Harry R. Lewis. Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2006.
I could still remember I picked up a book from my sister's desk several years ago. It was Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987). This classic on the failure of American higher education has drawn me to the present book, Lewis' Excellence without a Soul, which I would not have had the chance to read if not via an email from my institution. Lewis' book, in some way a forceful critic on the former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who was alleged to have sold Harvard's soul to the devil (market force?), striking to me in the first place, in particular its preface. It states:
"The fundamental job of undergraduate education is to turn eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds into twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds, to help them grow up, to learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose for their lives, and to leave college as better human beings." (p. xii)
"to talk seriously to students about their development into people of good character who will know that they owe something to society for the privileged education they have received." (p. xii)
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In the following, I would quote passages/sentences of great interest and importance to me.
"in some ways Harvard is unique; it is the oldest university in America, and so it has set many standards, for good or ill, and even among icons it holds, in the public imaingation, a distinctive preeminence." (p. xiii)
"[students] are more likely to remember a brilliant instructor than what that instructor taught." (p. xiv)
"College, at its best, is where students start to understand themselves and to find ideals and objectives for their lives." (p. xiv)
"Classroom pedagogy is one aspect of teaching, but so are the purposes and structure of the curriculum and the perennial issues of advising and student-faculty contact" (p. 2)
"we teach the humanities to help students understand what it means to be human...students from families with little money may not share the assumptions that well-to-do families have about the purpose of education" (p. 3)
"Professors are hired as scholars and teachers, not as mentors of values and ideals to the young and confused." (p. 4)
"The relationship of the student to the college is increasingly that of a consumer to a vendor of expensive goods and services." (p. 4-5)
"Something is wrong with our educational system when so many graduating Harvard seniors see consulting and investment banking as their best options for productive lives." (p. 6)
"'The demands of productivity,' a humanities editor says, 'are leading to the production of much more nonsense.'" (p. 9)
"A certain level of distinction is normal at Harvard, and it is both enjoyed and ignored." (p. 12)
"In a competivitive environment, in which the university wants the best students from the entire world's population and the best faculty from all the world's Ph.D.'s, public image has become much more important than when universities relied on self-reproducing pools of students and professors." (p. 14)
"Universities were never truly ivory towers, and they should not be; they are privileged with independence and public support because they serve society. Thus public scrutiny is apporpriate and important. But one irony of the current climate at Harvard is that as the school has adjusted to relentless scrutiny from external media, the institution that historically provided 'public' scrutiny, the alumni-elected Board of Overseers, has become carefully managed and quite docile." (p. 15)
"A Princeton professor I know quipped that the fact that my most successful student was a dropout confirmed his theory that Harvard's value added is negative - the more Harvard education you have, the less far you go in life." (p. 22)
"[B]readth and freedom in academia are like lower taxes in politics - it is hard to be against them, even if they come at the cost of important sacrifices." (p. 25)
"[Ph.D. graduates] risk not being taken seriously as promising academics if they give voice to thoughts of going into business or law. Professors can help them get where they are supposed to be going, but will rarely help them figure out if they want to go there...professors will often prefer graduate students who, like themselves, are devoted single-mindedly to learning, who are focused on knowing as much as possible about a limited domain, and who are skilled at hiding any personal agonies." (p. 47)
"General education was not, the report said [General Education in a Free Society, published in 1945; known as the the 'Red Book'], education in knowledge in general, whatever that might mean. General education had a specific objective. It looked to the student's 'life as a responsible human beings and citizen' and to certain 'traits of mind and ways of looking at man and the world.' General education had a point of view.' (p. 53)...report by the Student Council...'it is in a period of confusion and catastrophe rather than in times of glittering prosperity or preoccupation with material problems that students must think deeply about permanent values, and about the future of civilization itself.'" (p. 55)
"In the absence of any pronuncement that anything is more important than anything else for Harvard students to know, Harvard is declaring loudly that one can be an educated person in the twenty-first century without knowing anything about genomes, chromosomes, or Shakespeare." (p. 62)
"It is odd irony to think that Harvard should be engaged in a competition with other universities to send away more students who have so eagerly sought to attend - especially since a number of college with robust study-abroad programs adopted them in part because of housing shortages, limtied academic opportunities, or locations in sleepy towns that do not hold the interest of their students for four consecutive years" (footnote, p. 67)
"I have found parents and students alike skeptical that those with the privilege of attending one of the world's finest universities should learn 'global competency' by substituting experiences abroad or courses at inferior universities for the opportunity to study, think, and debate with others at Harvad." (p. 71)
"[Students without ability to cooperate and communicate] had been conditioned to a particular way of pursuing excellence - making sure others did not profit from their excellence." (p. 75) original emphasis
"A good course is not merely a well-taught course, any more than a good book is simply a well-written book. Good courses have good concepts behind them. A student can come away from a course enlightened, even if the lecturer's delivery is imperfect." (p. 81)
"An 1878 survey of American college concluded, 'It is as original thinkers and authors that the majority of college professors attain a reputation; but the qualities that fit one for pursuing original investigations...may unfit him for...the teacher's task. It is, therefore, oftentimes true that a great scholar, of national reputation, is only an indifferent teacher.' Conversely, great teachinig can be viewed in academic circles as a kind of performance art, fine if you can do it but raising doubts about the teacher's seriousness as a scholar." (p. 83)
"[one young graduate said] I didn't learn much that I could not have learned on my own. The most important things I learned were from managing the Quincy House Grill." (p. 88)
"[a technology employer explained] admission to Harvard and other top colleges was already a strong indicator of quality, and getting good grades, or at least not getting too may bad grades...confirmed that the student was not only smart but had worked steadily for four years without disruptive personal difficulties." (p. 139-40)
"The principal reason students don't work hard is that the work they are asked to do is not very interesting and has not been made to seem very important." (p. 142)
"[the parents said] 'We never knew what to do with her. You admitted her - she is your problem now." (p. 157)
"Today's consumer culture, in which the college's job is to make its students happy rather than to educate them, threatens the old idea that the disciplinary system should make sutdents into better people." (p. 161)
"A Chinese student might be excused of plagiarism because it is endemic in his native culture." (p. 162)
"The careerism of undergraduates has been much lamented, especially by humanists. The humanities, because they are the least obviously useful of the subjects taught in college, are the biggest casualties of the market-model university. Students choosing courses for occupational reasons tend toward the social sciences and the sciences." (p. 203)
"Many students go into consulting and investment banking as a result - jobs that offer money, utilize students' social and analytical skills, and have come to be known as markers of success...But an economy in which all the smart people were consultatns or investment bankers would not last very long." (p. 205)
"The purpose of a concentration is not to teach anything in particular of substance but to teach certain 'habits of mind'; 'to educate students as independent, knowledgeable, rigorous, and creative thinkers.'" (p. 210)
"A liberal education in the sense Harvard now uses the term is simply an education not meant to make students employable. Undergraduate educated should not be too advanced or too specizlized, nor should it include courses that would be helpful in the world business. Harvard's image of the liberally educated graduate mirrors the aristocratic ideal of the amateur athlete. Becoming too skilled any any one thing, so skilled that a graduate could make a living doing it, is distasteful. Students are better off being broadly educated generalists - though not much breadth can be demanded because students would resist any requirement." (p. 253-4)
"Professors, like ideal graduates, should possess knowledge in many things as well as expertise in one. That ideal should inform judgements of faculty excellence. Professors should be able to teach what students need to learn. If faculty members can't teach what needs to be taught, they should be able to learn it so they can teach it." (p. 265-6)
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BTW, it should be worth listing its content here:
1. Choice and Direction
2. Meritocracy and Citizenship
3. Contact, Competition, Cooperation
4. The Eternal Enigma: Advising
5. Why Grades Go Up
6. Evaluation Is Educational
7. Independence, Responsibility, Rape
8. Students and Money
9. College Athletes and Money
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Pilar Mendoza' review, The Review of Higher Education 30.4 (2007) 486-487.In view of Lewis' persistent favor to the English tradition of liberal education, Mendoza commented: "Liberal education has been associated historically with high social status and with those who were "liberated" from the need to use knowledge to earn a living. However, this view asserts the superiority of liberal education over vocational education. " (p. 487)
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