The Student as Scholar

While I thought about this conference, my mind drifted back to fall 1956, when I became academic dean at one of the world's smallest higher learning institutions, a tiny college of arts and sciences in southern California. During my first month on the job, the faculty curriculum committee met to review the college's requirements for graduation. In an act of unrestrained innocence, I asked why we had a "distribution requirement" for all students. A senior professor replied, "We borrowed it from Pomona College" (our prestigious neighbor down the road). I then asked where Pomona got it and was told, "From Harvard"—which gave me a basic lesson about higher education policymaking that's stood me in good stead for almost forty years. Liberal education is one of the most enduring and widely shared visions in American higher learning. Almost everyone agrees that beyond acquiring competence in a special field, undergraduates must be broadly informed, discover relationships across the disciplines, form values, and advance the common good. It's also true, however, that this inspired vision of liberal learning, which is powerfully reaffirmed in almost all college mission statements, is under siege on many fronts. The decline in the quality of the nation's schools surely has weakened liberal education, as has the growing emphasis on careerism and credentials. Also, the cultural fragmentation in America today makes it especially difficult for academics to bring to undergraduate education a sense of coherence and shared purpose. In 1920 Archibald MacLeish diagnosed the problem this way: 'There can be no educational postulates so long as there are no generally accepted postulates of life itself." Beyond all of these impediments, it is my own impression that the most serious challenge to liberal education on most campuses is the system of faculty rewards. And I remain convinced that liberal learning will be renewed only as faculty members who teach undergraduates and spend time with incoming students are rewarded for such efforts. But before considering how this ambitious goal might be accomplished, I would like to take a backward glance and reflect on how priorities of the professoriate have changed through the years.