Fri 7 Aug, 2009
“A Texas-Sized Defeat for ‘Western Civilization’”
5:25 pm Comments (6) Filed under: Arts and CultureTags: Education, Great Books, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Rob Koons, University
My college friend Rob Koons was putting together a concentration on “Western Civilization and American Institutions” at the University of Texas, but he got the plugged pulled on him in a manner that was not only unceremonious but also confused, contradictory, and educationally unwise.
He learned some lessons from the experience, including:
Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a “distribution” standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences.
The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called “liberal knowledge” have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, “Whose ethics?” As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.
The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.
Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda.
This is further evidence that something is wrong with the American university. I’ll have more to post on this early next week.
Hat Tip: Divine Conspiracy Blog
This is completely consistent with the trend I noted in the “Sam Harris” post. A trend which has attracted the attention of much better writers than I and from whom I learned about it. Here is something from Dorothy L. Sayers “Lost Tools of Learning” presented as a speech in 1947.
http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html
Of course, in Sayers’ time it hadn’t achieved the penetration it has today, but the signs were there for any who cared to look. As your friend notes in his article, most don’t care to look, in fact their interest is in preventing others from looking.
Seriously, if I had children today I would think twice before consigning them to the tender mercies of modern “education”. Here’s another article. I can’t comment on the quality of the survey (my previous observation about “survey shows” reporting still stands), but based upon my own interaction with post secondary graduates, it can’t be too inaccurate.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=110009000
There may be problems with the Koons situation at UT, or the UT curriculum, but to characterize UT’s curriculum as
is absurd in the light of http://www.utexas.edu/ugs/core/requirements/2008-2010
Hi, Paul, long time no see!
I’m wondering, what do all those course numbers represent? I’m not in a position to do that research right now. The bare number list provides no information with respect to whether this constitutes an Uncurriculum or not. The sheer number of options would tend to support the Uncurriculum view.
If you check out note 4 it seems to corroborate the uncurriculum.
[...] professor of philosophy and government at the University of Texas (part of the organizing group for this sadly torpedoed initiative) and a strong Christian leader. This book covers much the same topics as Morrow’s, but [...]
From http://registrar.utexas.edu/catalogs/ug08-10/ch12/ug08.cr12c.m-uts.html#mathematics-m
I have a fairly narrow point here, only that the mere presence of a choice for students from selected classes doesn’t mean a lack of structure and order, an Uncurriculum. I see absolutely nothing wrong with offering the choices above in fulfillment of one of the *requirements* of graduating from UT.
One might argue that students should, for instance, read Socrates before Amy Tan, and maybe that is part of Koons’ point, but it’s not good to get all complaints about a curriculum jumbled up, although if one gets fired, I can imagine a lot of jumbling is going to result.
His comment about a trend away from required sequences in the major raises my eyebrows. Specifics would be interesting, I’d make a small bet that it’s not much of a trend, it would run counter to the vast majority of everything I’ve seen in my 25 years of teaching in universities.