How to get a college education - Back to School

On an optimistic note, I think that most or all of Post-Modernism, the Affirmative Action/Multicultural ethos, and the Victimologies will soon pass from the scene. The great institutions have a certain sense of self-preservation. Harvard almost lost its Law School to a Marxist faculty faction, but then cleaned house. Tenure will keep the dead men walking for another twenty years or so, but then we will have done with them.

But for the time being, what these fads have done to the liberal-arts and social-sciences curriculum since around 1968 is to clutter it with all sorts of nonsense, nescience, and distraction. The entering student needs to be wary lest he waste his time and his parents' money and come to consider all higher education an outrageous fraud. The good news is that the wise student can still get a college education today, even at Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

Of course the central question is one of telos, or goal. What is the liberal-arts education supposed to produce? Once you have the answer to this question, course selection becomes easy.

I mean to answer that question here. But first, I find that undergraduates and their third-mortgaged parents appreciate some practical tips, such as: Select the "ordinary" courses. I use ordinary here in a paradoxical and challenging way. An ordinary course is one that has always been taken and obviously should be taken -- even if the student is not yet equipped with a sophisticated rationale for so doing. The student should be discouraged from putting his money on the cutting edge of interdisciplinary cross-textuality.

Thus, do take American and European history, an introduction to philosophy, American and European literature, the Old and New Testaments, and at least one modern language. It would be absurd not to take a course in Shakespeare, the best poet in our language. There is art and music history. The list can be expanded, but these areas every educated person should have a decent knowledge of --with specialization coming later on.

I hasten to add that I applaud the student who devotes his life to the history of China or Islam, but that too should come later. America is part of the narrative of European history.

If the student should seek out those "ordinary" courses, then it follows that he should avoid the flashy come-ons. Avoid things like Nicaraguan Lesbian Poets. Yes, and anything listed under "Studies," any course whose description uses the words "interdisciplinary," "hegemonic," "phallocratic," or "empowerment," anything that mentions "keeping a diary," any course with a title like "Adventures in Film."

Also, any male professor who comes to class without a jacket and tie should be regarded with extreme prejudice unless he has won a Nobel Prize.

ALL these are useful rules of thumb. A theoretical rationale for a liberal-arts education, however, derives from that telos mentioned above. What is such an education supposed to produce? A philosophy professor I studied with as an undergraduate had two phrases he repeated so often that they stay in the mind, a technique made famous by Matthew Arnold.