrey Williams, of Carnegie Mellon University.
I was fortunate when I came to Harvard to be invited to participate in a reform of the undergraduate curriculum undertaken at the direction of the president, Lawrence Summers, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby. I learned a lot from them, and from many colleagues, during my involvement in that enterprise. I thank especially, for their friendship and our work together, Evelynn Hammonds, Andrew Knoll, Charles Maier, Steven Pinker, Michael Sandel, Kay Shelemay, Diana Sorensen, and Maria Tatar. The road was longer and rockier than anyone probably anticipated, but reforms were accomplished. I was lucky to be in the game to the end, and to work with Derek Bok, Drew Faust, David Fithian, Dick Gross, and Jeremy Knowles. They taught me a great deal about how universities actually work, and much of what is in this book, not to mention the urge to write it, is informed by our collective experience. Above and beyond all else, I salute, in gratitude, the six intrepid souls to whom the book is dedicated: Stephanie Kenen, Stephen Kosslyn, David Liu, David Pilbeam, Alison Simmons, and Mary Waters.
Louis Menand is Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard. He has also taught at Princeton, Queens College, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he was Distinguished Professor of English. He is the author of several books, including
The Metaphysical Club
, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2002. He has been associate editor at
The New Republic
(1986–87), literary editor at
The New Yorker
(1993–94), and contributing editor at
The New York Review of Books
(1994–2001). Since 2001, he has been a staff writer at
The New Yorker
.
1
Most of the data on American higher education in this book are from the
Digest of Education Statistics
of the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education (http://nces.ed.gov/);
U.S. Statistical Abstracts
of the U.S. Census Bureau (http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/); and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/). In my citations, I give the source of my data, but I generally do not provide specific urls, since these change as databases are updated.
2
F. M. Cornford,
Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician
, 4th ed. (1908; Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1949), p. 15. See Gordon Johnson,
University Politics: F. M. Cornford’s Cambridge and His Advice to the Young Academic Politician
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3
Clark Kerr,
The Uses of the University
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 99. Kerr published four more, expanded editions of this book, the last in 2001. He died in 2003.
4
As do most writers on higher education, I often use the phrase “liberal arts” as shorthand for “liberal arts and sciences,” which are defined as subjects of disinterested inquiry rather than areas of professional or vocational education.
5
See the lively account in Elizabeth Renker,
The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 126–43. Renker seems to think that my own view of what she calls “the end of the curriculum” is elegiac; this is a misunderstanding.
1
Harvard began a reform of its general education curriculum in 2003. The faculty approved a new system in 2007; it was not launched until the fall of 2009. The amount of time between the decision to develop a new program and its implementation is not unusual, and it is also not unusual for proposed reforms to fail. The sociologist Daniel Bell devised an ambitious general education curriculum at Columbia in the sixties; a committee chaired by the political scientist Robert Dahl proposed one at Yale in the seventies. Neither program was adopted: see Daniel Bell,
Reforming General Education: The Columbia College Experience in Its National Setting
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1968), and
The Great Core Curriculum Debate: Education as a Mirror of Culture
(New Rochelle, NY: Change Magazine Press, 1979), pp. 79–102. I was one of many professors involved in the design of the new general education curriculum at Harvard. We compared the process to the Big Dig (a local reference).
2
Expository writing and a foreign language are often required of all college students. (It was once common to require students to pass a swimming test before they could graduate—Columbia still does—and some colleges have a physical education requirement.) The usual practice is to require all, or most, freshmen to take a writing or writing-intensive course, but to allow students to place out of the language requirement by scoring a certain mark on a test, such as an SAT-II. Although these requirements are technically part of the general education curriculum, they are rarely subjects of controversy, in part because they are important mainly to the departments that staff them. There is no zero-sum interdepartmental gaming involved.
3
Yale recently changed from a somewhat more elaborate distribution system. Unless otherwise cited, information about general education requirements is from college Web sites, and is subject to change.
4
Brown does require that its students demonstrate “competence in writing,” but only students who instructors feel lack such competence are required to do course work addressing the problem.
5
Stanford, for instance, has carefully circumscribed requirements in ethical reasoning, the global community, American cultures, and gender studies (all under the rubric of Education for Citizenship), in addition to an introductory humanities course and a “disciplinary breadth” requirement.
6
The discussion of the history of general education reform in this chapter draws on a Harvard University document, “Curricular Renewal in Harvard College” (2006), to which I contributed in collaboration with a number of colleagues and administrators. The section I draw on was researched and drafted by me, but benefited from the editorial oversight of the entire committee. (This was an interim report and its recommendations were later superseded.)
7
See Laurence R. Veysey,
The Emergence of the American University
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 180–251; Julie A. Reuben,
The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. pp. 61–87; and Jon H. Roberts and James Turner,
The Sacred and the Secular University
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 83–106.
8
Arthur Levine,
Handbook on Undergraduate Curriculum
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978), pp. 3–4.
9
As many commentators have remarked, it would be virtually impossible to get a faculty to agree on a single fixed syllabus for those (or nearly any other) subjects today; that the Columbia core is grandfathered in—that it has become the face of the franchise, so to speak—is possibly the main reason it still exists. Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities are only a part of Columbia’s general education program.
10
Robert A. McCaughey,
Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 290. On the development of the core curriculum at Columbia, see ibid., pp. 285–99, and Timothy P. Cross’s history of the core (1995), at http://www.college.columbia.edu/core/oasis/history0.php. See also Justus Buchler, “Reconstruction in the Liberal Arts,” in Dwight C. Miner, ed.,
A History of Columbia College on Morningside
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), pp. 48–135; W. B. Carnochan,
The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 68–87; and Levine,
Handbook
, pp. 330–33.
11
Quoted in Carnochan,
Battleground
, p. 76.
12
Ibid., pp. 70–72.
13
The course is the spine that runs through Trilling’s literary criticism, from his first, enormously successful collection,
The Liberal Imagination
(1950), to his last book,
Sincerity and Authenticity
(1972), which is virtually a gloss on the syllabus. Trilling describes the course in some detail in “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in his
Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning
(New York: Viking, 1965), pp. 3–30; he also comments on it in “Reflections on a Lost Cause: English Literature and American Education” (1958), in Diana Trilling, ed.,
Speaking of Literature and Society
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), pp. 243–69, and “Some Notes for an Autobiographical Lecture,” in Diana Trilling, ed.,
The Last Decade: Essays and Reviews, 1965–75
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 231–34.
14
Students at St. John’s take a four-year seminar on classic texts in Western thought and literature (which includes, for seniors, four weeks on the writings of Karl Marx).
15
See Nicholas Lemann,
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), pp. 42–52, 78–79. James Hershberg’s biography,
James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age
(New York: Knopf, 1993), is mostly concerned with Conant’s involvement with the atomic bomb. (Conant served as chief civilian administrator of nuclear research during the war and was responsible for the recommendation—not the decision, which was the Secretary of War’s—that the bomb be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Hershberg does not discuss Conant’s educational reforms in much detail. I discuss both aspects of Conant’s career in “The Long Shadow of James B. Conant,”
American Studies
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), pp. 91–111.
