I have been selected as the new director of Syracuse University’s Renee Crown Honors Program and accordingly my wife Connie and I are moving back east. Both of us are New Yorkers and so this opportunity is not merely a significant career step it’s also a real homecoming.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that in a time of transition I should be nostalgic. My family moved to Albany, New York from rural New Hampshire in the summer of 1963. My father had taken a post as the assistant commissioner for higher education.
Those were extraordinary days for American higher education. The post WW II influx of veterans seeking college degrees through the G.I. Bill and the initial wave of baby boom students drove a necessary expansion of Higher Ed. The Republican governor of NY, Nelson Rockefeller saw an opportunity for the Empire State to match California’s superb public university system. That goal was lauded by both political parties. The McCarthyite suspicion of post-secondary education felt like a matter of history–indeed the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in ’63 went to Richard Hofstader’s book “Anti-Intellectualism in American History”. Our body politic was it seemed, once again, all for learning.
My nostalgia feels odd because I’m not generally sentimental. As a person with a disability I went to public schools and to college in the years before the advent of the Americans with Disabilities Act. People with disabilities, people of color, women, GLBT persons–all know that the “good old days” weren’t so good. Moreover even today our fight for acceptance in the village square and on college campuses still feels largely provisional, feels in fact like a delicate work in progress.
And so I find myself asking what exactly I’m nostalgic for. The answer can’t be found in a vintage clothing shop. I’m nostalgic for a time when Americans believed that Higher Ed was worth the hard work and sacrifice that it actually takes to get a university degree. At the present time the importance of getting a college diploma is being loudly questioned by pundits of every type. Worse we see discourse that questions the efficacy of college instruction, most notably Richard Arum’s book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”.
Arum’s book argues in essence that approximately one quarter of American college students graduate without having attained better critical thinking and writing skills than when they entered academe. By turns the conclusion is that many colleges let down their students by failing to demand sufficient rigor, either because professors are inattentive or the curriculum promotes loopholes (courses without writing assignments) that students can exploit rather easily.
“Academically Adrift” doesn’t take into account the fact that the United States is the only country in the world where almost anyone can go to college–a matter that is astonishing and rather inspiring. The opportunity to learn is available to all comers. And I am nostalgic for the idea of opportunity–but opportunity mixed with a good, old fashioned American “go-get-em” determination to make the most of a good thing. To my mind the only thing that the Arum book proves is that there are plenty of people who possess insufficient ambition to make the most of a remarkable opportunity.
So it turns out that as I head back east I am not nostalgic for a place so much as a state of mind.
S.K.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Planet of the Blind 