As Andrew Del Banco argues in his new book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, higher education was developed for a different purpose, one it should fight to maintain. Andrew explains why colleges have largely abandoned this mission, and why a broad, not entirely specialized liberal arts education remains relevant in an age in which the ability to grapple with life s big questions is as crucial as ever.
00:01:50.220Well, you know, it's my impression, most faculty members are hired to focus on a special subject,
00:01:57.360engineering or English or whatever it may be.
00:01:59.840And then they wake up one day and they find they've spent 10, 20, 30 years, in my case, more than that by now, inside an institution that they don't know very much about.
00:02:09.600And I began to feel that I wanted to learn something about where the institution in which I spent my life, first as a student, then as a teacher, came from.
00:02:22.180You know, every institution has a history, and usually we can learn something about where we are by figuring out where we've been.
00:02:31.080So I just got curious about the history of this thing that we call college.
00:02:36.200And I began to read about it, educate myself about it.
00:02:40.160And so I guess one answer to your question is just intellectual curiosity.
00:02:45.160The other one is that I think there's a general feeling, certainly it was there on my part, that this is an imperiled institution.
00:02:57.380There's a lot of pressures on it from all kinds of directions, cultural, economic.
00:03:03.060And I think we have an obligation to understand its value and to defend it and to try to see that it has a fruitful future.
00:03:11.500So that's something like an answer to your question.
00:03:16.100Yeah, I mean, you wrote this book right around the time of the Great Recession.
00:03:19.660And there was a lot of, I guess, hand-wringing and concern about students graduating college with enormous amounts of debt and there's no jobs.
00:03:27.300And we're still having that conversation today.
00:04:05.160And before you know it, you've accumulated a lot of debt and you have either no degree at all or a degree that isn't worth very much.
00:04:12.920Another reason that the cost of college has been going up so rapidly and students have had to borrow so much is that the states, by and large, have been disinvesting from public higher education.
00:04:24.140So the cost of educating students over the last several decades has been transferred in large part from the taxpayer to the student and the student's family.
00:04:38.540Now, it's a political argument as to whether that's justified or not, but it is a fact.
00:04:43.700I haven't mentioned the private sector, which is what a lot of people think of first when they think of college, you know, famous old institutions in the Northeast, Ivy League institutions and so on.
00:04:55.920Those institutions, the level of student indebtedness is actually very low because those institutions are able to provide financial aid for students who need it.
00:05:07.180So it's a complicated picture, but it certainly is on the minds of a lot of people.
00:05:12.140And quite understandably, the cost of college has compelled people to ask hard questions about, you know, what am I investing in?
00:05:22.460What kind of return should I be expecting on my investment?
00:05:26.740What's the deliverable at the end of this process?
00:05:29.680And the answer to that question has changed a lot over our history.
00:05:33.000And that's one of the questions I try to explore in this book.
00:05:35.480Well, let's talk about that because I think that's the big question that people ask.
00:05:38.600What am I going to college for exactly?
00:05:50.700But as I was walking around, I was like, this is really, if you can think about it, it's kind of weird.
00:05:55.460This idea we cordon young people off from the community.
00:05:58.520We create a sort of a community within a community for a few years where all they can do is focus on learning.
00:06:03.820And we build big, giant, beautiful buildings and libraries.
00:06:07.520And then there's football stadiums and all this stuff.
00:06:10.780And so you think about it, how did this happen?
00:06:12.220Like, where did this idea of college where we take young people for four years of their lives and we just make it a small little community?
00:06:22.120I think that's interesting to explore.
00:06:23.180Well, it's a great question, and therefore there's no real quick, easy answer.
00:06:28.500First thing to say, I think, is that the kind of college you're describing is almost unique to the United States.
00:06:35.100That is a place where young people roughly between the ages of 18 and 22, let's say, go, as you say, to be cordoned off from the world to some extent, to live in a community of other young people, roughly the same age, and live in the place where they study and grow up.
00:06:57.640So that's an idea that is quite unfamiliar in most of the world where most people who go on beyond secondary school to university, you know, they live in town, they go and listen to the lectures, they may have a friend's group.
00:07:15.140But there's nothing like residential campus life in most other countries.
00:07:21.100So what we take for granted in this country is actually very strange in the eyes of the rest of the world, particularly, you mentioned the football stadium, particularly big college sports, which is a completely foreign idea in most countries.
00:07:34.740But specifically, so where did this uniquely American institution of the residential college, which is what we're talking about right now?
00:07:42.980And we don't want to forget that most American students do not attend such institutions.
00:07:55.600It came from the colleges of those ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge, where young men, and they were, of course, only men in those days, came together initially to prepare for careers as ministers.
00:08:12.140And divinity, by and large, and spent three rather than four years literally behind locked gates so that they were separated from the outside world.
00:08:25.400And that idea of the residential college got transferred to what became our country in the early 17th century in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Harvard College was founded, our oldest college.
00:08:42.520And in fact, the founders of the college, it's very interesting to read their admission statement that they published when they opened the college.
00:08:49.700They said very specifically, we want students here to grow up in what they called the collegiate way.
00:08:57.060And if you think about that word collegiate, related to collegial, collegium, community, they wanted students to learn from each other and to live with each other.
00:09:11.220They wanted, I guess you could say, the boundary line between study and life to be a blurry one.
00:09:21.080It's not that you came into study and then you went back into the world, but you came into a whole world that was about study, gaining in self-knowledge was the hope, developing a character committed to public service.
00:09:35.560Because most of these students were initially trained to be either ministers or school teachers.
00:09:42.100So they very explicitly designed this college in contrast to the European university where students kind of dropped in to pick up some information and then dropped out again.
00:09:55.180So there's almost a monastic experience they were trying to create.
00:09:58.280Yeah, well, monastic, it's tempting to go to that analogy.
00:10:01.360There is something like a convent or a retreat or a monastery, but I can assure you that students never behave monastically.
00:10:11.100One of the first things you realize when you start reading about the ancient colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and early Harvard and early Yale is that a lot of the things we think are indicative of a decline in student morals today have always been true.
00:10:28.520Right down to right down to food fights, riots over the quality of the college food, being out after hours when the gates were locked and your friends had to figure out a way to smuggle you back in, putting on wild parties.
00:10:41.780All of that stuff has always been part and parcel of the college experience.
00:10:45.760Now, I think you noted some experiences in the past, and I've read this too, of just outright riots that were happening on the campuses over something.
00:10:52.500And they would go and attack the president's house, throw rocks through his window, and the next day the president would get up and give a lecture in front of these hooligans who had just pelted his house with rocks.
00:11:03.780Yeah, I think over the long sweep of history, today's college students are actually relatively better behaved than their predecessors were.
00:11:11.480But back then in colleges, the early colleges, they took that into account, that fact that young people were still rough around the edges, they were works in progress, so they were malleable.
00:11:21.160So when you look at the founding documents of these early colleges, a lot of it was about character building.
00:11:25.800Like they said, we're making this college to develop the character of these students while they're here with us so they can go out and do good in the world.
00:11:33.220So, you know, that was the purpose, character development.
00:11:35.520Did the curriculum, or how did the curriculum of these early colleges reflect that purpose?
00:11:40.500Well, you know, I referred earlier to the mission statement of Harvard College, which came out about 1638.
00:11:47.980It was not only a mission statement, it was also, you might say, the first fundraising brochure in the history of American higher education.
00:11:55.760They wrote a document and sent it back to their Puritan allies in England and said, hey, we need your help.
00:12:02.460We need your support to maintain this college.
00:12:04.560And in that document, there's a beautiful line that's always struck me with great force.
00:12:10.920They say the purpose of this college, I'm paraphrasing now, is to ensure that we do not leave an illiterate ministry.
00:12:21.620We do not leave an illiterate ministry to the people when our present ministers lie in the dust.
00:12:31.600OK, so the mission there was very explicit, was to prepare the next generation in the face of the inevitability of death, to prepare the next generation to carry on the Christian ministry to the people of New England.
00:12:51.300Now, the mission, of course, grew enormously.
00:12:56.140And if you ask today, what's the mission of that particular institution, there'd be 150,000 different missions.
00:13:04.980But in that original mission, I think, is that implication that we are here to help people cope with the trials and tribulations of life, to understand how to live a virtuous life, how to serve other people, and how to face death when that moment comes.
00:13:59.740They'll go off and form a church of their own.
00:14:01.620That's essentially how the early colleges proliferated.
00:14:05.620But in that era that lasted throughout the colonial period and into the first half of the 19th century, most colleges were explicitly Christian institutions.
00:14:18.460And indeed, most college presidents until the late 19th century were clerics.
00:14:26.680So in that context, people felt relatively confident in how to answer the question of what does it mean to develop a good character?
00:14:40.160It meant to be a believing Christian who lived according to the precepts of whatever particular brand of Christianity was at home in the particular college.
00:14:54.200We now obviously live in an era where that criterion no longer applies.
00:15:01.360Some people might miss it, but there's no going back whether one wants to or not.
00:15:07.760We live in an era where there's a great—I hardly need to point this out to you or your listeners—there's a great deal of debate, dispute, argument, and even animosity and hatred over basic questions such as how should people behave in their private sexual lives?
00:15:31.700Where should the line be—where should the line be drawn between ambition as a good thing and greed as a bad thing?
00:15:47.600There are as many answers to those questions now as there are thinking people in our country.
00:15:56.260Therefore, for any institution to say, we're here to train you to be such and such a kind of person, it's still possible for institutions to do that.
00:16:07.420And there are some institutions that define good character rather narrowly.
00:16:13.920But most of the more visible colleges in our country are trying to accommodate a great diversity of points of view, people from all walks of life, different religious and cultural traditions, different ethnic and racial identities,
00:16:32.940and to try to help them create some kind of workable community where people can agree at least on the basic elements of what it means to be a citizen, a neighbor, and a productive member of our diverse and heterogeneous society.
00:17:06.680I think we should be trying harder to continue to help young people find their way through life with some sense of who they are and who they want to be.
00:17:19.200Is that probably why now, you know, college today, there's less of a—I mean, they still talk about we're here to develop the whole person, the character.
00:17:27.480But because there's—we don't—there's no single shared telos.
00:17:31.920Because we're—they can't really—it has to be very vague.
00:17:36.840So as a consequence, universities and colleges today, I think it's typically why we see it like, well, college is a way where you can get a credential so you can go and work.
00:17:46.060It's sort of—the economic part is what's emphasized instead of the character part because it's easier.
00:17:51.180You can say, well, you get a degree, you can get a job.
00:17:55.720Well, and look, it's also—it's not only easier in a sense, it's also completely understandable.
00:18:01.940I mean, one of the great success stories in American history is the way in which we have opened up college to an incredibly larger portion of our population than the founders of those institutions would ever have imagined.
00:18:15.700I mean, we've made it almost universally available, and that's a great thing.
00:18:22.920One of the results of that, of course, is that college is no longer the preserve of affluent people who don't have to worry about what they're going to do after college.
00:18:32.880It's a place filled with young people who, as we said earlier, have taken on debt or their families have made financial sacrifices.
00:18:41.080So most everyone who goes to college legitimately has on their mind the question is, okay, I'm going to get this degree after four years.
00:18:49.140How am I going to make that into a marketable credential?
00:18:52.060What's it going to bring me at the end of the process?
00:18:55.780And that's a very legitimate question, particularly for young people who come from families who don't have a lot of resources.
00:19:03.120What I regret, and I guess you asked me at the beginning of the conversation, why did I write this book?
00:19:10.300And I suppose it's a little bit of a sermon in its own way.
00:19:15.080What I regret is that even as our colleges work hard to prepare students for productive working lives, you're going to be an engineer, or you're going to be a healthcare worker, or you're going to be a computer programmer, or whatever it may be, we shouldn't give up on that other aspect of the college experience.
00:19:36.240We shouldn't, I think, be telling students, this is the right way to live, and that's the wrong way to live.
00:19:43.580But we should be giving students an opportunity to ask those questions, not just privately, silently, in their own minds, which all students do to one extent or another, I believe.
00:19:58.320But to have conversations about those kinds of questions with their peers, with their contemporaries, and colleges could do a better job of fostering and facilitating those kinds of conversations, some of which can happen outside the classroom and do happen outside the classroom, of course.
00:20:17.280But some of which could and should happen inside the classroom, and that's what we used to call, we still call it that, but it doesn't have much meaning anymore in most places, we used to call it general education, right?
00:20:30.560We made a distinction between the major, the special field where you got a credential that said you knew how to do X or Y, and general education, which was supposed to broaden your horizons, deepen your imagination, open your mind to the experience of other people, not only in the contemporary world, but people in the past.
00:20:56.420You know, it's often said the past, you know, it's often said the past is another country, and it's not a country that anybody can visit, except by reading about it.
00:21:07.020And yet, by studying the past, which is a large part of what college used to be about, one gets a sense that, you know what, the world doesn't actually have to look exactly the way it does today, it has been different.
00:21:19.380There are some, some societies have been run by monarchs or tyrants, other societies have tried to make democracy work, other societies have done a mixture of the two, some societies believe in the radical principle of free speech to be protected at all costs.
00:21:39.760Other societies have strict limits around what individuals are permitted to say in public and penalties applied if they say something that government disapproves of.
00:21:51.160It's helpful to know that human beings have organized themselves in different ways over time, and that we collectively have a choice about how we want our society to be in 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now.
00:22:06.800Those are the kinds of questions that I think belong in the curriculum of every college, whether it's a nursing program or an engineering school, or for those very small and dwindling number of students who want to become professors when they grow up.
00:22:23.340Everybody should have a chance to think about these kinds of questions, and so I hope that in the years ahead, educators will make a greater effort in that direction, and parents will understand that that's a legitimate and important part of their children's college experience as well.
00:22:42.260So, we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:22:50.500Yeah, I think that's a big point you see throughout the book is as you look back to the past, you see that at the beginning, the curriculum was very interconnected, interdisciplinary.
00:23:00.680The math was connected to the philosophy, and the philosophy was connected to the science.
00:23:05.580So the idea was to give a student a general liberal arts education.
00:23:09.580So one trend that's happened – so, okay, let's talk about one trend that's happened.
00:23:13.380We mentioned the shift from focusing on character development to the economics, because that's just – it's understandable that colleges had to do that because we're a diverse, heterogeneous society.
00:23:22.740The other shift has been more from general education to a very specific or specialized instruction.
00:23:29.980Yeah, well, you know, a lot of smart people long before this conversation have pointed out that one of the characteristics of the modern world is the relentless trend toward increasing specialization.
00:23:46.560Technology, for example, on the one hand, it's supposed to make life easier and simpler and more manageable, but creating new technology, even learning how to use new technology, is a specialized skill.
00:24:03.540Science, which has become the center of intellectual life in so many ways, where the exciting discoveries are being made and where we can feel its presence in our everyday lives.
00:24:17.640The scientific knowledge is expanding at an incredibly rapid rate.
00:24:22.860So there's no way that even the smartest young person can be an omniscient, all-knowing, renaissance man scientist like, say, Isaac Newton was or Galileo.
00:24:40.680The student has to focus on a particular field, whether it's biology or physics or the new growing field of neuroscience, and there are innumerable number of specialized courses that you have to complete en route to a degree in any one of those fields.
00:24:58.860And that's just the first degree, right?
00:25:00.380That's the BA degree or the Bachelor of Science degree.
00:25:03.500So the pressure of specialization is everywhere on all of us all the time, and it has the effect of crowding out space for reflecting on broader questions.
00:25:19.800Of just taking a pause, taking a breath, putting a textbook or the problem set aside, and experiencing being alive and asking yourself what you want to do with this opportunity to be alive.
00:25:36.320Those questions are not very evident in the college curriculum anymore, although every once in a while, somebody will, like at Yale, they had a famous course called Happiness.
00:25:45.420And it was, you know, jammed with, I think, a thousand students wanted to take it.
00:25:51.460At Harvard, they have a course called Justice, which is very popular with students.
00:25:56.100So students have an appetite to confront these big questions, even as they know they have to prepare themselves, you know, to take the LSAT exam if they want to go to law school or the MCAT if they want to go to medical school or whatever the special focus may be.
00:26:12.960They still crave that opportunity to ask the big humanistic questions, and I think colleges ought to be doing a better job of giving them that opportunity.
00:26:23.600And so that's the value of a liberal arts education, even in the 21st century.
00:26:27.080It allows you to think about what does it mean to be a human, and what does it mean to live the good life.
00:26:30.780And so you mentioned it's getting harder to teach that stuff because, I mean, it's often those general ed courses or liberal arts courses, they're kind of given the short shrift.
00:26:41.180It's just like, well, I just got to get through this.
00:27:48.580It trains graduate and professional students for the professions.
00:27:55.000And the college that may exist inside the university tends to be a rather subsidiary entity within this larger thing.
00:28:03.800But on a more abstract level, what a university is about fundamentally is the production of new knowledge.
00:28:12.760Now, that's most evident in the sciences where we understand nature better and better with every passing year.
00:28:24.900But it's also true in history, where historians discover new aspects of the past and propose new interpretations of the past based on the research that they do in the archives, and so on and so forth.
00:28:40.640A college has a college has a very different function.
00:28:43.980A college is about the transmission of knowledge to young people, not in the sense that it's a static body of knowledge that's never going to change, but in the sense that, okay, this is what we as a culture have learned about ourselves and have learned about the world.
00:29:04.200And we want you to know the basics of this so that you can go out and contribute and change the world.
00:29:13.880That's a very different mission from the university mission.
00:29:18.040And the two tend to get tangled up together, and it's inevitable.
00:29:23.160I think what you see over the last 125 years or so is that colleges are becoming more and more like universities.
00:29:34.300And there's some positives about that.
00:29:38.020But by and large, I think more is being lost than is being gained.
00:29:42.620The pressure on the college student to specialize earlier and earlier, the pressure on the college student to be able to say on the day when they walk through the door, this is going to be my major, this is going to be my career.
00:30:00.020Whereas the taking the time to sit back and explore and reflect and figure out what makes you excited and taking the chance of studying something that you might not be very good at, but that you're curious about it.
00:30:15.280So you might get a bad grade that's going to bring your GPA down.
00:30:18.780Those opportunities have become narrower for college students than they were even when my generation was in college back in the 1970s, a long time ago by now.
00:30:31.260So this is a longstanding tension between college and university.
00:30:35.200And one thing young people can ask themselves when they're thinking about where they want to go to college is do they want to go to an institution that's inside a big university or do they want to go to a freestanding independent college where that university ethos may be a little lighter?
00:30:56.900That doesn't mean they won't get great science.
00:30:59.020In fact, there's a lot of evidence that pre-meds at liberal arts colleges do better than pre-meds at big universities.
00:31:06.780And of course, the faculty mostly hold PhD degrees, so they've all been in universities.
00:31:12.300But there's still something different about an independent college than a university.
00:31:17.960Yeah, and I think the point I was getting at earlier is that professors, there's this pressure on professors that sort of at crosswinds.
00:31:23.820They're trying to be a college professor where their job is to transmit knowledge.
00:31:28.200Yet at the same time, they have this pressure from the university crosswinds saying, we need to create new knowledge.
00:31:34.840Because universities use that in their public relations.
00:31:37.680Like, hey, we've made this new discovery or even in the liberal arts or social sciences.
00:31:41.940And so college professors, I have professors, friends, where they've complained about that.
00:31:45.920They want to focus on teaching, but they have this immense pressure to put out a new book or a certain amount of articles, and they feel like they can't do both very well.
00:31:58.360Well, this is a big distortion, and it's a big problem.
00:32:01.940I mean, if you think about it, people who become professors, they get a degree in graduate school, and they earn that degree by doing research.
00:32:09.600Very little attention in graduate school is spent on helping you become a better teacher.
00:32:15.000It's almost an accident if you have an outstanding researcher who also is an outstanding teacher.
00:32:22.200But there's no logical connection, really, between the two things.
00:32:25.720And then when they get to the college or the university, it's the rare institution that will provide incentives and rewards for people to really throw themselves into their teaching and give the time and attention that undergraduates need.
00:32:41.180And, you know, we could talk for hours more about the trend toward online teaching and learning and what that's likely to do to the relationship between teachers and students.
00:32:53.320But at the end of the day, students need attention.
00:32:58.420All students need it, especially those who are not as well prepared for college as others.
00:33:03.500And if we're going to ever do anything about our low graduation rates in this country, our poor success rates and the evidence of relatively limited learning that goes on in our colleges, by and large, we have to strengthen this relationship between teachers and students.
00:33:23.780And that's a very tall order, which is easy for me as an outside commentator to call for it.
00:33:34.840It's a harder thing for a college president or dean or provost to make it happen.
00:33:44.020You know, if I could say one other thing, Brett, to maybe, at least in my own mind, pull together some of the things we've been talking about.
00:33:51.120But we all know that we're in the middle of this, and we're still in it, unfortunately, this COVID-19 crisis.
00:34:00.200And it's very obvious that it is, in the first instance, a public health crisis.
00:34:06.520And it has also been an economic crisis, especially for less fortunate Americans who work as restaurant workers or retail workers or in meatpacking factories where COVID really took a high toll or places had to shut down.
00:34:28.980So it's all those things, public health crisis, but it's also a values crisis because it has forced us to ask fundamental questions about individual liberty on the one hand and government authority on the other, right?
00:34:48.040You know, all the debate and dispute we're witnessing right now over whether or not there should be a mask mandate, whether or not you should get the vaccine, to what extent is getting the vaccine something you should do for yourself?
00:35:03.880And to what extent is it something you should do in order to protect others around you, not just your loved ones, but also strangers whom you come into contact with?
00:35:20.820These are humanistic values questions.
00:35:23.960I don't have answers to these questions, and it's discouraging to me that we have so many public figures who are so shrill and certain that they have the right answers to these questions.
00:35:40.900My point is that we want the graduates of our colleges to be thoughtful, reflective people who are capable of thinking about these questions and not just having opinions about them based on what their parents told them or what they heard on this or that talk show or TV network,
00:36:04.040but based on evidence, argument as opposed to just opinionating and being willing to listen to people with a different point of view on these questions.
00:36:17.720All human questions are hard questions, and college is a place where students should begin to understand that and understand that they're going to spend the rest of their lives thinking about these questions, whether they want to or not.
00:36:32.280So I just wanted to put our conversation in that context.
00:36:39.800There'll be another crisis in five years or 10 years.
00:36:42.380We don't know what it'll look like, but I can assure you that it, once again, will not be a problem that's susceptible only to technical solutions.
00:36:52.480All human problems are values problems, and that's why we want to make sure that the humanities and general education,
00:37:01.260as I've been talking about it, continue to be a part of the college experience, and that colleges don't just become training institutions to prepare people to perform certain kinds of functions.
00:37:13.660So sorry if that sounded like a sermon, but I feel pretty strongly about it.
00:37:17.240No, you're making a strong case for why liberal arts education is still relevant to even our technocratic society.
00:37:24.340Even when we have the technology underlying that, we're always going to have to deal with the humanistic questions that go along with it.
00:37:34.480Look at the questions that technology has raised, like privacy questions.
00:37:38.680Every time I turn on my computer, Amazon or Google, they know all about what I was shopping for yesterday and what my interests are and so on.
00:37:46.880And the free speech questions, I mean, can you post lies and slander on Facebook and nobody – there are no penalties for that?
00:37:56.200Again, these are hard questions, but they're going to get the better of us.
00:38:02.300They're going to overcome us if we don't have a population that's capable of thinking about them and debating them and discussing them in a civil way.
00:38:10.680And I don't mean this as an idle comment, but in the way that you promote in your podcast, people talking about complicated issues, not yelling and screaming at each other and trying to sell something, but actually trying to think together.
00:38:26.840And that's what a college should be about at the end of the day.
00:38:30.360So that's my hope for what the colleges will look like in the future.
00:38:35.560I think you kind of alluded to it earlier.
00:38:36.860Say if you're a young person listening to the podcast or you're a parent of a young person and they're looking at which college to attend, and you're looking for one that will provide that robust liberal arts education and where you see a good model of that collegial education where there's an interaction between students and then teachers, intimate, and it's edifying.
00:38:58.780What advice would you give to those people to find that right college?
00:39:04.180Well, I would say a couple of quick things.
00:39:06.860First of all, it helps to understand that most American students don't have the luxury of making that choice.
00:39:14.500So what we've been talking about for the whole time together here, which is fine, is a certain stratum of the undergraduate experience, the college that you get in the family car or maybe in your own car or maybe you take an airplane or a train and you go there and you move in and you live there for several years.
00:39:35.620That is not the typical experience for most American students who attend underfunded, overcrowded, public two-year or four-year institutions often as commuters.
00:39:47.400So that's one thing that young people should realize.
00:39:50.940If they're in that position, it's a fortunate position to be in.
00:39:54.480The second thing I would say, and I find myself saying this a lot when parents come to me because they, you know, I wrote this book about college, so I'm supposed to know something about it.
00:40:04.740The only thing that really matters is that whichever college you go to is one that you feel good about.
00:40:12.240It doesn't matter where it is on the prestige ladder, it doesn't matter how many faculty have won the Nobel Prize or have a high rating in the citation index, doesn't matter if the football team is good or bad, at least not in my view.
00:40:29.820It only matters that you go there with a feeling of excitement and curiosity and desire to learn.
00:40:37.860And there are hundreds, if not thousands of institutions in our country that can be that place for you.
00:40:47.460So one of the really sad things has been to see how the prestige mongering of the last quarter century and more has distorted the lives of young people who, not just in high school, but in middle school and even practically in preschool, are under pressure to perform well on standardized tests and get that extracurricular summer experience that they can put on their resume and so on and so forth.
00:41:14.580All of that is distorting the lives of young people and none of it has anything to do with what we've been talking about, learning and growing.
00:41:24.700So finally, I mean, what's the right college?
00:41:27.140It's the college that feels right and that's going to be an individual choice.
00:41:35.260In general, it's a good idea to go somewhere where the faculty actually care about the students, right?
00:41:40.820And that might, the degree to which faculty care about students might actually be in inverse proportion in some cases to the prestige of the institution.
00:41:50.120Because if you go into a place where the faculty spend most of their time doing research or traveling around the world telling other people about their research, they don't have a lot of time for students.
00:42:00.980So, you know, you've got to feel it out, you've got to, and the process of choosing a college, if you are one of those privileged, relatively few who can choose, the process itself should be a learning experience, should be an educational experience.
00:42:19.340Because it should require you to ask questions about yourself.
00:42:26.540What kind of people do I want to be around?
00:42:29.500Do I have, is my comfort zone large enough that I can go to a place where there are going to be a lot of students who are not like me, don't look like me, and who come from other parts of the country or the world?
00:42:40.320Or do I really need to be in a place where I feel comfortable and people have had a relatively similar experience to my own?
00:42:47.440There's no right or wrong answer to those questions either.
00:42:49.860But those are the kinds of questions that you should be asking, not, you know, where does this institution stand in U.S. News and World Report, which is a whole other subject.
00:42:58.280Right. And I think another takeaway, too, at least from my experience, is that no matter where you go, you can create that collegial experience wherever you're at.
00:43:08.420It doesn't matter if you're at Harvard or the University of Oklahoma.
00:43:11.520I mean, some of my best memories from my college days at Oklahoma, yeah, I went to the football games. That was fun.
00:43:17.060But I loved, you know, after meeting with a bunch of students after class and continuing the discussion that we had about Aristotle's politics.
00:43:25.260That was great. I loved it. And I miss it. And I'm glad I had those experiences.
00:43:30.280Well, that's the way it should be. And I'm not surprised to hear you say that because otherwise you wouldn't be doing what you're doing.
00:43:37.620But, you know, the best teacher I ever had, whom I think about every day when I teach myself, used to say that the best kind of class is not one that ends, you know, with a conclusion or the answer to a question.
00:43:52.520The best kind of class is one where the students leave the room wanting to talk more and wanting to think more about what's just been under discussion.
00:44:04.440And if you can find a college where that's happening, then you're in good shape and take advantage of that.
00:44:10.980And you'll get a lot of value out of your investment in college.
00:44:15.600And I wish to all your listeners that that will be the case for them.
00:44:20.340Well, Andrew, where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:44:22.320Well, my work is a little bit all over the place.
00:44:28.160I mean, my last book is actually a history book about how enslaved persons who ran for freedom in the years before the Civil War changed the course of American history and how it would be good for all of us to know something more about their history than we tend to do.
00:44:51.400So, you know, I'd be delighted if your listeners want to go read this little book about college, which is a bit out of date by now.
00:44:59.300But if they want to read my most recent book, The War Before the War, which I subtitled Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, that would be nice, too.
00:45:13.640And I think they'll find that it's possible to actually read it.
00:45:17.360Well, Andrew Delbanco, thanks for his time.