Our
Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why
They Should Be Learning More.
Derek Bok. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006. Pp. 360. $24.95, cloth. ISBN: 0-691-12596-1. TEL:
609-258-3897 • FAX: 609-258-1335
Until I read the first chapter of this book, I never fully appreciated Henry
David Thoreau’s complaint in Walden about his Harvard education: “To
my astonishment I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation!—why,
if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it.”
I always assumed this said more about his contrarian disposition than about
his experience in school.
In this first chapter, “The Evolution of Undergraduate Education: A
Brief Summary,” Bok describes typical antebellum instruction: “Although
many colleges offered courses in the sciences, such as astronomy or botany,
classes were taught more often by invoking Aristotle or other authorities
than by describing experiments and the scientific method. By most accounts,
the formal education was sterile. Many students felt that they learned much
more outside the classroom in informal clubs and literary societies, where
they engaged in debates, read modern literature, and discussed serious subjects.”
No wonder Thoreau was displeased.
Unlike recent critics, former Harvard president Bok is not concerned with
whether students are being trained to compete in an evolving knowledge-based
society. “It is especially important,” he says in the introduction
to this book, “to bear in mind all the purposes universities serve and
to resist efforts to turn them into instruments preoccupied solely with helping
the economy grow.”
It is those purposes other than that of strictly preparing people for the
job market that Bok is concerned with here. He writes: “If colleges
miseducate their students, the nation will eventually suffer the consequences.
If they can do a better job of helping their students communicate with greater
precision and style, think more clearly, analyze more rigorously, become more
ethically discerning, be more knowledgeable and active in civic affairs, society
will be the better for it.”
The key to accomplishing these other purposes, Bok believes, is to improve
the teaching practices of the professors and graduate students who teach undergraduate
courses. Much undergraduate instruction is not effective, he thinks, because,
“In the eyes of most faculty members in research universities, teaching
is an art that is either too simple to require formal preparation, too personal
to be taught to others, or too innate to be conveyed to anyone lacking the
necessary gift. Lacking formal preparation, graduate students have learned
to teach by modeling themselves after the professors they admire who have
taught them. This tradition introduces a profoundly conservative bias into
faculty behavior that acts as an anchor to deter major changes in established
forms of instruction and educational practice.”
It is important to distinguish here between class content and instructional
methods. In Bok’s words: “Since faculty members normally keep
abreast of published work in their fields, the content of their courses tends
to be reasonably up to date. The same cannot be said of their teaching methods.”
“Safely insulated from reliable evidence of how their students are progressing,
most faculty members have happily succumbed to the Lake Wobegone effect. As
surveys have confirmed, close to 90 percent of college professors consider
their teaching ‘above average.’”
He finds this to be ironic, in that “… faculties seem inclined
to use research and experimentation to understand and improve every institution,
process, and human activity except their own.”
The result of this lack of self-examination on the part of college faculties,
Bok says, is that “… persistent learning problems remain undetected
and unresolved…. It is therefore not surprising that, in sharp contrast
to many human endeavors in which performance and quality clearly improve over
time, no one knows whether college students are writing better or thinking
more rigorously or making greater progress toward other educational goals
than they were 50 years ago.”
Bok recognizes that some forms of learning are hard, or even impossible, to
measure. How can one know with any degree of certainty whether a student has
achieved self-knowledge or acquired a philosophy of life?
“Yet,” he writes, “many other important competencies do
lend themselves to rough but usable assessments. Student writing, quantitative
reasoning, foreign language proficiency, and critical thinking and analysis
are all pertinent examples. Using available measures, colleges can discover
important skills that are not being mastered, subjects students do not truly
understand, entire groups of undergraduates that are performing well below
their apparent capabilities. With these problems identified, faculties can
experiment with new methods of teaching and gradually develop more effective
ways of improving student learning that can be described and used successfully
by others.”
This is where Bok levels his harshest criticism at college faculties. “It
is the failure of most college faculties to make serious efforts of this kind
that merits disappointment over the way undergraduate education has evolved.”
He dismisses possible objections that measuring the effectiveness of instructional
methods is too nebulous and imprecise to be helpful. He says, “If faculties
are willing to examine their students and record the results on official transcripts,
it is hard for them to argue that they are incapable of devising methods of
assessment reliable enough to evaluate the effects of their own teaching methods.”
Bok thinks there are significant impediments to improving undergraduate instruction.
First among these is the reluctance of faculties to having their teaching
scrutinized.
“Like most human beings,” he says, “professors do not relish
having their work evaluated by others, especially when the evaluators ask
potentially awkward questions, such as whether their students are actually
making progress toward widely accepted goals. Nor do instructors who are used
to lecturing welcome research on pedagogies that may put pressure on them
to change the way they teach.”
But this is also where he begins to identify ways to improve instruction:
“Until Ph.D. programs [programs that create future professors] include
a serious preparation for teaching and convey a deeper understanding of the
complexities of student learning, faculties will not only have little inclination
to change their ways, they will not even perceive much need to do so. Without
more prodding and encouragement than they are currently receiving, presidents
and deans are unlikely to challenge the status quo.”
Bok says there is a “crust of inertia and complacency that keeps most
colleges from challenging accustomed methods of teaching to become genuine
learning organizations. Some other energizing force will be needed for this
purpose.”
He thinks government and accrediting agencies could do it. He suggests questions
such organizations could fruitfully ask colleges. Among these are: “What
steps does [the institution] take to examine its own teaching programs, identify
significant weaknesses, and experiment with new methods? What efforts does
it make to identify promising innovations in other institutions? Are there
serious programs to train new teachers? Does the college make effective use
of teaching evaluations and, if so, how well are they constructed? How much
account is taken of teaching in making faculty appointments and promotions?
Are funds regularly made available to faculty for trying and assessing new
methods of instruction?”
Bok believes it is in the smaller, less prominent colleges that the necessary
improvements in undergraduate instruction have the best chance of succeeding.
Such colleges, he says, are less concerned about being embarrassed by publicity
about educational weaknesses that serious self-studies might expose. Also,
he says faculties in smaller schools are more likely to be interested in teaching
and experimenting with new methods than are faculties in high profile institutions.
I think of my own undergraduate experience here. I did have some professors
who clearly tried to engage us in their material. One in particular, a philosophy
professor, prodded and goaded us in his delightful and energetic Socratic
way. But, I also remember a botany class where there seemed to be lots of
talk—all from the professor—about monocotyledons and didcotyledons
(one or two leaf structures growing out of germinated seeds), but I never
had even the vaguest notion of their significance.
With the exception of my writing classes, I don’t recall any of my college
instructors—even the ones I considered my best—making any efforts
to improve my writing. I handed my papers in, and they read them, made comments
here and there, and put grades on them. But that was it. I don’t recall
any comments, spoken or written, about what I could do to make the writing
better. Nor do I recall opportunities to rewrite.
Ironically, I think, it is in our high schools—the schools taking the
worst pasting from school critics—where a good deal of the experimentation
Bok encourages is taking place. Teachers in my English department at Canton
High School kept up a continuous conversation on what they were doing and
new things they were trying. Sometimes the new things didn’t work, but
as one of my biology professors was fond of saying, “No experiment fails.
You always learn something.”
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