Cynicism on the Curriculum
What would eighteen-year-old me have thought?
When I’m asked to give advice to new faculty, I always relay one of the bits of advice I was given back in the day, by a colleague who’s now on the verge of retirement, which is “Don’t assume that your students are like you were.” People who go on to become college faculty are a tiny subset of the general student population, and not at all representative of typical students, or even students within a given major. We tend to be a bit more intrinsically motivated, particularly when it comes to classes in our chosen majors, and thus are way more engaged by readings and problem sets and activities than the median student. If you go into a course expecting all the students to respond to your assignments the way you responded to the assignments you got when you took the same course, you’re going to be deeply, deeply disappointed.
That is, as I said, among the most useful bits of advice I got as a new faculty member, and it’s served me well in the planning phase of any number of courses. At the same time, though, it’s really hard to shake, and I often find myself evaluating things from the standpoint of “How would I have reacted to this when I was a student?”
And there are times when that’s actually a useful lens, as in some respects, I was probably a little closer to the median student mindset than a lot of my colleagues back in the day. I played rugby all four years at Williams, and was an enthusiastic participant in the hard partying that came with that. Truth be told, for my first couple of years, I was way more enthusiastic about the partying than the schoolwork, though I did strike a better balance from my junior year onward. To the extent that I can recapture that attitude, it’s often not a terrible guide.
I had a couple of moments of this in the last week or so, one of them on Twitter, in response to some writers talking about the need for business education:
That’s actually a reaction that pre-dates college— in high school, the 12th-grade Social Studies course required by the school (and quite possibly the state, though it wasn’t a Regents course) was an odd mix of civics and economics, which included a fair bit of stuff in the “how to handle your business as an adult” kind of vein. There were units about ways to organize businesses and types of basic investments, and a whole unit about how to handle a bank account— I remember learning how to write a third-party check, a skill that no human has required for at least twenty-five years, except for that one lady in front of me in the check-out line at Price Chopper.
This is information that’s very much in the vein discussed in those tweets. It was also the most brain-meltingly boring shit I ever had to do in an academic context, and when I say that, you should think about just how many math courses one has to take in order to get a Ph.D. in Physics. The only thing that made it remotely tolerable was that it was taught by my uncle John, who recognized the absurdity of some of this material, and let us have some fun with the class. We used to re-arrange the desks in the classroom while he was on hall duty (we moved about half of them outside one day, but he made us bring them back), and on one slow day he wrote us all passes to run in the halls, as a way of teasing another teacher who was famous for hating running.
The fundamental problem with the class was that this was presenting material that was in principle very useful for us to know, but not immediately relevant to us. I don’t remember if it was formally an “honors” section, but it kind of functionally was— all of the kids in that class were college-bound, many to very good schools, so nobody was especially challenged by the math involved in balancing a checkbook. Also, none of us were going to need that information in the immediate future— we were going to be living in dorms, not worrying about whether renter’s insurance fit in the monthly budget— and as a result, it was kind of distant and abstract, and hard to take seriously. I did all the work, of course, so at one time I knew this stuff well enough to get good grades on it, but I retain next to none of it. The whole thing felt like a huge waste of time— which was not entirely unwelcome in a year when I was taking a bunch of AP courses and applying to college, but didn’t exactly enhance my respect for the curricular design.
The second time I had this “Boy, I would’ve hated this as a student…” reaction was this morning when I read this piece about Stanford’s new Gen Ed program, written in response to the Mark Bauerlein thing that was in last week’s round-up of academic doomsaying. It’s a pretty good response in a lot of ways, but the description of the program— Civic, Liberal and Global Education, or COLLEGE because higher ed foundations love a cute acronym—is a bit much in places:
COLLEGE brings back the idea of a shared curriculum, though not to celebrate a canon or to nudge students to declare humanities majors. Rather, COLLEGE is designed to engage all our entering students, whose interests range widely across disciplines, by confronting them with existential questions: What is the true end of education? How do we sustain democracy? Can we solve problems on a global scale? COLLEGE also tackles underlying issues in campus social dynamics, which reflect national trends and are a growing concern at Stanford.
Our new first-year program is structured as a three-course sequence, taught over three quarters. The fall course is entitled Why College? Your Education and the Good Life, and it offers students the opportunity to reflect on the meaning and purposes of higher education. Why College? encourages students to consider that there is more to college than preparing for your first job and suggests that the point of education is not only to provide you with a livelihood but to help you live well (to paraphrase W. E. B. Du Bois).
And a bit later:
You don’t have to limit yourself to the Western tradition to discuss the emancipatory powers of education. Why College? readings range from Mary Shelley to Rabindranath Tagore, and from Seneca to Tsitsi Dangarembga. We teach our students to read closely, notably by having them keep commonplace books, but classroom conversations are ultimately about student experiences. The texts are pretexts to help the students recognize how they may still be constrained by their own background, educational experience and family. Faculty and postdoctoral teaching fellows facilitate discussions, rather than lecturing to the students, thus modeling the value of learning collectively by considering different perspectives. We read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, but we also have them practice genuine introspection, notably by requiring the students to write self-reflective essays at the start and close of the quarter.
Now, admittedly, a piece of my reaction to this is very contemporary, in that I have difficulty imagining anything I would enjoy less than grading a stack of self-reflective essays by first-year college students. But an equally big factor is imagining the reaction of eighteen-year-old me and his friends to reading this, which would’ve prominently featured eye rolls and jerk-off motions.
And, you know, I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize this text as the kind of thing that makes faculty committees (and grant funders) swoon. But I have a really, really hard time imagining myself taking this seriously when I was a first-year. It probably wouldn’t’ve been unwelcome in some respects— a nice respite from the pretty heavy math and physics courses I also would’ve been taking at that time— but this is the kind of thing I 100% would’ve approached in an incredibly cynical manner, putting in the absolute minimum effort needed to get a B and move on to something I cared more about. It could probably be rescued by a particularly good professor, but equally well could be completely sunk by one who didn’t click.
My college years mostly pre-date the vogue for this kind of ham-handedly explicit interdisciplinarity, but I did have to take one course in this vein, a team-taught seminar course in the January term that attempted to combine English, Astronomy, and Art History. The one strong memory I have about that course was when my friend Dave and I crafted an extremely flippant response to an assignment that we thought was pretty silly. Which is to say, exactly the kind of cynical response that I imagine myself having to the Stanford program.
This is, fundamentally, my biggest issue with grandiose ideas about Gen Ed programs: the intentions are noble and good, but far too often the implementation is something that seems perfectly designed to provoke a cynical response from the college-age me who lurks in memory. And in the end, I think that pushing students toward cynicism with lofty bafflegab is a worse outcome than you would get from a less structured program that allowed greater student agency. I retain more from, and have fonder memories of, more narrowly focused courses that I took to fulfill distribution requirements because they looked interesting than I do of the one course that was explicitly designed to promote the liberal arts ideal.
Now, it is entirely possible, even likely, that I was a bigger asshole at 18 than the median in the current crop of students showing up on campus for the first time. It’s also possible that my future-faculty status manifested in a greater ability to be cynical about these things than the median student, who would be more likely to approach these things seriously and thus take more away from them. I might very well be falling into the “Don’t assume students are like you were” trap from the other side, as it were. But, as I said at the top, it’s hard not to see things through that lens, and that inevitably colors my responses.
That’s a little less lofty than last week’s academic content, but you get what you get. Here are some buttons:
And if you’d like to tell me exactly how much of an asshole I still am, the comments will be open:
I would have hated (and still would) writing "self-reflective essays". I did really enjoy a series of interdisciplinary electives at Auburn called "The Ascent of Man" and later "The Human Odyssey". Lots of discussion of interrelated advances in science, philosophy, arts, etc. Used the James Burke Connections series. Also we could take "Tech and Civ" for our history series, which focused on the impacts of different technological advances on history (irrigation, stirrups, that kind of thing).
It's hard to imagine 18 year-old Brian getting anything whatsoever out of this kind of program.
I think I'd have gotten more if we had gone deep into very specific subjects or thinkers, rather than a kitchen sink approach like this one. I'm a big math/science type, but I loved my New Testament studies class.