Too Big To Fail , Part III

I have addressed issues related to students and learning, to parents and their roles once students have left for school, now it is time to address the universities and colleges themselves.

I will start with the most important part of why any student would choose to enroll at any school: the faculty. Today my trope of choice is biology for reasons that I hope will become clear.  The faculty is the skeleton of a university. They are joined together loosely to form a frame to learning. Some schools and departments may be the backbone of a specific university; others may be a clavicle or knee, and yes, some are tiny little bones inside the ear that make us hear things we never would have heard of in our lives were it not for them.

Without the faculty the reason for a university would not exist. In some ways there are classes that do not differ much from the time of Plato’s Academy in which a teacher seeks to draw out answers in a small seminar. In others, classes are now on-line and lecture halls can hold 500 people, so things have evolved to meet the needs of what the renaissance thinkers called the body politic. I can assure anyone who has not spent time at a selective university that classes are often transformative. Some of the brightest people on the planet are engaged in teaching. To be a professor at one of these elite institutions makes getting a job in investment banking or place in medical school look like a cake walk.

The places open each year for the best professors number in the dozens for the whole US; in some academic areas it is literally less than a handful. I have personally been transformed by some of the best in the world. Richard Rorty, who The New York Times called the most significant philosopher in the US, helped put me on a path of seeing things much the way as I do now: knowledge and learning as an extended conversation in which usefulness is the defining rubric rather than truth. I was lucky enough to have some of the best writers in the world help me learn the craft: Mark Strand, Greg Orr, Charles Wright, Donald Justice, Carolyn Forche and the list goes on and on.

And these departments do produce students who have gone on to be great successes. I was lucky enough to share classes with Lisa Russ Spaar, a great poet and contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and John Lane, author of many books of poems and essays, and Franz Wright, winner of the Pulitzer. And this is just a very, very partial list. For those students who earn a spot at a great school, the opportunities are endless for having professors alter your brain. As a teacher I have seen this too. It has been incredible to get updates from people like Thadd McQuade a man devoted to changing lives through theatre, or a long list who others who have become successful doctors, lawyers, screenwriters, poets, and teachers too. Few professions offer such satisfaction. It is heady stuff to invoke a bad pun.

Some departments are knitted together; for example, politics and political and social thought, or English and American Studies. Others are located at far ends from each other; astrophysics and nursing might be one example. The larger the body of a university the more spread out is the skeleton. As this has happened universities have designed increasingly more interdisciplinary options so that students can cross schools, disciplines, and modes of thinking. At many schools a student is free to create a major, or a research topic that will get published (see a previous blog post for an example of this). The best students often do honors projects that lead to acceptance to the best graduate schools or openings in competitive fields of endeavor. In essence, the opinions and opportunities, while not infinite, would take at least a thousand years or more to exhaust.  

This is one of the great things I hear at the beginning of any semester: “I wish I could take 20 classes.” It is this excitement for learning that generates excitement in teaching. With highly motivated students a professor does not spend time policing behavior. Instead, the time is spent stretching the joints of the mind and the soul, increasing the heartbeat with the thrill of discovery, with the high five of experiments that work.

I will end this all too brief overview with a piece of advice I have given for many years.

Always take professors rather than classes.

A great professor makes any topic life-altering. I have seen this happen more times than I can count. By great, I do not mean the most popular. This is what I have a problem with on sites like "Rate my professor.com." They tend to equate fun and entertainment with the best and this is not very useful in my opinion. Some curmudgeons are far more important ten years out than the one that was funny and an easy grader. I would then rate classes, were it possible, by how much the neurons have been altered. Are the pathways opened in a way that will lead to an endless series of forking paths (see Borges'  story for this reference)? Mens sana in corpore sano as those old guys said (a healthy mind in a healthy body). It is in the health of the body politic and the body itself, the big muscle we call a brain that we change and grow and  if we are lucky pass on our with genes and memes.  In this sense there is no better time to be a student in the history of the world. The resources have been poured in to create an atmosphere that would astound anyone even a decade or two ago. These palaces of learning are the envy of the world. That is why the set of the best seek to enroll in selective schools. It is a laboratory in which the new Prometheus is being created. In another post I will cite why this Edenic scenario also has its limitations and risks. For those who know your Mary Shelley, you may already have a clue.