The College of My Dreams

What would I do if someone gave me a few million dollars to start a new college?

1. The new school would be a liberal arts college specializing in the humanities. Majors would be philosophy, history, and literature; majors in each field would be required to have some courses in the other two. Social science would be divided between philosophy and history; theology would be in philosophy. There would be no science majors, but all students would be required to be literate in basic math and science (including actual science and math work, not just “History and Philosophy of Science”). The arts would be extracurricular, with an emphasis on music. Every graduate should be expected to have a usable command of two foreign or classical languages.
2. Bright, motivated students would enter after tenth grade and attend for six years. The length of the program should make it easier for students from inferior programs to catch up with the others, and there should be full scholarships to make it possible for students to attend regardless of their family situation. Everything reasonable should be done to flatten out and suppress the distracting influences of youth culture, commercial pop culture, pop psychology, political fads, and family wealth. Counseling should be available, and the environment should be congenial, but making students feel good about themselves should not be a primary purpose of the school.
3. Talented graduates should not have to work in coffee shops or as temps: everyone who graduates from the school should be able to earn $15/hr (2005 dollars). This will not be vocational school, but it can’t be oriented primarily to preparation for grad school, given the problems with humanities graduate education. (There are a number of academic areas and useful academic skills which do prepare you for actual jobs, and these should be stressed; statistics, database, writing, etc.)
4. Because of the narrowness of the offering, cooperative relationships with neighboring schools should be established for students with special interests, as well as for those who decide not to finish the six-year program.
5. The weight of the program should be past-oriented more than present-oriented. No real effort should be made to directly address the issues of the day, though it should be assumed that many or most students will have an interest in politics.

My specific concerns about education can be deduced from the kinds of solutions I have proposed -- obviously this is a highly-specialized school, and not an answer to all the problems of post-secondary education. It can be seen that I belong to the “reactionary leftist” category, and that the program I describe is basically old-fashioned and elitist. But while my proposal does conflict with contemporary trends, there is really nothing unusual, extreme, or impractical about it. All I need is a few million.

Originally published at http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/2005/10/college-of-my-dreams.html

College of my dreams: response to comments

Several people noted that the ideal college I recently described was pretty similiar to existing liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore and Reed, and especially St. John's. The difference from St. John's is that my school wouldn't be organized around The Great Books, and thus would be less past-oriented.

The suggestion that the mathematical part of the program should stress statistics rather than calculus strikes me as a good one.
 

The six-year program (starting at age sixteen) was my way of dealing with the well-known weaknesses of even the best American high schools. In my opinion, some of the excessive specialization of American higher education comes from the fact that a lot of very bright students, even in elite schools, start their serious education only at the age of eighteen -- and yet are expected to enter PhD programs at age 24 or so. Just to get students like this up to competence in a specialty is tough enough in itself, and general education is the thing that suffers. (A particular motive of mine would be to provide a place in the humanities for very ambitious students. Science-oriented students already have MIT and Cal Tech -- schools which, as I understand, have maintained their standards in part by recruiting students from abroad.)
 

A third feature of my school, not commented on by anyone, was an attempt to disengage undergraduate humanities education from the graduate school system, and to produce humanities graduates who are able to get decent jobs outside the university. My proposal here was vague, but teaching all students a wide variety of midlevel software applications usable in IT, publishing, data-management, etc., should keep them out of the coffeeshop jobs, and partnerships with professional schools in journalism, education, etc. might lead them to careers in which their educations will actually be valuable.
 

If the BA degree amounts only to "cultural enrichment", it is a reasonable choice only for those with plenty of family money, and by and large it will attract mostly slackers and personal liberationists. Idealistic professors who scorn "vocational training" almost always have pretty good tenured jobs, and they do a disservice both to their students and to the humanities. (This problem is particularly vivid for non-college families which must make sacrifices to send their first member to college).
 

It all comes down to money. The humanities in the university are a vestige of an aristocratic era when a general education grounded on Latin and Greek (or on Classical Chinese in China, or on Koranic and Vedic studies in the worlds of Islam and India) was required for those aspiring to positions of power. Those days are gone. Very few today are able to live on family money, and jobs normally go to people with technical training in a specialty of some kind.
 

The humanities BA is now useful only as a stepping-stone to something else -- usually either a PhD or a law degree. A humanities PhD, in turn, is useful only when it leads to a tenure-track position. Adjunct positions aren't something to aim for, and PhD's can't even work as newspaper reporters or as high school teachers without additional schooling.

When you lump all post-secondary education together, it's unquestionably a good investment, but when you separate out humanities education, the case is not good at all. (I've read that in the UK, people with arts degrees actually do less well than HS graduates without college). The humanities BA has been undercut by other, more technical forms of post-secondary education (often enough in the same schools). A four-year nursing, education, or social work degree is worth far more than a BA, even if the holder of the BA is brighter and harder-working than the holder of the technical degree.
 

My piece was more of a thought experiment than a serious proposal for change. I'm not sure that the demand would be there from students and their families, nor do I think that anyone in the education biz is really interested in the kind of thing I proposed. In any case, the educational world looks ready to shrink, and in a deflationary world people tend to hold on to what they've got and refrain from new ventures. Dissatisfaction with university career tracks in the humanities is pretty widespread, but (as with the lottery) as long as there's any reward at all to be hoped for, people will keep trying to chase it despite the odds. So the most reasonable thing to expect is an increasingly grumbly and mopey humanities world.
 

Originally published at
http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/2005/10/college-of-my-dreams-response-to.html

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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