McCosh Hall, Princeton University. Courtesy of Bosc d’Anjou via Flickr.com
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
The American academy is failing, and Harvard is to blame. A structured curriculum, developed over centuries, educated everyone from Thomas Aquinas to Hegel to John Witherspoon. The classical education, however, has been sacrificed at the altar of choice. The elimination of a structured, carefully organized curriculum has not only resulted in the death of the American university’s mission but it has also led to the university abandoning its formative role.
Harvard deserves censure following a 1885 public debate between their president Charles Eliot, and ours, James McCosh. Eliot revolutionized Harvard’s curriculum by greatly reducing the particular courses required to graduate. McCosh, alternatively, firmly advocated for the status quo – namely, for the careful curation of a student’s education throughout all four years. His vision most clearly survives today at institutions like St. John’s College in Annapolis, which offers a well-defined ‘Great Books’ program. While boasting a wonderful curriculum, St. John’s does not enjoy the prestige of a leading university. On the other hand, Princeton, like much of the rest of the academy lacks the curricular unity necessary for a coherent and substantive education, and instead, often provides pragmatic training for which the university is not well suited. As Alexander Leitch records in his history of the University entitled A Princeton Companion, McCosh argued that Harvard’s paradigm “encouraged dilettantism,” and in this paradigm, “everything is scattered like the star dust out of which worlds are said to have been made.” In his own paradigm, there would be modern languages, English, Latin, and Greek “and their literatures…expressly called Classic[s]” in addition to physical, mental, and moral science.
An early defender of the reconcilability of Darwinian evolution with Christianity, McCosh encouraged students to “choose a wide range of [classes] to be taken side by side with obligatory and disciplinary courses.” These electives, however, were not to crowd out the body of the general education, for McCosh believed “a college ….should have specialists, but not mere specialists, for such are bigoted and intolerant.”
Today’s Princeton has very clearly departed from McCosh’s aspiration. As Daily Princetonian columnist Hunter Campbell recently observed, many students here at the University select ‘easy-A courses’ to fulfill their distribution requirements. But Campbell’s suggestion that the University simply require students to take a number of courses outside their specific discipline, otherwise unspecified, would only further prevent the University from its goal of providing education.
The University, for lack of a unified curriculum, encourages students to be intellectually myopic, without regard for the integration of the various disciplines: in short, to become “bigoted specialists.” While it is possible to derive a valuable education while at Princeton, this task is nevertheless very difficult because of the general incoherence of its educational mission.
Universities have grown to fill an alternative goal of professional training. Many occupations nowadays require a fair amount of technical preparation and pose a certain barrier to entry which a modern higher education allows students to leap. For example, jobs in Silicon Valley require training in computer science, a field which is difficult to say the least. But universities as a job-trainer are an immensely wasteful allocations of resources. This country needs to implement technical training in place of a traditional college education for those who simply seek pragmatic skills. ‘Coding Dojo,’ for instance, promises proficiency in Python, MEAN, and JAVA for a fraction of the fees and time of a Bachelor’s Degree, for only $14,000 over the course of 14 weeks. The University, and universities writ large, should not offer any bachelor’s programs directed primarily at instilling marketable qualities. While a proper education will certainly prepare students for the workplace (i.e. by equipping them with the critical thinking tools needed to solve complex problems), focusing on this secondary end puts the cart before the horse.
A university fulfills a nobler goal when it turns to holistic education. As Will Nolan argued in the last year’s final issue, academic inquiry for its own sake is a beautiful and worthwhile exercise, as a consequence of the intrinsic beauty of wisdom and knowledge. Isolated from their practical applications, each of the disciplines investigates a particular part of the whole of human knowledge. And each particular strand of knowledge is good per se only when it is in reference to the structuring of the larger body of human knowledge. Necessarily, this requires that if we are to successfully master even one of disciplines, we must understand the relation between the disciplines, since as McCosh puts it, “the truest and best specialist is the one who is well acquainted with the collateral branches.”
Many of the departments at the University have well developed internal curricula, in accordance with the principle that in order to further specialize one must have basic knowledge of how the specialties relate. Many departments have distribution requirements in internal fields of knowledge directly relevant to their own field. Tellingly – with the exception of the humanities – all departments require a particular level of competence in mathematics, precisely because of its communicability with all the disciplines; in order to engage with many of the sciences, mathematics is commonly required.
Distribution requirements in the ‘classical humanities’ for students outside these departments, however, are as sparse and unstructured as Campbell bemoans, and STEM requirements for humanities students often are fulfilled by those easy-A courses. As the University explicitly advertises, the system of distribution requirements exists in order to ensure a broad exposure for the sake of variety, rather than integration of the disciplines. This paradigm not only weakens understanding of the particular subject, especially when it comes to why it is important, but also undermines the value of an overall education at this institution. Since studying a subject simply for its practical application is not proper to the University setting, and an education does not properly coordinate or situate the specialties, what remains as the University’s goal?
I foresee two suitable paths forward for the University and for the academy more broadly. First, they could become entirely technical institutions, in service of wholly pragmatic ends, or, they could return to their original formative goal. Narrowing in on pragmatic training would require the shedding of ‘useless’ departments in the humanities and a majority of the speculative research that attends the practical applications of many of the disciplines. Degrees would cost a matter of weeks rather than years to earn, and in accordance with this new efficiency, tuitions would drastically drop.
As I’ve mentioned earlier however, universities have historically served a much nobler goal: the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Pragmatic institutions ought to arise independently, and hopefully these replacements will arise, but rather than abandoning original mission to educate, the University ought to double down.
Very practically this will look like the Great Books programs at institutions like St. John’s College in Annapolis and the University of Dallas. St. John’s offers a bachelor’s degree in one course of study only: the Liberal Arts. Students can focus on either philosophy, primarily ‘metaphysics, ethics, and political theory, or on history of math and science. Students are also permitted to take classes that bolster particular understanding in classical studies and comparative literature. Finally, a variety of other introductory classes in what we would recognize as conventional majors are available: history, politics, law, economics, and so forth. But these smaller classes always come second in prominence to the course of study, the liberal arts education. In their mission statement the college explains that “the aim of the education offered by St. John’s College is the liberation of the human intellect. “This is an education for all. By reading great books and struggling together with the fundamental questions that they raise, students and their teachers learn from their differences and discover more deeply their shared humanity.” Curricular integration is necessary in an education because of the common human experience it enables us to understand and explore. Diversity serves the goal of comprehensiveness, rather than variety.
St. John’s graduates, moreover, are well prepared to move on into the professional world. They pursue a diverse set of career paths, armed with the tools necessary for critical analysis. Nearly all of their students that apply to law school receive placement and a great majority of students pursue advanced degrees. Immediately forgoing practical training does not imposes an unacceptable burden upon students, but rather a fully integrated curriculum adequately prepares them for professional life.
Note that advanced degrees are by no means violations of this principle of educational unity. Before a student pursues one, however, it is to the benefit of both his individual expertise and to his general education that he receive a well-ordained education before he specialize further. Similarly, an ideal university could feasibly execute both undergraduate education and the research component of modern universities in which, as long as the components have clearly defined and distinguished ends.
The University ought to at first imitate St. John’s example, providing in the process an example for the rest of higher education. Princeton ought to adopt a unified curriculum modeled after St. John’s that fosters critical thinking and definitively aims to provide a substantive understanding of the human experience. This requires moving away from pragmatic training, in the interest of both resources and curricular integrity. Human flourishing cannot be otherwise inculcated.
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