Nearly
everyone outside academia knows that America’s colleges and universities are
doing a poor job of preparing their charges for adult life. Undergraduate
education, nonetheless, continues to enjoy tremendous prestige. Few upper
middle class parents would prefer a gainfully employed child to one attending
university; indeed, for most affluent parents, the former would be a
source of embarrassment. Higher education’s social esteem makes it hard to
fully assimilate its well-known failings but it also completely hides the
worst. For, you see, the biggest problem isn’t the facts and skills students
don’t learn, it’s the bad habits they do.
I was a philosophy professor for 13 years
and, at the beginning, I noticed that my colleagues weren’t requiring much from
students and the deleterious effect of this on the latter’s work habits. So, I
tried making my students work to get good grades. But, regardless of the
penalties I imposed, it was impossible to get all but a tiny minority to
seriously apply themselves. The most active response I got from students was
extreme resentment. Most students stared at me incredulously when I explained
that they’d have to work hard to get a decent grade. A few times I heard a
shocked student complain – without intending or even noticing any irony – “But
this is harder than high school!”
I tried telling my classes that some work
was required even though I wouldn’t be checking it and, literally, almost no
one could comprehend what this meant. They immediately heard “won’t be checked”
as “isn’t required” because almost all of them prioritized entertainment and
socializing far above learning. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of students
who major in the humanities do so precisely because they have no reason for
being in college besides avoiding work and because humanities classes require
far less of it than the sciences. But, even outside the humanities, the typical
student views the person in front of the classroom, not as a teacher, but
merely as an obstacle to getting a B or better.
Of
course, students couldn’t stay in college with no desire to learn if their
professors weren’t cooperating. And here we come to the second reason that
college is such a crippling experience for so many: virtually no professors at
an even minimally distinguished college or university regard their real job as
teaching. Indeed, if you work at a prestigious college or university, you do so
little teaching that it would be almost impossible to do so. I was an assistant professor in UCLA’s
philosophy department from 1996-2004. Philosophy faculty taught four ten‑week
courses a year, each meeting four hours a week. Salaries, however, by no means
reflected our minimal teaching duties. Upon leaving, my annual salary – one of
the lowest in the department – was $65,000 plus about $4,000 a year in
(untaxed) “research” money for travel; the most senior department members had
six figure salaries plus five figure travel budgets. Teaching loads and salaries
at Princeton, where I earned my PhD, and Temple, where I worked next, and
similar institutions are comparable. For a successful academic, teaching is just a cover story – it’s what
you say you do to justify your generous pay. What you really do – what gives
you self-respect, pride of accomplishment and takes up most of your time – is
produce “research.”
Academic research calls to mind beneficial
technological advancements. But, even most scientific research has no practical
value. It’s mostly, at best, the accumulation of tiny facts that will never
affect anyone outside a handful of aficionados. Even in the sciences academic
research is mostly academic. But
research in the humanities is entirely academic. That’s not to
say that the great humanist texts have no value; the humanities’ canon does
have very important things to say about how to live a good, productive, and
happy life. But these practical lessons don’t generate the kind of papers
required for success in academia. The writing of a successful professor must be
couched in the most abstract terms – it must be completely inaccessible to all
but a few like-minded colleagues. Accessibility and practical import are the
hug and kiss of professional death; they mark your work as unsophisticated and
you as not very clever.
After a
few years as a philosophy professor, I began to wonder how anyone could find a
life fulfilling, devoted to topics so abstract, specialized, and lacking in
practical value. I also
became alarmed as I saw students accumulating huge debts while graduating with
a diminished capacity for real world work; and dismayed when, upon relating my
concerns to colleagues, they neither disagreed nor cared. It took me a while to
see that my wonder, alarm, and dismay were related. The overwhelming majority of university
professors are people who were very good at school but not much else. Almost
none of my colleagues had ever had a job outside of school; almost to a person,
an academic career was a way of staying in school and avoiding the difficulties
of having to work with others to achieve real world results. In school, we
excelled at writing papers that served no purpose besides being testaments to
our cleverness. Eventually, I began to see that academic research is largely
just a continuation of these meaningless scholastic exercises for those who
lack the wherewithal to do anything else.
Now, I don’t think much of anything that
I’ve said should really surprise anyone. After all, films about college life
concern themselves almost exclusively with partying – the image of a student
puking in a toilet is much more likely to appear in their ads than a book. We
all know that most students are more concerned with having a four-year holiday
than learning anything. And,
though you may have been surprised at how little teaching successful professors
do, I think everyone knows that administrators and professors view their main
job as producing research – the slogan, after all, is “publish or perish”, not
“pedagogy or perish.”
And we all think we know one result of the
misplaced values found at every level of higher education – namely, that a
large proportion of students don’t learn anything. However, this isn’t the
worst result and, indeed, my point is that it’s not even true! A person can’t
spend four years in an environment without learning anything and all the focus
on what college doesn’t teach obscures the more serious problem of what it
does. Any students who enter college lacking self-motivation and a precise
knowledge of what they’re trying to accomplish – and in my experience, that
includes virtually all humanities majors – learns a lot of negative lessons.
Here’s a far from complete list.
1. They learn to work only for rewards, do
the absolute minimum required for the reward sought, and that doing the very
best you can has no intrinsic value.
2. They learn that it’s okay to show up to
daily responsibilities unprepared, unkempt, exhausted, and late.
3. They learn to never admit their errors
and to complain and invent excuses when things don’t go the way they want.
4. They learn that skipping out on one’s
daily responsibilities a tenth of the time counts as outstanding attendance to
them.
5. They learn that doing a bad job has no
negative consequences so long as the average of all the jobs you do isn’t too
much worse than mediocre.
The
above lessons obviously won’t lead anyone to success. All but the most
committed undergraduates acquire habits that weaken them and, hence, must be
unlearned if they’re to have any chance of a good life. But that’s to be
expected when students enter college to avoid work and faculty don’t regard
teaching as their real jobs and, in any event, themselves lack the dispositions
of thought and action necessary for functioning in the non-scholastic world
and, hence, couldn’t teach anyone to do so even if they wished. And nothing
will change until it’s more embarrassing to affluent parents to have a child
spend four lackluster years at university than it is to have one gainfully
employed.
