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Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More ReviewThis critique of higher education is written by Derek Bok, once and future president of Harvard University (he's taken over from Larry Summers as interim leader). But Bok's experience at Harvard - while it certainly informs his analysis - does not make him an elitist. Far from it, his suggested reforms, as he explains, may work best at schools not so hide-bound as Harvard with tradition and defensiveness: "which may help to explain why so many of the most interesting teaching innovations do not begin in the best-known universities but in colleges with less prominent reputations" (337).
Bok's analysis marks out a welcome middle path between knee-jerk defenders of the American university and its detractors. While relatively speaking, our system of higher education remains the envy of the rest of the world, it still fails undergraduate students in a million small ways, chiefly connected with its lack of attention to how students learn best in and out of the classroom. Bok's complaint is not that colleges have lost their way - he's very clear that there was no Golden Age of American higher education - but that we could be doing much better.
In a series of chapters devoted to the skills that he believes students should work at during their four college years, Bok slays a number of sacred cows and offers concrete suggestions for how to make substantial improvements. For example, he is refreshingly skeptical of the value of "concentrations" (probably known as "majors" to most of us); their requirements grow larger and larger, but what are they really accomplishing? Similarly, he expresses skepticism about distribution requirements, making the point that they often amount to a hodge-podge of unrelated courses chosen by students because they are easy or will help them get a job (though elsewhere Bok is very sympathetic to the student's need to prepare for a career during college). Even when students choose their general education courses from genuine curiosity, the courses (for example, large introductory science courses) have often been designed as "foundations for students intending to major in the field and perhaps go on to obtain a Ph.D." (261). Such courses won't really help the student who wants a basic holistic introduction to the field. Bok always wants to move us back to a firmer understanding of educational purposes.
Perhaps Bok's most serious and repeated criticism concerns pedagogy. As he observes, there is just not enough attention to it. Important introductory courses are too often taught by graduate students and adjuncts to save money for the institution and time for tenured faculty research. The courses that the regular faculty do teach are usually presented in a lecture format that does not involve students actively in their learning. Bok, however, is not a defeatist, and he does generally respect the American faculty, repeatedly noting that most college teachers are "conscientious," "thoughtful," and concerned with student learning. This assumption makes his book quite different from critiques of higher education such as those written by pundits like Roger Kimball or William Bennett. And it is what enables Bok to offer real, practical suggestions for improvement, which he does both throughout the study and especially in the final chapter.
Bok believes that, with the appropriate incentives, college faculty and administrators can be motivated to focus more on undergraduate teaching and outcomes for students. Because measurement of teaching quality and learning outcomes is so problematic, he suggests that resources be provided that encourage faculty and deans to develop plans for a "continuous process of self-scrutiny" (342) with the aim of improving teaching. He is no Pangloss; he doesn't imagine that universities can reform themselves overnight. But he is not a defeatist either. His clear-eyed and plucky approach is refreshing. He often says his reforms will not cost much ("Fortunately research of this kind is not financially burdensome" [339]); is that Harvard's endowment talking there?
To wit, I do have a few reservations: Although Bok criticizes curricular fragmentation, many of his proposals might lead to more of it, especially his mandatory courses in intercultural understanding and moral reasoning. I think he underestimates both the difficulty of teaching such complex intangibles and also the danger that these courses will devolve into indoctrination. I also think that he puts too much faith in student surveys and other kinds of educational research. Again and again he cites such studies as if they did not have the methodological problems he acknowledges elsewhere. As a lawyer, Bok tilts toward the social sciences and away from the arts, humanities, and hard sciences. Thus, it's not surprising that many of his proposals move schools toward educating students in citizenship. He may be frank about his purposes, but personally I don't always agree with them. I note in this regard that a student could graduate from the ideal university, described in this book, without having taken a single course that studied the world before 1900.
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