June 05, 2004
How Can "Highly Selective" Colleges BE so Highly Selective?
Jay Mathews has a sane and useful opinion piece in the Washington Post this morning. Pity it runs on a Saturday. Mathews answers the "how can 'highly selective' colleges BE so 'highly selective'?" by pointing out that the most selective school work VERY hard for those 10% acceptance rates --
College applicants act like hungry patrons crowding the restaurants that have the longest lines at the door. The places that are hardest to get into must be the best. But there is little research to back up that assumption, and one reason that Harvard, Stanford and Yale got about 20,000 applications each last year is that they asked for them.Mathews says that Harvard sends out about 70,000 first contact postcards to generate the 20,000 applications to lead to the 2,000 admissions. It's a business, people, not an educational mission. Or maybe the educational mission/business distinction was a false one all along?
I get to spend an afternoon and evening at the heart of many American academic fantasies -- an Oxford college for tour, talk, and dinner -- next week. I'll keep reminding myself that the fantasy (the 19th century model) was a decayed form of medieval canonical life with celibacy requirements for Fellows until the late 19th century (how else could they be expected to live in college's premises and on the salaries they were paid?), a curriculum so narrow that even experiemental American Great Books curricula can't execute it, and a parasitic dependence on a state church that failed to work effectively after the Industrial Revolution and the rejection of the enthusiasts of the Oxford Movement and Evangelicalism. I know that's a callow summary but not far off base.
Every time you hear someone talk about curriculum or faculty forming a community or building campuses in a series of interlocking quadrangles* you should ask yourself "is this a notalgia for something that involves Oxbridge fantasies?" Oxford is a legitimate historical model for organizing higher education, as is the German proseminar (the fantasy in the background of most graduate education talk), but to the degree that the suggestion is based in nostalgia for the residential college system, the tutorial, and a curriculum focused like a laser on the Classics we have to wonder how useful it would be for a contemporary context.
*The campus masterplan at both of my institutions of higher education, Rice and Emory, occasionally gets swayed by the idea of creating quads. Why quads? Why do we call them that? Oh, go read Tom Brown at Oxford or Gaudy Night. The former presents the full-blown ideal 19th century University experience. The presents us the disjunction; the women's college in the Dorothy Sayers novel is a recent foundation trying to construct a working Oxford college with limited funding and without the career path for its graduates of ordination in the Establish Church.