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The global challenge for college curricula
Over the next few weeks, we will be featuring the writing of ACTA's intrepid class of summer interns. The below comes from Christopher B. Lacaria, a Robert Lewit Fellow in Education Policy at ACTA and a member of the class of 2009 at Harvard College, where he is studying early modern and medieval European history.--Charles Mitchell
In a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed, American Association of University Professors president Cary Nelson explained how the diverse and culturally eclectic curricula offered by many universities today yield practical benefit in the real world:
American business would in the end be better served by more culturally aware and culturally articulate graduates, graduates who could understand the dynamics of globalization, graduates who could understand the benefits and risks of globalization, graduates who could relate business opportunities to political realities here and elsewhere around the world would in fact be valuable graduates.
Prof. Nelson's admirable appreciation for such a multicultural and global education notwithstanding, he misses a crucial point: how can American college students aspire to international citizenship, when they apparently are ignorant of their civic responsibilities at home?
Despite AAUP's ostensible representation of the American professoriate, not all in the academy view their duty likewise. At an American Enterprise Institute conference co-sponsored by ACTA and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis, described a much more fundamental obligation for him and his fellow educators. American civic literacy, he forwards, should rank high among curricular priorities properly ordered:
In research universities, professors are selected and rewarded on the basis of their creativity and imagination, the novelty of their insights and of their approaches to knowledge. Universities need to be reminded that they have another role as well, to teach some of the things that are so important that they can too easily be taken for granted. And in fact, whenever a course on the United States presidency, or on constitutional law, is offered to undergraduates at Harvard, the enrollments are enormous.
Before launching into the international arena, American college students deserve a thorough rearing in their own institutions, history, and values--as Polonius admonishes his son Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, "to thine own self be true."
Perhaps this reminder would be superfluous to today’s academy had it had not long busied itself with cleansing the college canon of such authors, all in the name of "globalizing" education.
Posted by cmitchell on July 09, 2007 at July 9, 2007 12:01 PM
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Comments
After I read this little piece I looked at where the student was from, I expected from one of the types of colleges that offers the kind of education he seems to favor. No, to my surprise, he's Harvard class of 2009!
Here's a little friendly advice: If a research university like Harvard as described by Harry Lewis describes is not to your liking, do some homework before you start college and pick a school that is more to your liking! If you can get into Harvard, you can probably get into one of those other schools.
However, if you're hell-bent on going to Harvard, don't expect the rest of us to feel too sorry for you when it turns out not to be the kind of education you want!
Posted by: Mike at July 9, 2007 03:50 PM
Umm...please re-read that play, paying careful attention to the character of Polonius.
Posted by: Clem Malmborg at July 9, 2007 11:00 PM
It is a strange blind spot, indeed, that producing "more culturally aware and culturally articulate graduates" does not extend to graduates as well-versed in their own history and culture as they are in those of other nations. The self-loathing of much of contemporary academia is a subject worthy of serious scholarship. "Globalization" seems to function as a buzzword justifying dismissal of entire fields from proper academic consideration. The starkly anti-intellectual streak in colleges and universities is at once amusing and deeply worrisome.
Posted by: Federal Dog at July 10, 2007 10:22 AM