‘Crisis of the classroom’ pervades UCLA lectures
By William Allen
This article was previously published in the Summer 1994 edition
of the California Political Review.
I am a grumpy professor at a prestigious university. I am grumpy
because I am a professor. For I do very little teaching; instead, I
merely conduct classes. More accurately, while conducting classes,
I profess much profundity  but not much is learned. And what
little is learned is largely confined, by choice of the customers,
to immediate, nitty-gritty concerns of the final exam.
The intellectual returns from student investment cannot be great
when the investment is not great. And there is not likely to be
great investment by those who are uncommitted, unorganized,
undisciplined, unprepared and unconscious, who have no professional
pride and no conception of competence and accomplishment.
The problem is not only that most children of the campus Â
and there are a blessed few exceptions  do not know much and
cannot do much. In addition, most are blissfully unaware of how
little they know and can do; they are not effectively engaged in
the subtle and rigorous process of learning and have little notion
of what is entailed in learning; and they have neither found nor
had impressed upon them effective incentive to try to discover what
to do in trying to learn. They are young even for their tender
years.
Such dour assessment reflects a mountain of discouraging
evidence. A few anecdotes can illustrate.
*There was the freshman who allowed as how she would like to be
a biologist, for, in her only biology class (in a lousy high
school), she received a grade of D.
*There was the senior who had a part-time job as receptionist in
an engineering firm, and concluded that it would be "neat" to be an
engineer  although she found it quite impossible to grasp the
concept of the slope of a straight line.
*There was the upper-division customer in a history class who
asked the instructor during the final exam if we are living in the
20th century. (The reply was: "Most of us are.") Several of the
student’s colleagues in the class were uncertain as to whether the
1700s are the 17th century or the 18th.
*There was the large proportion of another history class who
agreed that Aristotle elaborated received Christian doctrine Â
more than 300 years before Jesus.
*There was the final exam in a principles-of-economics class in
which half of the young scholars agreed that "most goods are not
free because most property is privately owned" and "because
business is run for profit"; and a third of the elite group held
that "recurring waves of inflation are the result of recurring
waves of greed or irresponsibility of business managers or workers
or consumers."
These young people  almost all of them genial and likeable
when treated very gently  hardly try seriously to
conceptualize, synthesize and generalize; they have gained
virtually no erudition or perspective; they are embarrassingly
inarticulate and illiterate; they have no developed wisdom or
insightfulness or sense of the wholeness and evolution of any part
of their world; they are utterly lacking analytic intuition, feel
for causal relations and intellectual flair. And they commonly
become either surly or sassy if criticized. They consider any grade
less than B an insult.
An eminent colleague has publicly stated "the majority of
students cannot think or write or study at the college level.
Neither will they learn. Most will graduate with a C, C+ or B-
grade average. But they aren’t totally uneducated. And most of them
don’t know it, having picked up no idea of what an education might
be. The whole thing is scandalous."
Scandalous, indeed. But, in this crisis of the campus, do not
look for much voluntary reform from college administrators or even
from faculty, who typically acquiesce in and often prosper from the
scandal. For dilution of professionalism can mean more bodies in
the classroom, more classrooms, more faculty and more deans. And of
course, more is always better.
Allen is a UCLA professor of economics.