There was something quite familiar about a piece I read in the latest issue of The Atlantic, entitled "The Truth About Harvard" (you have to subscribe to read it online) by Ross Douthat. In it Douthat laments the state of liberal arts education at the premier university in the country. Some selected quotes:
On the degradation of the Humanties:
Sure, historians believe in their primary sources, English scholars in their textual debates, philosophers in their logic games. But many of them seem to believe that they have nothing to offer students who don't plan to be historians, or literary theorists, or philosophers. They make no effort to apply their work to what should be the most pressing task of undergraduate education: to provide a general education, a liberal arts education, to future doctors and bankers and lawyers and diplomats.
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As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered everywhere at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task.
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Mostly I logged the necessary hours in the library and exam rooms, earned my solid (if inflated) GPA and my diploma, and used the rest of the time to keep up with my classmates in our ongoing race to the top of America (and the world). It was only afterward, when the perpetual motion of undergraduate life was behind me. that I looked back and felt cheated.
All of this sounds familiar to me because I read the exact same sentiments 18 years ago in Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, albeit expressed from the POV of a Prof not a student. Bloom's point was that students like Douthat are bound to feel the way they feel because the professors simply do not believe in the benefit of a liberal arts education. Students will feel cheated because too many profs believe they have nothing substantial to give them.
Douthat's article is hardly perfect. Students at Harvard deserves nary a word of criticism in his view. They don't go to class? Well, says Douthat, they are being "creatively lazy" and "working smarter rather than harder." At the same time he tries to tell us that these same students are part of a meritocratic elite, where
...your worth as a person is determined not by clan or class but by what you do and whether you succeed at it.
Seems like a pretty dumb "elite" that won't bother going to class when it is their GPA (at least in part) that will determine their ultimate fate.
Sometimes laziness is simply laziness, even at Harvard.
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