Concluding this set of LIBERAL EDUCATION posts -- Part VIII

The question is how much this excellent system is at risk because of the dysfunctional California legislature, a dyspeptic electorate, and the seemingly endless budget issues that face the state.   It is against that backdrop that increased tuition, alumni donation programs, and revocation or at least major revision of Proposition 13 are crucial issues for our time.

It would be nice to report that the evening ended on an upbeat note, but in fact it was disappointing. ‘Bob’ (Dr. Robert Jacobsen) remained engaging, trading insightful stories and examples in response to many questions, but there was no conclusion, no call to action, no point of view that seemed to hang together enough to generate a direction.

Walking back to our campsite, one attendee lamented the missed opportunity, which provoked a question about just what defines ‘educational excellence’ anyway.  Is it learning facts, skills, and concepts – or is it learning how and why to learn?  It is hard to imagine, for a 21^st century world where the predictions are that each person on average will have five or more careers, that the purpose of an educational system is to teach job skills – it isn’t even possible.  And it is equally hard, almost nonsensical, to imagine that teaching facts, especially factoids, in a connected Internet-based world has much value or utility.

The undergraduate school, we felt, is the nexus of opportunity – this is the place to discover, to experiment, to turn with disinterest from one pursuit to savoring the next, to finding your inner passion.  And mentors, coaches, and colleagues – some still call them teachers, upper classmen, and classmates – are invaluable in this discovery process.  The secret, though, of the UC undergraduate experience is not just the breadth, the relatively modest cost, or the local site – it is that when that passion is discovered, it can be embraced, grabbed deeply and inhaled, from researchers who have dedicated their lives to this domain.  This is not skill-based learning, and certainly not on-the-job training.  It is completely antithetical to the government’s “gainful employment” metric, belatedly and stupidly imposed to reduce student loan default rates.

How do you place value on the twenty-one separate music degrees offered at UC Santa Barbara or the eighteen language degrees at UCLA?  These are not routes to high-paying Silicon Valley jobs presumably, although one could have argued similarly about abstract mathematics and statistics two decades ago, and missed entirely the huge opportunity today at such companies as Google and Facebook for those specific skills.

Can you imagine yourself back at age seventeen?  Was it course content, friends, or the pending job that mattered most?  Some offer the ‘three rules of two’ as a good metaphor for the successful young college student: (1) make a friend in two days; (2) be stimulated by a teacher within two weeks; and (3) have a project-based success within two months.  Experience  these and you’ll become more, rather than less, enthused.   This is not an argument for survey courses – in fact, it is just the opposite.  Immerse, go deeply quickly, get infected with a field.  See if it lights your fire.  If not, move on.  But you’ll catch fire best if you meet someone already on fire.

The really good schools – those with Nobel Laureates, for example -- put them in the freshman classroom, not tucked away in an obscure cloistered lab.  And those schools listen carefully to student ratings – who inspires in the classroom?  These are content-free discoveries often.  It is the ‘why’ that excites researchers, not the ‘how’ – and that, we concluded around the obligatory campfire (even though the day had been unseasonably hot), is the secret of the UC campuses, the true genius of a Clark Kerr.  Put excellent researchers on your campus, and honor them but all the while expect them to mingle and mix with the youngest students, to create that wonder, that spark of enthusiasm, that sense of ‘what it takes’ to pioneer on the cusp of an important question or performance or action.  Great things will come of it.

Seems so simple, now that we’d heard Jacobsen and reflected on it ourselves.  What might it take to inculcate this message with the California legislators and the voting public?