Trim the College!

It is agreed that all who can more or less read and write and want to go to college should be able to. Lack of money should not be a hindrance. But as to what a college is, there is no agreement. It is not even discussed. But look at the facts. The undergraduate unit of an Ivy League university, whose dean boasts of offering “Fifty-some majors, thirty-some concentrations, and hundreds of electives,” differs widely from an Ivy League college that stands by itself, and both differ from a small southern or mid-western college that started as a denominational school– or from the typical Catholic institution. The college of a huge mid- or far-western state university is another thing again, and so are the scattered parts of a state system that were originally teachers’ colleges or normal schools.

This variety, it is said, gives everybody a chance to find the place that suits his or her talents and tastes. That is pious nonsense. The young have no idea what they are getting into and often have no choice. It is determined by geography and cost, as well as by current dogma. The admissions officers nowadays admit or reject according to criteria that are incommunicable and the rejected must shop around. The sole exception is the state university that must take all high school graduates—or some top percentage of the class. Four months later, a good many are disgorged, to find some other refuge, also called college. Most of the applicants to the well-known places, called prestigious on account of their excellence (whether it is still there or not), are also shunted about and find themselves in places quite unlike the one of their hopes.

What further complicates this complicated catch-as-catch-can is the price of the longed-for boon of a “college experience.” In the colleges deemed best and near-best, a middling well-to do family with three children must spend a quarter-of-a-million dollars in less than ten years. People who have not saved or cannot borrow such a sum may find institutions that cost a third or a half less. But given their lower income, the strain on the family budget is the same. Is anybody prepared to deny that this situation, though tamely accepted, is sheer unreason? All to college, but the hurdles are a mile high– and it turns out that half the entrants never graduate.

To be sure, the able student qualifies for scholarships and the less so for loans. Both can also work for hire to defray the cost of books and food and lodging for four years. But with all these partial aids, another irrational situation comes about: the student who after college must do graduate work to qualify for one of the professions enters his first employment with a debt of $100,000 plus interest.

So well known that it hardly needs mention is the laborious task of making application to half a dozen or more colleges and the searching invasion of privacy suffered when a request for student aid is attached.

The Basic College Defined

All aspects of this social lunacy make up the first argument for rediscovering what a college is and trimming them all to that fundamental size. But what is the basic college? History suggests some answers. When the cathedral school decided in the twelfth century that more advanced teaching should be available, the medieval university was born. It took three directions, two of them professional: Theology and Law. The third was “Letters,” the liberal arts, what we also call the humanities, with mathematics included as one of them. We have duly retained the phrase liberal arts and pay lip service to it. We even apply it as the designation of certain colleges, but the real thing is now hard to find.

Two other models of the college developed after the university: first, the English universities, at Oxford and Cambridge, took the form of small separate colleges. Those were founded by royalty, prelates, or statesmen and thereby led to specialize in their interests. But all were intent on introducing the young to traditional knowledge rather than a profession. A second type came in the sixteenth century, when the Jesuit order began to cover Europe with colleges designed to strengthen the Catholic faith in opposition to the Protestant. This goal was to be achieved not by indoctrination alone but by making well-educated minds. The proof of their merit is that nearly all the great thinkers of the next two centuries, from Descartes to Voltaire, went to Jesuit colleges—and repaid their mentors by combating with success their religious dogmas.

These colleges, like the English and the faculties of letters at continental universities, taught the liberal arts and the numerical sciences. Certain subjects such as logic no longer seem to us needful, but the lesson for the present is that the core of an all-purpose higher education consists in these “arts.” They are fit for all minds, endowing them with particular and general abilities: to think, speak simply and clearly, express views rationally, own and use a body of facts and ideas that help communication because they are widely known, detect errors and fallacies, resolve intellectual problems, and possibly make discoveries in some branch of learning.

To this armament of powers, the last five centuries have supplied new materials to exploit: history and the social sciences and the hugely expanded substance of the physical and life sciences. This enlargement must broaden the curriculum of the basic college, but it does not change its character and role. These are set by its place and time in the life of the young.

In creating the high school, the United States put into the last two years the studies that in Europe belong to the French collège or German gymnasium. It is a question which system is better suited to the normal growth of intellect in the young. But that is a detail rendered of no importance by the present failure of the American public school to enable its charges to carry college work. In these conditions, what ought the basic college, the longed-for heaven of ambitious youths and their parents, to be and to do?

1. Devote its energies and resources to the liberal, the formative arts as previously defined: the humanities, math and science, and the social sciences.

2. For as long as may be needed, run a remedial program in reading, writing, grammar, math, legible handwriting, and articulate speech.

3. Offer facilities on a modest scale for physical exercise and intra-mural sports and also for extra-curricular activities of the traditional kind. In addition, keep a resident physician, an ambulance, and a regular connection with a nearby hospital.

But what of the student whose interest lies in the direction of film and theatre, art and music, photography and television, and who wants a “major” in one of them to “qualify” for a job in these industries the day after graduation? Those activities are pre-professional. Let there be a School of Applied Arts on campus or at the nearby university, similar to the Schools of Business and of Journalism. The applied arts are not college work; the very scheduling of long hours of practice makes for conflict with the other studies.

Concentrating on the liberal arts is not enough. They must be first introduced as a required group, a so-called core in the first two years. The alternative, free choice from the first year on, may lead to four years of freshman work, which evades the purpose, the very meaning of curriculum. In the last two years the guided choice of two or three subjects confirms the student’s developing sense of direction. The young discover where their abilities lie, rather than know this as freshmen.

To be of any worth, the liberal arts must not only figure in the catalogue, they must be taught as arts, not as scholarly disciplines—and it must be done by teachers. The present system favors the opposite. Scholars known for their research or giving signs of such a future are put in the classroom to do what they choose. Departments promote and give them salary increases, while barely tolerating the men and women who “merely” teach. These last usually do it well, are appreciated by the students, and often keep up with the advances in knowledge on a wider front than the honored specialists. This rooted academic tradition is a second show of Unreason. True, among the fine scholars some are excellent teachers and also less good ones, who nevertheless have a conscience and work hard at the task. But the general tendency is to teach the liberal arts as professional subjects. Indeed, one may hear the teacher of an introductory course assert that he hopes to attract some of the students into his field as scholars. The course thereby ceases to be a college subject. “Liberal” in liberal arts means precisely “free” of professionalism and pedantry, immediate use, and the business-like mood.

At the present time there is an even worse corruption of the college curriculum, in the form of topics masquerading as subjects. Whether meant to acclimate pop culture on campus or to get large classes, these pseudo subjects are anti-liberal in their temporary appeal and their particularity. After concentrating on such questions, it is no wonder that college students turn for graduation speakers “to the stars of TV News and the entertainment world.”

What, by contrast, are college youths to carry away from their study of the liberal arts and still possess when they have been swallowed up by career, parenthood, and civic obligations? Some of what they learned will be buried, but innumerable portions of fact, purport, reasoning, and significance will still be fresh for instant recognition and application to life uses. It is this “apperceptive mass” that makes them deserve to be called educated instead of ignorant.

Other Advantages of the Basic College

Besides fulfilling its indicated purpose, the college so conceived yields results that can be measured in money. First saving: the college offers only courses that serve the liberal arts, instead of the hundreds of others of specialized scope that confront the undergraduate at large university colleges. Like the catalogue, the faculty of the basic college is small, and by seeking teachers it need not pay extraordinary sums to obtain the transcendent researcher that all are bidding for. Likewise, by limiting the campus amenities within reason, that is to say, on the scale of those current in middle-class homes, and by giving up all expensive outside attractions, the annual budget is disburdened. The endowment may begin to suffice. Living within its means, the college need not lower its standards to keep all students at all costs for their tuition.

Colleges nowadays feel compelled to do things that are no part of their role. They maintain a development (fund-raising) office, a government-relations office, a public relations (advertising) office, and an alumni office, with in addition offices to deal with mental and social troubles on the campus. Together, these have planted a bureaucracy at the heart of the institution. A good administrator could reduce it to near invisibility. A college should not advertise its wares or compete except in the figurative sense of attracting good students. In fact, applicants cannot compare places until they are admitted and a year has passed.

Among the things a college may but need not do is to provide the students and the townspeople free entertainment. If the college orchestra or debate team or drama society, as extracurricular efforts, want to give one or two performances a year, open to the public and free of charge, well and good. But to incur expense to hire professional coaches and famous lecturers, to keep a resident quartet or a captive poet goes beyond the implied contract between an educational institution and society. Such extras are said to be for “enrichment;” it is best to make sure first that there is something to enrich. As for entertainment, students profit most from providing it for themselves.

Students ought not only to entertain, but also unconsciously teach one another. For this reason the true college remains of modest size. Large numbers prevent familiar conversation on serious subjects, as well as jollity and camaraderie, not within little cliques but wider groups. College matures by the sense of belonging to a common society. That sense begins through the required core in the first two years; it is sustained by the unspecialized handling of all subjects, which leads to comparing notes and discussing teachers. These, by the way, must feel no need to seek popularity by watering studies or inflating grades, as in one Ivy League college where 51 percent of the student body make A’s across the board and graduate cum laude. If the students care to publish their opinion of faculty members, they should do so informally in an issue of the campus paper, without a yearly canvass on a printed form that gives the result misleading and damaging statistical force.

One last provision: student aid is to free the recipient to be a student. He or she should not have to work for money, especially when classmates don’t. For one thing, it skews the individual academic record by handicapping the worker, who is also deprived of thoughtful leisure and the beneficial companionship just cited. “The college experience” should be more than a formal term.

With the nature of a basic college understood and respected, the cost of tuition comes down to a point where the middle-level family, now ineligible for help, will not have to go into debt. By the same economy, the full subsidy of the less well off becomes possible. Seeing reason return to the academy, many people whose exchequer is now drained by tuition will gratefully contribute to the annual fund or give scholarship money, seeing that it all goes to support college education.

Not a word so far has been said so far about off-campus athletics. Nothing can abate the national passion for intercollegiate games. Where these are expected, demanded, and therefore unavoidable, it is mainly by the alumni, and only those of certain colleges. Of the 4,000 institutions of higher learning, a great many are free of the incubus. Elsewhere, let the paid heroes of victorious teams be the responsibility of those alumni. Perhaps in the burdened places part of the budget will have to be paid as ransom for the right to be only and wholly a college. With the management of the teams and all attendant costs, including the hire of players and coaches, in alumni hands, the recurrent hypocrisy, cheating, and disputes about enforcing the rules of academic standing for athletes disappear. Good student athletes earn their degree, the others are guaranteed it absolutely—call it an honorary degree. Meanwhile another expensive operation is eliminated.

Of course, none of what has been described here is possible. Too many vested interests oppose any such reasonable transformation of what we indiscriminately call colleges. The bureaucracy is entrenched on the campus as firmly as anywhere, and so is the faculty with its specialist bent and over-extended offerings. Very possibly, even the beneficiaries of the change—the hypnotized parents of youth—might shy away from supporting it, sensing what a wild utopia it is and vaguely afraid of some unforeseeable disaster if it were attempted. So let them start saving for tuition at each birth (early marriage is recommended) and with compound interest over seventeen years that quarter million is not unattainable.