In the course of tracing the changes from the religious foundations – the colleges – of the early American colonists through to the vast ‘multiversitys’ of today, Andrew Delbanco usefully draws attention to the fact that putting a big sign up on a college saying Committed to Providing Excellent Higher Education for All would probably signify that the very opposite was happening inside. He notes a grand inscription at Columbia University from the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘Erected for the Students that Religion and Learning May Go Hand in Hand and Character Grow with Knowledge.’ At the time, the buildings were actually going up for research staff, not for undergraduates, religion was ‘certainly no longer at the center of campus life’, tradition and the canon were being thrown over for the modern, and the idea that professionalised career academics should bother themselves with the moral improvement of undergraduates was quaint at best.
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Pure silliness. If colleges and universities are failing it is because the STEM fields are not required. Students are free to pursue any idea they like whether supported by evidence or not (and not even knowing what constitutes evidence).
I’m reminded that in order to practice law (definitely an liberal arts kind of degree), Abraham Lincoln took time out from learning the law at the Herndon office in Springfield to study and memorize Euclid’s Geometry. He understood that he didn’t fully understand what it meant to prove something and what constituted necessary evidence.
I doubt that would happen today. All that is needed today is to make some argument, have some opinion, no matter how irrelevant and no matter whether one has any evidence, couched in terms that can persuade critical masses of people as long as it is emotionally appealing to them, or confirms their preconceived notions and prejudices. This is what constitutes public discourse today, and nothing more.
I would make STEM mastery a prerequisite for every college degree. We certainly don’t need more of the “ideas” that the author is touting — far less and preferably none at all.