Abstract
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011) stand as bookends. Between them rests a generation of college graduates. Together, they chronicle the crisis in higher education. This paper argues: (1) Adrift’s employment of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) may serve in part to corroborate Bloom’s contention that popularized moral and cultural relativism have devitalized the love of learning. Students stripped in such fashion might be expected to show little increase in the general collegiate skills that the CLA measures and on which basis Adrift critiques higher education. (2) Adrift may be taken to support Bloom’s case that the higher-education reform that matters most is restoring a required core curriculum consisting of common courses in the sciences and liberal arts. The paper concludes with some reflections on the limits and possibilities of the reforms pointed to by the two books.
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Notes
The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1355a3-b9.
This is by no means to imply that Arum and Roksa deny or are indifferent to this point.
Catherine Rampell, “A History of College Grade Inflation.” New York Times, July 14, 2011. The article goes on to note:
. . . [P]rivate colleges and universities are by far the biggest offenders on grade inflation, even when you compare private schools to equally selective public schools.
By the end of the last decade, A’s and B’s represented 73 % of all grades awarded at public schools, and 86 % of all grades awarded at private schools, according to the database compiled by Mr. Rojstaczer and Mr. Healy. (Mr. Rojstaczer is a former Duke geophysics professor, and Mr. Healy is a computer science professor at Furman University.)
Southern schools have also been less generous with their grading than institutions in other geographic regions, and schools that focus on science and engineering tend to be stingier with their A’s than liberal arts schools of equal selectivity.
. . . [T]he researchers argue that grade inflation began picking in the 1960s and 1970s probably because professors were reluctant to give students D’s and F’s. After all, poor grades could land young men in Vietnam.
They then attribute the rapid rise in grade inflation in the last couple of decades to a more “consumer-based approach” to education, which they say “has created both external and internal incentives for the faculty to grade more generously.” More generous grading can produce better instructor reviews, for example, and can help students be more competitive candidates for graduate schools and the job market.
The authors argue that grading standards may become even looser in the coming years, making it increasingly more difficult for graduate schools and employers to distinguish between excellent, good and mediocre students.
Ibid.
Adrift here is quoting (Horowitz 1987).
Ibid.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a22ff.
Plato, Apology of Socrates, 20c-24b
Ibid., 38a
Bloom’s original idea for the title of the book was “Souls Without Longings.”
Herodotus, The Histories
Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution, p. 39.
“Improving Undergraduate LearnIng: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project,” Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Esther Cho (http://highered.ssrc.org/files/SSRC_Report.pdf).
See also “Majors Matter: Differential Performance on a Test of General College Outcomes,” Jeffrey T. Steedle, Council for Aid to Education, and Michael Bradley, New York University. Paper presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Vancouver, British Columbia:
Analyses revealed significant differences in performance between seniors at four-year colleges in different fields of study. Specifically, students studying natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities and languages scored the highest, and students studying business and education scored the lowest. Significant differences persisted after controlling for entering academic ability, sex, race, and language spoken at home, which is consistent with the thesis that students in certain fields of study gain more critical thinking and writing skills during college. There was no significant interaction between students’ fields of study and the content of the CLA tasks, which suggests that general college outcomes may be measured without great concern for the confounding influence of content knowledge on task performance” (http://www.collegiatelearningassessment.org/files/Majorsmatter.pdf), p. 1.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Volume I (New York: Ed. Arthur Helps, and Helmut Werner. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. Preface Hughes, H. Stuart. Oxford University Press, 1991.) But cf. George W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (London: G. Bell, 1896), “Preface.”
Plato, The Republic, 471c-502c.
Pew Research Center, “Is College Worth It? College Presidents, Public Assess, Value, Quality and Mission of Higher Education” (15 May 2011).
Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges.
Ibid.
Further Reading
Babcock, P. and Marks, M. forthcoming. “The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data,” Review of Economics and Statistics.
Bok, D. 2006. Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (p. 8). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boyer, E. 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (p. 12). Stanford: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Ginsberg, B. 2011. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford University Press.
Horowitz, M. L. 1987. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (p. 20). New York: Knopf.
Jencks, C., & Riesman, D. 1968. The Academic Revolution (p. 14). New York: Doubleday.
Kerr, C. 2001. The Uses of the University (p. 31). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kuh, G. D. 2003. What We Are Learning About Student Engagement. Change, 35, 28.
Massy, W. F., & Zemsky, R. 1994. Faculty Discretionary Time: Departments and the Academic Ratchet. Journal of Higher Education, 65, 1–22.
Rhoades, G. 2007. The Study of American Professions. In P. Gumport (Ed.), Sociology of Higher Education: Contributions and their Contexts (p. 128). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Lindsay, T.K. The Likelihood of Higher-Education Reform. Soc 50, 236–244 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9649-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9649-x
Keywords
- Higher education
- Higher education reform
- Allan Bloom
- Academically Adrift
- The Closing of the American Mind
- Liberal education
- Student learning outcomes
- Accountability
- Transparency
- Academic Standards
- Richard Arum
- Josipa Roksa
- Collegiate learning assessment
- American democracy
- Civic education
- Moral relativism
- Cultural relativism
- College affordability
- Political correctness
- Derek Bok
- George Kuh
- Harvard University