LETTERS
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LETTERS To the Editor The spring 2020 AQ is still another blockbuster, focusing on the undeniable fact of student (and faculty and administrative?) immaturity. From various perspectives, the problem is clarified and solutions proffered. There is a difficulty, however, that goes beyond the human limitations on painful display and that is the fragility of liberal education itself. What none of the writers say, but of which they are doubtless thoroughly aware, is that higher education did not become mass education until the twentieth century. Many of its devotees assume, as Leo Strauss observed, that through higher education democracy can become a universal aristocracy. We are learning just how problematic such an expectation is. Back in 1970 as a young instructor in a small town community college, fresh from a doctoral program, I was immediately struck by the yawning gap between the institution’s formal requirements and the students’ weak preparation. The poor quality of their prior schooling or their own lack of dedication often fell before the (not always) serious demands of social science, humanities, or natural
science courses. Yet my colleagues sought to mask this harsh reality with much talk about retention and success, as if these objectives were entirely within their power to deliver and the students’ ability to accomplish. The most telling evidence that these expectations were unrealistic was the rampant grade inflation. Excuses were made for the students’ undeniable failings, from their low income and poor upbringing to their race or sex. Few of them successfully made the transition to four-year colleges and universities. They would have been better off learning a trade or occupation and raising families. What I thought was unique to my institution and those like it has become the almost defining characteristic of higher education as a whole. Shucks, it turns out that we were trend setters! But as amusing as the current caricature of liberal educations is, mediocrity is not only corrupting the once hallowed halls of academe, it is driving democracy down to the lowest common denominator. Evidently, millions of people in college do not add up to responsible citizenship, not even for “the best and the brightest.” Craig Klafter (“Undergraduate Education and the Maturation of Students”) notes in
S. Forman
passing that the European liberal arts tradition was “transplanted” to North America during the English colonial period, its maturing function carried on only until the mid-nineteenth century (reasons unspecified). But he treats this epochal development in a political vacuum. Those “mature” American institutions were the seedbed for the American Revolution, infused as they were by the Enlightenment-era teachings of natural rights philosophers in a nation dominated by Christian churches and teachings. The “mature” patriots that we have ever since revered as our Founding Fathers drew on their rigorous and far-reaching liberal education both to establish republican constitutions and to secure the academic free
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