U-M Should Renew Liberal Education

by Lee Bockhorn

As I entered my final term here at U-M this past January, I thought it would be a good idea to take a class or two which would be more, well, fun than some of the degree requirement-fulfilling courses that have filled my schedule for the past several years. So, I decided to enroll in an introductory Shakespeare course in the English Department, a lone senior among a throng of freshmen and sophomores.

Why Shakespeare, when I could have elected some “blow-off” course that wouldn’t require plowing through a never-ending barrage of “thees” and “thous”? I had read and enjoyed some of his plays in high school, of course, and I thought that perhaps with another half-decade of maturity under my belt, I might be able to sink my intellectual teeth more deeply into works which many claim are the greatest literature in the English language. Fortunately, I have not been disappointed. Reading many of those same plays again has opened up new worlds for me in my appreciation for the magic of Shakespeare’s language and his stunning insight into the human condition.

For all the pleasure that has come with rediscovering Shakespeare, however, several disturbing thoughts have also come to my mind. I have already griped previously in these pages that U-M English majors are not required to take a Shakespeare course to graduate (although to be fair, there is a “pre-1600” requirement which most English majors fulfill with Shakespeare because they fear Chaucer even more). More troubling, however, is the realization I have come to as I near the end of my undergraduate sojourn in Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan makes no real effort to ensure that the students who pass through this campus on the way to adulthood attain any sort of truly liberal education.

“Men are as the time is,” the Bard reminds us, and this is certainly true today. Our age is one of cynicism, disillusionment, and debasement, and these qualities have infected our souls. Persons in their teens or twenties today too often serve their brains a steady diet of sludge from ephemeral diversions like television or the Internet. If you ever stop to listen — really listen — to what most college students today consider intelligent conversation, you are shocked by how absurd and trite most of it seems. The clichés and banalities picked up from television, movies and pop psychology flow all too easily from our tongues, and the depth and originality of our thinking is appallingly low. Yet I don’t believe that young people today should be blamed for this. We were born into an intellectual culture which prepackages opinions and attitudes about every aspect of life for mass consumption.

Of course, this problem is nothing new for a democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville, that great physician of American democracy’s ills, diagnosed the problem over 160 years ago:

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America ... In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. Everybody there adopts great numbers of theories, on philosophy, morals, and politics, without inquiry, upon public trust ...”

Given this defect in American democracy, our universities have a huge responsibility: stewardship over that brief 4-5 year period in our young people’s lives when they are free to stretch their intellect and mental scope to their furthest boundaries — a time when they will be able to shape the views and attitudes which will govern the rest of their lives. What the universities need to provide them, of course, is a liberal (in the best sense of that word) education — one that focuses the mind on the truly fundamental questions by seeing how the great minds of the past have attempted to answer them. Only this type of education can counterbalance our mistaken belief that the here and now is all that is important.

In the past this was accomplished by having students read works which have now become somewhat derisively known as the “Great Books.” These were books — including the works of Mr. Shakespeare — which, over time, had proven their worth in tackling the big questions: what it meant to philosophize, to love, to fight in war, to die and feel sorrow, and yes, to ask that greatest of all questions — what does our human existence mean?

Now, though, teaching the Great Books has gone out of style. The argument against the continued use of these books — what came to be known as the “canon” — was that they somehow reflected or were products of a culture that was racist, patriarchal, elitist, sexist etc. The only way it now seems to be acceptable to use them is as “texts” to be “deconstructed” by academicians, who are here to explain how these works became tools of cultural “domination.” It is very rare to find a campus these days where these works are studied simply because they might actually be able to show us the true nature of things.

Given the demise of the “Great Books” style of education in American universities, what can a school like Michigan do to ensure that its students still receive a truly liberal education? One way would be to institute a core curriculum — a set of classes that all undergraduates would be required to take in their first two years of study, regardless of their planned concentration. These classes would cover the broad range of knowledge that any “educated” person living in Western Civilization should know — the great literature, as well as natural and social sciences — and make some effort to provide a coherent picture of how it all relates. This is obviously easier said than done, but no one ever claimed that the responsibility of educating future generations was something to be taken lightly.

Unfortunately, what U-M and many other elite colleges offer now instead is a watered-down version of the above in the form of “distribution” requirements, which ask undergraduates to take a smattering of introductory courses from a variety of specialized subfields. Most of these courses are simply recruiting grounds for the various academic departments — storefront windows where they hock their wares to wide-eyed freshmen and sophomores, trying desperately to convince them that what they have to offer is more valuable and useful than what’s being sold next door.

In that respect, these courses make very little effort to provide some sense of the interconnectedness of higher learning — any sense of a coherent order of the whole. Of course, occasionally a handful of cross-listed courses are offered to satisfy this natural longing, such as “Philosophy of Science” or “The Physics of Music,” but these are the exception rather than the rule. Of course, the University has also tried to provide “interdisciplinary” experiences through the recent “theme semesters,” but these semesters have been as much about promoting a certain line of political propaganda as they were about true education.

The university gives students no guidance about how to pursue a program of liberal learning (other than the extremely vague classifications for the distribution requirements), and thus leaves them to their own devices. Of course, many in academe today would point to my current experience with the Shakespeare class and say, “See, liberal learning and enjoyment of the great works of our civilization is still possible in today’s colleges.” Yes, but only if you are actively seeking it; I happened to luck out. Universities have a greater duty than that — a duty to ensure that the diplomas they churn out are at least worth the paper they’re printed on: not just in terms of earnings potential, but in the enrichment of the mind of the person who has earned that piece of parchment.

So, if I could offer a bit of meager advice to the powers that be at U-M as I prepare to head on my merry way, it would be this: Michigan is too great an institution to settle for being a diploma mill — a place where people diligently learn vocational skills and then leave with souls as barren as the ones with which they arrived. U-M should make a better effort to provide all its students, from philosophy majors to electrical engineering students, with an education that expands their vision by showing them both the noblest and basest in man; in other words, an education that helps them learn what it means to be human. If our finest universities cannot commit themselves to providing that magnificent gift to all of their students, then all of their other gaudy endeavors are surely in vain. MR

This article was published in the 31 March 1999 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 9).
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