Wednesday, October 03, 2007

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?


[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?)]

10 comments:

  1. Never mind students, the really hard problem is getting your humanities / social sciences colleagues sufficiently interested and conversant in science to participate meaningfully in the kind of collaboration that fosters a true liberal education. At Union we had (don't know if they've given up on it by now, they should have) a Freshman Preceptorial that was a rather misbegotten and unworkable attempt to combine a Great Books seminar with freshman writing instruction. The science faculty were expected as a matter of course to teach, say, excerpts from Plato's Republic (no problem for me since philosophy has always been a guilty pleasure of mine.) But when it came to us trying to get science books into the course, anything that wasn't really history or philosophy with no real science content at all would be vetoed as "too technical" by the inhumanities and pseudosciences dolts.

    And the the attitudes of students, of course, will partly be influenced by this kind of sciencephobic mentality among many of the faculty.

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  2. Speaking as someone whose only university experience was as a student ...

    What I'm objecting to is the attitude that being literate in the humanities is all it takes to become educated.

    Absolutely. I wish I knew who expressed the following sentiment first, but the idea is that nobody can claim to be educated who is not acquainted with Moby Dick and the St. Matthew Passion; and neither can anybody who is not acquainted with genetics and physics. You can change the specifics, but it's a fine sentiment.

    In part, this is the tension between "education" and "training." A good friend works in health administration at a "director" level, and she ends up at cocktail parties attended largely by doctors. "Ah, yes ... doctors. Highly trained, every one. Some of them are even educated."

    But I have no more idea of how to "solve this problem" than anyone else. In part, it's very individual - if I really just want to be trained, I'll probably end up that way ... if I want to be educated, I'll probably end up that way, even if I take no formal courses in my areas of "non-training."

    I've always liked the notion that everyone in first-year university should take a common set of courses, but there are obvious barriers to that.

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  3. An open lab would be nice. Everything is so tightly controlled nowadays, it's become impossible to ... well, experiment.

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  4. I want you or PZ Myers to comment on the Problem with Atheists, a recent essay by Sam Harris.

    the problem with atheism

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  5. Skeptic4u asks,

    I want you or PZ Myers to comment on the Problem with Atheists, a recent essay by Sam Harris.

    It sucks.

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  6. Aw. I thought it was good, but your opinion overpowers my thought.

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  7. I'm in the humanities and I can't stand Great Books curricula! But that's another rant for another place . . .


    I for one have always been interested in science, but went into humanities because during my senior year of high school, when I took AP biology, I found I hated being in the lab. And I didn't want to spend my undergrad career doing something I hated. I loved reading about science, but I didn't like any of the practical stuff. Although now I regret it; I wish I had done a biology or physics minor, which had less-stringent lab requirements.

    I don't think that really answers your question, though . . . just wanted to weigh in with my humanities perspective . . .

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  8. Only studying humanities is pretty obviously a wrong idea as a general education. But then many scietists fail to see why anything else but science should be studied at all. That is also a problem, it sounds really blunt but in fact, few scientists get any education in the humanities.
    It is safe to say that scientists are being brought up to be "humanistically " and philosophically illiterate. In my opinion, this is the reason why we now have the scourges of on one hand , creationism (ID, Behe) and, on the other hand, scientism (Dawkins).

    Some humanists are either subdued lapdogs of science that belive even its most outrageous claims, or unhinged postmoderminsts that do not care for science. They could certainly use some more scientific education, rather than topple towards one of these two extremes.

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  9. As usual I will complain that the goals are constrained by the current structure, so we need to define our scope. But given that we want to keep universities for both education and training (thanks, Scott!) in general I would add the following challenges and methods to Scott's first-order analysis:

    - The unavoidable process of children's display of abundant curiosity being ground to dust between education and training, helped along by age processes. Perhaps more exploration supports a display of mature curiosity. A lab is supposed to be fun too!

    - More people are interested in science on the web than during education. Supporting web education and life-long learning should suck some people back into the U of life.


    philosophy is the core discipline in an university

    Obviously I have never attended a university then. :-P

    I have noticed a difference in priority of philosophy between people from the anglo-saxon tradition and the swedish, perhaps scandinavian. Now I'm confused by Scott's experience, which seems founded in the AS tradition.

    I think it is a good idea for several reasons, among them rooting all students in the same tradition. But I wonder how often it is done in practice?

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  10. I have noticed a difference in priority of philosophy between people from the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the Swedish, perhaps Scandinavian.

    Torbjörn,

    Funny you should say that. Aren't the Anglo-Saxons substantially from around Scandinavia? Especially Jutland.

    I have another sort of problem with the "liberal education" thing. There's a fairy tale lurking somewhere within this idea, that there is some unbroken line of thought starting with the "Greeks and Romans" all the way through to the "Enlightenment" to our modern times, with no other influences whatsoever - this so called "Western Civilization". I find Descarte's famous assertion, "I think, therefore I am" childish, and couldn't care less for the babble that passes off as "philosophy of the mind". Science isn't rationalism. And rationalism in the last 500 years or so has served mainly to prop up religion as an explanatorily intelligible account of the cosmos. I don't mind reading any amount of Aristotle or Cicero. I hate the fraudulent connections that are drawn thence through the shallow philosophical thinking of the last 200 years.

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