The changing face of higher education

“I have often said that the use of a university is to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible.” — Woodrow Wilson, for mer president of Princeton University.

Over the past month, parents have sent sons and daughters to university for the first time. What hopes, fears and dreams, await parents and progeny alike? The first premise to grasp, if you’re mom or dad, is that your own experience of university is almost entirely irrelevant where your children are concerned. This can hardly be overstated. While K-12 education has remained disappointingly static over the past 10, 20, fill in the blank, years, universities have changed beyond all recognition.

Universities are at once more solicitous to the needs of entire student bodies while being less responsive to the individual students who comprise the whole. This seeming paradox is actually not so difficult to reconcile. Different “learning styles,” “needs” and the services therein need to be delivered in as efficient (read inexpensive) a manner as possible. Yet contact with the professoriate is a receding prospect, with a phalanx of TA’s instead, themselves aggrieved by working conditions to judge by last year’s work stoppages at the University of Toronto and York. Arranging an appointment with a counsellor for anxiety, study skills or essay writing, by comparison, is easy, convenient and encouraged. I have known several parents who have carefully considered the students services side when factoring in the choice of where their children might attend university.

As for students themselves, they may be divided into two sets: those who are following professional or quasi-professional tracks such as business, engineering, nursing, architecture, etc., and everyone else, i.e., those who are uncertain of what they want to do. It has been at least a generation, maybe two, since attendance at university was a matter of intellectual cultivation, full stop; sure, there were always aspiring dentists, designers and doctors, but for the most part it was entirely respectable to say, “oh, I’m studying philosophy” and not offer an apologia as to what in the Dickens you were you going to do with that.

So the Geist of the university has been entirely turned on its head, with those students who have the inside track on a practical course of study deemed more able than their woolly headed, generalist counterparts. The function of the university as a place of higher learning and enquiry has been entirely supplanted by catering to the decidedly vocational. An entire Greek chorus of historians, linguists and philosophers and humanities scholars have sung this dirge for years. Colby Cosh adroitly pointed out that in this newspaper last Friday that subjects with the moniker of “studies” all too often strike a didactically moral pose, thereby short circuiting the hard work of making up your own mind based a careful reading of seminal texts.

In Saturday’s National Post, Rex Murphy was his sartorial self in evalu- ating the sad performance of Auschwitz ignoramus Alex Johnstone and her Ivy League counterpart, Emma Sulkowicz; the only thing Murphy missed commenting on was the powder blue gowns of the Columbia graduates, academic dress more appropriate to kindergarten convocations than graduates from the fourth-oldest university in the United States, one that is affiliated with more than fifty Nobel laureates. And yet, if there is clear shot at the best a liberal education offers, there is no better place than Columbia, with its “Core Curriculum,” one replicated at Halifax’s King’s College, with its Foundation Year that offers a heavy helping of Homer, Plato, Hegel, Shakespeare, et al.

The humanities face an uncertain future, particularly as the universities have badly lost their nerve and stand for everything, and thus for nothing. It is facile to leave it to students to choose from an endless choice of university programs and then complain when they pick a la carte items like peace studies, gender studies, etc., not to mention more practical pursuits like accounting or forestry. Some champions of a liberal arts degree have put forth the sophistry that a liberal arts degree is a great investment, but any economist can trump this with the position that more engineers, software specialists and so on can juice personal and societal streams of commerce more swiftly.

What is sacrificed, of course, are the undergraduate years to explore the academic universe in its fullness. How do you justify the liberal arts any longer? By an appeal to citizenship and making one a better human being? Not according to Aristotle, who argued in his famous book Ethics that the study of moral philosophy decidedly does not make you a better person; and the awful truth is that Nazi officers, including those staffing the dreadful death camps, were drinking from that deep stream of German Romanticism that included poetry readings of Goethe and chamber concerts from the repertoires of Mozart and Beethoven.

Had Johnstone been revealed as not grasping the niceties of Tudor succession or Pericles’ policy around Spartan intervention in Attica, she would not excited Internet enmity. Germany’s uniquely horrible history is another matter altogether. True scholarship, like true art, is its own end and subverting it for political means leads to disasters, some merely embarrassing, and others with more tragic and lasting consequences.

While K-12 education has remained disappointingly static over the years, universities have changed beyond all recognition