College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (The William G. Bowen Series, 68) Paperback – April 21, 2013

As a high school teacher of math and physics, I spend a lot of my time trying to get my students to think about college. Too many students have no sense of what their options are when they finish high school, and make uniformed choices. Then, there is the issue of what college is actually going to be like, since the high school experience very rarely gives students a good sense of the college experience. I had initially hoped that Professor Delbanco's book might be one to share with my students, but this book is much too sophisticated to make useful reading for most of them. However, for those of us in education who are concerned about making sure students get a successful college education, this book provides some nice food for thought.I always enjoy a nice tour of history, and Delbanco provides that here. He describes the beginnings of college education in this country--its roots in various religious denominations, how colleges spun off from other colleges, and how they differed from European models. He also discusses the difference between a college and an university, which is something on which I find most people are unclear.He then gets into some of the issues with which we have to deal today: issues of who gets to go to college and what they are going to study. Is college going to be only for the wealthy? Is college going to create an intellectual elite or should it? Is college meant to prepare students for successful careers or is it supposed to be something more, a place where students expand their minds and experiences? Delbanco works hard to provide some balanced answers.One of the things I like about this book is Delbanco's attitude. He points out the problems but he also realizes that these are problems that have been around since the founding of the first colleges and that were are continually looking for solutions to satisfy our current needs and desires. But he realizes that that doesn't change the fact that there are problems that we need to address.On the other hand, like most people who work in the humanities, he places a lot of the blame for what's going wrong on the rise of science and technology. Universities have become places for research as opposed to education. Specialization has isolated departments. Cutting edge equipment has raised the cost for schools. He appears to want to promote a liberal education which to him seems to mean that science and tech people should be forced to take more humanities courses which investigate "the big questions". As a product of a liberal arts education myself, I happen to agree with him. I would, however, point out that the opposite should be true as well (and may ultimately be more important): people in the humanities should be required to take significant coursework in math and science. It goes back to the old cliché among math and science teachers: everyone is embarrassed to admit that they can't read but no one is embarrassed to admit they can't do math. It's a shame.One thing that Delbanco very much gets right is his understanding that more emphasis needs to be placed on good teaching. What is unclear is what we can put in place that will get better teachers in the classroom. In my estimation, it's more than just putting in requirements and raising standards for teachers. When I started teaching 20 years ago, I felt that teachers were held in high regard. I was proud of what I did (and still am). Over the course of my teaching career, however, I have watched in sadness as teachers have had to shoulder the blame for many cultural problems beyond their control. Education in this country is unlikely to improve whatever evaluations or incentives are put in place until a general attitude of respect towards teaching returns. The best people no longer want to become teachers.I'm guessing that Professor Delbanco is preaching to the choir for many of his readers. People who read this are people who care about the college experience and want the best for our students. Whether we agree completely or not is beside the point. Unfortunately, solving this huge systemic problem is unlikely to come until there is a major cultural shift in our country--some crisis that precipitates improvement like the space race that improved our educational system at the end of the fifties. Until then, it will be up to we happy few who take books like this to heart, that will have to keep fighting the good fight.

This is a charming but sad book with fresh insights on an old theme. The author lists the current, common genres of books on higher education: jeremiads, elegies, calls to arms and funeral dirges. His is among the latter--a lament for the fact that the liberal arts college which embodies a community of learning is, increasingly, an anachronism. Only one in fourteen American undergraduates study within such an ethos today and even that ethos is different than it once was, since such institutions are not free of the vocationalism and commodification that all too frequently characterize contemporary higher education.A quote from the former head of the University of Phoenix says it all: "I'm happy that there are places in the world where people sit down and think. We need that. But that's very expensive. And not everybody can do that. So for the vast majority of folks who don't get that privilege, then I think it's a business." His business, i.e., his single for-profit institution now enrolls five times as many students as Ohio State. So much for the democratic impulses which once marked higher education: thinking is nice but it's simply too expensive. (Never mind the fact that most of the for-profits have tuition levels far in excess of those of AAU flagship, public institutions.)At bottom, there is but a handful of institutions which remain bona fide communities of learning, largely untouched by the sliding standards, gutted curricula, grade inflation and dubious modes of certification that characterize so much of our educational enterprise. Professor Delbanco mentions Rockefeller University (which has no undergraduates) and the California Institute of Technology.He praises the core curricula of the past, still in existence though in reduced form at his home institution, Columbia, and, to a degree, at Chicago, but, again, this is not so much a call to action as a funeral dirge for a passing reality.The greatest strengths of the book lie in its historiography and cultural analysis. This is, of course, the territory in which Professor Delbanco lives and he brings a fresh eye to the history of American higher education, from its colonial past to its postmodern, commercial present. When he talks about cultural documents--novels, e.g., that sought to encapsulate college life in their times, his analysis is searching and cogent.His explanations are not conspiratorial. They are straightforward and familiar. Universities displaced or encircled undergraduate colleges. As in the German model from which they sprung, the summum bonum is research and, ultimately, the practices which bring success in the research enterprise simultaneously marginalize the practices which bring success in undergraduate education. Undergraduate education is ultimately given short shrift because no one really cares about it. It generates tuition revenue and so it is tolerated.This sounds harsh but it is not wide of the mark. If anything, I would be even less hopeful, since we can only hire those faculty who are trained in today's graduate schools. There, the foregrounding of `research' has altered professional training in ways that militate against successful teaching. Today's Ph.D's concentrate their attentions on the production of their dissertations and their studies and exam structures have been reshaped to prepare them for that task. They are no longer broadly acculturated into disciplines (at least not in the central areas of the humanities which were long at the core of liberal education); they are trained to do very specific research tasks. They do not now teach the kinds of courses that once characterized core curricula because they are simply unable to do so. This is an even greater tragedy because the schools in which the majority will teach, regional public institutions, have students who need these kinds of courses more than ever.All should read Professor Delbanco's book and attend to its message.