Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
by Derek Bok
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Book Summary Information
Author: Derek BokEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-12-26
ISBN: 0691136181
Number of pages: 434
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Book Reviews of Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Book Review: One Individual's View
Summary: 4 Stars
Derek Bok's books are always interesting and always reliable, within certain parameters. They are anchored in research; every observation, including the uncontroversial ones, are footnoted. The facts and data are always there and they are always interesting. And the research is complemented by experience--decades as president of Harvard, after all.
So where is the problem? There is no problem, but there is an issue and Bok's recommendations in this book must be seen in light of it: he is, at base, a law school professor. This serves him very well when, for example (in another of his books) he is writing about the threats to the modern university of commercialization. He can expertly state the history, the precedents, the advantages and the liabilities. In this book, however, he is talking about undergraduate education, when he spent a large portion of his career teaching in a top, post-baccalaureate professional school.
One example: he argues for engaged learning, i.e., students actively participating in class, studying problems and issues, discussing them among themselves and hashing them out in a small class taught by a member of the regular faculty. He is very cool on lecturing, arguing that little is learned in that way and that most of it is forgotten anyway. He is, in fact, cool on `content' in class. At this stage in our civilization there is too much to be learned. Hence, the students should obtain the content for themselves and then, actively discuss the issues in class. As Professor Kingsfield said, "You teach yourselves the law; I teach you how to think like a lawyer."
And that's fine in law school, but lecturing has been common for nearly a millennium for a reason. Some material (in a basic science class, e.g.) is better conveyed through didactic instruction. Some material requires the help of an experienced scholar because the students will require contextual information to understand it (the thought of Wittgenstein, e.g. or the multiple meanings of `romanticism').
Bok's focal point of experience is (as with all of us) both personal and unique. He comes from a distinguished legal family; his wife's parents were both Nobel laureates. He attended Stanford and Harvard. He has taught in and been president of an institution that is unique in American higher education. He is used to teaching students who are very gifted, highly motivated and very well prepared. His notions of a classroom experience or the potential nature of a classroom experience will be very different from those of individuals teaching at regional, public 4-year institutions or community colleges.
What does the book argue? Bok positions himself, explicitly, between the earlier, conservative critics who were troubled by the erosion of general education, the study of the so-called great books and such issues as political correctness and affirmative action and the contemporary public voices lamenting the rise in costs, the indebtedness which students carry and the demand for more vocational education. He focuses upon a number of things which we should do far better than we do, e.g., preparing students for citizenship, developing multiple interests beyond the purely vocational, fostering critical thinking skills, inculcating a `global' perspective and a high comfort level with `diversity', aiding moral development and honing students' skills in both written communication and public speaking.
It is very interesting that (in a book focusing on underperformance) he spends very, very little time talking about such things as grade inflation or `expectations'. Fundamentally, students are learning less because they are not asked to learn more and they are graded ever more generously for accomplishing less. Bok's conservative Government department colleague, Harvey Mansfield, now gives his students two grades--the grade that they actually earned and the grade that the Harvard ethos would now demand.
There is very little in the book concerning students' lifelong reading habits or the cultivation of curiosity and virtually nothing that I recall concerning the involvement of undergraduate students in faculty research. While there is a body of educational research which he marshals to make his points, Bok acknowledges that educational research is often squishy and is unlikely to convince the faculty. And this is correct. Hence, he recommends local studies, more pertinent to the individual institution. And that is correct. However, the culture from school to school is vastly different, as he notes, with harsh comments, e.g., for the engineers (some of whose skills--in writing, e.g.--even regress during college).
In the areas where he has recommendations (e.g. public speaking skills) he displays impressive knowledge of the `state of the issue', the `state of the research' and so on; for the issues which he chooses to highlight his voice is informed, reliable, clear and articulate, if not impassioned. He is not impassioned because he accepts two major constraints which, he believes, he is powerless to change: a) the wishes of the faculty and b) the wishes of the students.
He accepts the notion of the student as consumer and says that colleges must accede to students' wishes if they are to maintain market share, enjoy deep applicant pools and, inevitably, solid USNews rankings. However, if there is any institution in the country which is positioned to go a separate way here, it is Harvard. Harvard could hire faculty capable of teaching anything in any way. Harvard could offer students what it believed to be an authentic, enduring, coherent educational experience and say, `take it or leave it'. And if Harvard did that, all of the institutions which aspired to be like Harvard would follow its lead.
He is also, it must be said, very naïve with regard to specific issues. He talks about the `great books approach' and says that while it actually is the only approach which shows concrete, positive results, those results might be due to the fact that the instruction was conducted actively rather than passively and in small classes. However, he says, the `great books approach', previously associated with Chicago and, to a degree, Columbia and now principally associated with St. John's in Maryland and New Mexico, has never been widely adopted because the students don't want it. St. John's attracts less than 1,000 applicants and admits ¾ of them, many of whom matriculate elsewhere.
There is a great difference between a doctrinaire great books approach (in order to learn Chemistry we will read Lavoisier) and a coherent curriculum which exposes students to great writing and historically-consequential writing (among many other things). Should students hold a baccalaureate degree in the liberal arts who cannot give a simple explanation of the thought of Freud, Marx, or Adam Smith? Should every educated person have read Shakespeare? Should she or he know the meaning of a `Faustian bargain' or the connotations of the word `spartan'? "Cultural literacy" (generally associated with grammar- and high school education, but also a part of general education at the college level) is very different from the `great books approach'. The problem now is that no one wants to define that `literacy'. The result is that, as Wanda Red writes as an Amazon reviewer of Bok's book, "a student could graduate from the ideal university, described in this book, without having taken a single course that studied the world before 1900."
For me, the problem is that the ivy league in general and Harvard in particular set(s) the bar for all aspiring institutions. Their students, however, come, in many cases, from wealth, privilege and top preparatory schools. They are also gifted. They already have a great deal of cultural literacy as well as social capital. First-generation college students, minority students, working-class students, immigrant students often do not. However, if Harvard acts as if a serious program of general education, with specific requirements, is unnecessary, others will as well. In one very interesting section of the book, Bok discusses the benefits of vocational vs. liberal arts education in the workplace. Vocational ed is very useful for the first ten years. In the next ten years, however, when promotions are at stake, the liberal arts graduate has the advantage. For the executive boardroom, neither--Bok argues--has an identifiable advantage. Without a solid liberal arts education (including a coherent general education component), the minority student, the first-generation college student, the working class student and the immigrant student will all be at a considerable disadvantage and the (ultimately shortsighted) demands for university education that is increasingly vocational will accelerate and, increasingly, be heeded.
Summary of Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, former Harvard President Derek Bok examines how much progress college students actually make toward widely accepted goals of undergraduate education. His conclusions are sobering. Although most students make gains in many important respects, they improve much less than they should in such important areas as writing, critical thinking, quantitative skills, and moral reasoning. Large majorities of college seniors do not feel that they have made substantial progress in speaking a foreign language, acquiring cultural and aesthetic interests, or learning what they need to know to become active and informed citizens. Overall, despite their vastly increased resources, more powerful technology, and hundreds of new courses, colleges cannot be confident that students are learning more than they did fifty years ago.
Looking further, Bok finds that many important college courses are left to the least experienced teachers and that most professors continue to teach in ways that have proven to be less effective than other available methods. In reviewing their educational programs, however, faculties typically ignore this evidence. Instead, they spend most of their time discussing what courses to require, although the lasting impact of college will almost certainly depend much more on how the courses are taught.
In his final chapter, Bok describes the changes that faculties and academic leaders can make to help students accomplish more. Without ignoring the contributions that America's colleges have made, Bok delivers a powerful critique--one that educators will ignore at their peril.
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