Maggie's Farm

At Commentary. One quote:

Today’s New York Times reports that people are increasingly fed up with the high costs and high-handed ways of American colleges. It’s about time. As the Times reports: “‘One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education,’ said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, ‘is the vote of no confidence we’re getting from the public. They think college is important, but they’re really losing trust in the management and leadership.’”

College tuition has risen far faster than inflation. In the 1960s, I paid $2,200 a year to attend a first-rate university. From the month I graduated to December 2009, there was an inflation of slightly over 550 percent. So tuition today, net of inflation, should be on the order of $12,500. It’s $37,005, almost three times higher. Why?

At Minding the Campus. One quote:

In his first and longest chapter, "The Problem of General Education," Menand takes us through the historical evolution of Columbia University's core curriculum, one that he and most fans of rigorous, highly structured general education take as America's finest model of the genre. But then he goes on to document how his own campus, Harvard, and most other elite universities disdain such a highly specified approach in favor of "distribution requirements" which leave the selection of general education content largely to the student. One senses that Menand favors (or at least approves of) a Columbia-style core curriculum but seems to be resigned to it being an anachronistic outlier: "the problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on general education a mission - call it 'preparation for life' - whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to. This is why ....liberal arts faculty want to own general education and to have little to do with it at the same time."

It's about the Conspiracy to Keep Them Poor and Stupid. One of our favorite guys writes a piece in City Journal about another one of our favorite fellows. One quote:

Like A Nation at Risk, Cultural Literacy came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist. The progressives often lumped him in with the three “killer Bs”—Bennett, (Allan) Bloom, and (Saul) Bellow—whom they loved to hate at the height of the 1980s culture wars. Because Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind appeared just above Cultural Literacy on the bestseller lists for most of 1987, many liberal commentators paired the two writers, calling them conservatives agitating for a return to a more traditional, elitist education.

In fact, Hirsch is and always has been a liberal Democrat. Far from being elitist, he insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents.

The pup who works in NYC is studying for her GMAT. It sounds like a rightly demanding and discriminating exam.

She says the grammar correction sections are extremely subtle aspects of complex sentences, and that the two-part interactive math problems only give you two minutes each if you want to finish them. If you get one right, the computer gives you a more challenging one. It ramps up fast, she says, to try to find your limits. That's a great idea, like an automated oral exam where they can push each line of questioning until you are totally stumped and crushed with humility. The two-part math questions involve something like Which of the following additional pieces of information do you need to solve this problem? A,B, Both, Neither.

Brain swirls. These sorts of logical challenges quickly separate the men from the boys.

There are two essays also. Sounds like good fun to me, but I like exams. No. I love exams, whether offered by schools, institutions or, most importantly, by real life every darn day.

The pup does too: she is busy re-memorizing her exponent and square root tables to save time on the exam. She has great fun doing it, and says "It will never hurt you in life to have 9 to the 5th on the tip of your tongue." She began with 1-12 to the third and is working her way up.

No calculators allowed for this exam. Good on them for that.

I like my kids to get out of the Northeast for at least some part of their education, and they all have done so. I am delighted to have a pup at Kenyon College. She loves it, and I am pleased and relieved about that because through secondary school she spent every free moment banging around NYC, going to theater, museums, concerts, street fairs, theater internships, pubs, etc. I had come to think of her as a city girl.

My overall impression of the Kenyon kids is clean-cut, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, cheerful, studious, not overly Maoist, and very engaged in all of the activities of the school. For one example, the pup tells me that she does not know one kid who is not involved in some musical activity, and that the intro Theater course is the most heavily subscribed, with four large sections.

Small liberal arts colleges in the countryside tend to feel like Prep Schools to me, and Kenyon does have that feeling. If a kid went to school in the relatively isolated countryside or to a place like Exeter, Andover, Hotchkiss, Choate or Deerfield, I don't think they would find Kenyon to be an exciting change of pace. (With around 1600 kids, Kenyon is half the size of the BD pup's high school.)

Kenyon was founded as an Episcopalian seminary and college by Dartmouth grad Philander Chase in 1824 when Ohio was pioneer country. It remains, technically anyway, an Episcopalian school.

Kenyon grad Paul Newman built them a wonderful new athletic center with pool, gyms and work-out rooms (which are shared with people in the town). He didn't need to build them a theater, because they already have three: a black box, a small theater, and a high tech large theater - plus a large music performance auditorium in Rosse Hall. That's enough for 1600 kids.

I took some snaps of the cozy campus, of course.

The pup's favorite classroom, in Ascension Hall:

Lots more snaps of the Kenyon campus below the fold - 

A college lit prof at Temple begins:

Last semester, in an unguarded moment, I did what literature teachers should never do. I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom.

Whole thing here.

Part 1 was posted yesterday morning. This is from Dr. Bliss.

The Headmaster also had a policy that all administrators had to teach something - from the Admissions officer to the Provost and the Dean - and coach a sport too (however badly - nobody there cared if you were a lousy coach as long as we all got 2 hours of strenuous sport and fresh air). That was wise. Everybody was a teacher first. Every kid had to take 4 years of an ancient language and 4 years of a modern language, and you had to take math at least up to pre-calc. Plenty of kids flunked out. They would say to the parents "Sally does not seem to want or to be ready to take what we have to offer her here."

One of the teachers (or masters, as they were called), with or without their spouse as they wished, presided over every (assigned) table at all meals except breakfast, which was a free-for-all. You could not miss a meal. We students rotated the table service duty, and also the dish-washing duty (in what we called the Wombatorium).

We had required, monitored study hall (in old, panelled study halls) every night after dinner except Saturdays, from 7-10. Except for seniors. No talking and no non-textbooks. There was a prayer before breakfast and dinner, which was rotated through the students regardless of their religion.

Yes, everybody had to be in a sport, every semester. And every teacher was "Sir" or Ma'am." No complicated "dress code" - just a school uniform which made school shopping very inexpensive. The beds were hard and the rooms were cold in the winter. The only TV was in the snack shop, which opened after sports and closed before evening chapel.

Everybody rotated through School Duties: Dinner serving, Sunday Faculty Tea serving, scullery duty, lawn care duty, janitorial duty in the halls and common rooms (dusting, vacuuming), etc. No excuses.

There was brief chapel every evening (announcements, a prayer, a Bible reading, a homily, a hymn), and Sunday church, all presided over by the Headmaster with all faculty (and with all spouses and families on Sunday) in attendance. All the features of a low-Anglican service. The Jewish, Protestant (which I am), Hindu, and atheist kids never were converted (as far as I know), but they did learn to appreciate the virtue of a daily rhythm of contemplation and worship. Plus they learned a lot about Christianity. It is worth knowing about.

Darn good organist, who was also a Music teacher.

My parents sacrificed quite a bit for me to go there: new cars, trips, etc. I am true to my school. I still miss it, in a way.

We posted a little while ago about Sociologists complaining about not being a major factor in the Obama administration. Now I see the Anthropologists seeking political "relevancy."

Oh man, that is so 60s. So silly. What's the problem? Do social scientists feel disempowered? I think they should just stick to their knitting and find out fun stuff. It's not supposed to be useful: it's supposed to be pursuit of knowledge.