Higher Expectations

Can Colleges Teach Students What They Need to Know in the 21st Century?

Derek Bok

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691212357
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

How our colleges and universities can respond to the changing hopes and needs of society In recent decades, cognitive psychologists have cast new light on human development and given colleges new possibilities for helping students acquire skills and qualities that will enhance their lives and increase their contributions to society. In this landmark book, Derek Bok explores how colleges can reap the benefits of these discoveries and create a more robust undergraduate curriculum for the twenty-first century.Prior to this century, most psychologists thought that creativity, empathy, resilience, conscientiousness, and most personality traits were largely fixed by early childhood. What researchers have now discovered is that virtually all of these qualities continue to change through early adulthood and often well beyond. Such findings suggest that educators may be able to do much more than was previously thought possible to teach students to develop these important characteristics and thereby enable them to flourish in later life.How prepared are educators to cultivate these qualities of mind and behavior? What do they need to learn to capitalize on the possibilities? Will college faculties embrace these opportunities and make the necessary changes in their curricula and teaching methods? What can be done to hasten the process of innovation and application? In providing answers to these questions, Bok identifies the hurdles to institutional change, proposes sensible reforms, and demonstrates how our colleges can help students lead more successful, productive, and meaningful lives.

CHAPTER ONE

A Brief History of the College Curriculum from 1636 to the Present

Until the Civil War, America’s colleges embraced a form of education that did not differ fundamentally from the one introduced by the earliest colleges when they were founded many generations before. The standard curriculum at institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton was heavily prescribed and emphasized the study of ancient writings from Greece and Rome. The students who applied had to demonstrate at least a rudimentary grasp of Greek and Latin merely to gain admission. Once enrolled, they were required to take a series of courses largely devoted to translating and analyzing original texts in painstaking detail. Students were few in number and consisted in the main of young men intending to become preachers, teachers, or leaders in their communities.

As time went on and students aspired to a wider array of occupations, colleges introduced a few elective courses in science, mathematics, and moral or political philosophy. Later, practical subjects such as engineering, soil chemistry, and modern languages began to make an appearance, especially in state universities. Nevertheless, the leading private colleges continued to require most of the courses in the curriculum and to emphasize the study of classical texts, despite growing pressure from outside their walls to introduce more useful subjects.

In 1828, after a Yale trustee openly questioned the value of spending so much time studying “dead languages,” the president of the college and members of his faculty issued a report vigorously defending the classical curriculum. They insisted that the detailed analysis of ancient texts in their original language was ideally suited for developing a capacity for rigorous thinking, sound judgment, and discriminating taste.a¹ Armed with this stout defense, most colleges, including the largest and best-known institutions, clung to the traditional curriculum for two generations more.

THE YEARS OF TRANSFORMATION

By the advent of the Civil War, pressure to devote more attention to the practical needs of an industrializing society had grown too intense to be ignored. In the words of one historian of higher education, “The curriculum began to seem like a prison guarding a subject population.”² When Congress passed the Morrill Act in 1862, donating large tracts of federal land for the support of at least one university for each state, the new law did not prohibit the study of classical languages but stipulated that participating colleges should also “teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.”

Not long thereafter, a wealthy businessman, Ezra Cornell, donated funds to build a new university in New York State “where any person can find instruction in any study.” Its founding president, Andrew White, established a curriculum offering classical studies as only one of several options, including vocational programs and a course of study that gave students almost complete freedom to choose whatever subjects they wished. White’s curriculum was an immediate success. According to Harper’s Weekly: “With a grip on the best methods of education which is almost beyond the reach of an institution weighted down with traditions, … Cornell University stands in the vantage ground if not at the head of America’s educational institutions.”³

In the 1870s, Johns Hopkins University founded a pioneering graduate school that offered a PhD degree with advanced training to college graduates who wished to become faculty members in any of the fields of knowledge or disciplines associated with the liberal arts. Other universities quickly followed suit. From then on, new recruits to college faculties would increasingly consist of PhDs who specialized in teaching and research in physics, philosophy, history, or some other established subject. The instruction they provided no longer emphasized translating and analyzing texts but consisted in the main of lectures and seminars similar to the methods then in use in the much-admired German universities.

Meanwhile, as the demands for practical knowledge in a rapidly industrializing society continued to grow, the pressure on the classical curriculum intensified. The traditional arguments stressing the usefulness of classical learning, so bravely articulated in the Yale report of 1828, suffered a serious blow from the turn-of-the-century findings of noted psychologist Edward Thorndike. Thorndike’s experiments revealed that the qualities of intellect mastered in one domain of knowledge (for example, dissecting ancient Greek and Latin texts) were seldom transferable to other fields of intellectual endeavor.⁴

Among the leaders of the older American universities, Charles W. Eliot of Harvard was the first to break sharply with tradition by urging the demise of the heavily prescribed classical curriculum in favor of a course of study consisting almost entirely of electives. Although it took him twenty years, Eliot gradually persuaded his faculty to do away with all requirements except for a mandatory course in expository writing.

Many colleges did not go as far as Eliot did in abandoning virtually all required courses, but almost all moved a long way in that direction. Academic leaders had no other choice if they wished to attract a sufficient number of students. As Frederick Rudolph put it in his history of the college curriculum, offering a wide assortment of electives proved “unavoidable except in colleges with suicidal tendencies.”⁵

By the time President Eliot left office in 1909, however, the disadvantages of a largely elective program had already become apparent. Eliot had argued that electives would strengthen teaching by forcing professors to compete for students, while simultaneously encouraging students to work hard at their courses by allowing them to choose the subjects that interested them most. Events proved him wrong on both counts. Many professors turned out to be more interested in research and writing than in teaching undergraduates. Meanwhile, a faculty committee at Harvard found that students were spending only half as many hours per week studying for their classes as their professors had expected. Some 55 percent of Harvard seniors were discovered to have taken virtually nothing but introductory courses, which required less work and left more time for athletics, partying, and other extracurricular pursuits.

Colleges were quick to take corrective measures. To give students the experience of exploring a single subject in depth, faculties began to insist that every undergraduate take at least a minimum number of courses in a single field of knowledge. To avoid overspecialization, they also required students to choose at least a few courses from each of several broad fields of knowledge—typically the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences. By 1915, most colleges had adopted the tripartite curricular structure that still predominates today, featuring a “major,” or field of concentration, a distribution requirement to ensure a breadth of knowledge, and an ample number of courses reserved for student choice.

YEARS OF STABILITY AND GROWTH

After 1915, once the major reforms in the college curriculum were largely in place, little innovation occurred over the next thirty years. Experimental colleges such as Bard, Bennington, St. John’s, and Black Mountain were created but failed to attract many followers. Even the most celebrated academic leader of the 1930s, Robert Maynard Hutchins, could not introduce any major reforms that survived for long after his departure. In particular, he failed to persuade his own faculty at the University of Chicago to adopt his vision of a college entirely devoted to the study of Great Books. Once World War II began, colleges shelved any plans for substantial change as many thousands of students left to enter military service.

After the war ended, American higher education began a twenty-year period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. The GI Bill touched off a massive increase in the number of high school graduates enrolling in college. State legislatures provided ample financial support to build the faculties, classrooms, and residence halls to accommodate the continuing surge of students. The great flagship public universities grew in size to enroll tens of thousands of additional undergraduates. New public regional universities were constructed, and community colleges proliferated. One state after another created systems of higher education to coordinate their growing array of colleges and universities.

At the same time, Congress launched a determined effort to make America preeminent in basic research. Lawmakers appropriated a steadily increasing supply of funds to pay for new libraries, laboratories, and equipment for academic scientists and scholars along with generous scholarships for graduate students preparing for careers in the sciences and social sciences. In meeting the growing demand for a college education while building a massive program of scientific inquiry, universities forged a partnership with government that made American higher education the envy of the world.

During this great expansion, many subjects were added to the curriculum, such as vocational majors for new occupations and offerings in international studies to complement America’s increasingly prominent role on the world stage. Faculties tried periodically to make their general education offerings more coherent. These initiatives, valuable as they were, neither called for different methods of instruction nor disturbed the tripartite division of undergraduate study into the major, general education, and electives. Most colleges simply offered a growing number of courses, a more and more specialized faculty, and an increasingly fragmented curriculum.

YEARS OF TURMOIL

The years of prosperity came to an abrupt halt in the late 1960s. The steady growth in federal spending ceased as Lyndon Johnson’s administration struggled to avoid raising taxes while simultaneously paying for expensive Great Society programs and an escalating conflict in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the baby boom generation arrived on campus, bringing student activists who soon engaged in protests over civil rights, the role of women, and the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Male undergraduates were upset by the prospect of being drafted into the armed services and sent to fight in a war that many of them considered unnecessary and unjust. At the same time, black students were demanding that their colleges admit more students of color and hire more minority professors and administrators. Controversies erupted on numerous campuses with angry demonstrations, building occupations, and violent encounters with police. College faculties were badly shaken by these events, and the public’s confidence in higher education declined precipitously.

Student unrest dominated the agenda on college campuses for the next several years. Numerous changes took place in response to demands for coeducation in single-sex colleges, the abandonment of parietal rules, the admission of more students of color, and the creation of courses on the history and treatment of minorities and (later) women. Only occasionally, however, did undergraduates seek changes in the basic structure of the curriculum or the accustomed methods of teaching.

Much of the passion and protest disappeared with the ending of the Vietnam War in 1975 and the repeal of compulsory military service in 1973. Free at last from the hectic growth of the 1950s and the angry protests of the late 1960s, colleges seemed ready to renew their interest in matters of education and curriculum. In 1977, Frederick Rudolph ended his widely admired history of the college curriculum on a guardedly optimistic note:

Amid the growing concerns of critics and society … the time may be at hand when a reevaluation of academic purpose and philosophy may encourage the curricular development that will focus on the lives we lead, their quality, the enjoyment they give us, and the wisdom with which we lead them. And perhaps, once more, the idea of an educated person will have become a usable idea.⁶

As it happened, Rudolph’s hopes proved premature. The most notable development in undergraduate education during the mid- to late 1970s arose from a massive shift in the aspirations of undergraduates. The recession early in the decade followed by rapid inflation and a temporary glut of college graduates turned students’ minds to practical concerns. Within the span of a few years, the principal priorities of entering freshmen changed from acquiring a philosophy of life, working for racial justice, and protecting the environment to equipping themselves to get good jobs and make a lot of money. In pursuit of these ambitions, the share of undergraduates majoring in the liberal arts dropped from 60 percent to 35 percent while the number of students entering vocational programs, most notably business majors, rose correspondingly.⁷ Once again, however, colleges managed to accommodate these shifts in student interest without altering the basic tripartite structure of the curriculum or the customary methods of instruction.

By the mid-1970s, general education had become “a disaster area,” in the words of one foundation report.⁸ Although a few colleges introduced more highly structured “core” curricula, most continued to prefer distribution requirements that allowed students to choose any two or three courses from each of the several major divisions of academic study. The average share of the curriculum allocated to general education dropped from 43 to 33 percent to make room for more student electives and more courses and seminars for the majors.

In 1980, the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education completed a comprehensive, multivolume study of American colleges and universities that carefully scrutinized virtually every significant aspect of higher education. In summing up its work, however, the final report devoted very little attention to the curriculum or the quality of undergraduate education.⁹ Instead, most of the discussion was devoted to the need for colleges to prepare for an anticipated drop in college enrollments (which never materialized) and the mounting risk of increased government regulation. As events soon proved, however, colleg...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. An Overview
• Chapter One. A Brief History of the College Curriculum from 1636 to the Present
• Chapter Two. Educating Citizens
• Chapter Three. Preparing Students for an Interdependent World
• Chapter Four. Character: Can Colleges Help Students Acquire Higher Standards of Ethical Behavior and Personal Responsibility?
• Chapter Five. Helping Students Find Purpose and Meaning in Life
• Chapter Six. Improving Interpersonal Skills
• Chapter Seven. Improving Intrapersonal Skills
• Chapter Eight. Unconventional Methods of Teaching
• Chapter Nine. Prospects for Change
• Chapter Ten. Encouraging Reform
• Conclusion. Reflections on the Future
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index