Stop worrying and learn to love worksheets?

To determine if your teaching is effective, you can craft assessments that truly show whether students are learning what you're teaching. You can also ask for instant feedback on the class session, a la the Frederick Mosteller one-minute paper. Or you can take the lazy professor's way out (this is preferred, obviously): you go by your intuitive sense of yourself and your students.

At the end of Monday's session in my MW class, Belief and Unbelief, things didn't feel quite right. As I packed up my multicolored markers and wished the last student to leave a good afternoon, I thought that I had talked too much, too abstractly, and not enough about the really important matters I'd hoped the students would get out of the class session. Even though by my tally, 17 of 24 students spoke up at some point during the class, it just didn't feel like I got enough of them to engage the gears of their minds with the axle of the central concepts I wanted them to master. I regretted distributing a NYT article about the search for "the God gene," which I did in hopes of highlighting the stakes involved in saying that religion is (or isn't) instinctual. That issue seemed a distraction from more important ones, such as making sure they understood what the main text for the day (Hume's Natural History of Religion) was actually saying.

Less verbigeration, more talking to teenagers

There is no shortage of arguments for preserving the liberal arts. A sampling of recent and prominent ones includes Gregory Petsko’s open letter to the President of SUNY-Albany, where several humanities departments will soon be folding; Eva von Dassow’s speech to the U. of Minnesota regents; Martha Nussbaum’s argument for privileging human development over economic development in educational efforts; and Louis Menand’s account of how humanities professors have turned their disciplines into professions, rather than into vehicles for developing transformative ideas. At National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson proves that it’s not just politically liberal professors who think the liberal arts need to survive, defending the humanities’ central position in preserving cultural heritage.

All of these arguments are as excellent. They are also almost completely beside the point.

It’s true that to save departments that do not graduate future millionaires or produce patentable research, defenders of the humanities need to take their case to university administrators, boards of regents, state legislators, and the general public. At their best, the above examples attempt to convince these groups. At their worst, they are mere catechesis, attempting to convince people like me who already believe.

Are colleges like wines?

In America, each was once the near-exclusive preserve of wealthy, waspy elites but has more recently been democratized, marketed and made available to the middle and working classes. Though access to both of these complex goods is now universal, it is widely supposed that in both cases price tracks quality, such that the cost of a bottle of Dom Perignon or four years’ tuition at Brown is worth it: the product is better than one from a cheaper brand.

The problem is that when it comes to wine, price has little to do with quality, once quality is evaluated in truly blind taste tests. As Robin Goldstein shows in the book, The Wine Trials 2011 (which Goldstein co-edited with Alexis Herschkowitsch and Tyce Walters), Dom Perignon lost out in blind taste trials – including trials involving food and wine professionals – to the $12-a-bottle Domaine Ste. Michelle Brut. To Goldstein, what you’re really buying when you pay $150 for a bottle of Dom is the experience of owning and consuming something expensive. Buying Dom puts you in elite company: not just wealthy, but tastefully-yet-conspicuously wealthy.

Like wines, colleges are rated obsessively and vary widely in cost, and their quality is hard to pin down precisely, as many subjective elements are in play. Goldstein and his colleagues have developed a way to evaluate wines solely on what should be their most important aspect: how they taste. I wonder if a similar approach could be developed for colleges. If so, would it also bring to light some cheaper, lesser-regarded colleges that deliver high quality?

The state of the (liberal) arts

Will the liberal arts always be central to university education?  Are they now?  Certainly, they are becoming less central to SUNY-Albany, where several language and arts departments are being pruned (actually, made to wither and die, by executive decision) to save money.  It's not unreasonable to think that their roles will diminish at similar institutions, too.  The more apocalyptic among us might think that we are living in the last days, that this generation (of humanities professors) will not pass before it sees the last of their departments closed down.  Maybe that's going too far, but it is hard to look at the current state of the American university and think that the liberal arts have a bright future.  In fact, I take for granted that they don't.

Am I too pessimistic?  Perhaps the liberal arts are not dying, but merely changing.  Prophets of decline are easy to dismiss, in large part because they have so long been with us.  Perhaps the barbarians have simply always been at the gates, and they always end up being converted and setting up peacefully outside the castle.  The liberal arts have lasted this long, so why not assume they'll continue to last, if under a different, higher-tech form?