The hook is that this discussion happened almost a hundred years ago, in a meeting of delegates from 20 colleges held at Wesleyan University in 1925. To the extent today's students care about learning anything in between bacchanals and indignant protests, they could probably say similar things. A few do, says article author Jonathan Zimmerman, but those "paying customers" are widely outnumbered by the ones who want a memorable experience (much of which they will render themselves unable to remember) and a credential for a job that will put them comfortably in the upper middle class.
Zimmerman, a former professor at New York University and now at the University of Pennsylvania, names the usual suspects: A research-dominated faculty culture, little or no training in actual pedagogy, grade inflation, etc. To this he adds a feature from our modern age, in which professors are afraid to present challenging ideas in certain areas of discussion for fear of stirring up a mob against them for their clearly fascist bigotry -- even in fields that discuss nothing that could honestly be described as fascist or bigoted.
My own time as an undergraduate is some 35 years ago and while some of these trends had started to curve upward, I proudly possess a transcript that proves grade inflation had not been adopted by several professors. Most of my time in campus ministry has been in smaller regional universities, where students are far more likely to encounter instructors more interested in teaching than in advancing in their field through research.
The irony seems to be that the value of the college as a credential for where one starts in the world seems to vary inversely with the likelihood that one might actually be taught something. Professor Zimmerman would like to see a world where more colleges offered that likelihood -- and maybe things at prestige universities or large state research schools will one day break down so much that such a world will return. It happened in response to student critique and dissatisfaction a hundred years ago, at least for awhile, and maybe it will happen again.
Kind of like if you read Horace Mann's works from the nineteenth century, the problems that public education was supposed to solve (poor schooling, poor discipline, etc.) are the very things that public education suffers from today.
ReplyDeleteHuman nature is what it is. You can work with it, but you cannot change it by process or state control.