From the General Secretary: Making the Grade

By Mary Burgan

The image of college life in America has always carried a notion of adolescent abandon—of a moratorium from the world of work in which studying is a minor distraction from the other chores of growing up. This dismissal of the work of studying has been encouraged by many sources in the current discourses on educational success. First, there are the stories of high-profile, high-tech dropouts like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Their careers seem to be cases of sheer genius, of innate insight and skill that defy the disciplines of curricula and courses. Then there is the current orthodoxy that idealizes students as learners, presuming that since they already know a great deal, college should empower them to engage in their own interpretations. The exhortation to faculty to become guides in helping students sort through ideas is rarely accompanied by any assurance that students will master the information they need before they come to class. Many a symposium has been wrecked by the failure of student discussants actually to have read the text. The only choice for a professor in this situation is to commit the crime of lecturing.

Then there is the cry that "it’s on the Web!" Just as the calculator has made the multiplication tables obsolete, so the Web has redefined knowledge. The combination of facts and systematic interpretation now suffers the indignity of a struggle with the flickering come-ons of the Internet, to be served hot or cold. The promise of distance education is wondrous, but it is also too frequently a promise of ease. "I can pick up that course online" implies dropping by the 7-Eleven for $5 of gas and a candy bar. And so, finally, the student becomes a consumer, and education should be as fungible as cash from the ATM. To paraphrase Tina Turner, "What’s study got to do with it?"

It turns out, of course, that study has everything to do with it. One of the most important outlines for pedagogical reform in higher education was a 1984 Department of Education report entitled Involvement in Learning. In words that have become clichéd by now, the report encouraged "learning communities" within our colleges and universities. As it advised administrators and faculties to strive for active learning, however, it also advised students to take charge of their own education. It urged them to avoid the overly vocational, to edge away from easy courses, and to measure their own understanding. For example, they should see whether they could understand an article from Scientific American, read a foreign newspaper, or describe a "high-quality analysis of a particular set of data, texts, or artifacts" in the field of their major or minor.

Such a mandate to work hard is one that we must recapture and amplify in the demands we make of our students, and in our assessments of them. Few of us aspire to the status of Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase, but all of us could take some time to think about what it takes to make the grade in our courses. If our students are customers, we need to convince them that the most valuable commodity we have to offer is our challenge to them to do the work. We also owe them the truth about whether they’ve yet succeeded, for even as the current culture tells lies about the ease of education, it neglects the joys of achievement. And, finally, the lies are most tempting to students who doubt their own abilities. The lies whisper, "You can’t do that anyhow. Don’t even try." When the faculty tells the truth about the work of studying, it not only reinforces good students, it brings the mediocre closer to the consciousness that they rarely test their own talents enough to know what’s possible.

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