The New York Times, By Stanley Fish, April 23
Early on in his new book, ”œCollege: What It Was, Is, and Should Be,” Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University quotes the economist Richard Vedder and the former university president William Brody to the effect that little has changed in higher education despite enormous changes in technology, demographics, funding models, and student habits and attitudes. Vedder notes that ”œwith the possible exception of prostitution, teaching is the only profession that has had absolutely no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.” Brody is less wry, but the point is the same: ”œIf you went to a [college] class circa 1900, and you went today, it would look exactly the same.”
In many of the books on higher education now flooding the market, statements like those would be preliminary either to a denial of the point (everything is not the same; here are the new things we’re doing), or to an affirmation of it followed by detailed recommendations (here’s what we should do to catch up). Delbanco, however, not only accepts the fact that little has changed in the classroom ”” ”œmost of what we see in the past looks a lot like the present” ”” he celebrates it in the course of answering his title’s question. College, he tells us, ”œis a hedge against utilitarian values” that ”œslakes the human craving for contacts with works of art that somehow register one’s longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself.”
It is typical of Delbanco’s mode of presentation that he doesn’t hit you over the head with an argument, but leaves you to work it out: if humans do indeed crave such contact, that craving is the same in all ages, and the kind of experience that satisfies it will also be the same: ”œ[T]he questions we face under the shadow of death are not new, and … no new technology will help us answer them.”
That includes the technology of science. Delbanco pays tribute to science’s ”œprogressive power,” but its ”œprinciple of progress,” he says, does not ”œtranslate well” into other areas of human life: ”œScience tells us nothing about how to shape a life or how to face death … It not only fails to answer such questions; it cannot ask them.” Delbanco knows that some scientists have predicted that in time ”œneuroscience will define and ensure happiness and … biochemistry will distinguish truth from falsity among what today are mere opinions about sex and gender,” but he doubts ”œit will happen”; even if it does, ”œnone of us will be around … and it’s not clear that we would want to be.”
?? Science [scientifically-derived knowledge] tells us nothing about how to shape a life or how to face death? Quibble, quibble
but years ago, British firms preferred to hire Liberal Arts graduates and specialists rarely climbed the corporate ladder.
Most of the scientists I have known did have other interests beyond their specialty – often music – but I would not call most of them well-rounded individuals, which is what the businesses were looking for.
The ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ trap often catches specialists, whereas those more broadly trained are usually more flexible in their approach to problems and often better at social interaction. Scientists are notorious for lacking skills in ‘people management’.
As far as education per se, the most important thing to learn is not facts, but how to keep oneself open to learning; how to think logically; how to connect disparate information. Most scientists may be good at logic but seldom deal with areas outside their specialty and are not always open to things which call their knowledge into question. Great scientists may not be this way, but most scientists are not ‘great scientists’.
It is worth remembering that the Founding Fathers were all traitors.