THE BIG LIE | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -

In response to the pressure on universities to make their graduates immediately employable, increasingly they do. As a result the new philosophy of educational management -- that universities function as businesses responsive to business needs -- is quickly becoming a philosophy of education as well. When the university becomes continuous with the market, a centralized training ground for homo economicus, it is only a matter of time before education is viewed as a product like any other. Indeed, according to Newsweek, hundreds of colleges across the country offer free courses to alumni whose company is displeased with the training they received, and some, for instance St. John Fisher College in New York, go so far as to offer refunds on any diploma that does not operate to the customer's satisfaction.

This is the Big Lie, expressed succinctly when, as a chemical engineering student, I asked the purpose of a particular assignment. "This will enable you," the professor intoned, "to make a lot of money."

Why is the promise that a university education will lead to a secure livelihood "The Big Lie"? It is, after all, true -- and furthermore a good job is a genuine good, a precondition for many of the goods of human life. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with promising, and designing a system to deliver, a practical and economically powerful education. A primarily vocational education is one important way of serving the economic and technical needs of a powerful nation. The problem arises with the notion of a liberal education. While it is true that a liberal education sometimes results in material comfort, it does not follow that liberal education is for material comfort.

In fact, the guiding principles of a university education often clash with its most widely advertised goal. Traditionally conceived as an institution insulated from the labor market, allowing its members freedom of thought and nonproductive exploration, the university houses manifold disciplines, each aimed at inquiry of a distinct kind. Indeed, it is one of our culture's guiding maxims that an education consisting of such rarefied intellectual pursuits is unlikely to help one earn a living. What, after all, are you going to do with it?

Driven by the increasing tendency of universities to market themselves based on the bottom line, teachers compromise between the students' vocational goals and the university's educational ends by using lucrative employment as a motivator for intellectual learning. But such slights-of-mind end up substituting the external good of employment for the internal goods of a liberal education. The students don't know why they are learning any given subject, because they haven't been taught the inherent value of that discipline in itself. This substitution is the essence of the Big Lie.

Imagine the following scenario. A mother wishes to teach her daughter, Karen -- an average little girl with a sweet tooth -- to play the piano. She must play a certain amount of time each day, and perform in recitals. When she has practiced a certain number of hours, or a recital is especially good, she will be given some candy. Early on, Karen will almost certainly play because of the candy. Of course, candy has nothing to do with the internal rewards of playing the piano. But unless Karen is exceptionally gifted, if the only reasons she is given for playing are external, she may never feel the piano extending through her core, or have the strangely religious experience of contacting an audience through living music. And perhaps the fact that her teacher "seemed to grade with an objective standard in mind" will strike her as odd, unfair and unfathomable.

Imagine, now, that Karen turns out to be a gifted musician and she wins a college scholarship in music. She understands that if she continues to get high recital evaluations, she will probably achieve a comfortable living as a pianist. But this arrangement comes at a price. In addition to her classes in performance technique, music theory and music history, she must take a number of courses that will be relatively useless to this career: calculus, writing composition, ethics and analytic chemistry. She will be evaluated in these classes as in the rest, and her performance will in part determine the course of her career. What's more, unless she maintains a certain minimum standard in these unrelated courses, her musical training will cease. But when her teachers and parents use Karen's music career to motivate her performance in chemistry class ("you have to learn to calculate electron shells if you want to make a living playing piano"), is it any wonder that she sees it as a kind of threat?

When chemistry has been placed like an obstacle between a student and her career goals -- a class that, insofar as it is not expected to have intrinsic worth functions only as an obstacle -- it is no surprise that she confronts the situation with some hostility. And perhaps she will look for a way around it. If all her reasons for taking chemistry are external, why shouldn't she cheat? If she will not cheat, what reasons will she give? Are they good reasons? Do your students know what it is they will get from music, or literature, or mathematics that makes it better than a pyramid scheme? Clearly not all of mine do, and every student who arrives in a college classroom in this state has been failed by the educational system that has forgotten its essential purpose.

It is not only students, but also teachers and the disciplines themselves that suffer the effects of the Big Lie. Once the primary good of any enterprise has been determined, coherence demands that the practices within it be related to that primary good. Thus have the arts and humanities been called upon to detail their contribution to the primary good of gainful employment. We all know the familiar answers: English teaches people to write, philosophy teaches "applied ethics" or logic and music, we are told, makes you better at math.

What is so disturbing to me about these stock answers is that they make what are in fact ends in themselves into mere means to "higher" ends. When an English professor, for example, attempts to shape her discipline into a means to employment, she has no choice but to recast the reading of Chaucer and the writing of personal essays as steps on the road toward corporate business deals and company memos. But of course, few professors ever face this tension with the directness it deserves. Instead, they unknowingly participate in the Big Lie by blithely continuing to teach as if nothing in contemporary liberal arts had changed. And this bait-and-switch only leaves our students more upset and confused.

Impractical disciplines do have practical justifications. The arts and humanities are often deeply practical -- they crack open the world in all its pleasure and pain and invite us to grapple with the unfathomable, the absurd, the difficult, the truthful. But we need to assert these essential goals, reconnecting practice with pedagogy.

If you believe that the goal of thinking is to write a contract to protect a client's interests, a program to avoid Y2K mishaps or an efficient manufacturing scheme for stick-pin production, then -- by all means -- clearly proclaim it so. (I won't attend your college, but then again, you wouldn't want me.) If, however, you hope to help your students step outside of their belief structure, think beyond the known or expected, question their own viewpoint and see from someone else's, then don't talk of jobs but about the beauty and meaning of learning to think for oneself.

If the ultimate aim of education is to encourage human flourishing, the arts and sciences must embody a vision of human life that transcends the economic. If we are true to this vision, we all have a great deal to gain. But if we refuse to see and convey the distinct fruits of each discipline, our students will never learn to savor them, and we shouldn't be surprised when they drag through classes, calculating their GPAs like so many 401(k) statements.
SALON | Jan. 25, 1999

Michael O'Donovan-Anderson holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. He is the author of "Content and Comportment: On Embodiment and the Epistemic Availability of the World" (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997) and is currently writing a book on Ancient Greek literature and the paradoxical dualities of human life.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S

Bartering brains for bread Can the institutions of higher learning escape the long arms of their corporate sponsors?
By Mark Luce
Jan 6, 1999