Editors’ Introduction: What Is College For?

As institutions of higher learning struggle with evolving financial realities, skirmishes are exposing the profound disagreement over the mission of higher education itself. In the days when budgets were more robust, the core values of an education could be less defined, more assumed, perhaps even a little diffuse. Institutions could be entrepreneurial and expansive without giving much thought to the whys and the wherefores of how new programs and projects fit into the larger aims of the university. Nothing clarifies the mind, however, like a good budget crisis when every unit on campus has to begin to justify its existence. Or when under the attacks of critics, the university itself has to begin to articulate just what it stands for, just what it is supposed to do.

Andrew Delbanco’s recent book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (2012), lays out one vision:

At its core, a college should be a place where young people find help for 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. Here is my attempt at reducing these qualities to a list, in no particular order of priority, since they are inseparable from one another:

1. 1. A skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past.

2. 2. The ability to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena.

3. 3. Appreciation of the natural world, enhanced by knowledge of science and the arts.

4. 4. A willingness to imagine experience from perspectives other than one’s own.

5. 5. A sense of ethical responsibility.

He goes on to argue that “it is absurd to imagine [these habits of mind] as commodities to be purchased by and delivered to student consumers. Ultimately they make themselves known not in grades or examinations but in the way we live our lives” (4).

This may seem familiar ground to those of us in the humanities who have been working to defend a traditional liberal arts orientation to undergraduate education, whether we teach in community college, small liberal arts colleges, or large multiversities. Delbanco distinguishes himself, however, by using a history of the American college as a foundation on which to build his defense of undergraduate education as a basis for ethical citizenship. Rather than arguing from the present moment—a moment where a credentialist orientation partners with growing college costs to construct the undergraduate-as-consumer, bent on purchasing his or her future with as little time and intellectual output as possible¹—Delbanco begins where US higher education began, with small, usually denominational, colleges whose purpose was spiritual and ethical as well as intellectual or vocational.

He quotes from an 1850 diary kept by a student at a small Methodist college in Virginia. After attending a sermon by the college president, the student wrote, “Oh that the Lord would show me how to think and how to choose” (15). While such a request may seem surprising, Delbanco attests to the power of this student’s plea:

The era of spiritual authority belonging to college is long gone. And yet I have never encountered a better formulation—“show me how to think and how to choose”—of what a college should strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others.

(15–16)

Delbanco asserts that despite the changes in the structures and cultures of college life since this student wrote his diary entry, college students are not so different today than they were then: “They have always been searching for purpose. They have always been unsure of their gifts and goals, and susceptible to the demands—overt and covert—of their parents and of the abstraction we call ‘the market’ ” (22). What would happen to our curricula and pedagogies if we took this view of...