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Colleges have betrayed their mission, complains Samuel Hazo, by becoming diploma factories for consumers
Sunday, September 03, 2000
College was once defined as a time when students were briefly absented from the present in order to discover the past so that they could more wisely face the present in the future. As collegiate education now appears, that correct statement sounds like a voice from the grave.
The current collegiate goal is not the beginning of wisdom but proficiency (in marketable skills), not breadth of knowledge but adjustment, not cultural understanding but social (upward) mobility. In brief, the goal of graduating free men and women (intellectually free) has been replaced by giving degrees to instantly employable trainees.
What if anything is wrong with this? Nothing is wrong with it if you believe that it's quite acceptable to graduate instant earners who can't write (some can't even spell), who don't understand and feel no need to understand the history, literature and even the geography of their own country, who don't know nor care to know another language (70 percent of the graduates of America's 3,000 or more college and universities earn degrees without being required to study a foreign language) and whose main goal in life is not regenerating or contributing to their society but retiring from it in comfort as early as possible.
Who is fooled by this nonsense?
Significantly, enlightened employers are not fooled. Most of them still prefer to hire liberally educated and literate graduates. Nor are thoughtful alumni fooled who regretfully witness the intellectual evisceration or dumbing down of their alma maters. Nor are those fooled who reject the idea that gown-and-town means that gown should serve town as a slave serves a master. Nor are those fooled who are aware of our country's multiplying moral and intellectual lapses and realize that urging graduates to adjust to these conditions will only perpetuate them.
If it's true that the real thinkers of our time see these educational follies for what they are, why and how do such follies manage to survive and even multiply?
The answer is simple: money.
If students (collegiate customers) prefer colleges and universities where courses are offered that cater to their dreams of becoming successful human beings but not necessarily successful as human beings (there is a difference), then such courses will be offered and staffed on an increasing basis. Colleges and universities that make these accommodations say they do so in order to survive without ever asking what they will survive as. And other colleges and universities (unless they have the backbone to remain true to their real missions) will follow suit, which finally means nothing more than following the dollar.
Any average salesman will tell you that this is only good merchandising. True educators will tell you this is selling out.
Graduate education fares no better, particularly in the humanities.
First of all, many of those who earn doctorates find that the jobs for which they have prepared themselves do not exist. It is estimated that 125,000 Ph.D.s are now not doing the work for which they have prepared themselves - a plight about which they were probably not forewarned. Those Ph.D.s who have found employment were often the disciples of those to whom theory was more important than subject matter, particularly in literary study. Literature was not read as literature but was deconstructed, made to answer to ideologies of gender or race and, in general, was turned into a subdivision of sociology. Small wonder that the number of those majoring in English dwindles if their very teachers had not read the works to be studied but had only read or theorized about them.
In my final year at the university where I taught all my life, the English department was mandatorily fused with a communications department to bandage the decline of student interest and other problems. A bad situation was made worse - it combined a genuine "solid" with a mere skill, which is as ludicrous as it is impossible. When I made my dissent known (as did others) through the usual channels - not once but repeatedly, and even offered to engage in a public debate on the educational demerits of this change - it was to no avail.
Such educational shortcuts are not confined to higher learning. At the high school level, for example, believers in vouchers fail to see that their plan, when stripped of its novelty, is just another form of busing, but without the actual bus.
The same redistribution of students is envisioned while the more realistic solution of renewing high school from within is left a-begging - as if the alternative of creating a competitive countersystem will solve all problems. This ignores the basic fact that education is a cooperative endeavor if it is anything at all and that the emphasis on competition, though common in the dog-eat-dog world of business, creates nothing but waste when it becomes a matter of educational policy.
What is the result? The primary result, except in all too few instances, is that college graduates are essentially programmers and planners, not thinkers.
They have swallowed the bad gospel of education for advancement, for social mobility, for blending in with the status quo. Learning is not an end in itself but a means to something seemingly better.
One is tempted to ask: What is better than pursuing the truth wherever it leads? What is the alternative to cultural understanding but simply perpetuating the mediocrities of the time? Where are the education leaders who speak out against the vocationalizing of studies in colleges and universities that are being turned more and more into trade schools? Too many of such leaders act like the chief executive officers they are, keeping the "plant" going, brooking no dissent, not really in touch with their faculties and concerned primarily with the thickness of their endowments or personal salaries.
These are common practices - as they are in corporations - but hardly laudable in what is called the higher learning when hundreds of "adjunct professors" are obliged to staff classes on the cheap for usher's fees and no benefits. Is this not related to the corporate practice of rewarding retiring CEOs (competent or incompetent) on six-figure salaries while day-to-day workers are cut or furloughed?
To raise issues like this is often viewed as a form of academic treason to be selectively refuted at leisure, ridiculed or totally ignored.
Perhaps that will be the fate of this essay. In fact, I secretly hope for such refutations. They would only validate my expectations. But unpleasant truths often have the capacity to outlive their refuters - not because the truths are unpleasant but simply because they are true.
Samuel Hazo is a McAnulty Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University. He is Pennsylvania's state poet and director of the International Poetry Forum.