What Is College For?

In a speech at UNC-Chapel Hill on March 3rd, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco called for the reform of American higher education. Specifically, he advocated a core curriculum—a set of course requirements for all students intended to give them an understanding of the great works of human civilization—as a solution to many of the modern university’s woes.

“If you’re at an institution that has no expectations of what you should know,” said Delbanco, “—if you come out as an educated person it’s either an accident or it’s something you’ve done for yourself.”

In his speech “What Is College For,” Delbanco explained how universities began in America, what a university is supposed to do, and how the modern American university is failing to live up to those purposes. “I often raise more questions than I can answer,” he said, which turned out to be true in this case, though he did offer a few suggestions to help universities reorient themselves toward their proper goals.

Delbanco, who directs Columbia’s American Studies department and is the author most recently of Melville: His World and Work (2005), opened with a brief history of American higher education, including its explicitly religious roots (somewhat mirroring Russell Nieli’s Pope Center report “From Christian Gentleman to Bewildered Seeker”). Delbanco’s history started with what he humorously though truthfully called “the first fundraising letter,” a letter written by the founders of Harvard describing the purpose of their institution:

“After God had carried us safely to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

By “advance learning,” Delbanco explained, the founders did not mean discovering new things but promulgating existing knowledge, especially theological knowledge. The primary textbook back then was the Bible.

Today, university administrators often talk about interdisciplinary studies—“I’m not sure what [it] means but I’m pretty sure they don’t,” Delbanco jested—but in early American higher education there really was a connection between all forms of learning. As famed higher ed reformer John Henry Newman put it, the university was a place where “all branches of knowledge are connected together because the subject matter of knowledge is intimately united in itself as being the acts and work of the Creator.”

The idea of the university as promulgator of known knowledge changed in 1876 with the inauguration of Johns Hopkins University, the first American research university. President Daniel Coit Gilman declared that the purpose of Johns Hopkins was to “extend, even by minute accretions, the realm of knowledge.” This corresponded with the development of what Delbanco called the “relay-race view of history” in which succeeding generations build on the knowledge of preceding ones. This concept, according to Delbanco, represented “one of the most extraordinary achievements of human civilization.”

However, there was a downside. “In this new kind of institution”—i.e. the research university—“undergraduates became … relatively if not utterly marginal,” with the notable exception of their tuition dollars as a funding mechanism for research. Indeed, the first president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, felt that the inclusion of undergraduates at all was a “temporary concession to the weakness of the founder.”

So why should undergraduates still attend modern research universities? Delbanco outlined three primary functions of a university education.

The first is economic. The college degree has become increasingly valuable—to students anyway—as a credential. “The college degree has,” he said, apparently channeling the spirit of my Pope Center colleague George Leef, “replaced the high school diploma as the minimum credential” needed to find a decent job. As such, a degree is important because it is “virtually the only way—with some lucky exceptions—of entering into that shrinking thing we call the middle class.”

The second function of a university education is to form young people as citizens: to teach them to listen to one another, to formulate arguments to defend their beliefs, and even to question their own beliefs. Even more important than learning individual facts, this process should give college graduates “a well-functioning bulls*** meter.” College, therefore, is not so much about memorizing the best that has been thought and said but being able to use such things as a measuring stick for new ideas that come along.

Finally, college should, in the words of a Columbia alumnus Delbanco quoted, teach students how to “enjoy life.” By means of Columbia’s core curriculum—“every student [at Columbia] has to spend a year studying literature and a year studying political philosophy and a semester studying music and a semester studying art”—students’ “sensibilities had been opened up.” The core curriculum had helped them appreciate the finer things in life.

The last two out of the three primary purposes of a college education are, in Delbanco’s view, largely a product of a core curriculum. The demise of core curricula on college campuses across the country over the last half, therefore, is troubling.

There are people who know the kinds of things worth studying, he acknowledged, but generally speaking 18-year-olds don’t know what books and classes are worth spending time on. The rise of the smorgasbord, buffet line, just-take-what-looks-tasty model of higher education that accompanied the demise of the core curriculum has many causes, one of which is the increased emphasis on the economic value of college. However, Delbanco didn’t think the economic rationale was sufficient to justify gutting the core.

“I haven’t heard any good arguments against [core curricula], frankly, except that they slow you down in the process of specialization and put you at some marginal disadvantage for [economic advancement], but I don’t really buy that.”

Indeed, the picture Delbanco painted of higher education in today’s America is quite gloomy. Out of three reasons for attending college, one represents a terrible waste of time and money—a line on a resume made necessary not primarily because of any actual value but because everyone else is doing it, too—and the other two have been eroded for so long that they’re barely still there.

Still, a university education that provides the real value Delbanco articulated can still be found by those willing to look for it. He mentioned St. John’s University as one school that has totally embraced the idea of the core curriculum—“all core, all the time,” in Delbanco’s words. Brown University, on the other hand, has zero requirements. Columbia’s required class load is something of a middle ground between the two, ensuring some measure of citizen formation and sensibility development but still allowing for specialization.

Nevertheless, complacency is not acceptable. Reforming higher education to make it more meaningful for students and useful to our country (something groups like the Pope Center and ACTA have been trying to do for some time) is a “tall order” but worthwhile. “It’s always a work in progress, but I can’t think of too many things that are more important.”