The Art of Manliness - September 01, 2021


College — What It Was, Is, and Should Be

Topics
college history and future college origins and development college experience college experiences
Hosted by
Brett McKay
Mentioned
Andrew DelBanco Fugitive Slaves Isaac Newton Would Be Aristotle Williams COVID-19 Johnny Sally
Could Sleeping in Separate Beds Improve Your Relationship？ Being a Man in the Lousy Modern World

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46 minutes

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7,277

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368

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Hate speech

1

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Summary

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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.

Transcript

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00:00:00.000 We're at McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.840 Modern students are apt to see going to college as the way to earn a credential that'll help
00:00:14.040 them get a good job.
00:00:15.000 But as Andrew DelBanco, professor of American Studies at Columbia University, argues in
00:00:18.900 his book, College, What It Was, Is, and Should Be, higher education was developed for a different
00:00:23.400 purpose, one it should fight to maintain.
00:00:25.200 Today on the show, Andrew shares how he decided to write his book to understand more about
00:00:28.440 the history, nature, and value of an institution which has come under increasing pressure in
00:00:32.240 the modern age.
00:00:33.100 Andrew describes how America's earliest colleges were founded as places where students can
00:00:36.580 learn from both their teachers and from each other, and thereby develop the capacity to
00:00:39.880 grow in character, serve others, live a good life, and even face death.
00:00:43.580 Andrew explains why colleges have largely abandoned this mission and makes the case for why a broad,
00:00:47.860 not entirely specialized liberal arts education remains relevant in an age in which the ability
00:00:52.300 to grapple with life's big questions is as crucial as ever.
00:00:55.000 We also talk about the difference between colleges and universities, and no, they're
00:00:58.100 not synonymous, why a prospective student might choose the former over the latter, and
00:01:01.680 what other things those contemplating where to go to school should consider when making
00:01:04.660 the decision.
00:01:05.460 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash college.
00:01:20.260 Andrew DelBanco, welcome to the show.
00:01:22.780 Thank you.
00:01:23.340 Glad to be here.
00:01:23.980 So you got a book published over a decade ago, I can't believe it, it seems like not
00:01:29.040 that long ago, called College, What It Was, Is, and Should Be.
00:01:33.280 What's the impetus behind this book?
00:01:35.420 And I mean, what did you start noticing in colleges and universities?
00:01:38.720 Because this is your business, you're a professor, that caused you to take a look at the history
00:01:43.240 of colleges to see, maybe there's something from the past we can learn on how to improve
00:01:49.220 the college experience.
00:01:50.220 Well, you know, it's my impression, most faculty members are hired to focus on a special subject,
00:01:57.360 engineering or English or whatever it may be.
00:01:59.840 And 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.
00:02:09.600 And 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.
00:02:22.180 You know, every institution has a history, and usually we can learn something about where we are by figuring out where we've been.
00:02:31.080 So I just got curious about the history of this thing that we call college.
00:02:36.200 And I began to read about it, educate myself about it.
00:02:40.160 And so I guess one answer to your question is just intellectual curiosity.
00:02:45.160 The other one is that I think there's a general feeling, certainly it was there on my part, that this is an imperiled institution.
00:02:55.200 It's a fragile institution.
00:02:57.380 There's a lot of pressures on it from all kinds of directions, cultural, economic.
00:03:03.060 And 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.
00:03:11.500 So that's something like an answer to your question.
00:03:16.100 Yeah, I mean, you wrote this book right around the time of the Great Recession.
00:03:19.660 And 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.
00:03:27.300 And we're still having that conversation today.
00:03:30.500 And so, yeah, that's one idea.
00:03:31.840 I mean, we typically think of college as, well, it's a place you go so you can get a job.
00:03:36.420 Right.
00:03:37.360 Well, look, the student debt problem is a real problem.
00:03:40.060 But there's also a lot of misunderstanding about it.
00:03:43.380 A great deal of student debt is accrued in graduate school.
00:03:48.040 A great deal is accrued by students who are attending for-profit so-called universities.
00:03:54.640 And I use the term so-called because I think a lot of for-profit institutions are really masquerading as universities.
00:04:01.300 And they take advantage of students.
00:04:05.160 And 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.
00:04:12.920 Another 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.
00:04:24.140 So 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.
00:04:38.540 Now, it's a political argument as to whether that's justified or not, but it is a fact.
00:04:43.700 I 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.
00:04:55.920 Those institutions, the level of student indebtedness is actually very low because those institutions are able to provide financial aid for students who need it.
00:05:07.180 So it's a complicated picture, but it certainly is on the minds of a lot of people.
00:05:12.140 And quite understandably, the cost of college has compelled people to ask hard questions about, you know, what am I investing in?
00:05:22.460 What kind of return should I be expecting on my investment?
00:05:26.740 What's the deliverable at the end of this process?
00:05:29.680 And the answer to that question has changed a lot over our history.
00:05:33.000 And that's one of the questions I try to explore in this book.
00:05:35.480 Well, let's talk about that because I think that's the big question that people ask.
00:05:38.600 What am I going to college for exactly?
00:05:41.740 And it's funny.
00:05:42.340 I took my son to a football camp at the University of Oklahoma a couple months ago.
00:05:47.100 That's where I graduated from.
00:05:49.120 And it's a beautiful campus.
00:05:50.700 But as I was walking around, I was like, this is really, if you can think about it, it's kind of weird.
00:05:55.460 This idea we cordon young people off from the community. 0.99
00:05:58.520 We create a sort of a community within a community for a few years where all they can do is focus on learning.
00:06:03.820 And we build big, giant, beautiful buildings and libraries.
00:06:07.520 And then there's football stadiums and all this stuff.
00:06:10.780 And so you think about it, how did this happen?
00:06:12.220 Like, 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?
00:06:19.780 How did that get its start?
00:06:21.460 I mean, let's start there.
00:06:22.120 I think that's interesting to explore.
00:06:23.180 Well, it's a great question, and therefore there's no real quick, easy answer.
00:06:28.500 First thing to say, I think, is that the kind of college you're describing is almost unique to the United States.
00:06:35.100 That 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.
00:06:57.640 So 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.
00:07:15.140 But there's nothing like residential campus life in most other countries.
00:07:21.100 So 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.
00:07:34.740 But specifically, so where did this uniquely American institution of the residential college, which is what we're talking about right now?
00:07:42.980 And we don't want to forget that most American students do not attend such institutions.
00:07:47.880 We'll get back to that.
00:07:49.300 Where did this idea of a residential college come from?
00:07:52.300 And the answer is pretty straightforward.
00:07:53.860 It came from England.
00:07:55.600 It 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.
00:08:12.140 And divinity, by and large, and spent three rather than four years literally behind locked gates so that they were separated from the outside world.
00:08:25.400 And 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.
00:08:42.520 And in fact, the founders of the college, it's very interesting to read their admission statement that they published when they opened the college.
00:08:49.700 They said very specifically, we want students here to grow up in what they called the collegiate way.
00:08:57.060 And 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.
00:09:11.220 They wanted, I guess you could say, the boundary line between study and life to be a blurry one.
00:09:21.080 It'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.
00:09:35.560 Because most of these students were initially trained to be either ministers or school teachers.
00:09:42.100 So 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.
00:09:55.180 So there's almost a monastic experience they were trying to create.
00:09:58.280 Yeah, well, monastic, it's tempting to go to that analogy.
00:10:01.360 There is something like a convent or a retreat or a monastery, but I can assure you that students never behave monastically.
00:10:11.100 One 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.
00:10:28.520 Right 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.
00:10:41.780 All of that stuff has always been part and parcel of the college experience.
00:10:45.760 Now, 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.
00:10:52.500 And 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.
00:11:03.780 Yeah, I think over the long sweep of history, today's college students are actually relatively better behaved than their predecessors were.
00:11:11.480 But 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.
00:11:21.160 So when you look at the founding documents of these early colleges, a lot of it was about character building.
00:11:25.800 Like 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.
00:11:33.220 So, you know, that was the purpose, character development.
00:11:35.520 Did the curriculum, or how did the curriculum of these early colleges reflect that purpose?
00:11:40.500 Well, you know, I referred earlier to the mission statement of Harvard College, which came out about 1638.
00:11:47.980 It was not only a mission statement, it was also, you might say, the first fundraising brochure in the history of American higher education.
00:11:55.760 They wrote a document and sent it back to their Puritan allies in England and said, hey, we need your help.
00:12:02.460 We need your support to maintain this college.
00:12:04.560 And in that document, there's a beautiful line that's always struck me with great force.
00:12:10.920 They say the purpose of this college, I'm paraphrasing now, is to ensure that we do not leave an illiterate ministry.
00:12:21.620 We do not leave an illiterate ministry to the people when our present ministers lie in the dust.
00:12:31.600 OK, 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.
00:12:50.420 Simple as that.
00:12:51.300 Now, the mission, of course, grew enormously.
00:12:56.140 And if you ask today, what's the mission of that particular institution, there'd be 150,000 different missions.
00:13:04.980 But 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.
00:13:29.740 That's a pretty tall order.
00:13:59.740 They'll go off and form a church of their own.
00:14:01.620 That's essentially how the early colleges proliferated.
00:14:05.620 But in that era that lasted throughout the colonial period and into the first half of the 19th century, most colleges were explicitly Christian institutions.
00:14:18.460 And indeed, most college presidents until the late 19th century were clerics.
00:14:25.880 They were ministers.
00:14:26.680 So in that context, people felt relatively confident in how to answer the question of what does it mean to develop a good character?
00:14:40.160 It 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.
00:14:54.200 We now obviously live in an era where that criterion no longer applies.
00:15:01.360 Some people might miss it, but there's no going back whether one wants to or not.
00:15:07.760 We 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?
00:15:31.700 Where should the line be—where should the line be drawn between ambition as a good thing and greed as a bad thing?
00:15:40.240 What does a good life look like?
00:15:42.900 What does it mean to commit to a family?
00:15:45.700 What does a family look like?
00:15:47.600 There are as many answers to those questions now as there are thinking people in our country.
00:15:56.260 Therefore, 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.
00:16:07.420 And there are some institutions that define good character rather narrowly.
00:16:13.920 But 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,
00:16:32.940 and 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.
00:16:54.620 That's a tall order.
00:16:56.480 That's very hard work.
00:16:58.040 For that reason, I think most colleges have more or less given up on it.
00:17:04.780 And I'm sorry about that.
00:17:06.680 I 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.
00:17:19.200 Is 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.
00:17:27.480 But because there's—we don't—there's no single shared telos.
00:17:31.480 Right.
00:17:31.920 Because we're—they can't really—it has to be very vague.
00:17:36.840 So 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.
00:17:46.060 It's sort of—the economic part is what's emphasized instead of the character part because it's easier.
00:17:51.180 You can say, well, you get a degree, you can get a job.
00:17:53.960 Right, right.
00:17:55.720 Well, and look, it's also—it's not only easier in a sense, it's also completely understandable.
00:18:01.940 I 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.
00:18:15.700 I mean, we've made it almost universally available, and that's a great thing.
00:18:22.920 One 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.
00:18:32.880 It's a place filled with young people who, as we said earlier, have taken on debt or their families have made financial sacrifices.
00:18:41.080 So 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.
00:18:49.140 How am I going to make that into a marketable credential?
00:18:52.060 What's it going to bring me at the end of the process?
00:18:55.780 And that's a very legitimate question, particularly for young people who come from families who don't have a lot of resources.
00:19:03.120 What I regret, and I guess you asked me at the beginning of the conversation, why did I write this book?
00:19:10.300 And I suppose it's a little bit of a sermon in its own way.
00:19:15.080 What 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.
00:19:36.240 We shouldn't, I think, be telling students, this is the right way to live, and that's the wrong way to live.
00:19:43.580 But 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.
00:19:58.320 But 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.
00:20:17.280 But 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?
00:20:30.560 We 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.
00:20:56.420 You 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.
00:21:07.020 And 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.
00:21:19.380 There 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.
00:21:39.760 Other societies have strict limits around what individuals are permitted to say in public and penalties applied if they say something that government disapproves of.
00:21:51.160 It'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.
00:22:06.800 Those 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.
00:22:23.340 Everybody 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.
00:22:42.260 So, we're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:22:48.620 And now back to the show.
00:22:50.500 Yeah, 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.
00:22:58.860 There wasn't a lot of specialization.
00:23:00.680 The math was connected to the philosophy, and the philosophy was connected to the science.
00:23:05.580 So the idea was to give a student a general liberal arts education.
00:23:09.580 So one trend that's happened – so, okay, let's talk about one trend that's happened.
00:23:13.380 We 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.
00:23:22.740 The other shift has been more from general education to a very specific or specialized instruction.
00:23:29.980 Yeah, 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.
00:23:46.560 Technology, 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.
00:24:03.540 Science, 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.
00:24:17.640 The scientific knowledge is expanding at an incredibly rapid rate.
00:24:22.860 So 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.
00:24:40.680 The 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.
00:24:58.860 And that's just the first degree, right?
00:25:00.380 That's the BA degree or the Bachelor of Science degree.
00:25:03.500 So 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.
00:25:19.800 Of 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.
00:25:36.320 Those 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.
00:25:45.420 And it was, you know, jammed with, I think, a thousand students wanted to take it.
00:25:51.460 At Harvard, they have a course called Justice, which is very popular with students.
00:25:56.100 So 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.
00:26:12.960 They 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.
00:26:23.600 And so that's the value of a liberal arts education, even in the 21st century.
00:26:27.080 It allows you to think about what does it mean to be a human, and what does it mean to live the good life.
00:26:30.780 And 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.
00:26:41.180 It's just like, well, I just got to get through this.
00:26:43.380 That's how the students perceive it.
00:26:44.780 But then also there's something going on on the college level.
00:26:48.800 There's another change we can talk about.
00:26:50.380 So you mentioned the early colleges in the United States, they were, you know, very small, cozy, collegial.
00:26:56.680 You wanted to have this intimate relationship with your teacher where you have these discussions.
00:27:00.260 But throughout the 19th century, things started getting bigger, and we shifted from like a college to a university system.
00:27:08.380 I think that's some people, that's something to be interesting to explore.
00:27:11.860 I think when we throw around college and university, we use them as synonyms, but they're not.
00:27:16.560 They're different.
00:27:17.360 Walk us through the difference there.
00:27:18.400 Well, no, I think that's right.
00:27:20.580 We use those two words interchangeably.
00:27:22.520 You know, Sally is going off to Williams, and Johnny is going off to Wisconsin.
00:27:29.820 In the first case, it's a college.
00:27:31.620 In the second case, it's a university.
00:27:33.040 But we make no distinction in our mind.
00:27:35.540 There's a big distinction.
00:27:37.780 And I would try to boil it down this way.
00:27:40.960 First of all, a university is a much more complex institution that does a lot of things.
00:27:47.460 It conducts research.
00:27:48.580 It trains graduate and professional students for the professions.
00:27:55.000 And the college that may exist inside the university tends to be a rather subsidiary entity within this larger thing.
00:28:03.800 But on a more abstract level, what a university is about fundamentally is the production of new knowledge.
00:28:12.760 Now, that's most evident in the sciences where we understand nature better and better with every passing year.
00:28:24.900 But 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.
00:28:40.640 A college has a college has a very different function.
00:28:43.980 A 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.
00:29:04.200 And we want you to know the basics of this so that you can go out and contribute and change the world.
00:29:13.880 That's a very different mission from the university mission.
00:29:18.040 And the two tend to get tangled up together, and it's inevitable.
00:29:23.160 I think what you see over the last 125 years or so is that colleges are becoming more and more like universities.
00:29:34.300 And there's some positives about that.
00:29:38.020 But by and large, I think more is being lost than is being gained.
00:29:42.620 The 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.
00:29:57.600 That's the sort of university ethos.
00:30:00.020 Whereas 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.
00:30:15.280 So you might get a bad grade that's going to bring your GPA down.
00:30:18.780 Those 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.
00:30:31.260 So this is a longstanding tension between college and university.
00:30:35.200 And 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?
00:30:56.900 That doesn't mean they won't get great science.
00:30:59.020 In fact, there's a lot of evidence that pre-meds at liberal arts colleges do better than pre-meds at big universities.
00:31:06.780 And of course, the faculty mostly hold PhD degrees, so they've all been in universities.
00:31:12.300 But there's still something different about an independent college than a university.
00:31:17.960 Yeah, and I think the point I was getting at earlier is that professors, there's this pressure on professors that sort of at crosswinds.
00:31:23.820 They're trying to be a college professor where their job is to transmit knowledge.
00:31:28.200 Yet at the same time, they have this pressure from the university crosswinds saying, we need to create new knowledge.
00:31:34.600 Right.
00:31:34.840 Because universities use that in their public relations.
00:31:37.680 Like, hey, we've made this new discovery or even in the liberal arts or social sciences.
00:31:41.940 And so college professors, I have professors, friends, where they've complained about that.
00:31:45.920 They 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.
00:31:55.740 So it's sort of middling.
00:31:58.360 Well, this is a big distortion, and it's a big problem.
00:32:01.940 I 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.
00:32:09.600 Very little attention in graduate school is spent on helping you become a better teacher.
00:32:15.000 It's almost an accident if you have an outstanding researcher who also is an outstanding teacher.
00:32:20.960 It happens.
00:32:22.200 But there's no logical connection, really, between the two things.
00:32:25.720 And 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.
00:32:41.180 And, 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.
00:32:53.320 But at the end of the day, students need attention.
00:32:58.420 All students need it, especially those who are not as well prepared for college as others.
00:33:03.500 And 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.
00:33:23.780 And that's a very tall order, which is easy for me as an outside commentator to call for it.
00:33:34.840 It's a harder thing for a college president or dean or provost to make it happen.
00:33:40.140 But it's certainly worth the effort.
00:33:44.020 You 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.
00:33:51.120 But we all know that we're in the middle of this, and we're still in it, unfortunately, this COVID-19 crisis.
00:34:00.200 And it's very obvious that it is, in the first instance, a public health crisis.
00:34:06.520 And 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.
00:34:28.980 So 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?
00:34:48.040 You 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?
00:35:03.880 And 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?
00:35:15.240 These are not scientific questions.
00:35:18.060 These are not technical questions.
00:35:20.820 These are humanistic values questions.
00:35:23.960 I 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.
00:35:40.900 My 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,
00:36:04.040 but 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.
00:36:17.720 All 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.
00:36:32.280 So I just wanted to put our conversation in that context.
00:36:37.220 I hope that makes some sense.
00:36:39.800 There'll be another crisis in five years or 10 years.
00:36:42.380 We 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.
00:36:52.480 All human problems are values problems, and that's why we want to make sure that the humanities and general education,
00:37:01.260 as 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.
00:37:13.660 So sorry if that sounded like a sermon, but I feel pretty strongly about it.
00:37:17.240 No, you're making a strong case for why liberal arts education is still relevant to even our technocratic society.
00:37:24.340 Even when we have the technology underlying that, we're always going to have to deal with the humanistic questions that go along with it.
00:37:32.840 They'll never go away.
00:37:33.620 They'll never go away.
00:37:34.480 Look at the questions that technology has raised, like privacy questions.
00:37:38.680 Every 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.
00:37:46.880 And the free speech questions, I mean, can you post lies and slander on Facebook and nobody – there are no penalties for that?
00:37:56.200 Again, these are hard questions, but they're going to get the better of us.
00:38:02.300 They'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.
00:38:10.680 And 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.
00:38:26.840 And that's what a college should be about at the end of the day.
00:38:30.360 So that's my hope for what the colleges will look like in the future.
00:38:34.740 I mean, so here's a question.
00:38:35.560 I think you kind of alluded to it earlier.
00:38:36.860 Say 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.
00:38:58.780 What advice would you give to those people to find that right college?
00:39:04.180 Well, I would say a couple of quick things.
00:39:06.860 First of all, it helps to understand that most American students don't have the luxury of making that choice.
00:39:14.500 So 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.
00:39:35.620 That is not the typical experience for most American students who attend underfunded, overcrowded, public two-year or four-year institutions often as commuters.
00:39:47.400 So that's one thing that young people should realize.
00:39:50.940 If they're in that position, it's a fortunate position to be in.
00:39:54.480 The 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.
00:40:04.740 The only thing that really matters is that whichever college you go to is one that you feel good about.
00:40:12.240 It 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.
00:40:29.820 It only matters that you go there with a feeling of excitement and curiosity and desire to learn.
00:40:37.860 And there are hundreds, if not thousands of institutions in our country that can be that place for you.
00:40:47.460 So 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.
00:41:14.580 All 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.
00:41:24.700 So finally, I mean, what's the right college?
00:41:27.140 It's the college that feels right and that's going to be an individual choice.
00:41:35.260 In general, it's a good idea to go somewhere where the faculty actually care about the students, right?
00:41:40.820 And 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.
00:41:50.120 Because 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.
00:42:00.980 So, 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.
00:42:19.340 Because it should require you to ask questions about yourself.
00:42:24.300 What do I get excited about?
00:42:26.540 What kind of people do I want to be around?
00:42:29.500 Do 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?
00:42:40.320 Or do I really need to be in a place where I feel comfortable and people have had a relatively similar experience to my own?
00:42:47.440 There's no right or wrong answer to those questions either.
00:42:49.860 But 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.
00:42:58.280 Right. 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.
00:43:08.420 It doesn't matter if you're at Harvard or the University of Oklahoma.
00:43:11.520 I mean, some of my best memories from my college days at Oklahoma, yeah, I went to the football games. That was fun.
00:43:17.060 But I loved, you know, after meeting with a bunch of students after class and continuing the discussion that we had about Aristotle's politics.
00:43:25.260 That was great. I loved it. And I miss it. And I'm glad I had those experiences.
00:43:30.280 Well, 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.
00:43:37.620 But, 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.
00:43:52.520 The 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.
00:44:04.440 And if you can find a college where that's happening, then you're in good shape and take advantage of that.
00:44:10.980 And you'll get a lot of value out of your investment in college.
00:44:15.600 And I wish to all your listeners that that will be the case for them.
00:44:20.340 Well, Andrew, where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:44:22.320 Well, my work is a little bit all over the place.
00:44:28.160 I 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.
00:44:51.400 So, 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.
00:44:59.300 But 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.
00:45:13.640 And I think they'll find that it's possible to actually read it.
00:45:17.360 Well, Andrew Delbanco, thanks for his time.
00:45:19.300 It's been a pleasure.
00:45:20.420 Thank you so much.
00:45:21.340 I hope we'll get a chance to talk again.
00:45:23.120 And you have a great day.
00:45:24.240 My guest today was Andrew Delbanco.
00:45:26.520 He's the author of the book College, What It Was, Is, and Should Be.
00:45:29.380 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:45:31.620 If you'd like more information about this book and his work and dig deeper into this topic, go to our show notes at aom.is slash college.
00:45:37.560 We'll see you next time.
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00:46:17.780 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.
00:46:19.060 Remind you to not only listen to the Wim Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.