Editor’s note: Jackson Toby is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Rutgers University and author of the 2009 book The Lowering of Higher Education in America, which the Pope Center reviewed here.
In recent months, we have seen quite a profusion of books on higher education, most of them critical. That is good because American higher education badly needs criticism.
Herbert London’s Decline and Revival in Higher Education is a critical book and I read it with great interest. It is part autobiography – London played on the Columbia University basketball team and graduated in 1960; subsequently he earned his doctorate and became a professor and dean at New York University – and part a withering critique of American higher education.
London cites many telling anecdotes to make his point that liberal education has declined substantially over the past half century. By providing a wealth of examples from his distinguished academic career, he demonstrates that a great deal of college education has gone from bad to worse, and he is skeptical about whether higher education is worth the enormous amount that parents and taxpayers now pay for it.
Here are some of his charges:
- College students are increasingly ignorant about the ideas and information that a graduate used to be expected to know and few learn to think critically. Lacking in cultural literacy, what tools can they use with which to think critically? Giving credit for life experience worsened this trend because the life experience of living in a ghetto, being imprisoned, or joining a commune, although educational in a broad sense, does not guarantee intellectual achievement.
- College students have become increasingly relativistic, so nonjudgmental that they cannot distinguish evil from imperfect. Those who know something about Joseph McCarthy and Adolph Hitler think that McCarthy was as bad as Hitler although some of them have not heard of either one.
- College students are often taught that feeling rather than knowing should be the end-product of their educations. Accompanying this emphasis on feeling is a glorification of expressing one’s feelings rather than in controlling those that are reprehensible. The emphasis on emotional rather than cognitive learning weakens respect for the expertise of professors. Professors may know more, but they may be no better at expressing feelings than students are.
- College curricula have proliferated and have come to include many subjects that embody partisan diatribes against real or imagined oppression rather than the cultivation of intellectual understanding. London cites women’s studies, peace studies, ethnic studies, black studies, and gay studies as curricula that are more ideological than scholarly. “Not only is there a college for everyone, now there is a course for everyone,” he writes.
- College departments that were once intellectually respectable, such as English, sociology, anthropology, political science, and history, have become increasingly controlled by radicals who are protected by tenure from the need to be scholars rather than ideologues. For example, London quotes Brooklyn College political science professor Michael Parenti, as saying, “Our job in academia is not only to reach out to working people but also to remind our students that they are workers…that their struggle is also a labor struggle, [and] that labor struggle is the most profound democratic struggle in our society.” The result is that students get sub-standard educations from such ideologues along with an exaggerated feeling of entitlement for themselves and other alleged victims of societal oppression.
- Academic freedom has increasingly been interpreted by liberal professors and liberal students as protecting “free speech” in class, however foolish, shocking, irrelevant to the course description, and ignorant it may be.
London’s charges reflect the perversion of higher education and some of the cases he uses to illustrate his points are truly horrendous. But the question is one of extent. How common are these perversions?
Undoubtedly, our higher education system is generally falling far short. Last year I published a book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America, in which I tried to explain the reasons why many college students these days do not get as good an education as Dr. London and I would like – and what can be done to raise standards.
Nevertheless, I believe that London has overstated his case that undergraduate education in America is deficient. Why am I more sanguine than he is?
First, because there are at least 3,700 colleges and universities in the United States and some of them have students who seek a serious, traditional education, perhaps because of parental influence, and they get it from faculty who share Dr. London’s high valuation of a rigorous curriculum.
London mentions Grove City College, but there are many others that still take education seriously. Brigham Young University and other colleges strongly committed to Mormon religious beliefs (as well as schools committed to other religious beliefs) would not fit the patterns he rightly decries. There is a wide range of college and university cultures. Most of the selective ones are generally more vulnerable to London’s critique, but many of the less selective ones are less so.
Second, within colleges and universities, some curricula are more vulnerable to London’s critique than others. Engineering, physics, biology, mathematics, chemistry, and computer science tend to be rigorous. Their students can receive failing grades, and courses in those fields have less grade inflation.
Students who are willing and able to do the hard work of learning difficult material get lower grade averages, but better educations than students who migrate to easier curricula, such as, I’m sorry to say, my own field, sociology. Despite the allure of easy degrees, quite a few students still knowingly enroll in tough majors, partly because of intrinsic interest and partly because they rightly believe that potential employers will value their field of study more highly than fields with a reputation of containing mainly “gut” or ideology-driven courses.
Third, many colleges have established honors colleges within the college or university for their intellectually most able students. More than a thousand American colleges now contain honors colleges. Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University, a public four-year institution, went much further than most honors colleges. Not only does Wilkes have a separate faculty, separate classes, separate dining halls, and separate housing for its intellectually superior students. It is located more than forty miles from the main campus of FAU, thus making it extremely difficult for Wilkes students to take courses on the main campus or for Boca Raton undergraduates to take classes at Wilkes College.
Even at schools without an honors college, students who desire a sound education can usually get it. They can ignore the campus follies and (mostly if not entirely) avoid the professors who waste their time on political tangents. The eager student can find the courses and professors that are worthwhile if he is willing to put some effort into it.
London has shown that American higher education is beset with serious problems, but I suspect it is less uniformly horrendous than he believes. For all the waste and folly, many young Americans nevertheless receive a good education.