Drew University: In Defense of College

Columbia professor and author Andrew Delbanco argues that college should be a time for students to discover their passions and feel free to fail

Suddenly everyone seems to be questioning the value of college. They cost too much. They’re too slow to change. They don’t prepare undergraduates to compete in the global economy.

Yet the concepts underpinning the traditional college experience are as fresh and valid as when the Puritans founded Harvard College nearly four centuries ago, according to Columbia University Professor Andrew Delbanco, the featured speaker at the April 25 meeting of the Drew Faculty Seminar series. And tinkering with those concepts, Delbanco said, is a bad idea.

The director of American Studies at Columbia and author of a new book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Delbanco said America properly changed the face of higher education by expanding educational opportunities and encouraging diversity. But he said colleges today should resist pressures to promote distance learning, compress the time spent at college and convert full-time faculty to part-time freelancers.

Delbanco believes college should be a time for undergraduates to reflect, explore new subjects, feel free to fail, and discover their passions. That is best done, he says, in a residential setting, among professors who are dedicated to teaching.

“One idea we should be very loath to give up is the fundamental idea that students have a great deal to learn from each other,” he said. “It’s fundamental to the American college, and an institution like Drew, where a large proportion of students live on campus. A true college is as interested in what happens outside class as in class.”

Delbanco said traditional colleges also provide a “rehearsal for democracy,” producing educated citizens who can tell the difference between demagogues and true reformers. “College gives you a bullshit meter,” he said. “That’s a technology that’s never going to become obsolete.”

But he admitted private liberal arts institutions are severely stressed. “Students are fleeing the humanities everywhere,” he said. “The money culture has also suffused higher education.”

After Delbanco’s talk, in the Founders Room at Mead Hall, faculty members pressed him for solutions. “What’s the most worrisome part of all this? What do we do?” asked Wendy Kolmar, chair of the English Department.

“I think we want to continue to find ways to attract people of high intelligence and idealism into the teaching ranks,” he said. “We also need to proselytize for what we believe in.”

University Press Release here.