It is an honor to be here with you at Notre Dame. Notre Dame and I have a deeper tie than you might suspect. Early in their married life, my young parents lived in South Bend, and my mother left this town heavily pregnant with me. So the idea of me originated in this place. In childhood I learned of the formidable power of the Fighting Irish. In later life, I have learned of the comprehensive excellence of this university. In the past three years, I have served with Father Jenkins on the American Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences and, more recently, the Council of Presidents of the Atlantic Coast Conference. I have found him to be an eloquent leader who engages challenges of practice from a strong stand of principle—a worthy representative of this great school.
Let’s get down to business. I understand that the topic for this year’s Notre Dame Forum—“What do Notre Dame Graduates Need to Know?” — was chosen in concert with an ongoing campus project: a reconsideration of your core curricular requirements. I know a bit about this process. Before I became President of Duke, I was the Dean of Yale College, where I led just such an exercise. As you perform this self-assessment, if I could offer a word of wisdom, it would be this: do be idealistic, but don’t imagine that perfection is just around the corner. It’s the fate of every curriculum to slip from aspirational intentions into operational routines. For this reason, it’s good on occasion to look back from the rules to the ideals those rules tried to codify: as Socrates almost said, an unexamined curriculum is not worth teaching. Such self-examination has the capacity to produce a broad community of reflection across institutions that, in daily life, are broken up into divisions and departments, each pursuing its piece of education without overmuch regard for the whole. This can yield deep and lasting institutional benefits.
President Richard Brodhead and John T. McGreevy, Dean of Arts and Letters, discuss the importance of the humanities in higher education following Brodhead’s speech. Photos by Barbara Johnston / University of Notre Dame
Through an exercise like yours, I can also testify, requirements actually can be improved. What we can’t do is solve the problem of education at the level of the rules.
When I led the revision of the Yale curriculum, I learned that outstanding schools have devised the foundations of undergraduate education in many different ways. Brown had no fixed requirements. Columbia required enrollment in a common core of seminars based on great books. Yale required a certain distribution of courses while leaving students free to choose among hundreds of offerings that satisfied each requirement. Harvard proposed that its general education requirements be satisfied from a defined set of core courses.
If any one of these models were absolutely superior to any other, we would know it by an easy test: alumni of that school would be smarter than anyone else. But in practice, many models are capable of producing acceptable and even impressive results, and the differences among them seem as much differences of institutional personality as anything else. In my experience, when people set out to reform their individual natures, however strenuous the exercise, they always end up inventing something still recognizably themselves. The same truth holds for university self-studies. Mutatis mutandis, Brown is yet more Brown-like, Columbia more Columbia-like, Duke more Duke-like; and Notre Dame will emerge yet more Notre Dame-like from the exercise at hand. Alexander Pope got it right: “’Tis with our Judgments, as our Watches, none/Goes just alike, yet each believes his own.”
I am not arguing that the way college requirements are articulated doesn’t matter, still less that they can’t be updated and improved. My point is that it’s possible to engage in sometimes contentious group editing as if the phrasing of the rules would produce the desired result inside students’ minds, whereas at best, rules can only take us so far. As rules, a university’s requirements can only specify what a student can’t not do. Also, by virtue of their required nature, rules often inadvertently make the means take the place of the end. We have all had the experience of asking students what they want to study that term and having them rattle off the requirements they planned to meet, as if checking the boxes were the aim of education.
If a school doesn’t have a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement supporting its curriculum, if going to College X doesn’t mean entering into a force field that boosts each student’s will to learn, grow and discover, then the best rules in the world can only guarantee conformability of transcripts. With such a culture in place, many sets of rules can produce admirable results. Without it, we are tinkering with technicalities of compliance.
Having administered this dose of skepticism, I will say that, among the sets of college requirements I’ve read, Notre Dame’s already deserve high praise. This school isn’t afraid to say what range of powers an educated person should have. The rationales for your various requirements are thoughtful and eloquently expressed. Most impressively, instead of articulating high-flown ideals with little relation to the specialized offerings that count to fulfill them, you have a serious process for assuring that courses advance the educational goal they count toward, and for strengthening the learning mission of a course while leaving the content to the instructor. You’re starting from strength—so whatever else you do, don’t mess it up.
From here, it can’t be my job to say how to improve on your specifics. What I can do is to open out the horizon a bit, to look out to the emerging cultural landscape and the challenges it poses to liberal arts curricula.
One challenge will be obvious to all: the facile negativism now current about higher education itself. After the 2013 State of the Union address, the Obama administration issued report cards measuring cost of attendance, debt rates and completion rates for every institution of higher education. Virginia law now requires all institutions to post the starting salaries for their graduates broken down by college major, so parents can know what course of study leads to what result. Measures like this codify a suspicion that college may well be a scam, a product whose high cost is not matched by any real benefit. Anxieties about cost are inevitable given the economic insecurity we live with since the Great Recession; but in our day, this understandable concern is driving an increasingly impoverished vision of the nature of higher education’s value. The White House website may tell you the effective cost of attending Notre Dame or Indiana University or Ball State, and this is useful information, except that it leaves the impression that the value of a college education is identical to the price. The Virginia website makes it easy to calculate the benefit derived from attending any institution, provided you assume the benefit equals the salary paid by your first employer.
And it’s not just the mass public opinion reflected in state and national politics that shows this narrowing concept of education’s value. Even among parents keen to send their children to selective universities, we’ve seen the growth of a default attitude that the liberal arts have become a dubious luxury, wonderful in one’s own time but not advisable for one’s college-bound children, whose main requirement is to emerge employed.
In face of the utilitarianism that has become the fashion even among well-educated folk, the friends of higher education have a job to do. Without minimizing or ignoring economic realities, we need to say loud and clear what the value of such education actually consists of. Liberal arts education isn’t just a matter of requiring students to pay quick visits to many unrelated fields on their way to a diploma. This education aims to engage multiple forms of intelligence to create deep and enduring habits of mind, an active, versatile, integrative spirit that’s naturally disposed, when it comes upon a new fact or situation, to use existing knowledge to try to grasp it, while updating existing understandings in this new light.
The value of this habit of mind isn’t measured by income alone. It is, in the fullest sense, equipment for living. Its value is that it supplies enrichment to personal lives, equips students to be thoughtful and constructive social contributors, and prepares them to participate in the dynamic, ever-changing world that awaits them after college. It’s easy to see why people might get anxious about something whose payoff is not immediate and the path to whose payoff is so oblique. But the fruits of such education can only be reckoned over long time-horizons, as they enable people to rise to challenges and seize opportunities they could not foresee at first. The lives of successful people almost never involve continuing to do what they first prepared for. As their lives unfold, they find that by drawing on their preparation in unexpected ways, they’re able to do things they had not originally intended or imagined.
Think of any successful person and the point is made. Paul Farmer is a name well known here: one of the premier global humanitarians bringing the benefits of modern medicine to places where human need is great, and a Western standard of care can’t begin to be afforded. No doubt he wanted to be that great thing from the first? But it’s not so. He came to college (in fact he came to Duke) with many interests and a possible chemistry major; by chance, he took a course in medical anthropology that opened his eyes to the social determinants of health, and switched to an anthropology major; then by further chance, in an extracurricular activity, he did field work with a nun immersed in liberation theology who introduced him to Haitian farm workers laboring in North Carolina’s tobacco fields. Woven strand by disparate strand, these experiences created the sense of calling that then led him to medical school and the eventual founding of Partners in Health.
General Martin Dempsey is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest ranking military officer and chief advisor to the president on the ever more complex issues of national security. He went, not surprisingly, to West Point. But after he began his military career, the army sent him for a less obvious second education, a master’s degree in English Literature at Duke. (You will note the fine tact with which I mention only people who were brought up Catholic who also all went to Duke.) Two years back, when General Dempsey gave a talk on my campus, a student asked what use (if any) humanities training had proved in his military career. He didn’t blink. It taught him the importance of communication, he replied, an essential skill for any successful career; plus it helped him to a more reflective grasp on the meaning of experience; plus it opened his mind, as he put it, to seek, not just to accept but to seek other perspectives or ways of thinking. I doubt he learned these things solely in English classes, but his whole education equipped him for the whole of his career.
I want to make four points about the work of educational self-reflection at this time, two generally affirming of tradition, the other two more revisionist or challenging. I have already reached my first point: given the world we inhabit, we need to mount an energetic and aggressive defense of liberal arts education. We need to explain what it’s good for and how it works, and we need to preach this not just to one another but to the larger public that either doesn’t “get it” or, just as commonly, actually does share this vision of human enablement but hasn’t been reminded of it and has fallen prey to the skeptical chatter of our day. In the wake of the commission I chaired, I found that the public doesn’t dislike the humanities, as academics widely suppose. People just haven’t been reminded that they find pleasure and meaning every day in reading, music, films, art—when the case is made in an accessible form, they “get it” quickly enough. Similarly, when I cite examples of how a broad, integrative education prepared people for a life of active learning unfolding across multiple careers, most skeptics I’ve met can be brought around, often citing evidence from their own lives. A few weeks back I spoke to a gathering in Palo Alto of people trained in engineering. One asked how we could still allow students to pursue pointlessly expensive education in the humanities. I gave my usual devastating reply. When we later had a chance to chat, I learned that having retired at a relatively young age, he was now spending time learning more about history and comparative religion.
So first: this is the time for reasserting the why and wherefore of the liberal arts—not just re-formatting requirements, but reasserting the qualities of mind we aim to promote deep down. The truism that higher education should be cheaper frequently travels with the notion that online, things can be done as well or better at a fraction of the expense. (Actually I have not heard this stated quite as baldly this year as it frequently was last year or the year before. Maybe the idea has become “so 2013.”) In recent years, we’ve all become more imaginative about marrying online experiments with traditional pedagogies, and I don’t doubt that we’re still in the infancy of discovery in this vein. But if there are things that can as readily be learned online, there are things that can never be learned except face to face, through the living encounter of living people who are present to one another in the fullness of their humanity. A fundamental requirement for the sort of education we sponsor is that it is relationship-intensive, the product of residential communities whose members continually engage each other in programmed and unprogrammed ways, and of a formal learning environment that’s rich in personal attention and active individual engagement. So second, as we make the case for our value to others, we need to ensure we are fully living up to this potential in our own institutional practice—making time for the interactions that transform lives.
One thing the online world has given us is the ability to access what we want when and where we want it. It used to be that if you were not in your seat or tuned in to the right channel at the right time, you missed the show. Now it appears nothing need ever be missed, so it seems an increasing imposition to expect me to pay attention to anything except at my absolute convenience. This brings me to my third point: though this state of affairs is unprecedented in human history, from now on we will be living with it, and universities are going to have to accommodate it.
The challenge is far harder than some might think. Few cultural artifacts have proved as enduring as the conventions of academic study. A degree requires four years; a year consists of two semesters (or four quarters—the answer can be different but whatever the answer, it is equally fixed); in each semester you take four courses more or less; each course meets for fourteen weeks . . . you know the drill. Two world wars, the rise and fall of fascism, then communism, the tripling of the world’s population, the rise of federally funded research —not one of these potent events has had an impact on higher education’s organizing forms. These units have been like the prime matter of the philosophers, combinable into other substances but immutable in themselves. At least until now.
It is not going to be easy for liberal arts universities to adapt to the new order of asynchronous delivery. The correct adaptation will not involve simple capitulation. Just as, in the age of websurfing and continuous partial attention, universities have a new mission to teach people how to devote their full attention to things for sustained periods, so in the days of at-will experience we will need to cultivate the capacity to appreciate irreplaceable, unrepeatable encounters—the thing that makes the evanescent live performance different from the replayable YouTube, or that makes the sudden moment of full engagement with a great teacher different from the best education video.
But this need not be an either/or, and we’ll entrap ourselves if we think of the choice that way. While continuing to cultivate what is irreplaceable in traditional instruction, we could begin to be more imaginative about the different units and formats in which education could take place. On a visit to Stanford last year I saw much to admire, but what I found most striking was the concept in their d.school (Design School) of “pop-up classes” that begin when a need or problem comes into focus and a critical mass assembles around it, and run on whatever schedule best suits for working this problem through. This sounds like nervous breakdown time for the registrar, but I’ve seen some ad hoc examples, and no doubt you have too. A Duke Law alum was the first Chinese citizen to pass the New York State Bar Exam. After he went back to China, he helped write the laws that created the Chinese stock exchanges, managed their SEC, then the social security system, then China’s sovereign wealth fund. He wants to teach at his old school but he can’t come for a full term, so when he visits, he teaches a “short course”: a class that meets daily for two intensive weeks.
As I speak, a Duke faculty member and his students are in South Africa for a program called DukeImmerse. The students have been taking four inter-related courses at Duke on urban politics and social justice, each of which could be massively deepened by on-the-ground experience in that country—so they have left for four weeks’ intensive study in South Africa, from which they will return to complete the term. It is going to be hard for such creatures of custom as academics, but in coming decades, we are going to need to be much nimbler at improvising new formats, lest a traditionalism of structure doom traditions that are vital to maintain.
Which brings me to my fourth provocation: we are going to need to be more imaginative about what actually counts as education. Year after year, we have treated the formal elements of academic instruction as if they were synonymous with education itself. Devilishly thorough in one way, the reaccreditation process we’re all subject to is interested only in this one thing. Only these count to satisfy degree requirements. Indeed, reassessment committees of educational programs typically assess these elements alone. But students derive education from a multiverse of sources, integrating academic and non-academic experiences in seamless if idiosyncratic fashion. And a really deep review of learning requirements should consider opening the lens.
At Duke, we’ve pioneered a model in which students take things they’ve learned in class out to real-world settings, where they’re challenged to repurpose their skills in solving problems under real-world conditions. Three thousand students have participated in the DukeEngage program since 2007, spending sustained periods in international and domestic sites addressing complex social needs: needs in literacy, health care and health education, sustainability practices, clean water systems, and a hundred more. Few experiences in my recent life have been as powerful as visiting Duke students in DukeEngage—young Duke engineers figuring out how to fix broken medical equipment in health clinics in rural Tanzania, or a young woman who, having studied Chinese at Duke, served as a teacher in a school for migrant children in Beijing. This is no extracurricular activity or summer pastime. This is education: a chance to learn the conditions of human life as they are lived outside the bubble of an elite American college campus, and a chance to discover how skills learned abstractly in academic settings can be applied and augmented in the world of human need.
The success of DukeEngage has led us to create other programs combining classroom learning with experiential components. Our Global Health program, newly available as an undergraduate major, a minor, and a certificate, supplements coursework with first-hand experience of global health challenges. In our financial economics program, students who know how to do problem sets have real-time analytical questions shared with them by financial practitioners, who then tutor them as the students attempt to address them. Our entrepreneurship program combines classroom study with hands-on experience in a great variety of forms: last summer we had students at Duke in Silicon Valley working in tech startups, Duke in Detroit working on social entrepreneurship projects, and Duke in Chicago working in entrepreneurship in the arts.
Increasingly, we see such experience as education: a means to knowledge that can be richly combined with other forms of knowledge; not a “practical” substitute for liberal arts education, but an animating addition to such education. I don’t pretend that everyone on our faculty has become a convert or that we’ve solved every issue about what should count for course credit, though on both counts we have made strides. What has gained ground is the perception that these mentored real-world engagements are not alien to our fundamental mission. Eric Toone, the director of our Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program, introduced me to a passage from Alfred North Whitehead that I will quote at length:
What the faculty have to cultivate is activity in the presence of knowledge. What the students have to learn is activity in the presence of knowledge. This discussion rejects the doctrine that students first learn passively and then, having learned, apply knowledge. It is a psychological error. In the process of learning there should be present, in some sense or other, a subordinate activity of application. In fact, the applications are part of the knowledge. [My italics.] For the very meaning of the things known is wrapped up in their relationship with things beyond themselves. Thus unapplied knowledge is knowledge shorn of its meaning.
Who can say: some day, some successor committee at Notre Dame may be finding new requirements in a thought like this.
I came to provoke a conversation and will be happy to get to that now. For by now you’re caught my point. This is not the time to abandon the liberal arts. What that mode of teaching contributes to individual lives and our social welfare is inestimably precious. We need it now more than ever. But lifting up the liberal arts need not only entail defending the exact state of current customs. Why could this not be a time for renewal, a time for protecting and even improving what’s best in current practice, and for imagining new ways this dream of human development could be realized among the new facts of our changing world?
What a great job for a university committee! I commend your project and wish you courage for this great task.