ACTA's Must-Reads

My name is Michael Pomeranz. I'm a recent graduate of Yale University. At Yale, I was fortunate to enroll in a program called Directed Studies. Founded just after the Second World War by faculty worried about the erosion even then of Yale's curriculum, Directed Studies has become a freshman-year-only, multi-course, writing-intensive, Great Books introduction to philosophy, history, politics, and literature. Each week, my classmates, professors, and I read three books, beginning with Plato and ending with Hannah Arendt. Each student wrote a paper each week. It was everything a general education should be: comprehensive, coherent, and introductory. It taught me to write. I still remember the first grade I received in college, on a paper about Herodotus and Thucydides: "79/C+/Organizational problems plague this paper." I improved, of course. I learned. That was the point of the class. It taught me. After a few semesters of choosing classes nearly at random from the course catalogue, my classmates would turn to me and say, "I wish I had done Directed Studies." We Directed Studies alumni knew we had something special. I attended a reunion of Directed Studies alumni at which Jose Cabranes, a federal appeals judge and a former trustee of Yale, among other things, called the choice to take Directed Studies the choice of the "thought-provoking over the merely self-affirming."

But self-affirming is what today's college curricula are. Every incentive on campus encourages students to deny the thought-provoking in stead of the easier, more comfortable, and, if you'll excuse the phrase, sexier classes. One that comes to mind, because it was offered with such fanfare every year, is the Yale history seminar "Shops and Shopping." That may be fine for an upper-level, narrow course on a specific subfield of the discipline, but it is not an essential foundation for learning. Further, because students who think they are "good" at history chose a course like this in lieu of, say, economics, they are not only allowed but encouraged when a conversation about how social security rewards and penalizes different workers differently merely to throw up their hands and say, "I'm not a numbers person." Professor Costrell elaborated on the particular problem of avoiding economics quite well.

What incentives pressure students away from a general education? On a campus where there are few or no general education requirements, a student taking a course outside of her familiarity -- that is, trying to learn something she does not know -- will find that most of her classmates are majors or specialists in the field. Her grades will suffer as a result. Her department will pressure her to take more classes in the department or in allied fields -- after all, the department will reason, she is not required to take these other classes, and the professors in the department quite understandably find their own subject much more interesting and relevant than wildly different fields. On a campus without formal general education requirements, the campus culture will articulate unofficial requirements. For example, parents and students will try to figure out which classes will best prepare the students vocationally, although President Boyle explained how that reasoning, if well meaning, is usually wrong. Similarly, students will attempt to catch the eye of employers and graduate schools taking a second or even third major or minor, stimulating a sort of arms race in subfields not appropriate for an undergraduate education. In short, schools that do not require a general education are not neutral in the question: they actually disadvantage students who "choose" a core.

The truth is that most students are no more likely to choose a general education in a cafeteria-style curriculum than we are to choose only leafy greens in our actual cafeterias. The first few semesters of college are difficult for any student, and especially for the 18-year old first-time, full-time students at the bricks-and-mortar colleges profiled in What Will They Learn? Students are often away from home for the first time, trying to adjust to that life and to make new friends, usually working to pay for tuition and, of course, working at the most rigorous schoolwork they have ever faced. To expect them to shoulder the additional burden of designing a curriculum is not only unreasonable; it is unfair.

I will not mention how trustees and administrations might use What Will They Learn? and its website, other than to say that I am a proud graduate of Yale, despite her grade; that I am very proud that Yale requires advanced foreign language, and rightly so -- although I found my language courses very difficult! -- because a proper understanding of another culture is impossible without familiarity with that culture's language; and that just as my grades went up from my initial C+, so I assume Yale's grades will go up after this initial evaluation.

I do want to say a few words about how What Will They Learn? and, in particular, the website can serve as a tool for students. First, for those students already in college, it makes a compelling case that the first few semesters should include survey courses in literature and American history or government, a thorough education in a foreign language and composition, and a college-level introduction to economics, mathematics, and physical or natural sciences. As Mr. Elfin pointed out, What Will They Learn? will become another important ranking system in the college education process.

Let me remind any of you who has not been recently an 18-year-old searching for a college, or the sister, grandmother, uncle, or nephew of an 18 year old searching for a college. The comparison tool on the website is an especially great function for comparing two or three or five or eight schools that a high school student might be considering. It compares graduation rates and tuition, all useful data, but first and foremost it considers the general education requirements. The things we use to compare colleges change: Student centers are unfunded, new groups founded, favorite courses have professors move on or are over-enrolled, freshman-year passions fade three weeks into class. But course requirements answer for the student the very sensible question she might have before choosing a college: What will I learn?

Finally, let me remind you all what may have been lost in the very interesting remarks by my three fellow panelists and in my remarks to this point, to wit, why students want a general education. A general education affords students a common language. When my chemistry major, pre-medical student, and engineer friends talk about even their most basic course work or technological interest, because I only really took one physical science course, I strain to recall high school biology and chemistry to keep up with what they're saying, and the truth is that in high school chemistry I was as often thinking about baseball practice as I was about covalent bonds. I have a friend who spent his entire college career avoiding writing papers for credit and, predictably, was totally lost when the discussion turned to any sort of argument advanced over a dozen pages. A general education allows us to talk to each other. A general education also introduces us to a field, which I was trying to get at earlier with my remark about Shops and Shopping. It may be an excellent course for someone familiar with popular history, but my friends in the engineering department really required a survey introduction to American history first. Finally, as Dean Lewis knows, the sort of enquiring young minds that seek a college education want a broad understanding of the world, and don't want their colleges to penalize them for seeking it.

In short, we want college education worthy of the name. What Will They Learn? helps us find it. Thank you.