A closer look at higher education
Should the US be rethinking the college and university system? Two academics offer their perspectives.
By Bob Blaisdellfrom the February 27, 2007 edition
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There's been a flurry of media attention in recent years around the charge that a cadre of left-leaning professors on American college campuses today regularly inject impressionable young students with weekly doses of toleration and cultural relativism.
Michael Bérubé, an English professor at Pennsylvania State University, finds such a notion amusing. "Honestly," he once heard a colleague confess. "I just wish I had the power to persuade them to do all the reading."
In What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and 'Bias' in Higher Education, Bérubé is a plucky advocate of a liberal arts education.
To begin with, he points out, most college professors are asked to assume very challenging jobs. Armed with nothing but books, a cluster of tables or desks, perhaps a chalkboard or lighted screen, college faculty communicate love of their subjects to young people who are either indifferent, unprepared, or – occasionally – excited.
They do this in spite of awareness that ignorance, like mold, grows without any help at all, while education flowers mysteriously, weeks or years later. They do it in spite of the lack of pay, public recognition, prestige – or power. "The political forces outside the university, as we professors have learned time and time again in such matters, are considerably stronger than anyone inside the university," Bérubé asserts.
Meanwhile, Professor Deborah L. Rhode of Stanford Law School offers In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture, a bipartisan sketch of the state of the many components of higher education in America. Rhode examines the inefficiencies of higher education, along with its peculiar strengths, its longevity, its resilience, and its vulnerabilities.
Why, for instance, she asks, "does higher education rely so heavily for managerial work on faculty members who are not trained for that task?" And even more baffling: "Why do teachers and scholars who prize the intellectual life take jobs that allow so little scope for its pursuit?"
Rhode, who is a lawyer, tackles some important questions about higher ed but steers a narrow path in her discussions and answers. She is careful, correct, and, at times, just plain dull. At her worst, she sounds like a feckless graduation day speaker: "Our pursuit of knowledge should always include self-knowledge, and a commitment to connect our principles with our practices."
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