PART 3 Schools

PART 3 Schools

Eight Great Books Creating a self, inventing a life, developing an independent mind: it all sounds rather daunting. How exactly is college supposed to help? By deploying that most powerful of instructional technologies: a liberal arts education, centered on the humanities, conducted in small classrooms by dedicated teachers. This is not a cheap or "innovative" enterprise, but it is still, and will be for the imaginable future, an indispensable one. What are the liberal arts? They are those disciplines in which the pursuit of knowledge is conducted for its own sake. The liberal arts have nothing to do with liberalism in the political sense. "Arts" can be misleading, too, which is why the larger term is often taken to denote the humanities. But the liberal arts, in their proper definition, include the sciences and social sciences, as well. They stand in contrast to applied or vocational fields like nursing, education, business, and even law and medicine (though they furnish the knowledge that underlies them) because, as Louis Menand has put it, they are conducted "without regard to any vocational utility, any financial reward or ideological purpose." In the liberal arts, you pursue the trail of inquiry wherever it leads. Truth, not use or reward, is the only criterion. That is why you don't just learn a certain body of material when you study the liberal arts; you learn how knowledge is created. You don't acquire information; you debate it. How do we know it is true? What

further questions does it raise? What are the premises that underlie the discipline in question (be it biochemistry or political science or American studies), and what are the methods by which it proceeds? You learn, in other words, that there is no "information," strictly speaking; there are only arguments. You do the hard, slow, painstaking work— four years is scarcely adequate to make a decent start—of learning to analyze the arguments of others and to make your own in turn: to marshal evidence, evaluate existing authorities, anticipate objections, synthesize your findings within a logically coherent structure, and communicate the results with clarity and force. The historian Simon Schama tells the story of a student who approached him after a lecture to complain that his father hadn't sent him to Harvard to become more confused. Yes, Schama answered, he did, or at least, he should have. College is the place to learn that most of what we believe (history is exemplary in this regard) is much more provisional and complicated than we usually care to admit. That may sound like mental masturbation—the pointless multiplication of complexity and nuance, the endless entertainment of theories, hypotheses, and alternatives, everything that people mean by "academic" in the pejorative sense. What it is, in fact, is an honest confrontation with reality. The world is full of immensely intricate things: the structure of an enzyme, the language of a Shakespeare play, the workings of a modern economy. Despite our urge for clear and simple answers, the truth is very hard to come by. Some knowledge is settled enough to be regarded as factual—the Laws of Thermodynamics, the dates of the French Revolution—and mastering a portion of it is a part of education, too, but the leading edge of discovery is always a blur, always a grope. We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty. To receive a liberal arts education is to begin to appreciate this. But it is also more. Implicit in the notion of such education as it is practiced in the United States is the concept of breadth. You concentrate in one field, but you get exposure to a range of others. You don't just learn to think; you learn that there are different ways to think. You study human behavior in psychology, and then you study it in literature. You see what philosophy means by reality, and then you see what math or physics

does. Your mind becomes more agile and resourceful, as well as more skeptical and rigorous. And most important of all, you learn to educate yourself. All of this explains why liberal arts graduates are so highly valued in the workforce, and why it almost doesn't matter what you study. That's right: highly valued, largely regardless of major, despite what everybody seems to think. "Your College Major Is a Minor Issue, Employers Say," runs a recent headline in The Wall Street Journal. A survey of 318 companies found that 93 percent cite "critical thinking, communication and problem-solving skills as more important than a candidate's undergraduate major," in part because they are filling positions with "broader responsibilities" and "more complex challenges" than in the past. "There's been a big disconnect between what employers say to educators," notes Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, "and what the public and policy leaders believe matters in college." If certain majors end up earning higher average salaries than others, the Journal adds, the fact has more to do with the kinds of industries those students tend to choose to enter. It's no surprise, in other words, that the pay of people who go for the bucks (economics majors, say) is higher than that of those who don't. But it's a matter of choice, not necessity—earning desire, so to speak, not earning potential. Part of what you learn from majoring in something that actually interests you is that there are more fulfilling ways to spend your time than trying to be rich. Starting salaries, what's more, turn out to be misleading. A recent long-term study found that while vocational majors do indeed enjoy a wage premium immediately after graduation, it all but disappears within a decade. A proper education prepares you for your whole career, not simply your initial job. Another recent survey found that 30 percent of companies were recruiting liberal arts graduates, second only to engineering and computer science, at 34 percent, and far ahead of finance and accounting, at 18 percent. "Companies are looking for soft skills over

hard skills now," said the head of the firm that conducted the study, "because hard skills can be learned, while soft skills need to be developed." And the latter seem to be in short supply. The survey cited by the Journal found that only 44 percent of employers believe that graduates have what it takes for any real advancement in their organizations. According to other studies, "only a quarter of college graduates have the writing and thinking skills necessary to do their jobs." Graduates are said to have trouble "communicating and working in teams, and often struggle to see complex problems from a variety of angles"—exactly the kind of vision a liberal arts education instills. "Increasingly, anything you learn is going to become obsolete within a decade," says Larry Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard. "The most important kind of learning is about how to learn." Writing in the Harvard Business Review—in an article titled "Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities"—Tony Golsby-Smith, the founder of an Australian consulting firm, remarks that people "who study Shakespeare's poetry, or Cezanne's paintings, say, have learned to play with big concepts, and to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can't be analyzed in conventional ways." Humanities majors, he says, are well equipped to handle complexity and ambiguity, think creatively, communicate persuasively, and understand the needs of customers and employees. "If you want another good reason to hire from the humanities," he concludes, "consider this: consulting firms like McKinsey and Bain like to hire them for all the reasons I've described above. You can hire liberal arts graduates yourself, or you can pay through the nose for a big consulting firm to hire them to do the thinking for you." Professional schools are also awakening to the value of a liberal arts education. Medical schools, recognizing that doctors need to deal with people as well as diseases, are increasingly interested in admitting humanities and other nonscience majors. Bhaskar Chakravorti, a senior dean at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, has written about the need for MBA programs to move away from training "super-specialists" and toward developing lateral, integrative thinkers. Engineering programs have also started to recognize the importance of

giving their students a base in the liberal arts, precisely because technical information has a limited shelf life, while skills of thinking and communication last a lifetime. Humanities majors outperform biology majors on the MCAT, the medical school admissions test; social science majors on the LSAT, the law school admissions test; and business majors on the GMAT, the business school admissions test. They also have the highest average scores of all majors, by a wide margin, on the verbal and critical-writing portions of the GRE, the admissions test for graduate programs. If anything, the liberal arts are more important now than ever, as a rapidly evolving global economy relies increasingly on creativity and innovation. If Thomas Friedman is right, if the future belongs to those who can invent new jobs and industries rather than staffing existing ones, then it belongs to people with a broad liberal arts education. In today's world of economic fluidity and instability, where the old career ladders are falling down, where even the traditional notion of what constitutes a job is up for grabs, the necessary aptitudes, writes Richard A. Greenwald, author of The Micropreneurial Age, include "breadth, cultural knowledge and sensitivity, flexibility," and "the ability to continually learn, grow and reinvent." Tony Wagner, author of The Global Achievement Gap, notes that even high-tech companies "place comparatively little value on content knowledge." David M. Rubenstein, the billionaire cofounder and co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private equity firms, put it this way earlier this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "H = MC. Humanities equals more cash." Information is freely available everywhere now; the question is whether you know what to do with it. Even as we retreat from our traditional commitment to the liberal arts, in K–12 as well as college—"math and science" is the mantra, from our president all the way down and from kindergarten all the way up— our competitors are moving in the opposite direction. Countries like China, India, and Singapore have started to realize that the key to emulating America's creative dynamism is to go beyond the rote, technical education that they have always focused on and that we are embracing as fast as we can. The National University of Singapore has launched a liberal arts college in partnership with Yale. India's

prestigious IIT's, Institutes of Technology, are moving toward a higher quotient of courses in the humanities and social sciences. Despite the strong marks their high schoolers get on international tests as well as the country's success in producing scientists and engineers, educators in China are increasingly concerned that their system isn't cultivating critical and independent minds. Some in the United States have spoken of the economic downturn, against a backdrop of continued growth in Asia, as another Sputnik moment. But after the original Sputnik, we didn't decide to emulate the Soviet Union. Apparently we don't possess that kind of confidence anymore. All this is why the usual sneers about whether Aristotle is going to "come in handy on the job" are so utterly misguided. "After college," says a young woman who dropped out after all of a semester—she is quoted in one of those books that advise young people to forget about higher education altogether—"no one cares how well you can talk about Hume or Kant." Maybe not, but they care how well you can talk. They care how well you can think. And studying the most challenging works of art, literature, and philosophy—"being forced every day to think about the hardest things people have ever thought about," as a recent humanities graduate put it to me—is the best training you can give yourself in how to talk and think. Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you to learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free. That's why the humanities are central to a real college education. You don't build a self out of thin air, by gazing at your navel. You build it, in part, by encountering the ways that others have done so themselves. You build it, that is, with the help of the past. The humanities—history, philosophy, religious studies, above all, literature and the other arts—are the record of the ways that people have come to terms with being human. They address the questions that are proper to us, not as this or

that kind of specialist, this or that kind of professional, but as individuals as such—the very questions we are apt to ask when we look up from our work and think about our lives. Questions of love, death, family, morality, time, truth, God, and everything else within the wide, starred universe of human experience. The humanities are what we have, in a secular society, instead of religion. They are compatible with religion, but they have also, in important ways, supplanted it. As traditional beliefs were broken down across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—by modern science, by the skeptical critique of the Enlightenment—the arts emerged as the place where educated people went to contemplate those questions of meaning and value and purpose. Now the truth was multiple and personal, not settled and dogmatic. Instead of looking in the Bible, you read Dostoevsky, or listened to Beethoven, or went to see an Ibsen play. Libraries, museums, and theaters became the new churches, places where you came to court the old emotions of catharsis, transcendence, redemption, and joy. The arrangement became known as aestheticism, the religion of art. "The priest departs," said Whitman, "the divine literatus comes." A Portrait of the Artist dramatizes this precise transition. Instead of joining the Catholic clergy, where he would have had the power to enact the transubstantiation, Stephen chooses to devote himself to performing the miracle of literature, "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life"—that is, into the imperishable stuff of art. It is no coincidence that English became an object of university study around the very time aestheticism crystallized as an idea. The center of the college curriculum slowly swung from the Greek and Latin classics, taught by rote as fixed bodies of knowledge, to English and the other humanities. (In time, religion itself was incorporated into the new system as comparative religion or religious studies. Now we teach the Bible not as scripture but as culture.) The change was actually a form of continuity. Most colleges had been founded as church-affiliated institutions; now they sought to carry on their spiritual mission under the secular dispensation. Beside the specialized programs of study in the scientific and other disciplines that were also introduced in the late nineteenth century (majors, in other words), there emerged the

humanistic components of the liberal arts curriculum, including the "Great Books" and other "general education" courses that were designed to provide an opportunity for students to reflect upon "the big questions." The minister in the college chapel, preaching doctrine, gave way to the professor in the classroom, leading a discussion. But why art? What claim does art have on the truth? If the latter is indeed so difficult to come by, then how do artists manage it? By looking very hard and long, then working very hard and long to tell us what they saw. Anyone who's tried to paint an object or a scene will understand the point. It takes tremendous concentration just to start to see what's actually in front of you, let alone to get it down on canvas: to perceive a cup of water, say, not simply as an instrument of use, something that you barely glance at as you satisfy your thirst, but in the full particularity of its material existence—the liquid color of the glass, the fingerprints around the middle, the rim of light at the meniscus, the shape of the translucent shadow that the whole thing casts. As with painting, so with every art. In literature, what is observed is not primarily the physical world, but the psychological and social ones. The poet looks at what she really feels—about her body, or her sister— not what she's supposed to feel. The novelist reports upon the way we really treat each other—the pettiness or callousness or secret irrational longing—not the way we say we do. Those conventional modes of thought and emotion from which you need to free yourself—the party lines we spout, the happy talk that we're surrounded by—are exactly what art does its work by breaking through. There is a reason we avoid the truth, with our sociable lies and our psychological blocks: it is usually too hard to bear. "A book must be the axe," said Kafka, "for the frozen sea within us." John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of the nineteenth century as well as one of its greatest social critics, a crucial influence on Proust, Gandhi, and many others, put the matter this way:

The more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me,—that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion,— all in one. Our eyes slide over the world, as we obsess about our grades or our sex life or our income. Our minds slide over it. Art, to paraphrase the poet Shelley, bursts the spirit's sleep. To say that the humanities can be a path to truth is itself to challenge one of our most closely held beliefs. We live not only in a scientific world, but also in a scientistic one: a world that thinks that science—empirical, objective, quantifiable—is the exclusive form of knowledge, and that other modes of inquiry are valid only insofar as they approximate its methods. But the humanities and science face in opposite directions. They don't just work in different ways; they work on different things. To borrow a term from Stephen Jay Gould, one scientist who certainly understood the value of the arts, science and the humanities are "nonoverlapping magisteria," different forms of teaching that are each appropriate to their domain. Scientific knowledge relates to external reality, to that which lies outside our minds and makes itself available for objective observation. Humanistic knowledge relates to our experience of the world, to what reality feels like. The painter renders the subjective experience of sight— including, especially in modern art, the dreams and dreads that we project on what we see. The novelist seeks to give us the taste of what it's like to be alive at a particular moment. I once told my brother the doctor that as a literary critic I was interested in questions of time and space. He looked at me as if I'd said that as a literary critic I was interested in performing brain surgery. But the time and space I meant were not the physicist's; they were the experience of time and space as represented by the novelist. Think of time in Woolf or space in Dickens. In books like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, time unfolds according to the drift of consciousness, not the dictates of the clock. A sensation in the present—

say, the scent of morning freshness—plunges a character back to the past. Memory, reverie, longing, a detour through a scene from thirty years ago—friends together on a terrace, half in love, with all the world before them—then a sudden jolt into the present once again, or forward to a prospect of the future. But if Woolf paints the mind as it wanders through time, Dickens gives us the experience of moving through the modern city. Broad boulevards, tight and crooked little streets, labyrinthine alleyways, mysteries of fog and shadow. We stoop to enter attics, spread our limbs in sumptuous apartments, press against the human tide at dusk. Terror, grandeur, anger, envy: the metropolitan emotions jostle up against each other as we travel through the folded urban spaces where the stranger can become a friend, identities are lost and found, and coincidences are to be expected. No chronometer can tell us we learn from Woolf; no yardstick, from Dickens. What's wanted isn't formulas but stories. The scientist seeks to be objective and appeals to the impersonal language of numbers. The artist speaks from individual experience and appeals to our own individual experience. Humanistic knowledge isn't verifiable, or quantifiable, or reproducible. It cannot be expressed in terms of equations or general laws. It changes from culture to culture and person to person. It is a matter not of calculation but interpretation. When we engage in humanistic inquiry—when we think about a poem or a sculpture or a piece of music—we ask, not how big is it, or how hot is it, or what does it consist of, but what does it mean. We ask of a scientific proposition, "Is it true?", but of a proposition in the humanities we ask, "Is it true for me?" Is it true for me. Does it make sense, not to me but of me. The highest function of art, and of literature in particular, is to bring us to that knowledge of ourselves that college ought to start to give us. The ultimate reason to read the classic authors, Mark Edmundson says, "is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself." I heard from a psychiatrist who uses literature as a tool of practice ("where else does a

person become aware of the subtleties of language, emotion, character, or relationships?"). Here is some of what he said: I recently terminated a six-year course of treatment with a man who was initially referred because he had become addicted to narcotics. He was a deeply depressed, inhibited, bitter, and unfulfilled person. I suggested that he read D. H. Lawrence, and in this case, a rare exception, he took me up on the offer—the challenge really—and for most of his treatment, Lawrence was our constant companion. When I was a kid, people "found themselves" in literature. I found myself, for the first time when I was fourteen, in The Catcher in the Rye. No more. But this man would come in and read to me from Lawrence and say, "That's me!" "That's me!": the essential experience of art. We see ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves. Freud speaks of the uncanny —Unheimliche in German, un-home-like—that which is both strange and familiar at once. So it is with the revelations of art. Art brings us home by taking us abroad. We read of Hamlet or Jane Eyre, and across the differences of time and place, with a pang of guilt and bliss, we see our nature mirrored up to us, but seen as if anew. "Find yourself" is perfect: you are reading about medieval Denmark, a world of courtiers and princes, and all at once, as in a dream, you somehow find yourself among them. Art gives names to experience. We recognize Antigone or the Wife of Bath or Madame Bovary as permanent human types—the doomed idealist, the unabashed sensualist, the discontented dreamer—as well as permanent potentialities within ourselves. Think of the role that literary characters have played—Ahab, Huck Finn, Gatsby, Holden, Sethe—in articulating the American consciousness. But art also gives you models for experience, especially when you are young. You find in Elizabeth Bennet or Stephen Dedalus an image of the person that you want to be: Elizabeth, who turns a snub into a laugh, who faces down the man to whom she's meant to bend a knee, who marches at the head of all the smart and confident young women of modernity; Stephen, the artist embracing his solitary destiny, so certain of his genius that he's willing to

forsake his family and friends. Books are maps of possible futures. They help endow you with exactly that imagination that it takes to invent your life. The courage, too: if they can do it, so can I. Reading, says Edmundson, is "life's grand second chance." Art doesn't make you a better person; it only makes you a freer one. But popular culture also gives you models for experience, and so does advertising. Fifty Shades of Grey, a Nike commercial, half the pop songs in the world: they tap directly into your id, submerging you in fantasies of pleasure. Who wouldn't want to live like that? The difference is that art provides you both the models and the means to question them. It demands that you read alertly, with your mind and not just your glands. What are the limits of living like Elizabeth? What might Stephen miss about himself? Does Holden get it wrong? Does Ahab get it right? If the liberal arts turn certainties into questions, the humanities do that, in particular, with ethical and existential certainties: our convictions about how we should act and whom we should be. Stories, says the writer Andrei Codrescu, are engines of reflection. Middlemarch, A Portrait of the Artist, Heart of Darkness, the Odyssey: literature enables us to think about our lives, just as it's been doing in this book. Nor does that reflection only go to values. Everything we find in life we find in art. Ambition in Macbeth and The Sopranos, ennui in Chekhov and Fellini, marginality in Ralph Ellison and Arundhati Roy, and on and endlessly on. I have learned from Dante that love and hate are complements, not opposites (a good thing to know if you happen to belong to a family); from E. M. Forster, that liberal attitudes are often a cover for vanity and ignorance; from Mary Gaitskill, something of the ways the soul is manifested in the body. I don't know that any of those perceptions have influenced my choices, exactly, but they have deeply shaped my understanding of both myself and the world. Edmundson speaks of "the incessant labor of combining your own experience, taken in and metabolized by intense feeling and thought, with what you have acquired in books." Art and life, back and forth, each illuminating the other, both together creating a self.

I said before that when you paint an object, you have to see it in the full particularity of its existence. To borrow a phrase from Matthew Arnold, the Victorian man of letters, you have to see it "as in itself it really is." In itself and for itself—not in reference to you, as an instrument of your desire. But it isn't just things; we also tend to treat each other as extensions of ourselves. Art forces you to do the opposite. By allowing you to experience, in the most intimate and immediate way, what it feels like to be someone else—Achilles or Anna Karenina or Emily Dickinson —art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claims to dignity and understanding. "I place my faith in fiction," says the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, "in its power to make vividly present how different the world feels to each of us." Art teaches empathy and cultivates the emotional intelligence; maybe it can make you a better person. "Do you really lead a better life for having had a liberal arts education?" a student asked me once. Yes, you do, and those around you might lead better ones, as well. The social sciences are all the rage, it seems, among today's idealistic young. (David Brooks has called them "the empirical kids.") Policy, wonkery, data "Big" or otherwise: technocracy, again. But you can only measure what you know is there— and sometimes you can't measure it at all. Before you start to build a better future with "the crooked timber of humanity," as Kant referred to it, you need to find out what you're working with. You need to know what people are—how they think, what they want, how they act—as well as something of the moral pitfalls of your own proposed interventions. (The law of unintended consequences is pretty much the governing principle of narrative art.) The humanities put back everything the social sciences, by way of necessary simplification, take out. Economics, for example, the most authoritative of the social sciences today, informs us that people are rational actors, forever seeking to maximize their material self-interest—an assertion that would come as news to the author of King Lear, let alone The Brothers Karamazov. Only literature, in the words of the diplomatic strategist Charles Hill, is "methodologically unbounded" enough to show how the world really works. I've heard it said that novels are obsolete, that books like War

and Peace belong to an age when information could be delivered only in extremely inefficient forms. But War and Peace doesn't tell you the same kinds of things that you can learn from a blog post or a Wikipedia entry, not even fourteen hundred pages of them. It needs to be big and complex because it's telling you something that's big and complex. It doesn't give you "information"; it gives you life. The humanities, unlike the natural and social sciences, are also historical disciplines. English is the history of English literature; religious studies is the history of religion; and so forth. And you cannot understand the world, you cannot even understand yourself, unless you understand the past, for that is largely where your thoughts and feelings come from—not to mention almost all the laws and attitudes and structures that we collectively live by. To study the past is to continually have the experience of realizing, Oh, so that's why I think that. That is what is speaking through me when I say that. The critic Northrop Frye remarked that a liberal arts education ought to lead to a recognition scene, as at the climax of a play. But in the study of the liberal arts, he said, the thing we come to recognize is ourselves. "The most successful tyranny," said Allan Bloom, is "the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities." The past gave rise to the present, but it is also different from the present. It shows us that things do not have to be the way that they are now. It provides us with a vantage point from which to see that our conventional wisdom is just conventional, not wisdom—that what we think is natural is merely cultural; temporal, not eternal; particular, not universal. It offers us an exit from the present. It tells us that things change: not only don't they have to be the way they are, they will not be the way they are. The past, in other words, allows us to create the future. If you want to be a leader, if you want to find a new direction, then that is where you need to start. The defenders of the arts and humanities tend to give the argument away before it begins. Art is solace, we're told, or diversion, or decoration —nothing more, apparently, than a form of pleasant relaxation, highbrow entertainment for the moneyed class. The arts, we hear,

contribute to the economy—as if their very point were not to show us that there's more to being human than our bodies and their needs, more to a society than its commodities. When it comes to college in particular, the argument revolves around what's known as "cultural capital," the kind of social information that equips you for upward mobility. No less a figure than Stephen Greenblatt—Harvard professor, esteemed Renaissance scholar, prize-winning author—has defended the value of studying the humanities by telling us, in part, that "cultural knowledge turns out to be good for your career." I recognize the practical importance of cultural capital and the role of college in providing it, but I doubt that it has very much to do, at this point, with the humanities. The development of Great Books courses in the 1920s and '30s was indeed in part intended to socialize the children of immigrants, mainly Jews and Catholics from southern and eastern Europe, into the kind of culture that had only been accessible to WASPs. But any argument in that direction, whether with respect to the new immigration or to students from the lower classes, did not survive the dethroning of high culture in the 1960s and '70s. Virgil and Rousseau are not what people talk about at cocktail parties anymore, assuming that they ever were. Leonardo and Mozart no longer constitute a shared frame of reference, unless you mean Leonardo DiCaprio. Now it's HBO and NPR and REM. No one at the dinner party is going to find out whether you know anything about Montaigne, and if they did, they wouldn't care. Cultural capital now is largely transmitted from peer to peer, as the other students ape the manners of the kids who went to Exeter or Dalton, absorbing the proper tones of voice and modes of dress, the approved consumption patterns with respect to foreign travel, progressive opinion, and extra-virgin olive oil. The humanities are all well and good, goes another argument, for the children of the privileged, who don't need to worry about earning a living. But other students, even at selective schools, should stick to the practical disciplines: engineering, computer science, economics— quantitative fields, not verbal ones. The notion echoes something Woodrow Wilson said a century ago: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class . . . very much larger . . . to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit

themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." Substitute "technical" for "manual" and the argument is the same. It is not the proponents of a liberal arts education who are the elitists; it is those who would reserve it for a lucky few. If you think the humanities have any value, whether as a doorway to enlightenment or just as cultural capital, then they are valuable for everyone and should belong to everyone. If they are good for the poor (as Earl Shorris argued in his famous essay "On the Uses of a Liberal Education" and demonstrated in his Clemente Course in the Humanities, a program that has now been widely copied), then they are certainly good for the working-class kid at Dartmouth or the Asian kid at Duke—and, indeed, for everyone throughout the higher education system. Is there something condescending ("imperialistic," in the current term) about suggesting that the children of immigrants ought to study English literature and the Western classics? Perhaps, but there is also something immensely powerful, and not just in personal terms. Those Jewish kids between the world wars who were socialized into Western culture went on to take possession of it. Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Leonard Bernstein, and countless others, including, somewhat later, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Stephen Sondheim, and Woody Allen: they propelled themselves to the center of American art and thought, transforming it in their image. The best thing that could happen to our culture now is if the Asian and Latino kids did likewise. Telling them to stick to medicine or finance is just another way of keeping those communities down. Still, it isn't my intention here to advocate for Great Books courses. I do believe that having an acquaintance with the Western classics, the Bible included, remains essential to one's education as a citizen. They are still the major portion of our mental past. Exempting students from studying them is as much of a disservice as excusing them from learning Standard Written English; it debars them from full participation. But as our outlook globalizes and our population along with it, new pasts are growing ever more relevant. We ought to know where other people come from, too, especially since those other people now increasingly are us. These civic purposes are secondary, though. The crucial thing is to study, not the Great Books, but simply, great books. The idea is to find

yourself a few of Kafka's axes; anything that has the necessary edge and heft will do. It doesn't matter who created it or when, as long as it can do some damage, as long as it inflicts that wound. The canon is irrelevant in this respect. A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself. I'm also not suggesting that you have to be an English major. (Though it's not a bad idea. Edmundson says that when a student studies English, he majors "in becoming a person.") I'm not even suggesting that you have to be a humanities major. I'm suggesting that you take as many opportunities as possible in college to step away from whatever specialized program of study you've decided to pursue and have the kind of experience that the humanities can give you. Of course you need to specialize—now more than ever, as knowledge grows increasingly complex. You go from being a political science major to being a law student to being an attorney for the State Department to being an attorney for the State Department who focuses on issues of global trade. You study biochemistry in college, attend medical school, do a surgical residency, and end up performing kidney transplants. You major in art, get a PhD, specialize in Flemish painting, and become an expert in Van Eyck. It takes a huge amount of time. Who can afford to get a general education, too? The mistake lies in supposing that the two objectives are antithetical —though admittedly, the notion that they are lies deep within our culture. We speak of action versus contemplation; in the Renaissance, the terms were "arms" and "arts"; in Rome, otium (leisure, with connotations of reflection) and negotium (business, like "negotiate"). But the ultimate idea of a liberal arts education is to render that distinction meaningless. There isn't life over here and work over there, general courses for the first and your major for the second. The perspectives that you get from studying the general—the wisdom, to come right out and say the word—are meant to interpenetrate the practice of your specialty.

For while it is inevitable that you will train yourself to do, at most, a small set of things, it is not inevitable that you will only think about those things. What the habit of reflection will enable you to do—what maintaining contact with art and history and philosophy (or for that matter, if you do go into the humanities, with the natural and social sciences) will enable you to do—is bring the full range of human experience, of your experience, to bear upon your work. If you become a doctor, it will make you a healer instead of a pill-pusher, someone who treats people, not diseases. If you turn out to be a professor, it will mean the difference between becoming a pedant, who teaches courses, and a mentor, who teaches students. In fact we're suffering today from just such a cadre of technocrats, just such a specialized elite. The problem with our leaders now is not just bureaucratic cowardice; it is also a lack of ability to think outside of disciplinary boundaries. Alan Greenspan, to take the most spectacular example, has admitted that he was mistaken to assume that rational self-interest was enough to shield the bankers from disaster. As the journalist Chris Hedges pointed out, Greenspan simply couldn't see beyond his theoretical assumptions, couldn't factor in the kind of human folly to which a moment's reflection would have alerted him. Heather Wilson, a former congresswoman and longtime veteran of the Rhodes Scholarship selection process, has talked of her distress at the quality of recent applicants: Even from America's great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago. As a result, high- achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why. . . . Our great universities . . . are producing top students who have given very little thought to matters beyond their impressive grasp of an intense area of study. Nor is it only our leaders. I've talked to teachers, social workers, psychiatrists, not to mention doctors, who feel that in our rush for efficiency, our addiction to methodologies and "metrics"—testing

regimes, protocols, psychopharmacology, spreadsheets, the management mentality in all its incarnations—the human has been torn from what they do. The humanities are where we all can go to start to put it back. But some professions really don't make room for anything but specialized abilities. What chance is there if you're a transplant surgeon, say, to make use of those wider perspectives? Well, you do not transplant in a vacuum. You are part of a system: a team, a hospital, a medical industry, a society. Instead of just putting your head down and doing your job, you can also look around at how things work and try to make them better. You can reflect; you can resist. You can become, in other words, a citizen. Not a leader, necessarily, but also not a follower. This idea, after all—that school should prepare you for participation in that very rare thing in human history, collective self-government—is fundamental to our system of education. It's the reason that American schoolchildren are taught to ask questions, express their own ideas, develop their creativity, and learn by exploring and investigating. We don't teach by rote, the way they do in India. We do not separate our ten-year-olds into academic and vocational tracks, the way they do in Germany. We don't require undergraduates to study just a single subject, the way they do in Britain. We have always wanted people who are more than merely specialists. So what then? Are we to be a country in which everybody is dissenting all the time, challenging the way that things are done not only in the public sphere, but even in the workplace? Yes, that is exactly what we ought to be. We are a republic; we're supposed to lead together. In his novel The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides tells the story of a trio of students who graduate from Brown in the early 1980s. It's the heyday of semiotics. People say "what's your take?," drop the names of French theorists, score points by putting Musil on their bookshelves, and look down on classmates who imagine that literature is anything more than a bundle of "tropes." Finally, his last semester, one of the characters takes a religious studies course that affects him more powerfully than any class he's had before. It concludes with a take-home final. "You were free to

consult your books," Eugenides writes. "There was no way to cheat. The answers to such questions couldn't be found anywhere. No one had formulated them yet." This is the experience that the character, Mitchell, goes through as he completes the exam (and note the way that "practical" is used): While he wrote, he felt, for the first time, as though he weren't in school anymore. He wasn't answering questions to get a grade on a test. He was trying to diagnose the predicament he felt himself to be in. And not just his predicament, either, but that of everyone he knew. It was an odd feeling. He kept writing the names of Heidegger and Tillich but he was thinking about himself and all his friends. . . . As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was the perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.

Nine Spirit Guides If you want a good education, you need to have good teachers. It seems ridiculous to have to say as much, but such is the state that matters have reached, both in academia and in the public conversation that surrounds it, that apparently we do. Between the long-term trend toward the use of adjuncts and other part-time faculty and the recent rush to online instruction, we seem to be deciding that we can do without teachers in college altogether, at least in any meaningful sense. But the kind of learning that college is for is simply not possible without them. Teaching is not an engineering problem. It isn't a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another. "Educate" means "lead forth." A teacher's job is to lead forth the powers that lie asleep within her students. A teacher awakens; a teacher inspires. We're all familiar with the way this feels, because we've all had someone who has played this role for us. A teacher is a midwife, Socrates said. If you are "pregnant in soul," he says in Plato's Symposium, your teacher's presence makes you teem with thoughts that beg to be released into the world. The imagery seems contradictory: are you pregnant already, or does your teacher's presence make you so? Both: a teacher helps you to discover things inside you that you didn't know were there. But we needn't even talk about the soul. Let's stick to the mind in the narrower sense, the organ that we all agree a college education ought to

go to work upon. To put it in the language of computers, you can download all the data you want, but it won't be any good to you unless you have the software to make use of it. That software, the ability to operate on information—to understand it, to synthesize it into new combinations, to discover and create with it—is what college is meant to "install." But here the analogy breaks down, for unlike actual software, the installation isn't quick and easy, and it certainly isn't passive. Thinking is a skill—or rather, a large and complex set of skills. In terms of what they take to learn, they aren't any different than manual ones—than hitting a ball or throwing a pot. You do not learn them from a book or video or website. You learn them directly from another person. You learn them through incessant repetition and incremental variation and extension under the close supervision of an experienced practitioner. You learn them in classes that are small enough to allow for individual attention, supplemented by one-on-one instruction tailored to your own specific aptitudes and needs. If you're learning how to play guitar, the teacher will place your hands exactly where they need to go (and do it again and again until you get it right). The mind has "hands," as well, and an endless variety of things you can do with them. Remember that the central intellectual ability that you're supposed to develop in college is that of analyzing other people's arguments and formulating your own. If mastering a skill requires ten thousand hours of practice, it's no wonder that college is only a start, with more work to do in graduate school or on the job. (You'd need to be at it for fifty hours a week, fifty weeks a year, to fit it all in as an undergraduate.) And that assumes that you receive the proper instruction. You write a paper that makes an argument. Your teacher goes through it point by point, identifying errors in logic, faults in structure, problems with the way you handled evidence, opportunities you missed, and places where objections should have been anticipated. He also raises further questions, suggests additional lines of inquiry, and commends the ways in which you did things right. Then you do it again, and again, and again, in class after class after class, slowly strengthening your skills. You write a three-page essay (that you get, at best, a C on) your first week of freshman composition, a bunch of fifteen-page seminar papers junior year, and a fifty-page thesis that you hand in a few weeks before you

graduate. Or if you're a science major, you go through an analogous process with lab reports or computer programs or mathematical proofs. In class, you do not spend your time transcribing information. The proponents of distance learning are not incorrect to believe that lectures are usually an inferior form of instruction. That is why a significant portion of classes, at least, should be small enough to run as seminars. The purpose of a seminar is to enable your professor to model and shape the mental skills she's trying to instill. She conducts a discussion about the material, but she doesn't simply let you talk. She keeps the conversation focused. She challenges assertions, poses follow-up questions, forces students to elaborate their one-word answers or clarify their vague ones. She draws out the timid and humbles (gently) the self- assured. She welcomes and encourages, but she also guides and pushes. She isn't there to "answer questions," at least not for the most part; she's there to ask them. Some of those questions should be ones she doesn't know the answer to herself. Discussion in a seminar should be collaborative and open- ended, alive with serendipity and the energy of imminent discovery—a model, too, of how to think together. A student at Pomona praised his professors to me for granting students the "necessary illusion of discussing a book as a peer." Yet it isn't altogether an illusion. One of the rewards of being a professor is the chance to learn from fresh young minds as well as teach them. In The Marriage Plot, the class that changes Mitchell's life concerns the fate of Christianity in modern culture, whether belief remains a viable option. "Richter asked the students questions and listened to their answers as if it might happen here today: in Room 112 of Richardson Hall, Dee Michaels, who played the Marilyn Monroe part in a campus production of Bus Stop, might throw a rope ladder across the void." I myself became a decent teacher only when I started to relinquish some control over the classroom— stopped worrying so much about "getting my points across" and recognized that those moments of disorder that would sometimes occur, those spontaneous outbreaks of intelligence, were the most interesting parts of the class, for both my students and myself. We were going somewhere new, and we were going there together. College teaching, like any other kind, is a slow, painstaking, difficult

process. (It is also, when properly done and adequately supported, an intensely gratifying one.) It is itself a complex craft that can't be scaled or automated. You have to get to know your students as individuals—get to know their minds, I mean—and you have to believe completely, as a fellow student wrote about my own professor, Karl Kroeber, in each one's absolute uniqueness. (It was Karl who said that a genuine teacher teaches students, not courses.) "Mitchell observed Richter's thoroughness," Eugenides writes, "his compassionate revelation of error, his undimmed enthusiasm for presiding over the uncluttering of the twenty or so minds gathered around the seminar table." My years in the classroom, as well as my conversations with young people about their college experience, have convinced me there are two things, above all, that students want from their professors. Not, as people commonly believe, to entertain them in class and hand out easy A's. That's what they retreat to, once they see that nothing better is on offer. What they really want is that their teachers challenge them and that they care about them. They don't want fun and games; they want the real thing. What they want, in other words, is mentorship. I remember just how starved I was for that myself in college. I saw how starved my students were: for validation, for connection—for (let's not be shy of saying it) parental figures other than their parents. Not only is there nothing wrong with that desire, it is a necessary part of growing up. Other cultures—Jewish, Indian, East Asian—with their veneration of the teacher, recognize as much. In South Korea, so I'm told, parents warn their children that if they don't stop misbehaving, they'll tell their teachers. But in America, we're not so sure. We are possessive of our kids, jealous of other influences upon them. But in The Path to Purpose, William Damon talks about the critical importance of outside adults in helping young people find their way. And Mark Edmundson remarks, while acknowledging the inevitable sadness for the parents who are left behind, that "it almost seems the natural order of things that children

will leave their families and strive to put themselves under the influence of other guides . . . more attuned to their rising hopes." I heard a colleague give a presentation once on how to keep your office hour meetings under seven minutes. Sessions should be focused around specific issues; students should know why they're coming in. So far, so good: instructors certainly need to manage their time. But then she said, "Anything beside their work, I don't talk to them about. I don't offer psychological advice for the same reason that I wouldn't let a therapist grade their papers." It was a clever line, but it bespoke a common misconception about the kind of guidance that a mentor gives. You do not talk to your students; you listen to them. You do not tell them what to do; you help them hear what they themselves are saying. You ask the kinds of questions that Lara Galinsky talks about as being important at times of decision—those "why" questions that help people connect with what they care about. Most advisors just tell you what courses to take, a student at Brown remarked to me, but the best ones "help you to think in a different way about the choice." As Harry R. Lewis suggests, a mentor looks for the questions behind the questions their advisees ask. "The most important job of the advisor," he writes, "is to help students understand themselves, to face and take responsibility for their decisions, and to support and to free them to make choices that are at odds with the expectations others have for them." Students look to mentors—figures "more attuned to their rising hopes"—to give them what their parents won't or can't: the permission to go their own way and the reassurance that their path is valid. Lewis speaks of professors in their formal roles as academic advisors, but regardless of whose office they're supposed to go to, students gravitate toward teachers with whom they have forged a connection. Learning is an emotional experience, and mentorship is rooted in the intimacy of intellectual exchange. Something important passes between you, something almost sacred. Socrates remarks that the bond between a teacher and a student lasts a lifetime, even once the two have parted company. And so indeed it is. Student follows student, and professors know that even those with whom they're closest now will soon decline to names in an address book, then at last just distant memories. But the

feelings that we have for the teachers or the students who have meant the most to us, like those for long-lost friends, can never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will meet again. For all the skill that teaching involves, you ultimately only have a single tool: your entire life as you have lived it up until the moment you walk into class. "The teacher, that professional amateur," said the critic Leslie Fiedler, "teaches not so much his subject as himself." He provides a model, he went on, "of one in whom what seemed dead, mere print on the page, becomes living, a way of life." I developed a rule of thumb in graduate school. If a professor didn't mention something personal at least a single time—a reference to a child, an anecdote about a colleague —then it was a pretty good bet that I had nothing to learn from him. It's not that I needed my teachers to be confessional; I just needed them to be present. "Mortimer Adler had much to tell us about Aristotle's Ethics," Saul Bellow wrote about the University of Chicago eminence, "but I had only to look at him to see that he had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life." Students want you to be honest, not least about yourself. They want you to be yourself. You need to step outside the role a bit, regard it with a little irony, if only to acknowledge the dissonance between the institution and the spirit. It often feels that there are certain things you cannot say inside a classroom—the most serious things that you want to say, the most genuine things. You want to say that life is tragic, that we are dangling above a void, that what's at stake, when you read a book, is nothing less than life itself. But you feel your institutional surroundings holding you as if between quotation marks. You fear that your words will fall to the ground with an audible clink. That is where a little distance from the situation is of service. Just because I say this stuff in class, I used to tell my students, doesn't mean I don't believe it. There are two things that kids invariably tell you about their favorite professors. The first one is "she teaches about everything." That's never literally true, of course, so what does it actually mean? Great teachers, as

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus remark, are not bound by disciplinary ideas of what they're allowed to say. They connect the material at hand, in a way that feels spacious and free, with anything to which it might be relevant. They connect it to experience, and so they shed light on experience—on your experience. Just as great art gives you the feeling of being about "life"—about all of it at once—so does great teaching. The boundaries come down, and somehow you are thinking about yourself and the world at the same time, thinking and feeling at the same time, and instead of seeing things as separate parts, you see them as a whole. It doesn't matter what the subject is. A student put it to me this way, about a professor in an oceanic studies program: "He made marine ecology reflect universal truths." You know great teaching the moment you encounter it. Yes, you feel, this is it—this is what I came for. It reaches deep inside you. It satisfies desires that you didn't know you had. It makes the world feel newly large and meaningful—exactly, again, like art. The other thing that students say about their favorite teachers is "he changed my life." There is only one problem with telling students to seek out good teaching in college. They're going to have some trouble finding it, because academic institutions usually don't care about it. Oh, they'll tell you otherwise, in their promotional material. But I advise you to be skeptical. The profession's whole incentive structure is biased against teaching, and the more prestigious the school, the stronger the bias is likely to be. The trouble goes back to the conflict between the missions of the college and the university. Ever since the research model took root in the late nineteenth century, scholarship has been the path to status for both professors and schools, and teaching has been valued less and less. Already by the start of the twentieth century, Andrew Delbanco reports, "ambitious academics regarded teaching undergraduates as a distraction and a burden." The transformation wasn't instantaneous, of course. In 1923, the dean of the graduate school at Brown was warning about a professoriate that was still too committed to instruction. But he'd find

little to concern him now. With the postwar, and even more, post- Sputnik explosion of funding, the research model began to diffuse itself throughout the system as a whole. "The research professor," writes Louis Menand, became "the type of the professor generally." Between 1960 and 1990, federal research funding quadrupled while average teaching hours fell by half. Publish or perish: professors' loyalties lay with their disciplines now, not with their institutions. Their validation and advancement came from research, not teaching. Their attention was absorbed by peers, graduate students, conferences, scholarly journals, professional organizations—everything except their undergraduates. The glut of PhDs that started in the 1970s enabled schools to ratchet up their expectations. Now you had to publish more and more, whether or not the work was any good. Academic journals proliferated, as did university presses. More recently, the emergence of technology transfer as a major academic revenue stream—licensing the results of scientific discovery to private enterprise—has tilted the balance of institutional interests ever more decisively in favor of research (as well as against the humanities). Star professors, who can pull in outside funding, are increasingly coveted, and a common strategy for luring them has been to excuse them from all but the most nominal pedagogical responsibilities (as anyone who's been to Harvard knows). But everybody wants to be a star—and every institution wants to be a player. Second-level public universities (which usually means the ones with "State" in their name, like Michigan State) now aspire to compete with their respective flagship schools (like the University of Michigan). U.S. News has also had its baleful role to play. Fifteen percent of an institution's score on the all-important rankings consists of "academic reputation" as judged by administrators at other schools—a measure that invariably reflects perceptions about research rather than teaching, since nobody really knows what's going on in other people's classrooms (or even, indeed, their own). "To a disturbing extent," Jennifer Washburn writes in University Inc., "administrators have simply concluded that they need not concern themselves with the quality of undergraduate instruction." How much of all this scholarship is worth a damn is open to question, but there's no debate about the impact that the focus on it has on what

transpires in the classroom. "A superior faculty," wrote Clark Kerr, the architect of California's public higher education system, "results in an inferior concern for undergraduate teaching." Teaching well takes time. Challenging your students takes time: you have to assign a lot of work, and you have to comment on it carefully. Caring about your students takes time: you need to be willing to talk to them, if only about their work, and often for a lot longer than seven minutes. Just learning how to run a class takes time: how to lead a discussion, how to ask a good question, how to deliver a lecture that is worth your students' attention. The ten-thousand-hour rule applies here, too. But every minute spent on teaching is a minute that is not devoted to research. Good teaching isn't simply undervalued; especially at elite universities, it is actively discouraged, because it's seen as raising doubts about your seriousness as a scholar. "Winning the campus teaching award," said Ernest Boyer, vice president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, "is the kiss of death when it comes to tenure." This is not a joke. I was told by a professor at a leading university that when he was given such an honor as a junior faculty member, the provost leaned over at the ceremony and whispered, "Don't worry, this is really a good thing." Being an awful teacher, the professor later concluded, can hurt you at tenure time, but being a really good one can generate suspicion. The sweet spot, he decided, is to be unremarkable. (How's that for a slogan to put on a website? "Our teachers are unremarkable!") There is always that moment of lost innocence among undergraduates at elite schools, usually when a popular teacher is turned down for tenure, when they realize the university isn't really about them. The unspoken premise among institutions—or at least, the unspoken rationalization—is that the best scholars make the best instructors. But there is little reason to believe as much, and a lot of reason to believe the opposite. Never mind the issue of time. Academic training actively deprives you of the qualities that make for good teaching. A good teacher speaks plainly, in vivid, accessible language, because she is addressing what amounts to a general audience. But the kind of jargon academics learn to use is designed to repel the uninitiated. A good teacher ranges widely, making connections among subjects as well as from learning to

life. But academics are constrained to specialize, and increasingly, to hyperspecialize, looking neither left nor right as they plow their little corner of the field. (I asked a colleague once if he had seen a certain piece in the New Yorker. "No," he replied, "I don't read the popular press.") A good teacher, as I said, is personal. But academics learn to abstract themselves from the way they communicate, since scholarship is meant to be objective. Academic prose has been described as "author- evacuated," and there are classrooms one could equally describe as teacher-evacuated. There are certainly many now that are professor-evacuated. I don't need to dwell on the shift, since the 1970s, from tenure-track faculty to contingent academic labor—adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students, and full-time non-tenure-track instructors—except to say that it's getting worse all the time. As of 2011, tenure-track professors—the "normal" kind of academic appointment—represented less than 25 percent of the American faculty. Contingent labor is a lot cheaper, never mind what its employment does to instructional quality. Adjuncts are often remarkably industrious and dedicated, especially given the fact that their pay is ludicrously low (in the vicinity, on average, of three thousand dollars a course), but they tend to be overworked, overwhelmed, and relatively inexperienced, not to mention transient. Contingent instructors also tend to cluster in the kinds of introductory courses that professors shun—the very classes where it's most important to make students feel enfranchised, as they enter the alien world of college. And when a professor is at the front of the room, it's apt to be a lecture hall, with actual student contact handled by teaching assistants—or at many places, simply nonexistent. Kids know they're being cheated. One of my students told me that she had very few professors with whom she felt that she was "getting taller intellectually." Others said that one-to-one interaction with teachers was hard to come by, and real intellectual dialogue almost impossible—this despite the fact that Yale has a student-faculty ratio of 6:1, among the very lowest in the country. And Yale, it seems, is one of the best when it comes to instruction, at least among elite universities. A colleague who had taught at Harvard was amazed to find that we talked about teaching at all. A student at Northwestern told me that the kids there have to

compete for their teachers' attention. A 2005 survey of college freshmen found that less than one in six were "very satisfied" with the teaching they'd experienced. A survey of seniors found that more than a third reported being "frequently bored in class." And now, of course, come the MOOCs, those massive open online courses. Why anybody sees them as an answer is a mystery to me. Yes, they are cheaper, but they also make what's bad about the current situation even worse. Students complain that their professors are remote, so we're going to make them more remote (literally so, in fact). They feel that they have little contact with their teachers, so we won't allow them any. They need challenging assignments and detailed, individualized feedback, so we're going to give them multiple-choice quizzes that we grade by machine. Online instruction isn't just conducted on the Web; it embodies an idea of knowledge that's been shaped by the Web—by Google, by Wikipedia—a confusion of information with understanding. I still don't get why a MOOC is substantially more than a sexy textbook, one that promotes a range of practices and behaviors that higher education ought to fight against: passive learning, diminished attention, the displacement of reading by watching, teaching as showmanship, and the professorial star system. Replacing traditional courses with MOOCs would be like taking children away from a neglectful mother and handing them over to a wire monkey. MOOCs are not about democratizing education. That is just their cover story. They're about reinforcing existing hierarchies—and monetizing institutional prestige—as the higher education market lurches and heaves. The kids at Harvard get to interact with their professors. The kids at San Jose State get to watch the kids at Harvard interact with their professors. San Jose looks worse than before; Harvard looks even better. That is why Coursera and the rest are working with places like Princeton and Berkeley, even though their faculty are hardly likely to represent the best available, since teaching isn't why they have their jobs. The currency the MOOCs are dealing in—

and from the schools' point of view, at least, seeking to maximize the value of—is not instructional quality, but prestige. You'll know those institutions take their online courses seriously as a form of education when they start awarding credit for them. But don't hold your breath. They have no intention of diluting their brands. Kids at Dartmouth or Columbia are still going to get, and their parents are still going to pay for, the deluxe residential experience: contact (at least nominal) with famous professors, state-of-the-art facilities, endless extracurricular opportunities, and above all, the chance to meet, mix with, and marry their equally privileged or soon-to-be-privileged peers. Even in purely instructional terms, no one has claimed that MOOCs are anything close to traditional college classes. It's long been established that quality online instruction, including "blended" courses that combine the old and new modalities, is no less costly than the face-to- face variety, precisely because it is equally labor-intensive. When the purveyors of MOOCs—or their useful idiots in the media, who usually have no experience as teachers—extol the civic virtues of their enterprise, they want us to envision that mythic child in darkest Africa who, having somehow gotten access to a high-speed connection, enjoys educational parity with every other kid in the world. In fact, that's not their target audience at all. Coursera et al. are for-profit companies, and the universities with whom they work (and this goes for edX, the leading nonprofit, as well) expect to see a return on their considerable investment. The goal is to generate revenue, especially by licensing courses to schools that are lower on the food chain. Now that the state legislature in California—where the leading for-profits are headquartered, and where the tech business wields a lot of political clout —has pushed through a law requiring the Cal State system to accept MOOCs for credit, that objective is in sight. What we are seeing, in other words, is nothing less than the monetization and privatization of public higher education. People like to say these days that college is a bubble, but the real bubble is the MOOCs. (In fact, Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of Udacity, has already run the flag down the pole, announcing that early experiments were a failure and that he was turning his attention to corporate clients.) Despite the recent rush in their direction, MOOCs

have yet to demonstrate much benefit at all, even on their own terms. Only about 4 percent of students who start one actually finish it, but most of those are adult learners who already have degrees and are looking for enrichment or new skills—people, that is, who are capable of directing their own education. Yet that is exactly what kids go to college to learn how to do. When businesses start to hire people with online "completion certificates" rather than traditional degrees—and hire them for jobs that require complex skills and promise real advancement—we'll know that MOOCs have even the barest of practical value. I just hope it's not too late by then. There are people out there who are looking for the chance to dismantle higher education and sell it for parts. Once that's done, it can't be undone. College is not like cable television, another service people talk about "unbundling." You can get as much out of Comedy Central whether or not you're also buying Hallmark, or out of The Daily Show whether or not you're also buying The Colbert Report, but college is a holistic, sequential, immersive experience. Institutions ought to keep in mind that the one product they have to offer that no one can duplicate or automate is, precisely, the liberal arts education. The only genuine solution to the crisis in the classroom is for colleges to bring back teaching to the center of their mission. That means finding the will—and yes, the money—to reverse the long-term trends that have given rise to the present disaster: the move to contingent labor and the exclusive embrace of the research model. Universities need to staff their courses with real professors again, not academic lettuce-pickers. If we want people to do the hard, highly skilled work of educating the next generation—of workers, of thinkers, of citizens, of leaders—then we need to pay them well and treat them with respect. It isn't that professors do not make enough; it's that there aren't enough professors. Doubling the current number wouldn't overshoot the mark, and by making the academic job market into something other than the slaughterhouse it's been for as long as anyone remembers, we would also

enable a larger number of our brightest students to regard the profession as a viable career path again. But we also need to redefine the job. Very simply, more teaching, less research. We can improve pedagogical training, especially in graduate school, as some have suggested. We can offer bonus pay to those who excel in the classroom, as has also been proposed. But nothing's really going to change until we alter the basic incentives. That means one or both of two things: raising teaching to equal importance with research when it comes to making decisions about hiring, retention, promotion, and tenure, or creating a parallel teaching faculty of equal pay, job security, and institutional respect. If people could advance up the ladder through teaching or research or a combination of the two, we'd get a lot less pointless scholarship and a lot more quality instruction. A lot of faculty would welcome this arrangement, I believe. For every egotist who thinks his monograph is going to change the world, there are probably several professors who'd be happy to surrender the grind of publication and the pretense of originality: who have long felt that they "don't have anything to say" (a phrase one often hears), who are tired of spewing jargon for the benefit of half a dozen fellow subsubspecialists, who'd be delighted to trade the often stultifying work of the library or the lab for live contact with actual students. You want your teachers to be very smart, and you want them to know what they're talking about, but neither requires them to be leading scholars (still less, nonleading ones). Among the people I knew at Yale, the best teachers—as well as the most interesting individuals to talk to— were often to be found among the cadre of longtime instructors who helped to staff the introductory English courses. The truth is we already have a teaching faculty—those very same contingent workers. We just need to make them into a real faculty, not a class of academic helots. There is a large, public debate in this country about primary and secondary education. There is now another, equally public debate about higher education. What I fail to understand is why they aren't the same debate. We all know that students in elementary and high school learn best in small classrooms with the individualized attention of motivated teachers. It is the same in college. Kids don't suddenly turn into different people—fully independent and intellectually self-sufficient, needing only

to be plugged into a computer—the moment that they turn eighteen. Teaching isn't information transfer, and it isn't entertainment, either. It's about the kind of interchange and incitement that can only happen in a seminar—"seminar" being a fancy name for what every class already is from K–12. It is labor-intensive; it is face-to-face; it is one-at-a-time. We can try to do it on the cheap, but we will get exactly what we pay for.

Ten Your Guide to the Rankings I recently heard from a high school student who was trying to decide between Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. Could I give him some advice? I don't know, I asked him, do you think you look better in crimson, cardinal, or royal blue? That's about the only difference I can see between those places. The students, the teachers, the mentality, the madness: at those and other top-tier universities, they're all essentially the same. The rest is marketing and ego, the sorts of things psychologists have in mind when they talk about "the narcissism of small differences"—the meaningless distinctions people make to feel superior to those who are exactly like them. The real question is whether you want to continue to participate in the system that these institutions form the apex of, and if you don't—if you want to get the kind of education I've been talking about—then what are the alternatives. I am under no illusion that it doesn't matter where you go to college. We mustn't be naïve or sentimental about this. The notion that you can get an equally good education at Fresno State as at Stanford, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson, who has held positions at both institutions, has claimed, or at Linfield College as at Swarthmore, as Hacker and Dreifus insist, strikes me in both cases as a species of willful anti-elitism. Hanson claims himself that the only difference is the students, but even if that's really true (which I seriously doubt), that's

quite a big difference indeed. The students determine the level of classroom discussion and of instruction generally. They're the people you spend almost all of your time interacting with when you're not in class. They shape your values and expectations, for good and ill ("it's hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs"). In fact, it's partly because of the students that I'd warn kids away from the Ivies and their peers. But there are many options between Fresno State, which is part of the chronically underresourced Cal State system, or Linfield College, where the lion's share of students, as at Fresno, choose vocational majors, and Stanford or Swarthmore. A lot of students and families are opting to spend less on college and save their tuition dollars for graduate school, and despite relentless cuts in funding, there are still some very good public universities in every region of the country. The education is often impersonal, especially in the first two years, but the student body is usually far more diverse—genuinely diverse, diverse in terms of socioeconomic background—with all of the invaluable experiential learning that implies. A former student, now a graduate instructor at UCLA, had this to report: I am not someone who touts "diversity" for its own sake necessarily, but the way it arises in classes here speaks to the value of being in a public institution. In one of my seminars, the fact that one girl was Pakistani, one was Bengali, one was black and wheelchair-bound, and one was Israeli had an enormous impact on our discussion of Orientalism. You can't get away with convenient abstractions and pat analyses of the "other" under such circumstances. There are also other benefits of going to a public university, ones that tend to be invisible to the values of the upper middle class. Here is what Brian Johnsrud, an alumnus of Montana State University and former Rhodes Scholar, now a doctoral student at Stanford, had to say: Two weeks ago I had the privilege to be a keynote speaker at my alma mater during Career Week. If my talk had had a title, it would have been "The Advantages of a State-School Education." I

talked about the skill set that MSU provides that you don't get at an elite institution, including accountability, being forced to try your best because you aren't constantly patted on the back, and integrating studies with life skills like living and working off campus and generally learning to be an adult. State schools also offer talented students a greater chance to stand out from the pack and therefore make connections with professors. "What's more," my correspondent went on, as I've mentored MSU students applying for scholarships like the Rhodes and Marshall, I've been astounded by the incredible stories in their letters of recommendation. They illustrate remarkably personal, engaged, and academically rigorous relationships between undergraduates and professors, very different from Oxford and Stanford. Most important, for smart and motivated kids, a lot of public campuses have honors colleges or programs that provide a liberal arts education at the cost of a state institution. But public universities are not the only alternative to Harvard and its ilk. If you want a liberal arts education, the best place to look is a liberal arts college. Such institutions have potential drawbacks: they're small, which is not for everyone, and they're often fairly isolated, which is also not for everyone. They can be a little insular, a little given to self-righteousness. But if there is anywhere that teaching and the humanities are still accorded pride of place— anywhere that college is still college—it is there. Professors at liberal arts colleges devote a larger portion of their time to teaching, are more likely to be hired and promoted at least in part because of it, and are expected to make themselves available to students and to play an active role in campus life. Although they've been socialized into the same professional system as faculty at other places, their institutional identification is also likely to be greater. Instruction at liberal arts colleges is almost entirely seminar-based, and you can be reasonably certain that there will be an actual professor at the table. There are few adjuncts at liberal arts colleges, and with no layer of

graduate students between you and your professors and no large university for everybody to get lost in, the pedagogical environment is intimate and intense. (The absence of a big-time research infrastructure also means that the humanities are more than just an annex to the sciences.) Students have told me about having "nowhere to hide" in class, as well as about the long discussions they have had with their professors outside of class. They also frequently get input into matters of real consequence, like admissions, the design of new dorms, and even faculty hiring—something that's unthinkable at a research university. Liberal arts colleges are still apt to treat their students like members of a community, not just clients or customers. But the most important difference, as always, is the kids themselves. One correspondent told me that she'd always just assumed that universities are for careerists, liberal arts colleges for people who are genuinely interested in ideas, and that seems about right. Still, we shouldn't draw too sharp a line. The way that some Pomona students put it to me was that the consulting rat race doesn't start there until senior year—as opposed to a year or two earlier, from what they could tell from their friends at the Ivies. As U.S. News has tightened its grip and the admissions process has homogenized the experience of high- achieving kids across the country, the most prestigious liberal arts colleges—or at least, their students—have grown increasingly similar to their Ivy League counterparts. Economics, as I mentioned, is now the most popular major at at least six and as many as fourteen of the top twenty liberal arts colleges, including seven of the top nine. (The information is provided in the back of U.S. News.) You ought to consider avoiding such schools. The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate— liberal arts colleges, places like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and quite a few others: schools that, instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, have retained their allegiance to real educational values. Look at alternative lists like Colleges That Change Lives, Hidden Ivies, or the Washington Monthly College Guide and Rankings, which measures institutions by their commitment to social good. Look for a school that's going to care about you, not the new MBA program in the Gulf. Be skeptical of places that tout curricular flexibility

rather than intellectual rigor, or that are gutting the arts and humanities in favor of "practical" programs. Keep in mind that with the long-term glut of PhDs, there are brilliant professors everywhere now. I also spoke about the kid who can't be bothered to get A's in every class in high school because they're actually more interested in following their curiosity, so here's another rule of thumb. U.S. News supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top twenty universities, the number is usually above 90 percent, a threshold that is also reached at several of the top colleges. I'd be wary of schools like that (though I would make an exception for public universities, which draw from disadvantaged high schools from across their respective states). Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they're getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals. A recent graduate had this to say about her college experience: I remember not doing particularly well in high school in a few courses and not particularly caring, so I attended a small non-Ivy liberal arts school where I worked alongside many others in my same position, without pretense, but with much love for the pursuit of general knowledge. I never felt pressured to go in a certain direction; instead professors pushed me to ask big questions, to reason thoughtfully, and to approach each subject openly, using the knowledge I had garnered from other disciplines to contest theories and propose new ones. I remember while writing my honors thesis, which consequently did not exactly fit into my politics major, my advisers urged me to eschew the department guidelines and risk rejection, because, as they told me, it's not about the award, it's about the process of growth and learning and exploring that you will experience and take with you. I use that advice in everything I do.

She is now enrolled, I should add, in a leading doctoral program, and in a different field than the one she majored in. Another young woman wrote this: Berry College in northeast Georgia gave me a full academic scholarship, and they had a beautiful campus, and a writing program, so I ended up there. It was a fortunate choice. Berry is small, and odd, and spottily brilliant, so it fit me perfectly. It has a few well-known professors—well perhaps only one—but the humanities program is chock-full of professors who are both intellectual and human, who are drawn to the chance to teach small classes of students who really care about ideas—and a few of them, the best, are quite charmingly half-insane by ordinary standards. The students, too, were something I'd not found before— people who actually cared about ideas, and books, and with whom I didn't feel as though I constantly had to withhold or hide my truest self, at least the intellectual side of it. At Berry I found something I haven't had in person before or since—a whole tight group of "kindred spirits," with whom I could regularly have intense conversations about literature or art or what it was like to be ourselves—and, particularly senior year as the "real world" encroached, our frequent communal existential crises were a relief to us all. Teaching and the humanities: those are the meat, the middle, of the liberal arts experience. But you should also look for colleges that pay attention to the ends. Avoid a school that's going to hand you a course catalogue when you walk in the door, pat you on the shoulder, and leave you to figure it out on your own. A couple of advising sessions aren't going to do it, either. What you want, ideally, is a dedicated freshman seminar—meaning more than just a writing class—that is designed to introduce you to the purpose of a college education. There are many forms that such a course can take, but I learned of an exemplary version on a visit to Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Freshman Studies, a two-term sequence that's been taught since 1945, is presented as an "introduction to liberal learning." The

course seeks to generate a sense of intellectual adventure as well as of intellectual community. The big questions, like what is the good life, are put directly on the table. While the syllabus is centered on the humanities, it draws from every branch of the curriculum. Einstein and Stephen Jay Gould keep company with Plato, Woolf, and Stravinsky. As one of the instructors said (and almost all of the instructors are professors, teaching in sections of fifteen), the course pushes kids beyond where they think they are disciplinarily. They discover that they have a love for history, or physics, or art. It also helps them feel enfranchised. When I met with a group of seniors, they credited the class with enabling them to figure out what college is for. They had also clearly gotten the encouragement, and the tools, to be self-directed about their education. Their test scores may not have been as high as those of the kids I taught at Yale, but they seemed a lot more self-aware and certainly more at peace with their decisions. Out of their graduating class of 350, one of them boasted, only a handful were going to law school. The end of college is equally important—and by the end, I don't mean graduation day. Look for a school that's going to take an active role in helping you to think about and make the transition to postgraduate life no matter what you major in. That means introducing you to as wide a range of options as possible. The process cannot wait until your senior year, shouldn't be an add-on, and needs to involve something more than the kind of half-assed approach, increasingly common, that tries to shoehorn professional skills (or worse, empty talk of "leadership") into the liberal arts classroom. I'm not at all averse to active or service learning, courses and programs that put knowledge into practice and integrate study with extramural experiences. Reflection, again, should complement action, not gaze at its navel. Bennington, for instance, has redesigned its curriculum along exactly these lines. Students undertake a "plan process" that spans the four years and incorporates advising sessions, reflective essays, and the formulation of an individualized course of study. They do a seven-week "field work term" between semesters every year that helps to move them toward the postgraduate world in a mindful, systematic way. A Center for the Advancement of Public Action

offers a range of interdisciplinary courses and gives students the opportunity to organize their education around specific issues such as poverty, public health, and the environment. The goal is to leverage learning as an agent of social change—the kind of objective that makes leadership and citizenship into something more than pretty words. What about skipping college altogether? That's another fad these days— or at least, talking about it is. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg: the same examples are invariably trotted out (though Gates and Zuckerberg attended Harvard for several semesters, and each made crucial contacts there). The venture capitalist Peter Thiel—bachelor's and law degrees from Stanford, the former as a philosophy major—has been offering fellowships for people under twenty to leave or forgo college to launch start-ups. Well, if you're a computer genius (or a tennis star—Steffi Graf has also been educed in this connection, which tells you how thoughtful the argument is), then that might be good advice. Otherwise it's pretty stupid. In purely financial terms—wage premiums, unemployment rates, lifetime earnings—college is not only still a good investment; according to a recent study, it is the best investment you can make. It is also a necessary credential for many kinds of work and any kind of professional training. In terms of all the higher purposes that I've been talking about, it is equally indispensable. There may be brilliant autodidacts out there, people who need nothing but the world and a library (the writer Fran Lebowitz has said that she was glad to get kicked out of high school, because it gave her more time to read), but they're almost as rare as the Gateses and Zuckerbergs. Even Thoreau, the archetypal nonconformist, went to college, and may not have been Thoreau if he had not. It's true that college is imperfect even in the best of situations. Soul-making will never be strictly compatible with syllabi and semesters; imagination and courage do not fit neatly within rules and requirements. But if getting an inadequate education is bad, then getting none at all is even worse. You need to get a base, before you can take off on your own.

Far more significant than where you go to school, however, is why and how. What are you thinking about, as you make your college lists and do your tours? Never mind the fancy dorms and gyms; college shouldn't be a country club. What are the other students like? What are the teachers like? Look for schools where it's considered cool to think. Sit in on some classes, as prospective students almost never do. U.S. News has lists of "Best Undergraduate Teaching," too, and though they're based on the hearsay of reputational surveys (that is, the opinions of administrators at other schools), they may be worth at least a glance, if only since they have some names that don't show up as prominently on the main "Best Colleges" lists. Keep in mind that proxy statistics like student-faculty ratio or percentage of classes under twenty can be misleading. They don't tell you whether you actually get to see the faculty, or who is running those little classes. Go and find out for yourself. Most of all, forget about the rankings, which drive so many bad decisions on the part of colleges and students both. Rankings lump together very different schools, make meaningless distinctions among essentially identical ones, and measure market position rather than educational quality. Go to a school you connect with, not, as students almost always do, the most prestigious one that lets you in. Once you get there, keep your eye on the ball. You can't just passively absorb an education. Wherever you decide to go, you have to actively direct it. Look for teachers who devote themselves to their students, and don't be shy about approaching them outside of class. Look for courses, in whatever field, that want to humanize you, not specialize you. Follow your instincts wherever they lead. Choose a major that excites you: right now, about being a student. It's been said that college is the only situation where people want to get as little of what they pay for as possible. But this is your time; this is your shot. This is your chance to become, not the person that you want to be, not the person you've decided that you're going to be, but the person that you never could have dreamed of being. By far the most important factor, when you go to college, isn't the college. It's you.