College

What It Was, Is, and Should Be

by Andrew Delbanco

Number of pages: 248

ISBN: 978-0691130736

About the Author

Dr. Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is the Director of American Studies at Columbia University and has been Columbia's Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities since 1995. He writes extensively on American literary and religious history.

Editorial Review

Teaching at its best can be a generative act, one of the ways in which human beings try to cheat death by giving witness to the next generation so that what we have learned in our own lives doesn’t die with us. At its core, a college should be a place where young people find help navigating the territory between adolescence and adulthood. It should provide guidance, but not coercion, for students trying to cross that treacherous terrain on their way toward self-knowledge. It should help them develop certain qualities of mind and heart requisite for reflective citizenship.

Book Reviews

“Overall, Andrew Delbanco's book is a thorough, wide-ranging, critical, and often passionate look at the histories and current travails of American colleges. Interestingly, Delbanco's writing is a fascinating combination of romanticism and critical, pragmatic realism. He has a recurrent tendency to introduce idealistic notions and then rapidly knock them down with a dose of (sometimes harsh) realism. But for all of his criticisms, Delbanco is, in the end, still very optimistic about the future of college...and he adamantly argues that we all need to stand up, pay attention, and give a damn right alongside him.”— anthropologies

“Andrew Delbanco must be a great teacher. A longtime faculty member at Columbia, he is devoted to the development of his students as individuals, and recognizes that their time in college should be formative: “They may still be deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility.” Like most professors devoted to teaching, he has no interest in telling undergraduates what to think, but he does want to draw them toward a sense of skepticism about the status quo and to a feeling of wonder about the natural world.”—The New York Times

“Given his pedigree, Delbanco may sound like he’s protecting his own turf, but he makes a strong case that the purely materialist approach to education assures that the disparity between rich and poor students only widens, with“merit-based” financial aid and scholarships all going disproportionately to students from families with money. Scholarship reform, a classical curriculum, more real teaching (and less lecturing to crowded halls) are all in order.” —Kirkus Reviews

“At the outset of his deeply informed defense of the value of liberal arts education, Andrew Delbanco, a noted Melville scholar, illustrates one of his central points with a quotation from Moby Dick. When the novel’s narrator famously declares that “a whaling ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” Delbanco observes, “he used the word ‘college’ as the name of the place where (to use our modern formulation) he ‘found himself'.” —Brookings

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Wisdom to Share

College is our pastoral. We imagine it as a verdant world where the harshest sounds are the reciprocal thump of tennis balls or the clatter of cleats as young bodies trot up and down the fieldhouse steps. Yet bright with hope as it may be, every college is shadowed by the specter of mortalityــــa place where, in that unique season of "fall and football weather and the new term,” the air is redolent with the "Octoberish smell of cured leaves."

At its core, a college should be a place where young people find help navigating the territory between adolescence and adulthood. It should provide guidance, but not coercion, for students trying to cross that treacherous terrain on their way toward self-knowledge.

College should help students develop certain qualities of mind and heart requisite for reflective citizenship, such as a skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past; the ability to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena; appreciation of the natural world, enhanced by knowledge of science and the arts; a willingness to imagine experience from perspectives other than one's own; and a sense of ethical responsibility.

Elite institutions confer on their students enormous benefits in the competition for positions of leadership in business, government, and higher education itself as soon as they are admitted. Even those without the prior advantage of money have already gotten a boost toward getting what they want, thoughnot necessarily toward figuring out what's worth wanting.

Providing more people with a college education is good for the economic health of the nation.

Going to college is good for the economic competitiveness of the individuals who constitute the nation.

College opens the senses. Not only the mind, but also the capacity to read demanding works of literature and grasp fundamental political ideas. The alertness to color and form, melody and harmony is heightened and deepened. In the late years of a college student’s life, this person becomes grateful.

We tend to look back at this exclusionary history with a combination of incredulity and indignation and to praise the present at the expense of the past.

Outside the elite reaches of academia, many college teachers are underpaid and overworked, devoted to their students at cost to themselves.

Not only should colleges do better at providing remedial help to students who need it, but also they should recognize that their obligations begin with prospective students.

A college should not be a haven from worldly contention, but a place where young people fight out among and within themselves contending ideas of the meaningful life and where they discover that self-interest need not be at odds with concern for one another.