Is the Academic Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?

This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Jane Shaw, executive vice president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Since I joined the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy last fall, I have learned a lot about higher education in North Carolina. Some of it is deeply disturbing.

Just this week a new graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill told me how she entered college eagerly, anticipating exciting intellectual challenges. As a freshman she took a history course, “The World Since 1945.” Whenever she wrote something in her papers favorable to free markets or private property rights, the grader (a graduate student) would highlight it as wrong or unsupported, and her grades were mostly Cs.

In response, she read the textbook more carefully and worked harder, but she still received Cs. Then she “got it.” She stopped being analytical and began writing simplistically about current politics, inserting statements the teaching assistant would like, such as a condemnation of the Bush presidency. Her grades rose to B pluses and A minuses.

It’s hard to know how typical such experiences are. Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, was just fired for plagiarism. He first received notoriety, though, for his outspoken political views. He wrote shortly after September 11, 2001, that the World Trade Center victims were “little Eichmanns” and thus deserved to die. In the recent paper “How Many Ward Churchills?” the American Council of Trustees and Alumni argues that Churchill represents “academe’s increasingly unapologetic ideological tilt.”

But there is another side to the university. In my 10 months in North Carolina I have found examples of true education.

What is true education? Certainly, it includes an immersion into what former education secretary William Bennett has called “the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience.” Here are three illustrations in North Carolina that bring students close to “the best”:

1. At East Carolina University, classics professor John Stevens and his associates are developing an interdisciplinary Great Books program.

The term “Great Books” refers to classical texts, by authors from Aristotle to Solzhenitsyn, that contributed the ideas underlying civilization today. A Great Books course was a staple at Columbia University in the 1930s, and scholars at the University of Chicago championed the idea. Adults in the 1940s and 1950s held discussion groups — in living rooms, not classrooms — on Great Books.

Today, a few schools, such as St. John’s College, make Great Books the centerpiece of education. But elsewhere few students experience the “close reading of original texts” that characterizes the programs. Studying Great Books is the most intense form of liberal education, and now, students at ECU have a chance to experience it.

2. At UNC-Chapel Hill students can obtain a minor in Christianity and Culture, an interdisciplinary program in the College of Arts and Sciences. Such a course of study is said to be unique among public universities, where Christianity is usually ignored or reviled.

“Our curriculum is designed not to influence or change students’ religious faith or practice, but to enhance their knowledge of the role of Christianity over time in the context of art, classics, literature, history, philosophy, politics, and sociology,” says Christian Smith, the program’s co-director and an adjunct professor of sociology.

3. A third bright spot is the Gerst Program in Political, Economic, and Humanistic Studies at Duke. Among other activities, the program sponsors a cluster of seminars for freshmen called “Visions of Freedom.” The idea is to understand how the concept of liberty has been interpreted differently and how these interpretations have affected history. Seminars cover such topics as: the defense of liberty (by authors such as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson): criticisms of liberty by Marxists-Leninists, fascists, and others; and the relationship of freedom and responsibility.

This program began with a gift from a Duke alumnus, Gary Gerst, who was unhappy about the dominance of left-wing ideologies on campus. The rigorous intellectual courses – chosen and developed by faculty – offer an antidote to that narrow-mindedness.

“Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring,” wrote the 18th–century writer Alexander Pope, warning against superficial education. Are students drinking deeply of knowledge? Yes, here and there. But many others are being deprived of that satisfaction — and stifled if they try to achieve it.