What's It All About? : Part 2

In my prior blog posting I had intended to discuss the notion that universities are all about the students, and instead, talked about everything but that. To be generous, every roundabout eventually leads to an exit.

Campus curmudgeon P.F. Kluge.

When I was in college, an alum and part-time creative writing professor, P.F. Kluge, chose to live in a freshman dorm. A safer form of embedded journalism (with vomit rather than explosive projectiles being the only obstacle), his aim was to write an expose of his alma mater.

The book, Alma Mater, came out as the college President was ending his two-decade long term. Usually a gentle man, at our senior dinner everyone could tell that President Phil Jordan was angry (and not just because a week earlier students had burned his cardboard likeness in a massive bonfire).

The place he had dedicated a life to was snubbed by Kluge as "the second best Italian restaurant in town" and as a lower tier academic institution, already demurred by its non East Coast setting, where "every kid's a winner."

"For God's sake," he roared, "is this Kenyon College or Kluge College?" ... which then led to everyone chanting one or the other, with no clear winner as the two choices sounded nearly alike. "And by the way," I am almost certain he went on to say, "there are NO jobs. So tough luck for all of you graduates." 

Kluge felt that compared to his college days on the hill, the institution now embraced a milquetoast mentality. Students got away with everything. Faculty were friends you could call by their first name rather than icons of intellectualism. The college was a pit stop, a finishing school, a temporary oasis until real life. And the students.

Oh the students were coddled and cared for rather than shaken into a higher form of consciousness. He called this phenomenon "Kamp Kenyon" and wrote about it about ten years after the book was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

At current prices, we’re more than ever obliged to deliver the goods, to turn out English majors who don’t regard the apostrophe as an unidentified flying object. This we attempt to do, at Kenyon College, and often we succeed. But the obligation to challenge is matched by another demand: to accommodate. And this has led to another institution, a burgeoning case of mission creep, something that is called Kamp Kenyon.

The Huffington Post named Kenyon College one of the nation's friendliest, an accolade that no doubt would suggest to some that accommodating students far outranked academics.

Ironically, Kluge hinted, by focusing too much on the students, Kenyon, and institutions of higher learning in general, had actually abandoned their true missions: teaching, inspiring, passing on the thrill of knowledge.

Here’s the problem. Kenyon College is about challenging and testing students, Kamp Kenyon is about accommodating clients. Kenyon College keeps students busy, Kamp Kenyon makes them happy. Kenyon Colleges trades in requirements, Kamp Kenyon in appeals that become entitlements. Kenyon College has rules, to which it makes rare exceptions. Kamp Kenyon trades in excuses which become the rule.

Much like some college presidents wanted to keep higher education away from the marketplace, Kluge wanted to keep higher education away from too much outside influence---and creature comforts. Alas, even in a small, hard to find Gothic enclave hugged by cornfields, there was no escape. (To read Kluge's "love story" for the college, or perhaps his apology, check out his excellent novel Gone Tomorrow.) Keep in mind, all of this well intentioned hang wringing happened a decade before the onslaught of social networking and mobile devices.

Beet is a modern campus satire.

In Roger Rosenblatt's satire, Beet: A Novel, the longer-term consequences of a system of higher education run by the inmates becomes clear. Here's a passage taken from a Washington Post book review:

These aspects of academia are so well pre-satirized in real life that it's a challenge to exaggerate them, but Rosenblatt pigs out with one satiric observation after another. Beet College offers "Native American Crafts and Casino Studies; the Sensitivity and Diversity Council; the Fur and Ivory Audiovisual Center; Ethnicity, Gender and Television Studies; Little People of Color; Humor and Meteorology; Bondage Studies; Serial Killers of the Northwest; Wiccan History." This is the kind of campus that awarded "a plaster-of-paris bust of Rosie O'Donnell" to the male professor most sensitive to women's issues, but then refused to let him into the meeting because he was a man. 

Is college today simply a fine dining experience?

With even Harvard, a College with the most competitive admissions process in the universe, awarding over 20% of students A's, perhaps college has simply become a fine dining experience, where a student's every whim is immediately satisfied by white gloved waiters.

One undergrad even wrote an essay in Harvard Magazine suggesting that Harvard should be harder. (My suggestion: Come over to the engineering school and delve into our courses. Or take Math 55.)

As mentioned, there is a troubling irony that as colleges and universities strive to meet the demands of their students (the top of my inverse pyramid in the last blog), or in the words of our own dean, attempt to "put teaching and learning first", that the educational experience can be diluted.

Imagine instead, as Robert Hutchins did, The University of Utopia. A place focused only on higher learning (the wonderful tagline used in a Northeastern University marketing blitz a few years back.). Hutchins' wrote:

“Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.”

That's not the Four Season's; it's a BU dorm.

One may accuse me of cynicism, but Hutchins' Baconian-inspired idealism is not likely to take hold. The $100 million sports complexes, five star accommodations like those at Boston University (nicer than most hotels), vegan dining options, courses on happiness, and so on, are not going away.

Kluge's simpler, "real" college experience is a dream permanently deferred and best for novels. (A more eye opening view of college days of the past can be found in Philip Roth's Indignation---the anti-campus novel).

With the students apparently winning, has higher education lost?

Based upon my experience of helping to develop a new engineering-focused college admissions tour this summer, I think there is a different, more upbeat, way of looking at things. Yes, it is all about the students*---but with that lovely little asterisk at the end.

Our new tour, in draft stage, was developed with the generous help of a recent graduate in computer science, Neena Kamath '11 (now a project manager at Microsoft). Neena, in fact, began giving the tours on her own due to demand by students and parents who wished to know more about science and engineering at Harvard. (Imagine a gift like that for a public relations professional.)

During a "mock" tour with our dean and other administrators, Neena talked about the traditional Harvard experience, the Yard, the house system, the Harry Potteresque dining experience in Annenberg; academics; interactions with faculty; and the basic bread-and-butter of student life.

Her equal focus, however, was on what some might consider all the "extras" that get in the way of traditional classroom learning. Namely: research in the lab; Hack Nights; Robocup competitions in Turkey; summer internships; starting companies; going abroad; networking with future employers; engaging with alumni; varsity sports and intramural sports; ski trips with faculty and lab mates; concerts; using digital resources; living in Cambridge/Boston; volunteering; and so on.

A Harvard HackNight doesn't look like traditional learning.

It became clear that for her, there was not much of a distinction between what happened inside and outside of the classroom. Meaning, everything was part of being at student at Harvard---and everything offered an opportunity for learning, knowledge, and growth.

Harvard extended in ways that I could not even imagine, well beyond even the extensive campus that flanks the Charles river.

Despite advising freshman for five years, I suddenly realized that I really did not know what it was like to be a student in the 21st-century. That also led me to believe that many others who work in and write about academia (even those with noble intentions) may not know either.

So, a more accurate statement may be: universities are all about the student experience. And that experience is shaped by other students, faculty, administrators, the physical campus, resources, and outside activities. The relationship among all of those things should be a constant push-and-pull, rather than an idee fixe. And with social networking, online learning, and e-books---oh my!--- any higher ed utopia is going to be a moving target.

The insight that my campus experience is not the same as a student's experience may seem incredibly obvious, but only by hearing Neena's perspective on the tour, did it suddenly make sense.

Thus, it's only fair then to end with a profound student insight about the college experience:

"It's not at all what I expected it would be, but it's awesome."

- Olga Zinoveva '12, computer science concentrator