The first day of class can be a dream crusher. After a few weeks away from school we find ourselves almost excited for the new course load. We have scanned hundreds of lofty-sounding course titles and culled through all sorts of ambitious class descriptions, hoping that the three classes we take will satisfy some of the intellectual curiosity that has been building up over the interim. Or at least provide an interesting means of fulfilling our major requirements.
Unfortunately, on that first day of class academic reality snatches these high hopes away. No, Science of Life won't necessarily teach you about reproduction, photosynthesis or the other important topics its title will suggest. Yes, that economics class will involve more graphical analysis than learning the causes of the financial crisis. We know this is how scholarly inquiry works, but it is still disappointing. Reading over a syllabus on that first day reminds me that too often academia is in the business of taking big, interesting questions and making them as boring as possible.
But sometimes the first day of class can be inspiring, too. My most memorable first day came in an English course, where the professor asked the class why we wanted to study the material. After a few rounds of responses, one student raised her hand and said that it was interesting to see how language developed from the time period we studied until today. I am accustomed to teachers who revel in that sort of academic minutiae, so I was surprised when the professor laughed, then said, "Well, I suppose some people find that interesting. But I don't." He then continued to talk about the universality, emotion and entertainment value of the material; the real reasons why people first become interested in it.
The irony, of course, is that so much of academia is tied up in exactly the sort of inquiry my classmate was describing. It's one of those frustrating facts of life. We take a class on religion hoping to learn the roots of the Christian-Muslim divide, and instead find ourselves writing papers on the exegetical understandings of Abrahamic messianism. Philip the philosophy major wants to study the problem of evil, and realizes he must embark on a heavy trudge through classes on the empiricists, existentialists, continentalists and others to try to piece together a discussion of the topic. And we as students are often no better than the syllabi; when final paper time comes, we find ourselves embracing the same specificity and dullness that has turned so many people I know, here and elsewhere, away from the life of the mind. We miss the forest for the tenured trees.
I have a feeling that if a department were to organize its classes into "Big Topics," and not into a series of Ph.D. prerequisites, it would find them pleasantly oversubscribed. Harvard University offers a class titled "Justice" that explores exactly what that word means, and it is the most popular class in that university's history. By working through relevant texts and discussing morally tricky situations, the professor helps the hundreds of students enrolled in the class deepen their understanding of what justice really is. That's the kind of thing most of us want from our schooling: help answering life's big questions.
Dartmouth's mission statement says that its purpose is to "prepare students for a lifetime of learning and of responsible citizenship," but whether a modern university education really does prepare one for much of anything is a debated point. Last Friday Owen Jennings '11 questioned whether our "over-educations" really do prepare us for our later lives ("Too Young to be Old," Sept. 24). I think much of Jennings's frustration is due to the nature of our education.
Most people would agree that developing a moral system, reading good books or figuring out the meaning of justice are relevant and practical ends to an education. It is possible to do those things within the Dartmouth curriculum, but not without heavy academic distraction. All of us students, professors and administrators would benefit from reminding ourselves what our academic priorities really are, and remembering that there are, in fact, more interesting questions than the development of language since the English mid-Renaissance.
