In a January op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, College president Sian Leah Beilock argued that American higher education faces a “trust problem.” She wrote that colleges can be “too ideological” and students are often taught “what rather than how to think.” Her arguments are a response to a question faced by many elite universities across the country: What is, after all, the point of higher education?
“The Last Class” — a documentary screened in the Loew Auditorium on May 9 — shows a nuanced approach to this question. Following University of California, Berkeley professor Robert Reich ’68 as he teaches his final semester before retiring, “The Last Class” considers how professors can respond to challenges faced by universities while emphasizing the political significance of education in sustaining democracy.
Reich became famous for his work during the Ford and Carter administrations, and his tenure as Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor. Reich’s political life did not stop him from also building a prolific teaching career. Over the span of four decades at Brandeis University, Harvard and UC Berkeley, Reich has taught more than 40,000 students in total. The UC Berkeley course featured in the documentary, “Wealth and Poverty,” explores how income inequality has widened since the 1970s and the risks this widening poses to democracy. The documentary combines Reich’s voiceovers, interviews and footage from his lectures to portray his teaching style and show how he addresses some of the criticisms against higher education.
Reich says in the documentary that one of the cornerstones of learning lies in the willingness to engage in respectful dialogue with people whose opinions diverge from our own. He believes, however, that major U.S. universities, like UC Berkeley, are too ideologically homogenous.
In one instance, Reich tries to find guest lecturers for his class who think differently from him. Yet, he struggles to find colleagues who, for example, believe that income inequality could ultimately benefit society by encouraging entrepreneurship and creating new jobs. His solution is to explain arguments different from his own and encourage his teaching assistants to “find and protect” students who have dissident views. This technique addresses the common complaint that universities are ideological monoliths that do not respect dissenting voices.
Beilock’s catchphrase — that students should be taught “how to think” and not “what to think” — also appears in “The Last Class.” Reich says that students are often eager to learn pre-processed knowledge — they want to memorize and reproduce content in a way that guarantees an A on an exam. To counter these habits, Reich does not give final answers to in-class exercises, nor does he share his personal views during lectures. Instead, he directs his teaching assistants to ask students questions and help them develop their own well-informed opinions. By doing so, Reich says he is able to sharpen the critical thinking of students while taking actionable steps against the claim that universities indoctrinate students into reproducing their professors’ opinions.
The documentary compares the sense of hopelessness of Reich’s generation with that of the current generation of college students. Reich graduated from Dartmouth in 1968 — the same year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. In the documentary, Reich says that the political turmoil of the time made his generation question whether they would have a future.
Today, college graduates also begin their work lives in an uncertain world. The erosion of democratic institutions around the world and the imminent threat of climate change make it difficult for young adults to envision their own futures, Reich acknowledges. But in the face of these challenges, he distinguishes between pessimism and cynicism: Pessimism is the belief that things will worsen, whereas cynicism is the idea that we are doomed to that worsening and that nothing we can do will change it, he argues. His message is thus that, while pessimism about the future is acceptable, one should never fall into cynicism. Society can still change for the better — and he believes that teachers can encourage their students to promote that change.
“The Last Class” captures the current tensions of higher education in the U.S. by depicting one professor’s approach to its most pressing challenges. It illustrates Reich’s concerns with campus dialogue and freedom of speech, both of which have been set as priorities of Dartmouth’s current administration. Reich also highlights the political significance of the work of teachers. To him, teaching is a way of defending democracy and promoting positive social change. Democracy, he says, is not a spectator sport, but an active exercise — and universities should continue to be places where democracy can survive.
