Liberal Education and the Erosion of Collegiate Structure

Increasing pessimism about the state of liberal education has characterized the history of American higher education in the twentieth century. The multiplicity of complaints can be boiled down to two specific indictments. First, liberal education is insubstantial. It bears little relation to a cultural life beyond the campus. Students have small use for and derive little benefit from the knowledge they acquire in undergraduate courses, except insofar as it happens to prepare them for some vocation; otherwise college education tends to be irrelevant. Second, college education is incoherent. Prevailing beliefs about the character of worthwhile learning bear little resemblance to the daily activities of undergraduates. Most faculty members would like to see undergraduates trained in the habits of scholarly inquiry.' But most of the training undergraduates actually receive is in activities popularly called bullshitting and regurgitation. Consequently it is widely felt that students are not really being educated. Unsatisfactory relations between undergraduates and their teachers are often cited as the root of the problem. There is a great gulf between college students and their research-oriented professors. Even relations between undergraduates and the instructors and teaching assistants who directly supervise their work are transitory, perfunctory, and impersonal. Impersonality, worst in the large state universities, plagues every institution to some degree. These conditions are usually ascribed to the invasion of the masses into colleges and universities. There is a myth that in the nineteenth century when college students were a small elite liberal learning flourished, but that now democracy has triumphed over excellence.2 Though there is a grain of truth in this, it is only a small part of the story. Actually, though enrollments have grown enormously, faculty growth has kept pace. The current student-faculty ratio is not appreciably different from the ratio of a century ago-about nine to one.3 The real cause of today's impersonal relations and the disintegration of liberal education lies in the uneven historical development of the roles of student and teacher. To grasp the meaning of this, one