I’m going to be sitting with this post for awhile Josh. Thank you.
An early thought as the mother of a daughter about to start her junior year - and my apologies for being off topic.
Location was incredibly important to me in helping my daughter think about school choice. I was worried about her access to reproductive healthcare not only during her undergraduate studies but if she stayed for graduate school or found a job. This was something we talked a lot about.
Now I would also be concerned about attending a school where state legislatures are seeking to restrict academic freedoms.
These are along side the weighty questions you pose for sure but also feel tangled up in ways I’m still not awake enough to be coherent about.
Thank you, Beth, and apologies for the delay in responding (you were the first to comment, and I'm working in reverse order through the thread). You're absolutely right about the healthcare concerns for young women and the larger assault on academic freedom. Those get most of the headlines, so I suppose I was targeting the subtler attacks on quality. But there really are multiple and intersecting threats to the educational system that shaped both of us. I do worry that if we cede the argument on gen-ed courses, we will simply give Google and Meta and Tesla the whole game. If higher ed is just job training, then corporations can do it themselves. What they can't do is teach Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Phillis Wheatley. So I still believe the literary tradition is worth defending.
I need to rotate a few more American literary history posts in when I have time. There are so many wonderful writers who add depth to our understanding of national identity. And I think that should be every young person's birthright as an American!
I perceive my graduate years, mid-80s to early 90s, as coming more or less midpoint between what I'll here call the *old* university and the current situation you describe so well. I began teaching still imagining the possibility of doing it in that old environment and ended it, very recently, in a profession I never would have been drawn to enter to begin. That's a statement loaded with possible understandings and misunderstandings, but what's important in my making it now is the profundity of the change it suggests, and how well we understand it. Smaller point before my larger: my extended, interrupted undergraduate education was at the urban, commuter, City University of New York, decades ago. Institutionally, *then*, there existed no notable, empathetic involvement in the personal needs or success of individual students. The institution did not come to the student; the student came to the institution. Students succeeded, mostly on the basis of their own resources capable of employing university resources. That is, it was pretty much like the rest of life. To the extent that we have different expectations now at the college level that we may think we fail, it's crucial to understand all the conditions for those different expectations. Larger point: if we call it "general education" or refer to a "core," the fundamental questions are general education in what, core learning in or of what and why is the university or liberal arts college necessarily the place for that to go on. I don't think there is anywhere near the necessary clarity and coherence in addressing those questions either institutionally or socially .
Jay, I didn't realize that you'd been a teacher or that you'd left that profession recently. I'd love to hear that story sometime. Happy to take it offline -- dolezaljosh@gmail.com. Or maybe you could tell it in a guest post? You're exactly right about the impetus once being on the student to meet the university where it was. That wasn't all good -- there were plenty of students who fell through the cracks, some with disabilities, and that system was often a patriarchal one where many women didn't thrive. But we have swung to the opposite extreme of extreme accommodations. That's a whole separate thread. Struggle is part of education, and minimizing it is not necessarily helpful. No one is coming to save you in the rest of life, as you say.
I might need some help unpacking this: "if we call it "general education" or refer to a "core," the fundamental questions are general education in what, core learning in or of what and why is the university or liberal arts college necessarily the place for that to go on." If I hear you correctly, you're saying that we don't share a common understanding of what college is for, in which case I completely agree. This was the change I've described in other comments. Once I had the institution's support in emphasizing the importance of my discipline. Students and parents might have resisted, but the institution helped me win them over. When the institution began sidelining the humanities, the trust deficit was greater, and in some cases 15 weeks was not enough time to turn the tide.
Josh, LOL, I thought you knew. I taught for just over 30 years, with two endings. Exactly a decade ago I retired with a pension from my tenured job. I made that decision for a variety of reasons but prominent among them those you discuss regularly on this Substack. Rather than give up teaching, though, I sought new experiences, as an adjunct, mostly working full-time equivalent at a couple of colleges at a time. (I did need the money) I returned part-time to NYC from L.A. to teach there, at CUNY and Fordham. I started as an adjunct and ended as such, with 20 years of tenure and a spell as department chair in between, at a wide variety of institutions, so I had a good range of experience. But most, though not all, of my career decisions were particular to my life, so I tend not to discuss them as exemplary.
Well, that was just the start of what was turning into something much too long for a comment, so I will write you offline and we can discuss the possibility of a guest post if that interests. I will say that you did hear me correctly at the end about the lack of a common understanding of what general education and a core should be.
This is interesting by A. Jay, as noted earlier I was oblivious to many of the changes in higher ed when I came to this site. I grew up in a faculty family, old days when teachers taught, that was it mostly. It was a bucolic life for many. I worked in higher ed for awhile as an advisor and found it odd that all the work we put in didn't bump our grad rate one iota. Maybe it did for some students, but school wide it did not.
The insistent hand holding, building of Taj Mahal rec centers (and lazy rivers!), the layering of high paid administrators, just seems crazy to me. As A. Jay stated, in the past the student came to the college, not the other way around. Late in my undergrad career I found the career, counseling, and health centers, all paid for by my tuition, thus not costing me extra. Try that in real life. But I found it, which is more meaningful than the university holding my hand and walking me to each place.
There are some reasonable accommodations, such as for disabilities. I was less persuaded by the need for emotional support animals, which were sometimes quite disruptive. But I quite agree that many services now offered by institutions are not necessarily the institution’s responsibility. Title IX is a can of worms. But the institution absorbs a lot of high risk and high cost by attempting to handle assault claims internally. Tip of the iceberg.
Jul 21, 2023·edited Jul 21, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
My educational philosophy for teaching vet students and residents can be summed up by the B.F. Skinner quote: "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
Even in my hyperspecialized field, I care more that my students know how to find information and assess the credibility than memorize specific facts that will be outdated in a few years anyway. I hope they develop overarching schemas and general conceptual frameworks that serve them well to troubleshoot novel problems they encounter after graduation. I'd rather they get questions wrong and learn something from it than have them guess the answer correctly but not understand why it was right.
In a more broad educational context, higher education is for figuring out who you are as an adult and a human being, and whether or not that's who you WANT to be. It's developing critical thinking. t's learning to communicate effectively. It's making connections and memories. Yes, hopefully you learn skills that help your employment, but so many people switch careers away from their major this shouldn't be the primary concern, especially in undergrad.
The most important parts of receiving an education are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify or pin down with acronym metrics like "KPIs" and "OKRs." That doesn't make it any less critical.
Love this: "I care more that my students know how to find information and assess the credibility than memorize specific facts that will be outdated in a few years anyway." Exactly right. This is one thing AI can't do as well, at least not yet. And AI can't tell you who you are or where you belong in the world. Participating in the unending conversation can at least help you get a little closer to those answers.
I love the title of your Substack, by the way. A writer like James Herriot illustrates how false the dichotomies between science and art are, and how much we lose when we focus on STEM at the exclusion of other human faculties.
I posted on Facebook recently that I felt a sense of real freedom in the fact that I no longer have to care about my department or the small college where I'd taught for fifteen years before they sacked me at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think that's right. But I also said that I didn't have to care about the fate of my discipline (Philosophy) or the Humanities more generally and their place in the Zombie University you sketch here, and you've made me realize that I overstated the case there. I still care about these things. After all, I've devoted my life to them, and I continue to teach philosophy courses to incarcerated students part-time. And my two kids are both in college (well, our son starts in the fall and our daughter will be a senior). While they are both focused on the sciences, I couldn't help but feel a little proud that they are both also interested in Philosophy. Unlike me, they're already wise enough to know that trying to make a career of philosophy is a likely a dumb move though.
Corey, I'm glad to know that I'm not alone. This might be one of the stages of grief, circling back around to a more nuanced view of what we left behind. But I'd gently push back on your last sentence. I don't know what things looked like in the field when you first began teaching at your college, but I've had to counsel myself not to judge those early decisions based on what I know now. At the time I went to graduate school things were hard, but nearly everyone in my cohort found either a tenure-track gig or a long-term lecturer type role. So it wasn't a dumb move then. At least, I really enjoyed my teaching for the first ten years or so. That might be worth remembering, too. I hope you can be compassionate with yourself about the choices you made with the information that was available to you then. Just because it didn't last forever doesn't mean it was a mistake.
I’m sorry you were sacked. I know this “sense of real freedom” as I see emails from the department I’m about to leave and feel grateful that I don’t have to deal with or feel upset about recent drama. But I also really miss the drama and (some of) the people.
Great piece Josh! I have been suspecting for some time that universities are trying to create unworkable environments for their faculty, especially tenured faculty, so that "less expensive" personnel (or even AI bots) can be used in their place. I would ask, what is going to be the incentive to undergo the extensive learning and training it takes to become a faculty member soon? If traditional faculty and standards are removed from Higher Education, does it simply become Education?
Great question, Jennifer. In fact, I wonder what the incentive is for graduate students right now. PhD programs don't have an incentive to share the truth with would-be PhDs. And many professors feel bad about being really honest with their undergraduates. I once dissuaded a student from following in my footsteps, and she now does estate law. She might have been happier if she'd found a position like the one I originally had, but I don't think those positions exist anymore. And I suspect that she has a better work/life balance than she would if she were running the tenure rat race. Who knows? I'd have to ask her.
But in answer to your last question, I think instead of Higher Education, we now have Job Training, not even Education.
What Education remains may happen randomly and serendipitously, when student X meets faculty and staff Y and Z and has some kind of revelation that sticks.
Some excellent points in the article, I'll address the core curriculum, or as when I attended a small, state liberal arts college, the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum. At the time (of course now it's been watered down) it took two-plus years to finish the core curriculum and it comprised almost half of one's undergraduate degree. In term one of one's freshmen year, it looked daunting and it was.
However, I found it educational and enlightening, and so did many others. I attended college with many kids of mill workers and farmers, surprisingly a fair number (not all of them) enjoyed the core and learned a lot. It caused some to change majors or in my case as a Humanities major, decided to minor in Social Sciences as Anthropology was my favorite core class and History wasn't far behind. It's led to a lifelong interest in these fields.
Administrators, who outnumber faculty today, don't see these educational transformations of students. They're not in the weeds of education, they're in meetings. They don't see it, so when someone mentions cutting back on core classes -- because they read it in some higher ed journal -- they just do it.
College is about taking the classes you want, sure. It's also about taking the classes you didn't want and finding some pleasant surprises along the way. I hope we haven't lost that completely.
Love this example, Tim. And so well said: "College is about taking the classes you want, sure. It's also about taking the classes you didn't want and finding some pleasant surprises along the way. I hope we haven't lost that completely." The fact is that Plato and Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are not obsolete -- they still have the power to thrill with the right guidance. And it really is freeing to be able to participate in that long human conversation. Students and parents who want nothing but skills, and administrators who cater to them, have a tiny view of what being human is. But just like a parent can't really uphold certain values or standards if they are constantly undermined by another parent or authority figure, there's no way for professors all on their own to convey this wonder and importance to students if the institution has turned its back on the liberal arts. Near the end of my tenure, I became aware that some colleagues were advising their students away from my classes into less rigorous ones with the express purpose of getting the core "out of the way." If everyone isn't on the same page in reinforcing the importance of disciplines for their own sakes, the students really do get an impoverished education as a result. Perhaps that makes me sound like an old-timer, but I think Jay is right in his comment above about the "old university" versus the brave new one. I don't know when to pin down that change, but it seems to have happened 6-8 years ago, at least at my institution. I once taught American literature surveys that were waitlisted at 25 students. By the time I quit, those surveys had only English majors and limped along at 7-8 students per section. The college had shrunk by then, but the number of English majors had not. What had changed was the attitude of non-majors and their advisors.
I like Miguel’s definition of quality education for Biology, too. I think students should learn about the complexity of biological and ecological systems, and also the complexity of how we relate to them through scientific inquiry. My department does a pretty good job at this in the upper division classes but we (they, I guess) are still struggling to figure out the entry-level classes. It’s a huge challenge!
Yes, two of my good friends in Iowa are biologists. One is a bat specialist. He is very good at hooking entry-level students on his fascination with those creatures. The other is a botanist who organizes maple syrup boils with an old-school wood stove and evaporator. In both cases, it's the relationship with a lovable guide and the outdoor classroom, coupled with some hard questions about ecological systems and threats to them, that open up those fields to young people. My friend Paul introduced me to maple syruping, and I loved the taste tests he used to do with Mrs. Butterworth's fake syrup and the good stuff, freshly boiled. I did similar things in courses on environmental literature, where we'd enrich our discussions of food writers (Barbara Kingsolver, David Mas Masumoto) with salsa making or locally sourced omeletes and pizza. In both cases, what was most pleasurable (and delicious) was also the most ecologically sound :).
My motto for education in general, but especially for higher ed, would be, “It’s complicated. And fascinating.” As a former altar boy, and someone with a degree in rhetoric, I should know how to say that in Latin, but...
I can define my idea of quality in higher education very simply: It produces people who recognize and accept life's complexity and who see getting their degree(s) not as the end but as the launch of a lifetime of learning. Quality education isn't a terminal you reach--even if you earn a PhD. It's a passage into deeper levels of being and thought.
The problem is the idea that there's no single "structure" or "model" that gets students there. The problem is that the perpetuation of the institution becomes the goal, and whatever it takes to make that happen drives higher education's decisions and choices. I have no idea how to change that because we live in a culture driven by competition and winning and losing and making people easily usable for achieving commercial goals. I would only suggest, though I doubt that either students or institutions would do this, is that people either do several years of something else between high school and college or that the in-and-out in four years structure be broken apart. I don't think most 18-year-olds are ready to meaningfully engage with higher education. I don't think they know enough about who they are or who they might be. And I think it takes longer than four years or so to find that out.
So I suppose I'm suggesting that most higher education should look much more like community colleges in the way that people enter and move through them.
Love this: " It produces people who recognize and accept life's complexity and who see getting their degree(s) not as the end but as the launch of a lifetime of learning." You've distilled William Cronon's classic essay "Only Connect" in that sentence.
This captures the problem precisely: "we live in a culture driven by competition and winning and losing and making people easily usable for achieving commercial goals." If you aren't useful in achieving commercial goals, then the institution makes you feel useless. It was not always so.
I like the idea of gaining more maturity before coming to college. But I'd gently argue that a year or two of exploration within a distributional core once served a similar purpose. That period allowed me to reflect on my pre-law aspirations and change to English. I might have made a fine lawyer, even a good one, but I don't think I'd have felt as fulfilled as I did while teaching. Feeling like my whole self in an American literature class helped me figure that out. I also wonder whether a few years with AmeriCorps or Peace Corps would really make much difference for students if institutions are all geared toward employability. Someone who has learned to live with little while serving others would be more aligned with the old university model built on the liberal arts, more prepared for engaging with those timeless questions. But the gap year or two in today's climate might make someone decide to forego the university altogether. I'm reminded of a student who graduated from my former college with a Business Management degree. He went into insurance and did quite well, but after only two years, he quit and moved into nonprofit work, where he made very little money. I've always wondered if it was my literature course and classes like it that made him so discontent with capitalism. But he seems quite happy helping international refugees develop thriving vegetable farms in Iowa. It's a life of meaning and purpose, even if it's not padding the college's stats for average alumni earnings.
I see what you're saying about the virtue of students going to college straight from high school. And I think liberal arts classes can have than effect on students, broadening their sense of who they want to be. The only problem I see is the level of debt many of them incur even as undergrads. Depending on their socio-economic background, having to pay off student loans runs the risk of forcing students to stay in more lucrative work whether they find it fulfilling or not. I've also been influenced by the students I encountered when I taught community college. As a group, I found them much more engaged, critical, and questioning than the 4-year students I taught. Partly that was because they were generally older; part of it was they had experienced how confining work for work's sake could be. They had a clearer sense of who they were--or who they weren't--and a lot of them were looking for new directions. Teaching in community colleges was, by far, the most rewarding academic teaching experience I ever had, and I think it was largely because the students were in a different mental and emotional place. And it did a much better job of meeting the students where they are. No setting is for everyone, but I think 4-year institutions could learn a great deal from the way community colleges carry out their mission.
Totally agree with your second point, Miguel. It's not just older students who are more reflective and self-aware -- I noticed over the years that students who had moved several times during their youth had the same qualities. Those who had grown up in environments where they were pretty much just like everyone else had never been forced to reflect on why they were who they were. The dissonance of dislocation or cultural difference is a powerful catalyst for critical thinking.
To your first point, I don't disagree. There's no point in amassing obscene debt for the sake of a liberal arts education. However, I think you're stating the problem incorrectly. If it's a cost/value proposition, then the market wins and liberal arts fades into its original context as a luxury for the aristocracy. Only the wealthy get to ask the timeless questions and engage with the greatest art. If we state the problem as one of accessibility and question the premise about needing to pay exorbitant amounts for the chance to study Chaucer or Virginia Woolf, I think we're striking closer to the core. I believe every young person should have the opportunity to explore the human tradition as broadly as possible and to reflect on their own reflection in that mirror. Expressing that belief in the current climate may sound like tilting at windmills, and it doesn't change the hard realities of tuition rates. But I'm not willing to accept a money-based proposition about the value of the liberal arts. The current market reality is unnatural and is a byproduct of corporate models for education, which I reject even as I recognize their current domination of higher ed.
I taught for one semester at a community college and agree that those environments can be positive. But they can also be quite toxic and exploitative of faculty, so I'm not sure I agree that they are a good substitute for a 4-year residential college. Perhaps a thread for another time? I really appreciate your thoughts.
You make so many good points here that I had to think awhile and come back. The point that speaks most to me has to do with the huge disjunct between what students want (someone who cares) and what curriculum developers check off and turf-holders defend. I wouldn’t want to give up the research degrees that stand next to the sciences with testimony that humanists create knowledge, too. I’m also totally on the side of students asking us to be caring humans. Maybe we have more training for it than we think? It doesn’t look like training in business or education, but don’t we train for it with hours in the company of wise perceptives like Cather? I think I would rather train as a human by reading John Milton, GM Hopkins, Cather, Ben Franklin, and Stowe, than attend a workshop on showing empathy to students. I’ve talked myself into it, Josh: I think we have the best possible training for what students ask. In fact, lit phd’s can train the trainers. 🙌💪🏼🫶🏾 If there’s no system or standardization to the way we show up for students, so much the better. Hallelujah, there’s one thing we can still personalize. (Of course, there’s a lot of Pollyanna here.... Dept chairs have to be more practical.) I may have wandered a bit from your thoughts, but I hope I’m still within arm’s reach. Great post! 😳 😊
I completely agree, Tara: it's better to train as a human by actually immersing ourselves in the human experience in its most sophisticated representations. I really do think that employability is a byproduct of this, with other forms of support (like internships, say). It's not an either/or. But the employability or industry value that results from training in Cather, Milton, et al, is far more durable and enduring.
I made this point a while back, and I still believe it: incidents like the one in Philadelphia a while back, where two Black men were arrested after an employee reported them for asking to use the restroom without ordering anything, could be better addressed by courses that teach Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin. One learns to truly care about equality and to see oneself in others through such courses. Starbucks' solution was to close its stores for one day so everyone could go through sensitivity training. Racial conflict, in that context, is a PR problem to be managed, not a personal problem to be internalized and incorporated into a value system.
I’m going to be sitting with this post for awhile Josh. Thank you.
An early thought as the mother of a daughter about to start her junior year - and my apologies for being off topic.
Location was incredibly important to me in helping my daughter think about school choice. I was worried about her access to reproductive healthcare not only during her undergraduate studies but if she stayed for graduate school or found a job. This was something we talked a lot about.
Now I would also be concerned about attending a school where state legislatures are seeking to restrict academic freedoms.
These are along side the weighty questions you pose for sure but also feel tangled up in ways I’m still not awake enough to be coherent about.
Thank you, Beth, and apologies for the delay in responding (you were the first to comment, and I'm working in reverse order through the thread). You're absolutely right about the healthcare concerns for young women and the larger assault on academic freedom. Those get most of the headlines, so I suppose I was targeting the subtler attacks on quality. But there really are multiple and intersecting threats to the educational system that shaped both of us. I do worry that if we cede the argument on gen-ed courses, we will simply give Google and Meta and Tesla the whole game. If higher ed is just job training, then corporations can do it themselves. What they can't do is teach Emerson and Margaret Fuller and Phillis Wheatley. So I still believe the literary tradition is worth defending.
I need to rotate a few more American literary history posts in when I have time. There are so many wonderful writers who add depth to our understanding of national identity. And I think that should be every young person's birthright as an American!
I perceive my graduate years, mid-80s to early 90s, as coming more or less midpoint between what I'll here call the *old* university and the current situation you describe so well. I began teaching still imagining the possibility of doing it in that old environment and ended it, very recently, in a profession I never would have been drawn to enter to begin. That's a statement loaded with possible understandings and misunderstandings, but what's important in my making it now is the profundity of the change it suggests, and how well we understand it. Smaller point before my larger: my extended, interrupted undergraduate education was at the urban, commuter, City University of New York, decades ago. Institutionally, *then*, there existed no notable, empathetic involvement in the personal needs or success of individual students. The institution did not come to the student; the student came to the institution. Students succeeded, mostly on the basis of their own resources capable of employing university resources. That is, it was pretty much like the rest of life. To the extent that we have different expectations now at the college level that we may think we fail, it's crucial to understand all the conditions for those different expectations. Larger point: if we call it "general education" or refer to a "core," the fundamental questions are general education in what, core learning in or of what and why is the university or liberal arts college necessarily the place for that to go on. I don't think there is anywhere near the necessary clarity and coherence in addressing those questions either institutionally or socially .
Jay, I didn't realize that you'd been a teacher or that you'd left that profession recently. I'd love to hear that story sometime. Happy to take it offline -- dolezaljosh@gmail.com. Or maybe you could tell it in a guest post? You're exactly right about the impetus once being on the student to meet the university where it was. That wasn't all good -- there were plenty of students who fell through the cracks, some with disabilities, and that system was often a patriarchal one where many women didn't thrive. But we have swung to the opposite extreme of extreme accommodations. That's a whole separate thread. Struggle is part of education, and minimizing it is not necessarily helpful. No one is coming to save you in the rest of life, as you say.
I might need some help unpacking this: "if we call it "general education" or refer to a "core," the fundamental questions are general education in what, core learning in or of what and why is the university or liberal arts college necessarily the place for that to go on." If I hear you correctly, you're saying that we don't share a common understanding of what college is for, in which case I completely agree. This was the change I've described in other comments. Once I had the institution's support in emphasizing the importance of my discipline. Students and parents might have resisted, but the institution helped me win them over. When the institution began sidelining the humanities, the trust deficit was greater, and in some cases 15 weeks was not enough time to turn the tide.
Josh, LOL, I thought you knew. I taught for just over 30 years, with two endings. Exactly a decade ago I retired with a pension from my tenured job. I made that decision for a variety of reasons but prominent among them those you discuss regularly on this Substack. Rather than give up teaching, though, I sought new experiences, as an adjunct, mostly working full-time equivalent at a couple of colleges at a time. (I did need the money) I returned part-time to NYC from L.A. to teach there, at CUNY and Fordham. I started as an adjunct and ended as such, with 20 years of tenure and a spell as department chair in between, at a wide variety of institutions, so I had a good range of experience. But most, though not all, of my career decisions were particular to my life, so I tend not to discuss them as exemplary.
Well, that was just the start of what was turning into something much too long for a comment, so I will write you offline and we can discuss the possibility of a guest post if that interests. I will say that you did hear me correctly at the end about the lack of a common understanding of what general education and a core should be.
This is interesting by A. Jay, as noted earlier I was oblivious to many of the changes in higher ed when I came to this site. I grew up in a faculty family, old days when teachers taught, that was it mostly. It was a bucolic life for many. I worked in higher ed for awhile as an advisor and found it odd that all the work we put in didn't bump our grad rate one iota. Maybe it did for some students, but school wide it did not.
The insistent hand holding, building of Taj Mahal rec centers (and lazy rivers!), the layering of high paid administrators, just seems crazy to me. As A. Jay stated, in the past the student came to the college, not the other way around. Late in my undergrad career I found the career, counseling, and health centers, all paid for by my tuition, thus not costing me extra. Try that in real life. But I found it, which is more meaningful than the university holding my hand and walking me to each place.
There are some reasonable accommodations, such as for disabilities. I was less persuaded by the need for emotional support animals, which were sometimes quite disruptive. But I quite agree that many services now offered by institutions are not necessarily the institution’s responsibility. Title IX is a can of worms. But the institution absorbs a lot of high risk and high cost by attempting to handle assault claims internally. Tip of the iceberg.
My educational philosophy for teaching vet students and residents can be summed up by the B.F. Skinner quote: "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
Even in my hyperspecialized field, I care more that my students know how to find information and assess the credibility than memorize specific facts that will be outdated in a few years anyway. I hope they develop overarching schemas and general conceptual frameworks that serve them well to troubleshoot novel problems they encounter after graduation. I'd rather they get questions wrong and learn something from it than have them guess the answer correctly but not understand why it was right.
In a more broad educational context, higher education is for figuring out who you are as an adult and a human being, and whether or not that's who you WANT to be. It's developing critical thinking. t's learning to communicate effectively. It's making connections and memories. Yes, hopefully you learn skills that help your employment, but so many people switch careers away from their major this shouldn't be the primary concern, especially in undergrad.
The most important parts of receiving an education are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify or pin down with acronym metrics like "KPIs" and "OKRs." That doesn't make it any less critical.
Love this: "I care more that my students know how to find information and assess the credibility than memorize specific facts that will be outdated in a few years anyway." Exactly right. This is one thing AI can't do as well, at least not yet. And AI can't tell you who you are or where you belong in the world. Participating in the unending conversation can at least help you get a little closer to those answers.
I love the title of your Substack, by the way. A writer like James Herriot illustrates how false the dichotomies between science and art are, and how much we lose when we focus on STEM at the exclusion of other human faculties.
I posted on Facebook recently that I felt a sense of real freedom in the fact that I no longer have to care about my department or the small college where I'd taught for fifteen years before they sacked me at the beginning of the pandemic, and I think that's right. But I also said that I didn't have to care about the fate of my discipline (Philosophy) or the Humanities more generally and their place in the Zombie University you sketch here, and you've made me realize that I overstated the case there. I still care about these things. After all, I've devoted my life to them, and I continue to teach philosophy courses to incarcerated students part-time. And my two kids are both in college (well, our son starts in the fall and our daughter will be a senior). While they are both focused on the sciences, I couldn't help but feel a little proud that they are both also interested in Philosophy. Unlike me, they're already wise enough to know that trying to make a career of philosophy is a likely a dumb move though.
Corey, I'm glad to know that I'm not alone. This might be one of the stages of grief, circling back around to a more nuanced view of what we left behind. But I'd gently push back on your last sentence. I don't know what things looked like in the field when you first began teaching at your college, but I've had to counsel myself not to judge those early decisions based on what I know now. At the time I went to graduate school things were hard, but nearly everyone in my cohort found either a tenure-track gig or a long-term lecturer type role. So it wasn't a dumb move then. At least, I really enjoyed my teaching for the first ten years or so. That might be worth remembering, too. I hope you can be compassionate with yourself about the choices you made with the information that was available to you then. Just because it didn't last forever doesn't mean it was a mistake.
I’m sorry you were sacked. I know this “sense of real freedom” as I see emails from the department I’m about to leave and feel grateful that I don’t have to deal with or feel upset about recent drama. But I also really miss the drama and (some of) the people.
Great piece Josh! I have been suspecting for some time that universities are trying to create unworkable environments for their faculty, especially tenured faculty, so that "less expensive" personnel (or even AI bots) can be used in their place. I would ask, what is going to be the incentive to undergo the extensive learning and training it takes to become a faculty member soon? If traditional faculty and standards are removed from Higher Education, does it simply become Education?
Great question, Jennifer. In fact, I wonder what the incentive is for graduate students right now. PhD programs don't have an incentive to share the truth with would-be PhDs. And many professors feel bad about being really honest with their undergraduates. I once dissuaded a student from following in my footsteps, and she now does estate law. She might have been happier if she'd found a position like the one I originally had, but I don't think those positions exist anymore. And I suspect that she has a better work/life balance than she would if she were running the tenure rat race. Who knows? I'd have to ask her.
But in answer to your last question, I think instead of Higher Education, we now have Job Training, not even Education.
What Education remains may happen randomly and serendipitously, when student X meets faculty and staff Y and Z and has some kind of revelation that sticks.
Some excellent points in the article, I'll address the core curriculum, or as when I attended a small, state liberal arts college, the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum. At the time (of course now it's been watered down) it took two-plus years to finish the core curriculum and it comprised almost half of one's undergraduate degree. In term one of one's freshmen year, it looked daunting and it was.
However, I found it educational and enlightening, and so did many others. I attended college with many kids of mill workers and farmers, surprisingly a fair number (not all of them) enjoyed the core and learned a lot. It caused some to change majors or in my case as a Humanities major, decided to minor in Social Sciences as Anthropology was my favorite core class and History wasn't far behind. It's led to a lifelong interest in these fields.
Administrators, who outnumber faculty today, don't see these educational transformations of students. They're not in the weeds of education, they're in meetings. They don't see it, so when someone mentions cutting back on core classes -- because they read it in some higher ed journal -- they just do it.
College is about taking the classes you want, sure. It's also about taking the classes you didn't want and finding some pleasant surprises along the way. I hope we haven't lost that completely.
Love this example, Tim. And so well said: "College is about taking the classes you want, sure. It's also about taking the classes you didn't want and finding some pleasant surprises along the way. I hope we haven't lost that completely." The fact is that Plato and Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are not obsolete -- they still have the power to thrill with the right guidance. And it really is freeing to be able to participate in that long human conversation. Students and parents who want nothing but skills, and administrators who cater to them, have a tiny view of what being human is. But just like a parent can't really uphold certain values or standards if they are constantly undermined by another parent or authority figure, there's no way for professors all on their own to convey this wonder and importance to students if the institution has turned its back on the liberal arts. Near the end of my tenure, I became aware that some colleagues were advising their students away from my classes into less rigorous ones with the express purpose of getting the core "out of the way." If everyone isn't on the same page in reinforcing the importance of disciplines for their own sakes, the students really do get an impoverished education as a result. Perhaps that makes me sound like an old-timer, but I think Jay is right in his comment above about the "old university" versus the brave new one. I don't know when to pin down that change, but it seems to have happened 6-8 years ago, at least at my institution. I once taught American literature surveys that were waitlisted at 25 students. By the time I quit, those surveys had only English majors and limped along at 7-8 students per section. The college had shrunk by then, but the number of English majors had not. What had changed was the attitude of non-majors and their advisors.
I like Miguel’s definition of quality education for Biology, too. I think students should learn about the complexity of biological and ecological systems, and also the complexity of how we relate to them through scientific inquiry. My department does a pretty good job at this in the upper division classes but we (they, I guess) are still struggling to figure out the entry-level classes. It’s a huge challenge!
Yes, two of my good friends in Iowa are biologists. One is a bat specialist. He is very good at hooking entry-level students on his fascination with those creatures. The other is a botanist who organizes maple syrup boils with an old-school wood stove and evaporator. In both cases, it's the relationship with a lovable guide and the outdoor classroom, coupled with some hard questions about ecological systems and threats to them, that open up those fields to young people. My friend Paul introduced me to maple syruping, and I loved the taste tests he used to do with Mrs. Butterworth's fake syrup and the good stuff, freshly boiled. I did similar things in courses on environmental literature, where we'd enrich our discussions of food writers (Barbara Kingsolver, David Mas Masumoto) with salsa making or locally sourced omeletes and pizza. In both cases, what was most pleasurable (and delicious) was also the most ecologically sound :).
My motto for education in general, but especially for higher ed, would be, “It’s complicated. And fascinating.” As a former altar boy, and someone with a degree in rhetoric, I should know how to say that in Latin, but...
😂 Oremus!
I can define my idea of quality in higher education very simply: It produces people who recognize and accept life's complexity and who see getting their degree(s) not as the end but as the launch of a lifetime of learning. Quality education isn't a terminal you reach--even if you earn a PhD. It's a passage into deeper levels of being and thought.
The problem is the idea that there's no single "structure" or "model" that gets students there. The problem is that the perpetuation of the institution becomes the goal, and whatever it takes to make that happen drives higher education's decisions and choices. I have no idea how to change that because we live in a culture driven by competition and winning and losing and making people easily usable for achieving commercial goals. I would only suggest, though I doubt that either students or institutions would do this, is that people either do several years of something else between high school and college or that the in-and-out in four years structure be broken apart. I don't think most 18-year-olds are ready to meaningfully engage with higher education. I don't think they know enough about who they are or who they might be. And I think it takes longer than four years or so to find that out.
So I suppose I'm suggesting that most higher education should look much more like community colleges in the way that people enter and move through them.
Love this: " It produces people who recognize and accept life's complexity and who see getting their degree(s) not as the end but as the launch of a lifetime of learning." You've distilled William Cronon's classic essay "Only Connect" in that sentence.
This captures the problem precisely: "we live in a culture driven by competition and winning and losing and making people easily usable for achieving commercial goals." If you aren't useful in achieving commercial goals, then the institution makes you feel useless. It was not always so.
I like the idea of gaining more maturity before coming to college. But I'd gently argue that a year or two of exploration within a distributional core once served a similar purpose. That period allowed me to reflect on my pre-law aspirations and change to English. I might have made a fine lawyer, even a good one, but I don't think I'd have felt as fulfilled as I did while teaching. Feeling like my whole self in an American literature class helped me figure that out. I also wonder whether a few years with AmeriCorps or Peace Corps would really make much difference for students if institutions are all geared toward employability. Someone who has learned to live with little while serving others would be more aligned with the old university model built on the liberal arts, more prepared for engaging with those timeless questions. But the gap year or two in today's climate might make someone decide to forego the university altogether. I'm reminded of a student who graduated from my former college with a Business Management degree. He went into insurance and did quite well, but after only two years, he quit and moved into nonprofit work, where he made very little money. I've always wondered if it was my literature course and classes like it that made him so discontent with capitalism. But he seems quite happy helping international refugees develop thriving vegetable farms in Iowa. It's a life of meaning and purpose, even if it's not padding the college's stats for average alumni earnings.
I see what you're saying about the virtue of students going to college straight from high school. And I think liberal arts classes can have than effect on students, broadening their sense of who they want to be. The only problem I see is the level of debt many of them incur even as undergrads. Depending on their socio-economic background, having to pay off student loans runs the risk of forcing students to stay in more lucrative work whether they find it fulfilling or not. I've also been influenced by the students I encountered when I taught community college. As a group, I found them much more engaged, critical, and questioning than the 4-year students I taught. Partly that was because they were generally older; part of it was they had experienced how confining work for work's sake could be. They had a clearer sense of who they were--or who they weren't--and a lot of them were looking for new directions. Teaching in community colleges was, by far, the most rewarding academic teaching experience I ever had, and I think it was largely because the students were in a different mental and emotional place. And it did a much better job of meeting the students where they are. No setting is for everyone, but I think 4-year institutions could learn a great deal from the way community colleges carry out their mission.
Totally agree with your second point, Miguel. It's not just older students who are more reflective and self-aware -- I noticed over the years that students who had moved several times during their youth had the same qualities. Those who had grown up in environments where they were pretty much just like everyone else had never been forced to reflect on why they were who they were. The dissonance of dislocation or cultural difference is a powerful catalyst for critical thinking.
To your first point, I don't disagree. There's no point in amassing obscene debt for the sake of a liberal arts education. However, I think you're stating the problem incorrectly. If it's a cost/value proposition, then the market wins and liberal arts fades into its original context as a luxury for the aristocracy. Only the wealthy get to ask the timeless questions and engage with the greatest art. If we state the problem as one of accessibility and question the premise about needing to pay exorbitant amounts for the chance to study Chaucer or Virginia Woolf, I think we're striking closer to the core. I believe every young person should have the opportunity to explore the human tradition as broadly as possible and to reflect on their own reflection in that mirror. Expressing that belief in the current climate may sound like tilting at windmills, and it doesn't change the hard realities of tuition rates. But I'm not willing to accept a money-based proposition about the value of the liberal arts. The current market reality is unnatural and is a byproduct of corporate models for education, which I reject even as I recognize their current domination of higher ed.
I taught for one semester at a community college and agree that those environments can be positive. But they can also be quite toxic and exploitative of faculty, so I'm not sure I agree that they are a good substitute for a 4-year residential college. Perhaps a thread for another time? I really appreciate your thoughts.
You make so many good points here that I had to think awhile and come back. The point that speaks most to me has to do with the huge disjunct between what students want (someone who cares) and what curriculum developers check off and turf-holders defend. I wouldn’t want to give up the research degrees that stand next to the sciences with testimony that humanists create knowledge, too. I’m also totally on the side of students asking us to be caring humans. Maybe we have more training for it than we think? It doesn’t look like training in business or education, but don’t we train for it with hours in the company of wise perceptives like Cather? I think I would rather train as a human by reading John Milton, GM Hopkins, Cather, Ben Franklin, and Stowe, than attend a workshop on showing empathy to students. I’ve talked myself into it, Josh: I think we have the best possible training for what students ask. In fact, lit phd’s can train the trainers. 🙌💪🏼🫶🏾 If there’s no system or standardization to the way we show up for students, so much the better. Hallelujah, there’s one thing we can still personalize. (Of course, there’s a lot of Pollyanna here.... Dept chairs have to be more practical.) I may have wandered a bit from your thoughts, but I hope I’m still within arm’s reach. Great post! 😳 😊
I completely agree, Tara: it's better to train as a human by actually immersing ourselves in the human experience in its most sophisticated representations. I really do think that employability is a byproduct of this, with other forms of support (like internships, say). It's not an either/or. But the employability or industry value that results from training in Cather, Milton, et al, is far more durable and enduring.
I made this point a while back, and I still believe it: incidents like the one in Philadelphia a while back, where two Black men were arrested after an employee reported them for asking to use the restroom without ordering anything, could be better addressed by courses that teach Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin. One learns to truly care about equality and to see oneself in others through such courses. Starbucks' solution was to close its stores for one day so everyone could go through sensitivity training. Racial conflict, in that context, is a PR problem to be managed, not a personal problem to be internalized and incorporated into a value system.
My bias might be my SWQA career... but... spitballing for metrics...
TRIBE
DEBATE
BLIND SPOTS
CLASS
SUPPORT RATIOS
AI SURVIVABILITY
PATRIOTISM
CHARITABILITY
The US Senate's Dr Haidt's The 3 Great Untruths that Gen Z believes that are dooming Gen Z and democracy....
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