Slouching Towards Gomorrah (42 page)

What has gone wrong appears to flow from a poisonous combination of radical egalitarianism and radical individualism. Egalitarianism means that faculties have lost the self-confidence to tell students what it is they ought to learn. Radical individualism causes students to resist dictation by college authorities and faculty, to prefer following their own interests to learning what the institution wants taught. These two forces press higher education in the same direction. Hence the startling decline in required courses. But, as the NAS points out, the existence, number, and nature of required courses indicates an institution’s educational priorities, what it thinks an educated person should know. To the degree that higher educational institutions have such priorities and tend to agree with one another, they help maintain a common culture.

Yet the number of required courses has undergone a rapid decline in recent years. The NAS report deals with this in a chapter entitled “The Dissolution of Structure,” which shows that the dropping or easing of requirements—begun as a slow evolution by 1939—had become a rush by 1993. General education programs were 55 percent of requirements in 1914 and only 33 percent in 1993. That does not tell the full story because in 1914 no exemptions
from general education requirements were allowed in 98 percent of the courses, but by 1993 that had dropped to 29 percent. The loss of general education requirements is an educational disaster, producing students who have information about narrow corners of subjects but no conception of the larger context that alone can give the niches meaning. In college, my son was not offered a survey course in history and wound up studying such niches of history as the Weimar Republic. The college had given up on the idea that there was a central body of historical knowledge all educated persons should have. That is true across the board, not just in history. It will be a few years yet before America discovers what the decline of general knowledge means for our well-being.

The other two chapters of the report make equally dismal reading. “The Evaporation of Content” reveals, for example, that from 1914 to 1939, the percentage of institutions with literature requirements fell from 57 percent to 38 percent, where it held steady into the Sixties. By 1993, only 14 percent of institutions had such requirements. The same pattern held true in philosophy, religion, social science, natural science, and mathematics. Though distribution requirements increased, so many courses are often included in each curriculum category that the purpose once served by required general courses is not served.

“The Decline of Rigor,” the third and last chapter, states that the data from the catalogues “paint a discouraging portrait of diminishing rigor at the most prestigious colleges and universities in our land. Thus, by 1993 students graduating from these elite schools not only had fewer assignments to complete but were asked to do considerably less in completing them.” The NAS stated that the degree of rigor in a curriculum is important to more than how much the student learns. “It also has implications for character formation. The ability to work hard, to persevere in exacting tasks, and to master detail are all critical in determining individual achievement. By the same token, the degree to which these qualities are found among a society’s leadership has a direct influence on that society’s overall strength and vitality.”
¹⁴

The evidence showed a decline in freshman preparation. Between 1964 and 1993, combined verbal and mathematics SAT scores declined 7.3 percent, and this was concentrated especially
within the highest percentiles of test takers, the group from which the elite schools draw their students. The catalogues also revealed severe drops in admission requirements. This in turn led to the need for remedial courses in a variety of subjects. These were attempts to bring students up to the level at which they could do college work. Colleges were teaching what high schools should have taught. In 1939 and 1964, no college offered credit for completing what was essentially a high school course, and students who completed the remedial course were invariably required to take and complete the standard college course on the subject. The situation with respect to writing or composition courses is illustrative. By 1993, thirty-one out of thirty-five schools with remedial courses offered college credit for them, and in only four of the twenty-six cases where a regular writing requirement existed was the subsequent completion of that course required. One can only conclude that students were permitted to go forward without college level writing skills or, perhaps more likely, that the standard offering had been diluted so that it hardly differed from the remedial course.

What seems conclusive evidence of the decline of rigor is that the average number of days classes were in session during the academic year dropped precipitously over the period examined. The average was 204 days in 1914, 195 in 1939, 191 in 1964, and then a dramatic drop to 156 classroom days in 1993. The length of the standard class period, which was 59.8 minutes in 1914, had declined by 6.1 minutes by 1993. Equally telling is the trend of the days of the week in which classes are in session. In 1914, 98 percent of the institutions studied scheduled Saturday classes. This percentage kept declining until in 1993 only 6 percent had Saturday classes. The NAS refers to the “widespread impression within academe” that “even Friday classes are becoming a rarity.”

The willingness of students to attend Saturday classes is as good an indicator as any of the seriousness with which they take their studies. When I first went to Yale law school to teach in 1962, Saturday morning classes were standard. I scheduled all my classes for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and thus had the three days of the first half of the week free for writing. The students did not mind the arrangement, some of them brought their weekend dates to class. When I returned to the law school from government
in 1977, I learned that students would not take courses with Saturday classes and most would not attend Friday afternoon classes. The object was to get out of New Haven for the weekend as rapidly as possible. The change signified a loss of seriousness about education and intellectual work. The faculty accepted the new attitude, as indeed they had to unless they banded together to insist upon offering Saturday classes. The faculty, in this and other matters, did not care enough to act.

Not long ago I was asked to tape a discussion of the judiciary to be used in conjunction with a college textbook on American government. I asked why a tape was needed for college students and was told, “They don’t read. They don’t even read for pleasure. If they are given a reading assignment, they feel agony—which is why the textbooks are becoming shorter and dumber.” As somebody said, this is a generation that watches and rewinds. “There is a name for what happens when people pursue a pleasure so relentlessly that the more they ingest in the pursuit of happiness, the more they need, and the less happy, in general, they end up…. The word is addiction. Entertainment is the national dope.”
¹⁵

In chart after chart in the NAS report, one sees a number (of required courses, class days, etc.) in 1914, then a gradual falling off in 1939 and 1964, followed by a precipitous decline to 1993. This confirms a pattern repeatedly suggested in this book: trends slowly moving through an area of life, in this case higher education, until the Sixties when those trends accelerated rapidly. This suggests, as noted earlier, that we would in any event have eventually arrived where the Sixties took us but perhaps two or three decades later. Which in turn suggests that we are merely seeing the playing out of qualities—individualism and egalitarianism—inherent in Western civilization and to some degree unique to that civilization.

Decreasing competence is only the beginning of the story. Intellect loses its virtue when it ceases to seek truth and turns to the pursuit of political ends. Not all of this is seriously intended. We have reached the point described by Ortega y Gasset in which many of our intellectuals have abandoned the traditional standards of scholarship and have begun to kick up their heels and stand on their heads to pass the time. Even during the student rebellions of the Sixties and early Seventies it was evident that many of the rebels
were playing at being revolutionaries, having fun watching the faculties and administrations cower. On today’s faculties they continue to ridicule bourgeois standards, and their effects are pernicious.

But there are more serious types, teachers who see themselves as political activists whose campaign headquarters just happen to be the classroom. Professors openly describe themselves as advocates for radical change in the society. They teach courses to make converts to an ideology, always a liberal to left ideology. One might suppose that this proselytizing would be done covertly, as the milder forms of liberal propaganda used to be spread before the Sixties radicals became tenured faculty, but that is not the case. Radical faculty openly boast of their purposes and offer two justifications. The first suggests that standards may be subverted or abandoned if the need is great enough. That is the case today because this society is corrupt and oppressive and urgently needs drastic reform or restructuring. The second justification argues that standards are actually not being altered or abandoned: all teaching is inevitably political—if a professor tries to teach a subject objectively, he is a knave or a fool, since he is, knowingly or unknowingly, reinforcing a corrupt status quo.

The first argument we may simply brush aside. America today is the least oppressive and corrupt society, in the sense the radicals mean, in the history of the world. Whole shelves of books have been written to prove that what looks like openness and tolerance is actually a subtle form of repression. But these books are by fools and knaves, the sort of people who were assuring us that one communist government after another was a workers’ paradise while the actual workers were doing their utmost to escape those paradises and, often enough, losing their lives in the attempt.

The second justification for political teaching and scholarship is true, up to a point. If a professor of traditional views protests that he never used his classroom authority for political ends, the response is that of course he did, he was just not sufficiently self-aware to realize the political nature of all teaching, thought, and scholarship. Indeed, the effort to abide by traditional standards of scholarship, and teaching itself, rest upon a political (or moral) judgment. As of course they do: the judgment is that men will be freer and happier if truth is sought, and the results of the search confirmed or rejected, without regard to the political implications
of the outcome. The ultimate premise of the enterprise is political and moral, but it is a politics and a morality that command that the inquiry set in motion be nonpolitical and neutral.

The politically motivated scholar and teacher is engaged in a dishonest act: pretending that his conclusions are reached impartially when they are not. This is particularly pernicious when the modern liberal scholar speaks to the public as an expert but is really concealing a political agenda behind his credentials. During Edward Levi’s tenure as Attorney General of the United States, a highly charged dispute about his duties under a statute arose between the Department of Justice and a congressional committee. Liberals were on the side of the committee, and soon professors of law were being recruited to sign a statement that there was no legal validity to Levi’s position. One such canvasser approached a friend of mine for his signature. My friend declined on the ground that he knew nothing about that area of the law and could not judge whether the committee or the Attorney General was right. The law professor doing the canvassing said: “You don’t understand. This isn’t a legal issue; it’s political.” Yet the petition was to be presented to the press and the public as the expert opinion of law professors on a question of law. Again and again, one sees university faculty speaking to issues and demanding respect for their opinions because of their special competence and expertise when what is offered is no more than a camouflaged political statement. This is so common that it is taken for granted in the academic world. If you see a letter or a petition with many signatories and purporting to state an expert opinion, you can be almost certain that a majority of those signing have never read the relevant materials and their opinions are politics masquerading as professional expertise.

It is obviously easier to politicize fields like law or history or literature, but not even the natural sciences are wholly immune. A few years back the
New York Times
reported that paleontologists who doubted the theory that dinosaurs’ extinction was caused by the impact on the earth of an enormous meteor were called “militarists” by their colleagues and felt their careers threatened. The reason was that the theory was used as support for the notion that nuclear war would throw up enormous quantities of dust that would block sunlight and cause a “nuclear winter,” writing finis to
the human race. The dinosaur extinction theory was too valuable to one side of a political argument about nuclear weapons to be decided on its scientific merits.

This is but a small example of the tyranny of political correctness that has spread across American campuses. A few years back there was a burst of denunciation from all segments of the political spectrum when the phenomenon became known. A friend of mine laughed and said, “It’s a rout. They are discredited completely.” Unfortunately, it was not a rout. The janissaries of the Left are infinitely adaptable in their tactics but they do not abandon their strategic objective. They denied there was such an animal as political correctness, they claimed it was a term invented by extreme right-wingers to discredit liberals. (Conservatives are always referred to as extreme and right-wing to distinguish them from radicals of the Left who, we are to understand, spend their time in the middle of the road.) Meanwhile, however, the tyranny of political correctness goes on. As the sociologist Paul Hollander describes the situation: