Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: COVER STORY Date: Mon, 26 Oct 92 11:27:05 EST Message-ID: \SE COVER STORY \HD Islands of Tradition amid Academic Tempest \BY Stephen Goode \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: Even in this time of political correctness and multiculturalism, some small liberals arts colleges continue to offer students a foundation in Western civilization. It's not easy; costs and tuition have escalated, putting a strain on many students. But faculty and students say it's all worth it. TEXT: On a bookshelf in the office of Leland Park, director of the library at Davidson College, there's a plaque quoting Frontis Johnston, a longtime history professor at the genteel North Carolina school: "A liberal arts education doesn't prepare you for something, it prepares you for anything." Johnston, who was born in 1908 and died two years ago, meant that as an enticement and as a classic statement of what higher education can be, though these days it has a slightly different ring. For students who hope to land a good job after graduation, being prepared for something is extremely appealing. For Christine Ikenaga, a junior at Pepperdine University who wants to be an FBI agent, a liberal arts education is "a means to keep options open during a time of recession." Tanvir Ahmad, an accounting major at the Malibu, Calif., school, wonders whether students have the luxury of spending time in fields outside their speciality. Of Pepperdine's required courses in history, religion and other subjects, Ahmad says: "I ask myself, does it help business? Will they bring success?" Meanwhile, to worried parents who read the horror stories of political correctness run amok on the nation's campuses, Johnston's notion of being prepared for anything - anything? - can be more alarming than inspirational. The liberal arts, in particular, have been fertile terrain for the politicization that has come to be a defining characteristic of American higher education. Sensing a market in such fears, the conservative National Review published a guide two years ago of 50 "safe" colleges, safe meaning that the schools still offered a traditional education to their students, that faculty members were responsive to student needs and that parents could be certain their sons and daughters would not be subjected to the latest fads in education, be they radical feminism or deconstruction or the latest permutation of Marxism. Headlines to the contrary, there are in fact plenty of schools that have stood their ground - between the encroachments of practicality on the one side and politicization on the other. These colleges still hew to Frontis Johnston's ideal. They have retained a core curriculum - a list of courses that all students take, usually in the first two years of college and usually including such classics of Western civilization as Homer's Iliad, John Milton's Paradise Lost and Plato's Republic. Though requirements vary, the goal is the same: to bring students into close contact with the best that has been written; to give them common subjects to discuss; and to perpetuate, implicitly, the traditional idea that there are certain works, at a minimum, that every educated person should have read. A look at three such schools - Davidson, Pepperdine and the University of Dallas - suggests that the obituaries some have written for traditional higher education are premature. The liberal arts are alive, if not always well. Students and their parents just have to look harder to find an old-fashioned core curriculum. And they probably have to pay more for it, too. Each of these schools has raised its prices almost every year over the past decade or more, to pay for such things as maintenance and faculty salaries. Finances are a constant worry. Still, they manage to compete with better-known institutions for talented students. In fact, the smallness of the schools is one of their chief selling points. Beth Lindsey, a freshman at Davidson, says she didn't really consider any big school. "Why would I go to a big school?" says the Richmond native, whose father also went to the North Carolina college. Davidson has 1,400 students; Pepperdine's undergraduate Seaver College, about 2,400; and the University of Dallas, 1,100 . Lindsey says, "There's a definite virtue to smallness, you know people." Says an undergraduate at Dallas: "There's a setback, too. If you do something your freshman year, everybody remembers it in detail." Says another Dallas undergrad, in a nineties version of Johnston's motto: "It's all worth it finally because an education isn't just to make a living, it's to have a life." It's probably no coincidence that the three schools (which all made National Review's list), like many traditional schools, share a religious background that more or less has been maintained. Davidson was founded by Presbyterians, Pepperdine by members of the Church of Christ and the University of Dallas by the Roman Catholic Church. (Only Pepperdine still has obligatory religious services, a convocation that meets every Monday morning.) They boast (and with justification) of their faculties' commitment to teaching - as opposed to research and publication, the usual paths to fame and fortune in academia these days. T. C. Price Zimmermann, a history professor at Davidson, says many who teach at colleges such as his can be viewed as "refugees" from larger schools, "as professors who want to teach and who want to have students who want good teaching." Administrators and faculty at the three schools say they are repeatedly asked at national conferences of educators what it is they do at their colleges. "Education is coming back to what we do," says Dwayne VanRheenen, dean of faculty at Pepperdine. In his view, this means a return to the undergraduate student's education as the highest goal of the university. As Pepperdine President David Davenport puts it, condemning schools where the phrase "publish or perish" became the rule of the day: "It was not at all unusual for professors to pledge their primary allegiance to their discipline, rather than to their university or their students." The core curriculum at these schools isn't limited to the humanities, but includes science and mathematics. The goal is for students to achieve "proficiency in those things educated people should know," says one professor at Dallas. Davidson President John Kuykendall says, "The aim is to avoid German isolation," that is, the German tradition of specializing in one field and avoiding contact with any other discipline. It doesn't take decades of tradition to run a traditional school. The University of Dallas was founded 36 years ago, and there are still people on campus who had a big part in its founding. Every year art Professor Lyle Novinski takes freshmen on tours of the grounds - the school occupies a hill on the Dallas plain that gives a view of the city. Novinski and his wife, Sybil , the school's registrar and an associate dean , planted the trees that thrive on the campus, and Lyle designed the university chapel. Davidson, by contrast, dates from 1837. Its campus looks like a Hollywood studio mock-up of what campuses should look like - all red brick, columns, manicured lawns and magisterial buildings that seem intended to give students a sense of place and belonging. It's a campus that many students wander across barefoot, in shorts and studied disarray. In rankings of top small liberal arts schools in the nation, such as the annual U.S. News & World Report listing, Davidson consistently makes the grade. Pepperdine, for its part, is a fish out of water. Originally located in Los Angeles, right by Watts, it moved to its present site in chic Malibu - perched on a cliff above the Pacific like a terraced Hopi Indian village - after the 1965 riots. The location gives rise to frequent jokes; the Porsches{D-} and Mercedes-Benzes, it's said, belong to the students, the old clunkers to professors. Students boast of seeing celebrities in a nearby supermarket, then say that's no big deal. Small private schools like these are expensive, and becoming more so. Says University of Dallas President Robert Sasseen: "We have come to the place where we may price ourselves out of our own market, and that's uncomfortable." Costs at Dallas, Davidson and Pepperdine range from $16,000 to more than $20,000 a year, with Pepperdine the most expensive. Pepperdine junior Ikenaga tells of a friend who had to leave school because her family couldn't afford it any longer. Administrators at all three schools lament how much students must borrow to stay in college - with debt burdens upon graduation that rival payments on homes. Benjamin Klein, interim dean of faculty at Davidson, says, "It's the middle-class kids that are hit hardest." Kids from poorer families have access to scholarships, while rich students have no problem finding funds. Top college administrators, particularly at private schools, have a long-term concern about student borrowing. As Davenport points out, students burdened with heavy debts aren't likely to contribute to alumni organization drives for money, and, he adds, alumni who have deep debts tend to "develop a certain attitude toward giving that doesn't change," even after their debts are paid. Most students at all three institutions have some kind of financial help, whether scholarships or loans - but many still have to find jobs, which the colleges, with various degrees of success, aid them in doing. Administrators say the situation is a recipe for disaster - the difference between making ends meet and having to drop out or borrow more can be as small as having to make unforeseen repairs to a car. But there obviously are compensations that keep students coming to these schools, or their parents sending them. And it's not always something the students appreciate immediately. The old truism - that education is wasted on the young - still seems to hold. Pepperdine's Davenport describes students who return with plaudits after graduation, amazed at how much they have learned to value their education after graduating. Dallas's Lyle Novinski, who admits that high standards can be difficult to appreciate "at the beginning of things," adds that by their junior or senior years, most students are glad that the requirements have been made of them. Small colleges like these tend to be paternalistic, much to the consternation of 18-year-olds. They require big chunks of homework, and teachers aren't happy when the students ignore it. As John Wilson, dean of Pepperdine's Seaver College, says, noting the differences between his school and the big state universities, where teachers are more remote from students: "We did not lose the notion that the faculty knows what it is that students should know, and we weren't afraid to say that's exactly what it is the student should know." The paternalism at these schools also extends to enforcing regular attendance, something that can easily escape notice in large lecture classes at big schools. At Dallas, teachers such as Cherie Clodfelter warn their students not to miss class (all three colleges frown on student absences). "You are disregarding responsibility," she tells her students. Clodfelter, an education teacher who hails from rural Oklahoma, likes to tell her students, "The classroom is not democratic. I am queen of the classroom." Then, by way of explanation, she says, "You treat people fairly, but not alike," because different students require different approaches. The flip side of the paternalism is greater personal and institutional concern for the students, a fact the students themselves talk about endlessly. They compare their own experiences favorably with those of friends at big universities. Says an administrator at Davidson, "It's one of the things we have going for us, and it's one of the things that keep students around." Pepperdine provides a course for freshmen where students do papers for a teacher who also gives them classroom time to air personal problems. Students will talk about everything from scheduling French class to fire alarms going off at 6 a.m. to backed-up toilets. They also discuss Pepperdine's effort to get the students off campus - a plan, in Davenport's words, "designed to show them that Malibu isn't the whole world and not even a very important part of it." Some of the biology students in Visiting Professor Karen Martin's group, for example, work with teens at a nearby juvenile correction institution. "They're around 17 and have a third-grade education," one student says, but they like to read Stephen King novels donated by the students. "It's a very different world," another student adds. "None of them have ever heard of Pepperdine. They don't know what it is. And when you ask them where they're from, they think you mean what gang do they belong to." At Dallas, Angelle Caffery says her teachers "assume it is a really big thing to be available [to students] - and it is." Still sounding a bit amazed after two years at Pepperdine, Christine Ikenaga says, "Professors really do invite you to their homes. They do talk to you directly. They are so accessible." All of this is the opposite of what the students hear from friends who went to large state or private universities, where undergraduates are likely as not to be taught by graduate students and where access to full professors is limited. As recently as the 1950s, there was a rule on the books at Davidson that said students had to speak courteously to the people they met - a kind of speech code and concern for the character of students that has lately been revived, with a political twist and amid constitutional controversy, on many a fashionable campus. To this day, you can hear people at Davidson talking about the school as "a way of life, of mind tempered by courtesy." That way of life has changed, however. Thirty years ago, Davidson was all white and all male. This year's freshman class has a majority of women, and the student body president is black. Tension over teaching versus research also has arisen, with some faculty and students grumbling that recent denials of tenure were based more on failure to publish than on lack of teaching talent. But it's still clear which of these the school officially rewards. "When professors don't teach, it's a shameful state of affairs," says Klein. And Davidson, he adds, expects its teachers to work not only with upperclassmen but with freshmen, "the whole gamut. Any other approach doesn't make sense here." At Davidson, there is conflict between tradition and the pressure for change, but it's a fair fight. Zimmermann, who calls himself a Burkean conservative, explains: "If you don't know what your own tradition is, you're likely to change it for the worse. And you're likely not to be able to modify it in a serious or valuable way." Burkean or otherwise, this respect for the past pervades all three schools. Teachers and administrators alike say they want to avoid what they call the cafeteria approach to education, or the education smorgasbord - the kind of curriculum that allows students to pick and choose to the point where they can receive a diploma without even a smattering of history or science or literature. Continuity is carried to the greatest extreme at Dallas, though freshmen there began the year in modern enough fashion - watching a film, The Mosquito Coast. It wasn't intended entirely as entertainment, says Lyle Novinski, but to raise questions students will deal with as freshmen, throughout their tenure at Dallas and indeed throughout life - most notably, the notion that a life passionately lived is superior to one lived without deep commitments to others. These and other themes will be taken up by students in their reading of such works as the Iliad and Paradise Lost, which are among the books all students at Dallas read. The core requirements allow professors such as Richard Olenick, who teaches physics, to ask students what the Greek word for motion is (kino, which is the base word for kinetics) with the expectation that a few of them at any rate should know the answer. Olenick, it should be added, is no drudge. He takes his students to the nearby Six Flags amusement park, where they can ride the Texas Giant, a roller coaster that offers a 137-foot plunge at 62 mph, with new appreciation for the forces at work. He's also fond of making connections to the other subjects his students learn. When he writes 1564 on the blackboard by way of explaining Galileo's birth date, he may also point out that William Shakespeare was born the same year and that Michelangelo died on the same day Galileo was born . According to Olenick, a cardinal sin of teaching undergraduates "is to put the blinders of your discipline on." Says Dallas English Professor David Davies, who teaches a popular course in lyric poetry, "One of the things that attracted me to Dallas was that I could count on students having a basic background" in the classics. Students at all three schools are required to write a great deal. One of the two semesters in English that are required at Pepperdine, for example, focuses on writing. Students are guided through several drafts of a nonfiction story. The notion, says English Professor Lee Ann Leeson , is to make them as aware as possible of the necessity for revision. They should understand, she says, that writing well is a process, not something done at one sitting and handed in finished the next morning. As for the semester of reading, she says, "you're very conscious that it's the only literature course they'll be taking." The department's long-standing criterion for success is whether students continue reading after college. Does it all work? Does the effort pan out in better-educated students? Leeson admits she doesn't know if the English classes take. Dallas's James F. Reid, provost and dean of the university's undergraduate college, wonders what would happen to the whole core program if freshman enrollment dropped. "What would happen if the students stopped showing interest?" he asks. He doesn't have an answer, though he suspects faculty and administration might well reconsider the curriculum. Clodfelter states simply: "Often the core curriculum simply doesn't take. And it doesn't take with a lot of students." At Davidson and Pepperdine, too, professors and administrators say that the ideal isn't attainable, because time and human nature don't permit perfection, and that what's planted may take a long time to grow, if it ever grows at all. "We can evangelize for the core verities," says Davidson's Leland Park. "There's very little else that a school like this has going for it. What other education purpose could we have?" The teachers and administrators may worry too much. Dallas senior Robert Hanson, who worked for several years as a heavy equipment operator before returning to college, starts by praising the tendency of professors at the school to limit the number of books required. He likes this because it allows him to read the books more closely. He's an advocate of the core program: "It starts out gently. They bring you through history and then it all converges," he says, in a statement sure to make a teacher smile. Of course, there are complaints, students being what they are, but not usually about the studies. "You can say we have a great curriculum and very bad food," says one undergraduate at Dallas, sentiments echoed at the two other schools. At Davidson, students complained about recent rumors of restrictions on drinking. Some Dallas undergraduates felt plagued by new rules forbidding smoking in dorms. And everywhere, students complained that at small schools, if you do something that people hear about, they never forget. Reputations are earned for good. The best advocates of these schools are students who have transferred from elsewhere, including from abroad. Simon Priestly, a Davidson sophomore, says, "I wouldn't have learned anywhere close as much in Britain." And he likes Davidson's emphasis on body as well as mind: Students have to pass tests in four sports. Dallas senior Hanson previously attended community colleges. "They tended to the level of students who could sleep through classes," he says. "It's a $500 education, and that's precisely what you get." Pepperdine's Ahmad is of the same mind. "Professors won't give you the time of day" at the colleges he attended before going to Malibu. At Pepperdine, there are "small classes and the chance to talk," he says. Most everyone at Pepperdine has a tan - although that's not necessarily an indication of abundant leisure. The sun shines most of the time, and it's difficult to get away from. But at the school's central plaza on a typically sunny day, it's the diversity of the student body that's on display. There are tables with students seeking volunteers for different kinds of community services. There's a table selling Malcolm X caps and offering Malcolm X information. Zeta Kappa, a sorority, has a table with a poster that says, "Discover Tradition," and books of photographs of sorority activities for potential pledges. Chicago native Ikenaga, although not a sorority member herself, says, "There is a definite sense of community here." Pakistan-born Ahmad is not so sure. Although he now is a U.S. citizen, Ahmad lives at Pepperdine's international dorm, sharing quarters with a Mexican and a native of Hong Kong. "Sometimes I feel very much alone. There are not programs that mix the cultures, and people really don't speak to one another," he says. In this age of officially prescribed multiculturalism, a comment like Ahmad's would cause self-doubt at many a university, perhaps prompting redoubled efforts to incorporate appreciation of all cultures into the curriculum. A different sort of doubt crops up at Pepperdine, Davidson and Dallas. All three grew out of a particular culture, a particular religion . And none of these schools wants to abandon its rich religious traditions, despite the temptation to become secular. Says Pepperdine's Davenport, "To abandon our religious connection would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater." Dean Wilson notes that Pepperdine's relative youth (the school just turned 55) means that it missed the rush to secularization earlier in this century by many of the country's private universities. But secularization there has been - at all three schools. Longtime Davidson religion Professor Sam Maloney, for example, says that professors can no longer count on students knowing such basic Old Testament stories as God's demand that Abraham sacrifice his son, Isaac. "It's like building from scratch," Maloney says. The role of religion on these campuses is very much on the minds of administrators and faculty, as well it might be. At Pepperdine, a tall tower dominates the Pacific landscape. It bears a cross and an inscription: "A symbol of Pepperdine's dedication to the restoration of New Testament Christianity." There are similar plaques and inscriptions at Davidson and at Dallas. People pay attention to these symbols. Davidson history Professor David Shi speaks elliptically of their influence: "It's wrestling with that angel, a question of necessary ambiguity and importance." What Shi hopes for, in the end, is an "atmosphere where reason and faith are valued." The schools bend over backward to deny that they are religiously dogmatic, rather than open to a variety of thought. They may even bend farther than they need to. Pepperdine's Wilson, for example, says, "Students are quickly told there are no points for piety" - something it's difficult to imagine a Pepperdine student demanding. At Davidson, courses in religion are rigorously objective. "We are no longer in the religious business here," says one longtime Davidson observer. At Dallas last year, when an undergraduate complained that she felt she was being religiously pressured during her semester in Rome, college administrators went out of the way to help her through periods of ill will and doubt. All these schools have lengthy discussions on what it means to be a Christian college in the late 20th century. Last year, Pepperdine held a two-week colloquium where such figures in American religion and education as Richard Marsden, then of Duke, and Nathan Hatch of Notre Dame talked about secularism and education. Pepperdine faculty presented papers, and Hatch, Marsden and others offered comments. "Nothing definite was decided," says Pepperdine religion Professor Richard Hughes , whose own views are that the religion/secular debate "provides a kind of atmosphere that is both positive and negative" - a state of creative tension that enriches the experience of students, but is a real chore to maintain. Students at all the schools complain about requirements in religion and religious history - although each of the colleges is very careful to be frank ahead of time about what students will be required to take. Still, as a student at Pepperdine put it, "you think the closeness with the faculty will balance all things out, so you put the religion thing in the back of your head. You don't think it's going to matter all that much." When it does matter, it seems to be the case that students are more likely to feel enriched by their contact with the religion than not. At Davidson, Beth Lindsey praises a humanities course on issues raised in the Old Testament. Ahmad, a Muslim, says he doesn't mind Pepperdine's requirements in Christian history: "What I'm finding is that Christianity and Islam have a lot in common, and it's good to be in a position to know that." Dallas President Sasseen says the problem of modern education lies in this fact: "Democracy aims for the quick fix, and it's easy to succumb to that kind of program for kids." He says that is why college courses have become so inadequate. On the other hand, he warns, "if you're devoted to what is eternal, you may err on the side of conservatism" and may give students a program rich in tradition, but which they don't listen to, "not at all." There is what Davidson President Kuykendall calls an "innate conservatism" to these schools, combined with a kind of willingness to innovate, as long as faculty and administration can see rhyme and reason to the innovation. In the long run, he says, "we learn that you get to where you want to go by standing still." There's more to these colleges than the training of the mind and certainly more than grade point averages and career counseling. That's why students are attracted in the first place. These places still dare to talk about the soul. Says Pepperdine President Davenport: "If you don't educate the heart, you educate a dangerous person." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM