A closer look at higher education

Should the US be rethinking the college and university system? Two academics offer their perspectives.

from the February 27, 2007 edition

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"In Pursuit of Knowledge" is a quasi-textbook – in both the best and worst ways. As a piece of writing, this work is carefully crafted, but it too often comes across as sanded clean, formulaic, only occasionally leavened by interesting firsthand experience, quotation-book quotes, and wry observations.

"Why does a profession committed to the search for knowledge know so little about the effectiveness of teaching, which it claims as one of its primary missions?," Rhode asks. Good question, but the answer is a bit too neatly smoothed over, placed in the to-do file, and left for somebody else to deal with.

Reading "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts" is more fun, except when, in a miscalculation of his own powers as a dramatist or philosopher, Bérubé plunks us down in his undergraduate classrooms for nearly a third of his book. There, readers must endure Bérubé's pseudo-Socratic meanderings through two literary classics.

In the end, however, Bérubé does manage to offer a spirited defense of the outcome of US higher education. Critics attack America's colleges and universities "not because they don't work but because, by and large, they do.... Economically they're powerhouses; not only does a degree enhance the future earnings of college graduates for the rest of their lives ... but universities do indispensable, basic research and development and technology transfer in their corporate and applied-science sectors as well."

In the end, Bérubé insists, education is really a faith-based endeavor. Students go to college because almost everybody tells them it's a sensible thing to do. Professors, on the other hand – atheists or not – teach and then can only pray that some of what was communicated will sink in.

"One of the signal virtues of liberal arts education is that it bucks the trends of the corporate 'multiversity,' and puts faith instead in ancient, 'inefficient' forms of teaching like lecture and discussion and independent study," Bérubé writes. In this sense, he insists, "students' beliefs are part of the very fabric of the class."

• Bob Blaisdell edited "Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy's Writings on Education."

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