by Sam Kean
For those of us that like drastic solutions and saltational mutations, one way to fix the perpetual crises (existential, and otherwise) that colleges and universities seem to find themselves in would be this: get out the axe. Axe the business school, axe all the engineering programs, axe the professional programs, axe even (hard as it is to say) the fine arts programs. So no more accounting majors and no more civil engineering majors, no more masters of public health, and no more dance majors, or creative writing majors, or bassoonists, either.
The thing most of those programs have in common is that they’re crafts—things better learned by doing than by sitting and discussing the doing. As for the business and engineering programs, old-fashioned apprenticeships seem appropriate, and for anything they can’t learn by doing (calculus, perhaps), firms should educate their workers themselves for a few years, just as they train people in other ways. Anything but that amounts to a massive subsidy that society pays to businesses to train their workers for them. (Besides, what business wouldn’t be happy to add to the assets side of the ledger an extra $30k a year in tuition from prospects?) If fine arts people need training and tuning and nurturing and aren’t quite ready to get out there and slug it out for themselves, there are better models than a university—like Julliard. The hard cases are medical schools and law schools because those professionals really do need extended exposure to the material to gain the extra skills. But you can sell the medical school to a nearby hospital, and most law firms could certainly afford to train their own or, better, jointly fund a school that would.
The other thing most of those programs have in common is that students enter them expecting not so much to learn anything as to get a job. It’s a pervasive notion nowadays, that college = employment. Aside from it not necessarily being true right now (thanks to the economy) there’s a dubious assumption there, that the point of higher education is to make cash. Because let’s be frank: most of the students who attend college—especially those (and I don’t mean to pick on them; they’re just the obvious examples) business folk and engineers who attend college looking for jobs—don’t give a crap about broadening themselves. It sounds nice to say that future business leaders of America need to read Homer, but most don’t want to, most don’t care to, most don’t benefit from doing so. The ones who do want to, who need to read Homer will find him on their own. The ones who don’t want to read Homer will either forget him immediately or remember only the resentment they feel both for having to read it—and for the people in their classes who seemed to like it.
What would a university that followed this advice be like? Much smaller for one, which is good. Far too many students attend college nowadays (partly because we denigrate manual labor) and many colleges end up having to babysit students between the time they’re eighteen and twenty-one. (As one wag put it, college is really just a way for parents to ensure that their children take drugs in suitable company.) Under this scheme, the remnants of the university, those few that really want to study there, would focus on the liberal arts—what most people think of as the humanities and the social sciences. I’ve always argued to include the sciences as well, and in fact, that’s how most schools were once organized: if you wanted to study chemical engineering, you went to one school; if you wanted to study the fine art of chemistry, however (or biology, or physics), you remained in the college of liberal arts.
But I’m not so sure any more that science, at least as practiced today, should be included as a liberal art, and therefore whether scientists should go to college at all in this Plato’s Republic vision of the university.
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