The lowering of higher education

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In September, I will begin my 35th year as a member of the faculty at American University. And during the past 31/2 decades, I have witnessed many changes in higher education, most notably the rise of women in every imaginable aspect of academic life and the growing racial, regional and cultural diversity of our student population. Both these changes represent immense improvements over the conditions that prevailed before.

However, there are many troubling areas of campus culture that have surfaced over time and need to be aired and addressed, such as the enormous expansion of student freedoms (only 11 percent of their time is spent in the classroom), their social immaturity (the nearly complete erasure of the concept of "wait to the weekend" in terms of partying), their severe emotional fragility, and perhaps most importantly -- and certainly most alarming to me -- their rapidly declining interest in reading books.

This year my freshman class was born in 1985, and their generation has never known an America without computers, cellular phones, compact discs, climatically controlled shopping malls, and a vast array of other amenities -- technological and otherwise -- that have come to define our current culture.

Most of my students (many of whom are from very privileged households) do not know how to really read, and therefore they don't like to read. Their world is a world dominated by "screens" (television, internet, and movies) instead of "pages."

Additionally, a significant number of my students no longer see themselves as "students" and see themselves as "customers" instead and they are likely to view me and my colleagues not as professors but as "providers" of a particular type of service. Consequently, they feel that for the amount of money they and their parents pay (particularly at expensive private schools like my own) they are entitled to receive good grades whether they earned them or not. This, of course, is made worse as a consequence of the rampant spread of plagiarism (mostly through internet access) and grade inflation (which is a lethal disincentive for a student to work hard) on campuses throughout the country.

In our litigious society it is hardly unusual any more for students to vehemently complain about faculty members assessment of their performance, and some even sue their professors because they earned a "low" grade, usually defined by them as anything below a "B+."

On a recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, I took a group of my students to the gravesite of Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. Before coming to Washington, Black had been a member of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. While serving in the United States Senate, Black evolved into a passionate lover of the Western "classics," which introduced him to the universality of the human condition and thereby effectively liberated him from the psychic enslavement of racist narrow-mindedness. Thus, he grew so much in learning and stature that he was rightfully proud to administer the oath of office to Thurgood Marshall twice: when Marshall became U.S. solicitor general in 1965 and when he became the first African-American associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. Marshall and Black are buried very near each other close to the President Kennedy gravesite. Indeed, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the president's assassination.

When, in 1954, Justice Black joined the 9-0 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling -- knowing full well it would ignite a firestorm of social revolution -- the vast majority of his fellow Southerners were so disgusted with him that they labeled Black a "traitor to his heritage." The following year in 1955, the Montgomery Bus boycott began and two years later President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Ark., to integrate Central High School. The revolution had indeed begun.

In its essence, reading is a profound act of humility. It is an admission an author possibly knows more about a subject than we do and has offered us the opportunity to quietly "listen" -- at our own pace -- to his thoughts and draw from his well of wisdom.