Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Stanley Fish in the August 1 New York Times

I just sent a letter off to the New York Times, though I have no idea whether they will print it. My history in this domain: sometimes they do; mostly they don’t. But let me reproduce here what I sent:

“Stanley Fish, in his August 1 column, recommends public universities as much the best educational bargain: excellent faculties and a fraction of the cost of private institutions—who may only add the dubious, cache of prestige. I have no quarrel with his praise of (many, if not all) public universities, but his advice ignores the many youngsters who are not cut out for scrambling on multi-thousands campuses. Not every kid is equipped to buck the bureaucracies of large universities, to thrive in large classes, to get attention only when he or she demands it. Liberal arts colleges are good for the shy and reticent ones and they are capable of having them grow into confident adults, able to cope with the world. Unfortunately, very few of these much smaller institutions are public.”

There is not much I want to add here. For many years I have claimed that the most important decision about where a high school gradate should go to college is whether it should be at a large university or at a small liberal arts college. Many youngsters are perfectly capable of bucking bureaucratic rules, while resenting to be “mothered” by professors and advisors. Others are intimidated by rules and regulations and wind up not getting into what are for the not-so-clever “closed” classes. On the other hand, they might not at all mind a certain amount of advising that others might think of as intrusive. The success of undergraduate education is not simply a function of instructors competent in their fields, etc. But given that we are talking about an educational passage that also takes late teenagers into adulthood, more needs to be looked at besides scholarly competence.

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