Beyond the University - Michael S. Roth

The retreat of higher education is, somewhat paradoxically, evident. The rhetoric which has come to ensconce American higher education centers on the ability of institutions to prepare young people for their place in the economy. (There is, it should be noted, inherently an aspect of class to this argument - if you are headed for the Ivy League your appropriate place in the economy is understood to be of a different kind than if you're headed to community college.) Such rhetoric is paradoxical - perhaps absurd - for it simultaneously draws the training received in higher education closer to economic concerns, while marginalizing the unique place of such institutions within both the social and economic sphere. If a college education is reduced to yet another form of job training, the mission of the University is obscured and its necessity is in question. On this account Universities have done themselves few favors. Inasmuch as the colleges are "servants of the market" the arena of higher education appears increasingly unwilling to question the logic which would marginalize it.

Into this gap steps President of Wesleyan College, Michael S. Roth. Roth's slim volume makes a passionate plea for that education which is specifically uneconomical: a liberal education. The preparation of the young for working is one thing; preparing them for living is something else entirely. It is the latter which Roth is concerned with, and which he finds increasingly lacking in American higher education. It is not only what students learn that is important; nor how they learn. Rather it is how their learning is integrated into their living - this is the foundation of a liberal education. Inasmuch as each of us participates in society, what is good for ourselves in our relation to others and the world is a question always worthy of our exploration. When Universities focus upon the narrowly conceived training of individuals they threaten the very fabric of the social contract. Roth calls for a renewed emphasis on the development of the whole individual.

The debates surrounding America's higher learning trace at least back to Jefferson and Franklin. There is little cause to suppose that this generation will provide a definitive answer to the questions who should teach the young, and how ought they to do it? However, the potential nonexistence of a simple, conclusive answer to such a question neither means that exploratory efforts are doomed, nor that we should abandon the quest. Asking tough questions is also what education is about. Roth suggests that the narrowing of American education risks breeding the narrowing of the American mind. To abandon the hope that our improvement as people and as a society rests beyond the increase of our material goods is to both ignore the past and do a disservice to the future.