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Higher education is suffering on many fronts. Even as we decry government interference, most of us in academia agree that reform is needed. The sticker price for college is too high; the college admission process is out of kilter; fundraising has become disconnected from educational needs; faculty are focused primarily on research and publication at the expense of teaching; students are more concerned with landing well-paying jobs than learning to think with subtlety and discrimination.
Having spent more than 40 years as a professor (10 as a dean), I make this diagnosis from the vantage point of experience.
At the core of the problem, as I see it, is a lack of perspective. We have lost sight of what it means to be educated amid a clutter of academic bureaucracy and competing interests. We need to establish a unified general education program for undergraduates—a set of courses that can guide a student’s development as a discerning individual and member of society. This aspect of higher education went by the wayside some time ago as faculty became pressured to concentrate on specialized research and as students began to see college as a credentialing mechanism rather than a site for intellectual and character development. General education also suffered as it became harder to determine what work should be studied and how the material assigned should be discussed.
Yet general education now seems a crucial missing piece in the college experience. I am convinced that if we give students a solid common grounding in important works and ideas, other problems will begin to correct themselves.
Admittedly, there are pitfalls to this effort. How do we choose texts that reflect “the best which has been thought and said,” as the 19th-century critic Matthew Arnold put it? How do we make these texts fit a unified curriculum? And how do we find faculty who can teach them effectively in small discussion groups? There is the additional problem that many so-called great works have come under fire for being complicit in the sins of Western culture.
Yet all of these difficulties are remediable if there is a will on the part of the administration to address them. This is the rationale for a number of initiatives currently underway throughout the country. The Teagle Foundation, which describes itself as a “catalyst for the improvement of teaching and learning in the arts and sciences,” is spearheading many of these efforts. Headed by Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia University, where a general education “core” has long been in existence, the Teagle Foundation now provides grant money to many institutions for general education programs with a particular focus on reviving the humanities and developing civic knowledge and judgment. American, Purdue, Stanford and Vanderbilt Universities, Bard and Ursinus Colleges, and my home institution, Drexel University, among others, have received Teagle grants for this purpose.
In another initiative, Roosevelt Montás, a Teagle Foundation board member, has been hired by Bard College to lead a new center promoting general education reform. Montás is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021), and, as this title implies, is devoted to bringing great books back into the college curriculum.
Other colleges are reviewing their undergraduate course requirements and trying to introduce general education programs that are not tied to ideology or to rigid disciplinary perspectives. But what should these programs teach? I believe it makes sense to begin with great works in the Western tradition. This narrows the field and allows for a focus on work that has shaped U.S. institutions and values. If we want to foster cultural unity, this work deserves to come first, with texts from other traditions introduced in subsequent courses to provide a broader perspective.
A necessary premise is that great works in any tradition are not perfect, that one can learn from their flaws as well as their strengths but that reverence for genius should come before the critique of shortcomings. The humanities have languished, I believe, owing to a decline in the sense of wonder in what is studied—the sense that the best works uplift us and inspire our best impulses. Great work should, first and foremost, promote a sense of wonder at what human beings are capable of.
Some possible texts used or proposed in the first phase of a general education program might include Plato’s Republic, Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, William Shakespeare’s King Lear, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Emily Dickinson’s poems, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.
These works lend themselves to in-depth and wide-ranging discussion. A student who reads them with an engaged professor and then talks with peers and other faculty about them will emerge an educated person as Socrates might define it: someone who knows that they are relatively ignorant but wants to learn more. The specific books chosen are less important—for each of the suggested titles above, one could substitute others—than the fact that they are capable of generating wonder at their imaginative reach and craftsmanship, and that they are read in common across the university and discussed informally outside of class as well as more analytically in class.
I should add that the key to a successful general education is getting the best faculty on board to teach the chosen texts. By “best” here, I do not mean those most expert in the subject matter but rather those who are versatile and flexible teachers, able to grapple with work outside their field and inspire students to participate. This can be a challenge, since successful faculty these days tend to be focused on their research and resent being assigned introductory undergraduate courses. Yet universities can offer incentives to entice our best professors to teach in general education programs, which would go a long way toward making these courses desirable to students.
I am convinced that faculty members from any discipline, given the chance to teach great works in a seminar context, will come away invigorated and that students, in turn, will learn the pleasures of reading and discussion. This could help with retention, a problem that many colleges wrestle with, and with fundraising, as these courses may be the ones remembered most fondly after graduation. Having devised and taught in a general education curriculum, I can vouch for how much fun these courses are to teach and how hungry students are for in-depth discussion of big ideas.
A well-designed general education curriculum will help revitalize the humanities and counter the dehumanizing effects of social media and artificial intelligence. Instructors would, ideally, ban computers and phone use in the classroom, creating an intellectual space that exists apart from the technological cacophony outside of it.
General education must be our initial focus as we think about academic reform. We need to convince administrators, who tend to concentrate on short-term, bottom-line goals, that investing in this area will strengthen their institutions in the long run. It will clarify their academic mission, realign their priorities and support the joy of teaching and learning that should be central to a university education.
