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  ollege
is about more than book learning; it is an experience that shapes
character." Some version of this sentence can probably be found
in every college's viewbook, promotional video, or CD/ROM. And surely
it is accurate: Even the students who learn the least from formal
instruction somehow seem to acquire some of the attitudes, habits
of mind, and dispositions to act that are characteristic of the
colleges they attend.
But in many
respects contemporary higher education is hostile ground for improving
character. Trendy humanities departments celebrate the splintering
of personal identity; postmodernists dismiss the individual's search
for a moral center as a quaint illusion. Over in another corner,
feminists rage against what they see as their students' "false
consciousness" and as-yet un-extirpated gender stereotypes.
In some universities, "queer theorists" aim at even more
radical undermining of their students' understanding of self and
other.
So what kind
of character does a contemporary college education really instill?
The question came to mind this morning as I read a course evaluation.
"I hate to read. I like to learn what the reading say and mean,
but I despise the act of reading." These sentences flare up
from a college sophomore. No, not a sophomore at Anything Goes University.
Here, at my university. That means, roughly, a student who was in
the top 15 percent of his high-school class and one with SAT scores
north of 1250.
Moreover, the
course that elicited this cri du coeur was part of our great
books program: Chaucer, Machiavelli, Don Quixote, King
Lear. How did we admit to the university this junior-league
barbarian? I doubt that he told us his textual preference on his
application, but surely he left clues. But why did this young man
choose to go to college at all? Why would his parents send him?
Kids who hate water don't usually join the Navy. Kids who despise
music don't audition for the conservatory. Why should a kid who
hates and despises reading go to college?
Some Americans
have always doubted the value of "book learnin'" and American
colleges have always attracted a substantial number of students
more interested in sports, fraternities, or each other than they
are in Euclid or Shakespeare. Anti-intellectualism, pragmatism,
and youthful robustness are parts of our national identity. But
so are high intellectual ambition, inspiring ideals, and a capacity
for deep introspection. As Walt Whitman says, we "contain multitudes."
And so do our
universities. Somewhere in the course of the last quarter-century
we made a collective decision about college that most of our kids
— now almost seventy percent — should pursue higher education. The
multitude of over fifteen million students now in college includes
many who are bright and hardworking, plus many who have overcome
adverse circumstances and are making the most of a prized opportunity.
College shapes the character of these students the same way sunlight
and rain shape the character of healthy trees. It allows them to
grow into the sturdy adults they were aiming to become.
But the multitude
also includes students who go off to college because it is the path
of least resistance. Some are little Conans and Xenas who would
as soon read picture books ("graphic novels") as puzzle
out The Canterbury Tales; others are bright, but directionless.
College shapes their character too, but not necessarily for the
better. They have no burning ambition for the venture and often
end up idling four or five years, making friends, and, as the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz described his undergraduate days at Antioch, "trying
on outrageous selves."
Consider the
student who writes, "I despise the act of reading." On
his course evaluation this young man confesses that he "read
few of the readings," expects a B+ in the course, thought the
intellectual level of the course "excellent," and would
"strongly recommend" the course to others. He concludes
that the course has "changed my life. It has changed the way
I think and freed me from stale ideas."
That phrase
speaks (unread) volumes. Little Conan is clearly no ordinary book-hating
ignoramus. He is an ignoramus aspiring for the Dostoevskian depths
of nihilism, a man freed from stale ideas, a Nietzchean ignoramus.
He intends, of course, "to become a philosophy major."
Conan clearly does not see himself as part of the mass of unmotivated
and semi-literate graduates of the nation's public schools grazing
their way through the pasture of higher education. He is, rather,
the radical bold enough to admit his disdain for reading and his
conviction that one learn all the important stuff by hanging out
with cool people.
He is, in other
words, trying on one of those "outrageous selves" that
Clifford Geertz spoke of. This is not to say that college is necessarily
wasted on him. Humanity can be full of surprises. Conan's teachers
may reach him. He might conceivably emerge in two more years as
someone who has engaged the life-long project of acquiring an education.
That will depend on his learning to read, carefully, closely, and
thoughtfully. It will depend also on his having teachers who recognize
when he hasn't read the assignments and who give him the F he deserves,
not the B+ he expects.
But trying
on an outrageous self is not an innocent or harmless act. An outrageous
self that, for example, experiments with cheating after having glimpsed
that rules against plagiarism are just another "stale idea,"
commits a serious transgression. The transgression doesn't disappear
when the individual moves on to another "self." It remains
buried in the person regardless of how many masks he dons or doffs.
And cheating is only one of the self-destructive byways that offer
themselves to students who look at college as a mix-and-match identity
game. College life offers a plentitude of opportunities to try out
intoxicants, gender orientations, and the whole gamut of human follies.
In every generation,
of course, some students have found the world morally bewildering
and, unable to build a stable character, turned their lives into
a masquerade. Some belatedly realize that they cannot "compartmentalize"
themselves forever. They discover the individual is just himself,
responsible for all his acts committed under however many aliases.
But in today's
university, the lost soul is often lunchmeat for postmodern profs.
They reject
the idea that each of us has a single self, which, though it suffers
inner conflict and is capable of change, retains its essential identity.
Instead, they teach that the "self" is just a construction,
to be made and remade as circumstance and opportunity permit. This
doctrine, a domestic version of the "anti-foundationalist"
theories that took shape in Europe twenty years ago, has settled
in as an all-purpose justification for behavior that is sometimes
merely immature, sometimes ethically doubtful, and often terribly
self-destructive. Yes, college still shapes character, but the student
who enrolls in the typical American university today without having
a tight grip on his own identity is likely to end up with someone
else's.
When they send
their kids to college, most parents — even broad-minded parents
who tried on a few outrageous masks themselves back in the sixties
and seventies — probably do not expect intentional demolition of
their children's character to make way for Jack's Joke Shop of discardable
selves. College ought not to be a place to pose and pretend, a sanctuary
for exploring one's worse impulses. Versions of little Conan, who
this week "despises" the act of reading and next week
takes up extreme skateboarding, are to be found at every liberal
arts college and selective university in the country. They are the
new teachers' pets.
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