Sorting Through The Critiques: Which Criticisms of Contemporary Universities Are Valid?

Many people find fault with institutions of higher education. Whole libraries could be filled with authors who find problems with post-secondary programs.

It would be neither possible nor advisable for those who work in universities and colleges to seriously digest all of these diatribes. Professors and administrators are easy targets, and deserve a certain amount of sympathy for unfairly being the whipping boy for every would-be social critic.

Many of these attacks cannot be true, for the simple reason that they are mutually exclusive: students allegedly read too much Shakespeare and too little; professors are overpaid and underpaid; campuses are too luxurious and too spartan.

The bewildered reader must then decide which, if any, of these recriminations might be true. How will the reader decide which condemnations to take seriously? Tom Nichols, who himself works in a post-secondary educational institution, writes:

Bashing colleges and universities is an American tradition, as is bashing the faculty, like me, who teach in them. Stereotypes abound, including the stuffy (or radical, or irrelevant) professor in front of a collection of bored children who themselves came to campus for any number of activities except education. “College boy” was once a zinger aimed by older people at young men, with the clear implication that education was no substitute for maturity or wisdom.

If a professor, or a curriculum, is judged to be stuffy, irrelevant, or boring, then it should be noted first that such a judgment is mere subjective taste, and second that such a judgment may itself be irrelevant.

No professor or administrator would claim that her or his university is perfect; to the contrary, many of the attacks on the university come from within. Those who work there are all too aware of the dysfunctional bureaucracies which manage them.

Like most post-secondary educators, Tom Nichols freely admits that “colleges are screwed up.” This, in turn, leads to another problem: “fewer people respect learning and expertise.” Two factors lead to a suspicion of the university: its actual flaws and its perceived flaws.

The critique of the university, and distrust of a university education, cannot simply be dismissed as anti-intellectualism, because these attacks are often leveled by the staff and teaching faculty of universities, who are less likely to be anti-intellectuals.

To some extent, the institutions of higher education have brought these problems upon themselves, because “colleges and universities paradoxically became an important part of that problem.”

The twenty-first century university is, then, a mixture of good and evil, a mixture of excellence and incompetence, and a mixture of things both valuable and worthless. A student who receives and follows wise counsel can obtain skills, obtain knowledge, and foster the life of the mind. That same wise counsel can help the student avoid the departments and curricula which are worthless and even harmful.

The university can still be intellectually stimulating, if a student avoids social justice movements. The university can still spark imaginative creativity through academic rigor, if a student steers clear of political correctness. For this reason, Tom Nichols can remain positive about the institution:

I say this while remaining a defender of the American university system, including the much-maligned liberal arts. I am personally a beneficiary of wider access to higher education in the twentieth century and the social mobility it provided. The record of these institutions is unarguable: universities in the United States are still the leading intellectual powerhouses in the world. I continue to have faith in the ability of America’s postsecondary schools to produce both knowledge and knowledgeable citizens.

The good news is that, if students search carefully at a contemporary university, they can still read the writings of Aristotle, Parmenides, Ockham, John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Edmund Burke, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Raymond Chandler, and other authors. Students can still see works by Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Schongauer, George Grosz, Max Ernst, Käthe Kollwitz, and other artists. Students can still hear the music of Johann Walther, J.S. Bach, Arnold Schönberg, and other composers.

Beyond the gathering of such knowledge, which is a necessary precondition for reflection, students can, in certain select departments and courses, acquire and practice those critical thinking skills about which there is so much talk. The “knowing how” of critical thought is predicated upon the “knowing that” of data, evidence, or information.

It is still possible to avoid social justice mania - and, in the avoidance, encounter justice simpliciter.

Navigating between political correctness on the one side, and mere career training on the other, students can encounter a true life of the mind, despite the presence of a Bill Ayers or a Barack Obama.

Students or Customers: Do Universities Teach Students, Or Satisfy Them?

The tradition of universities in the United States is over three hundred years old. In the year 2036, America’s oldest university will have its four-hundredth birthday. But over the course of those four centuries, much has changed about role, both actual and perceived, of the university in society.

At the beginning, and for at least its first two centuries, a college education was not widely desired. It was possible to achieve a comfortable middle-class standard of living without higher education: one could operate a small business and acquire social respectability without a college diploma. In small and even middle-sized towns, certain clergy were often the only residents with college experience (usually Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian-Anglican).

Those who went to college often did so out of a sense of duty or obligation - often to their families - or out of a sense of being called to higher intellectual pursuits - not necessarily higher income levels. While a university degree offered entrance into some professions, it was less about career training and more about igniting a life of the mind.

As the university moved toward the end of its third century and started its fourth, three shifts began to occur. The private universities began to emphasize their social status more; the large state universities began to standardize their operations and their students bodies grew significantly; the smaller four-year liberal arts colleges started to expand their appeal beyond their original denominational audiences.

While these three shifts are different from each other, they shared at least one quality: they pulled postsecondary education away from its original aims. And while each of these three shifts had its own goal, they collectively contributed to an unanticipated consequence: the advent of the consumer-driven model for higher education.

Students were no longer students. They were customers.

At first, this change in paradigm was latent. It grew to be detectable at some point between the “G.I. Bill” in the late 1940s and the materially shrinking birthrates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Shockwaves from the latter arrived at the university in the mid-1980s.

If this reshaping of higher education was latent prior to the mid-1940s, and detectable starting in the mid-1980s, it became significant in the 1990s and thereafter.

The result, along with a anti-hierarchical youth culture, was a university mindset which worked to appeal to, and cater to, students, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

The influx of students into America’s postsecondary schools has driven an increasing commodification of education. Students at most schools today are treated as clients, rather than as students. Younger people, barely out of high school, are pandered to both materially and intellectually, reinforcing some of the worst tendencies in students who have not yet learned the self-discipline that once was essential to the pursuit of higher education. Colleges now are marketed like multiyear vacation packages, rather than as a contract with an institution and its faculty for a course of educational study. This commodification of the college experience itself as a product is not only destroying the value of college degrees but is also undermining confidence among ordinary Americans that college means anything.

This trend has occurred in tandem with mindlessness imposed by electronic mass media, as scholar Robert Bork notes. Whether the media pressured the universities to abandon intellectual rigor, or whether the media is the result of the university’s lack of academic imagination, is an open question. In either case, the result plays into the hands of a misunderstood and misapplied concept: democracy.

The goals of a society which valued and fostered individual political liberty and personal freedom, and a society which delegated civil authority to freely-elected representatives, dissolved as the words ‘equality and equity’ were misconstrued and misused, as Bork writes:

Whichever way the causation runs, the trend in question appears to be the result of an ever more insistent egalitarianism. America never has been enthusiastic about high intellect. “Again and again, but particularly in recent years,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1962, “it has been noticed that intellect in America is resented as a kind of excellence, as a claim to distinction, as a challenge to egalitarianism, as a quality which almost certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch.” He noted that anti-intellectualism “made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian.”

The university has been complicit in the miseducation. It has failed to teach that ‘equal rights’ do not imply equal innate talents or equal achievements; ‘equal opportunity’ does not entail equal financial income.

Because the university has failed to challenge its students intellectually, because it has failed to cause them to wrestle with the thorny concepts in history and philosophy, these students can believe that uniformity is justice, and that academic exploration of alternatives is bigotry.

These students later become enfranchised citizens in the nation. Universities structured on a consumer model have taught them to pursue comfort, both in the physical sense, but more influentially, in the sense that it is comfortable - i.e., it is the route of least resistance - to conform to, to cooperate with, and to promulgate the ideologies that they absorbed at college when they were not intellectually challenged. Any bits of reality which cause cognitive dissonance are perceived as uncomfortable and therefore evil.

Thus an enjoyable, student-centered college experience - with little academic rigor and little life of the mind - leads to adults who vote one way or another because it is simply comfortable.

Post-Secondary Institutions Fail to Educate: What They Don’t Learn at College

Both in high schools and in universities, students are exposed to a variety of experiences, some designed to encourage social skills in the setting of collaborative learning, others designed to inflame their passions about various socio-political causes. Less emphasis is given to mastery of academic disciplines.

At times, some educational institutions try to create the impression that they are working toward mastery of content areas. In such cases, however, either serious content is soon watered down, or it turns out that, from the beginning, the content was not serious, but merely designed to seem so.

In some cases, alleged academic content turns out to be a few slogans and dogmas borrowed from social or political movements.

Students may finish their university careers with a variety of diplomas and degrees, scholar Tom Nichols writes, but

Still, the fact of the matter is that many of those American higher educational institutions are failing to provide to their students the basic knowledge and skills that form expertise. More important, they are failing to provide the ability to recognize expertise and to engage productively with experts and other professionals in daily life. The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions.

There is a double failure on the part of post-secondary institutions. First, they fail to deliver on the academic mastery of academic disciplines. Second, they fail to develop the skill of critical thinking.

As these deficits become greater and greater, the claims about educational excellence become all the louder. Ubiquitous are the assertions by colleges and universities that their students are gaining both specialized knowledge and skills related to critical thought.

To be sure, a good education is still available at many colleges and universities. But it will be obtained only by ignoring the guidance of some academic departments and all administrators. Students are persistently encouraged to engage in various activities which are not conducive to content area learning, and which are not conducive to truly critical thinking.

Hours spent in seminars about ‘awareness’ or ‘sensitivity’ do little to increase knowledge of particle physics or Greek grammar. Required courses in ‘cultural appropriation’ are not places in which the skill of critical thought can be sharpened.

Students who will be teachers - the future educators of the nation - are particularly shielded from various forms of serious learning. Pondering what most universities call the ‘school of education,’ scholar Robert Bork writes:

The problem was both that budding teachers of the young were allowed to avoid competition in the mastery of any subject matter and that educational faddishness — grading adults on class participation rather than knowledge — was apparent. The endless pursuit of fads is a way of avoiding conventional (bourgeois) methods and standards. A few years later, in a good private day school, my son was taught the “new math,” in which, supposedly, he would learn the rationale behind arithmetic rather than engage in such foolishness as rote learning of the multiplication tables. Meanwhile, Japanese children were learning the multiplication tables by rote, and ended up far ahead of American children in mathematics.

If a school engages exclusively, or nearly exclusively, in mere rote learning, then such a school is properly derided. Thus a madrasa relies almost entirely on rote learning; even schools which expanded slightly beyond the madrasa model, like Al Quaraouiyine, still relied on mechanical memorization until recent centuries.

While reason rightly rejects institutions which rely solely or largely on rote memory, it is also clear that some amount of factual knowledge is necessary. In the rejection of education which consists exclusively of rote learning, reason does not swing to opposite extreme and reject all factual information.

Critical thinking is a skill which is reasonably practiced on a body of knowledge. One must know the data of history in order to reason about history. One must know the data of chemistry in order to reason about chemistry.

Sadly, instead of being taught how to think, many students are being taught what to think. The titles of seminars, classes, and courses at many universities read like a laundry list of contemporary socio-political causes and concerns, not like a list of stimulating intellectual explorations.

Students themselves are often aware of whether or not they are learning something of value in a given class or course. The life of the mind is at its best when it consists both of factual knowledge and of thinking skills. In short, students should ‘know that’ and ‘know how’ - they should master the data of a body of knowledge, and they should know how to analyze and synthesize such data.

Postsecondary Achievement: Lowering the Educational Bar

At one time, attending college was not a common experience. Even graduating from high school in, e.g., the year 1900, was not an automatic assumption. Generally, only those students who demonstrated both diligence and academic aptitude were encouraged to apply for college admission.

Usually, only those students driven by curiosity wanted to apply.

It is easy for postmodern observers to call this system elitist or meritocratic. Perhaps it was. This system, however, also recognized the reality that different people have different levels of motivation and ability.

In some aspects, educational systems have since become egalitarian. The word ‘egalitarian’ has meanwhile become the object of dispute: does it mean to give equal opportunities, or does it mean to ensure equal status? The question applies to ‘equal’ and ‘equity’ - is the task to give people the same chances, or it is to ensure that they all arrive at the same status?

In any case, colleges and universities now seek to address the broad population. Admissions policies become ever more ‘inclusive’ and the college experience inclines more toward training and less toward education.

In place of education, students put a great deal of time and energy into the college experience. This ‘experience’ can mean a passionate dedication to sociopolitical trends, or it can mean making friends and building networks of acquaintances the for purposes of either business or recreational.

But this experience is not about the thorough exploration of text, or about wrestling with systems of ideas. As scholar Tom Nichols writes,

Today, attendance at postsecondary institutions is a mass experience. As a result of this increased access to higher education, the word “college” itself is losing meaning, at least in terms of separating educated people from everyone else. “College graduate” today means a lot of things. Unfortunately, “a person of demonstrated educational achievement” is not always one of them.

Since the two words ‘educational’ and ‘achievement’ are no longer the bull’s eye for many educational institutions, these institutions no longer feel the need to measure achievement. What they instead measure, and what they instead call ‘success,’ is often mere conformity.

This diversion from the university’s original intended course is compounded when this lack of education is imposed upon future educators. This happens at what most universities call the ‘School of Education,’ which often is neither a school, nor has it much to do with education.

If those who would be teachers are not allowed or encouraged to see the critical yet appreciative exploration of text as the center of the educational enterprise, what hope is there that these future educators will be able to impart rigorous analytical skills to their students?

If future teachers don’t explore and wrestle with several thousand years’ worth of civilization’s texts and ideas, what hope is there that they will be able to teach their students to reflect on, or contemplate, these texts and ponder their relative merits?

Instead, the ‘School of Education’ keeps its students busy with all kinds of activity, few or none of which place text at the center of the life of the mind. As scholar Robert Bork writes,

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement. In the spring of 1953, as I left our apartment house for the last of a series of grueling law school exams, I met a young woman I knew to be in the school of education. I sympathized with her about how hard she must have been studying. She said she had studied not at all since there were no examinations. “How can they grade you, then?” “We are graded on class participation.” That struck me as preposterous, but the full dimensions of the calamity such a philosophy portended did not then occur to me.

‘Meritocratic’ and ‘elitist’ are not synonyms, and in some situations are actually opposed to each other. The purpose of a university ought to be that it guides and encourages students in rigorous exploration of text and in exploring historic ideas. This is how education differs from training.

Law and medicine, for example, were structured as postgraduate studies because the undergraduate work was supposed to sharpen the mind and fill it with a generous catalogue of ideas and logical skills. The undergraduate foundation was generic: it was shared cultural heritage and the inclination for critical and analytical thought. The graduate training was specific and applied.

The undergraduate foundation was neither applied nor practical: consider the trivium and quadrivium of the first universities. The undergraduate work was essential to allow students to pursue, if they wished, applied and practical training in law or medicine at the graduate level.

The first universities arose shortly after the year 1000, and for nearly a millennia did their work on this pattern. They produced a steady stream of great minds, great ideas, and great texts.

It is a great irony that the postmodern educational establishment speaks often of ‘critical thinking skills’ while producing graduates who are incapable of critical thinking. Consider for a moment that the phrase came into usage via the works of Immanuel Kant. Which students are familiar with Kant, his works, or his ideas? Or even his ideas as found in the thought of another?

The postmodern university has lost some things, and cannot offer these things to its students. It gives them training without first giving them education. It fails to give them a vision of text as the center of the life of the mind. It fails to teach them thinking which is contemplative, reflective, critical, and appreciative.

Looking Back: German Day 2018

On Friday, March 23, 2018, the University of Michigan’s German Department once again invited high school students to participate and compete in the annual German Day event on campus. Several thousand students came from high schools throughout Michigan.

Representatives from the Ann Arbor Public Schools once again proved themselves to be noteworthy. From Slauson Middle School, students arrived with their teacher Denise Socher. From Tappan Middle School, teacher Danielle Capitan brought her students.

Two teachers, Robert Lederer and Astrid Tackett, brought students from Pioneer High School. Huron High School students arrived with their teacher, Andrew Smith.

The AAPS students won a number of prizes in first, second, and third places, as well as “honorable mention” medals. For several consecutive years, AAPS students have left the competition with many medals.

A special award was given to Robert Leder from Pioneer High School. He was named German Teacher of the Year by the U of M’s German Department. German teachers around the state have a profound respect for Robert.

As is usually the case, the Ann Arbor students were the only participants to arrive at the event by foot. Students from Huron High School, led by Andrew Smith, had the longest trip: 2.8 miles.

AAPS German Classes to Chicago: Huron, Pioneer, Slauson, and Tappan

Once again, those students in the Ann Arbor Public Schools who are enrolled in a German class were invited to attend Chicago’s Christkindlmarkt. The City of Chicago organizes an annual Christmas market on Daley Plaza.

This market re-creates a central European outdoor holiday market.

On Friday, December 15, 2018, a fleet of charter buses carried students from Huron High School, Pioneer High School, Slauson Middle School, and Tappan Middle School to Chicago. The students were accompanied by their teachers - Danielle Capitan, Robert Lederer, Andrew Smith, Denise Socher, and Astrid Tackett - as well as a group of volunteer parent chaperones.

The group left Ann Arbor between 7:45 and 8:00 in the morning. A good time was had by all. They returned late in the evening on that same date.

Danielle Capitan teaches at Tappan Middle School; Robert Lederer and Astrid Tackett teach at Pioneer High School; Andrew Smith teaches at Huron High School; Denise Socher teaches at Slauson Middle School.