The Goal of a University Education

 
At the University or Toronto we're about to go through one of our regular navel-gazing exercises where the administrators ask us how they should plan for the future. In this case, it's a document called "Towards 2030." It's another one of those motherhood-type essays about improving the undergraduate experience and coping with a changing research environment. After 43 years in university, it's all beginning to sound a bit repetitive.

I was wondering whether anyone had any new ideas when I saw this article in the New York Times [Academic Business]. It's written by Andrew Delbanco who is the director of American studies and Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. There's nothing new there either. It's the same old complaints that we protested about in the 1960's; namely, the transformation of the university into a corporation. Even when we became Professors we didn't succeed in reversing this trend. The latest navel-gazing exercise is a case in point. It's the administrators who act as though this is "their" university and everyone else is an employee or a customer.

But Delbanco does make a few points that I'd like to comment on.

College today is a place in which students from many backgrounds converge, and it is neither feasible nor desirable to prescribe for them some common morality. But college should be a place that fosters open debate of the ethical issues posed by modern life — by genetic screening and engineering; by the blurring of the lines dividing birth, life and death; by the global clash between liberal individualism and fundamentalism.

I just came back from a class where my students discussed evolution and creationism with me and my colleague, who happens to be a Jesuit Priest. It was a lot of fun but you know what? In a university of 72,000 students (59,000 undergraduates) this class represents only a tiny fraction of the student body. The vast majority don't want this kind of education no matter how valuable we think it is. It's simply not true that if you create the classes they will come.

It's not good enough to just mouth the words about the value of a liberal education. We need practical solutions to the problem of getting today's students to buy into the concept. Anybody got any ideas on how to do that?

Delbanco also says,

Some signs suggest that higher education is waking up to its higher obligations. There is more and more interest in teaching great books that provoke students to think about justice and responsibility and how to live a meaningful life. Applications are up at Columbia and the University of Chicago, which have compulsory great-books courses; students at Yale show growing interest in the “Directed Study” program, in which they read the classics; and respected smaller institutions like Ursinus College in Pennsylvania have built their own core curriculums around major works of philosophy and literature.

This is where I part company with the Professor of Humanities. There was a time when I thought that the old books were a wonderful way to build a good program in liberal education. But since then I've come to appreciate that part of the problem is scientific illiteracy and we don't solve that problem by focusing all our attention on dead philosophers and even deader novelists.

Don't get me wrong, I still think that philosophy is the core discipline in an university and every student should become familiar with the basic problems in philosophy. What I'm objecting to is the attitude that being literate in the humanities is all it takes to become educated. You simply can't intelligently discuss the "ethics" of genetic engineering these days if you don't learn science. And you don't learn science by reading the great books, even if one of them is The Origin of Species.

Scientists need to speak out. You can stand around at cocktail parties discussing the meaning of Moby-Dick all you want but you can't call yourself educated if you don't know what DNA is or what causes eclipses and earthquakes.

I don't know how to get students interested in science either, by the way. Does anybody? Is the problem beyond the ability of the university to solve?

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[Photo Credit: The top photograph shows a walkway in one of theolder buildings on the University of Toronto campus from the Macleans website]

[Hat Tip: Michael White at Adaptive Complexity who has some interesting comments that are worth reading(Do Universities care about more than image?)]