By Peter Wood
Perhaps as long as people have made maps they have also
made maps of imaginary places. Sometimes
inadvertently, of course. Some
cartographers really did think Terra Australis filled up the
bottom of the globe or the red marks on Mars were the canals of Martian commerce. But imaginary maps have mostly been a
recreation for those not entirely content with prosaic realities.
Reforming higher education sometimes seems to be a
similar pursuit. It is connected--most
likely by an underground passage--to the cartography of the strange and
impossible. Ask the great reformers of
the academy in ages past how it worked out.
Even those who succeeded in creating new institutions--think of Thomas
Jefferson, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Cardinal Newman--imagined far more than
they achieved. It is a humbling
prospect. Of course, most reformers have
to settle for a lot less. Fourteen years
or so before Milton began mapping hell and heaven and everything in between in Paradise Lost, he published "Of Education," (1644) his
proposal for fixing what ailed the English academy. Like today's reformers, he was not in much
doubt about the importance of the education, "one of the greatest and noblest
designs that can be thought on," and one "for want whereof this Nation perishes." Milton's curriculum of Pythagoras and Plato,
the grounds of law and the Attic tragedies, pronunciation, grammar, and
arithmetic, is as beautiful a dream of an imaginary curriculum as the Arabian Nights is a dream of flying
carpets.
Abolish
Harvard and Start from Scratch?
Hardly a week goes by when I don't receive two or three
proposals from gentlemen (ladies seem less drawn to this cartographic
specialization) who have decided, after due deliberation, to tell the world how
to put education into good order. Many
of these proposals demonstrate careful reflection, informed understanding, and
a keen sense of the obstacles. Some are
brilliant and witty. Some are scorched
by disappointment. Some are
tedious. A few are delightfully
mad.
The imaginary insists on our attention every bit as much,
sometimes more than the real. We may
know our way to Tolkien's Mount Doom in Mordor better than
we do to actual Mount Erebus. Recently, to celebrate the 100th
issue of our journal, Academic Questions,
my colleagues and I at the National Association of Scholars gathered up "One
Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education."
My rules were that we wanted positive ideas and I wanted particular
doable proposals. The former precluded,
"Burn the Multicultural Affairs Center to the Ground." The latter obviated, "Abolish Harvard and Start
from Scratch." Such ideas have a certain
jaunty appeal, but they really don't pass muster with the spirit of Thomas
Jefferson or John Milton. We ended up
with some worthwhile proposals. Andrew
Delbanco called for teaching graduate students how to teach. Jill Biden wanted
to see more mentoring. Richard Arum
called for colleges to report the average grade students received in a class
alongside the student's own grade.
Wilfred McClay proposed that students be required to memorize some key
American texts.
Many of the ideas were not surprising, but the whole
proved greater than the sum of the parts:
read end-to-end the proposals make clear that the task of reforming
higher education is far from hopeless, provided that we think in terms of
specific reforms. The moment we think of
systemic reform, however, things darken.
The status quo is so deeply entrenched that only a fantasy map will get
us out of the Great Gillikin Forest to the Emerald City, from the Inferno to
the Paradiso. Reading those proposals is
like turning the pages of Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guaddalupi's The
Dictionary of Imaginary Places, each annexing still more,
Wonderlands and Lilliputs to the Utopias of yore.
Milton, incidentally, thought it important not to turn
students into mere aesthetes. His
curriculum called for 90 minutes before noon of exercises with weapons, "to
guard and to strike safely with edge or point" which would keep students
"healthy, nimble, strong, and well in breath." I recalled this the other day
when a correspondent laid out a concise plan for a new "prestigious college
right now." It was a version of the idea
of assembling MOOC courses from places such MIT and Stanford and combining them
with a liberal arts core. But to this
the correspondent added extended training in Israeli-style hand-to-hand combat,
small arms practice, and a course in nutrition.
Perhaps Milton would approve. The world is a dangerous place, and the
dangers are not wholly imaginary. Still,
if our larger task is to preserve civilization, we probably want to put the
greater emphasis on the liberal arts, and seek ways to keep students "healthy,
nimble, and strong" without necessarily preparing them for urban combat.
Let's require English majors, as Roy Winnick suggests, to
read great literature. There's a
start. Require students to a take a
statistics course, as Howard Wainer proposes.
Or make a stint in the private sector a requirement for academic
appointment, as Harry Stein proposes.
But let's brace ourselves for a long, long fight. There is no simple way to repair the American
university or the American liberal arts college. Some of their worst characteristics are their
most ingrained and it will take steady determination rather than a
great-leap-forward to set things right.
That said, I'm all for maps
of imaginary places. To figure out our
best destinations we have to have to give them form and substance in our mind's
eye first. But then comes the hard
work.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of
Scholars.
