Acad. Quest. (2014) 27:486–489 DOI 10.1007/s12129-014-9461-0 REVIEWS

How College Works, by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, 208 pp., $29.95 hardbound. Old School, New School Donald Phillip Verene Published online: 30 October 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

There are two conceptions of college education. We may call one “new school.” It holds that college education is best understood and pursued as the transmission of information and training in its application that, on graduation, leads directly to successful employment. This view is widely held by administrators, who are always in search of new programs, such as online instruction (which includes MOOCs, or massive open online courses), and economic analysts, both of whom wish to evaluate college costs as an investment in relation to what they regard as its Donald Phillip Verene is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy and director of the Institute for Vico Studies at Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322; [email protected]. He is the author of more than a dozen books on philosophy, literature, and culture, including The Art of Humane Education (Cornell University Press, 2002).

product. We may call the other one “old school.” It holds that college education is the attempt by those who have an education and can teach to assist each student to become an educated person, to acquire what is captured in the German word Bildung or the ancient Greek paideia. The new school view is of a piece with the advertisements on television and the Internet to recruit students for various commercial colleges and universities on the promise of training them for employment. This view is shared by governmental offices of education and accreditation agencies with their attachment to requirements of unending levels and rules of assessment and accountability. The old school view regards college as a unique human institution involving inquiry and the pursuit of truth in all its forms. It sees knowledge as a process that, as Plato says in the Seventh Letter, “after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself.”1 The new school view is education based on the marketplace. Plato, “Letter VII,” in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 1659.

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The old school view is education based on the marketplace (agora) of ideas. How College Works is in general agreement with the old school view. It is a study by two sociologists, one a senior professor at Hamilton College, the other a Hamilton graduate who is now a doctoral candidate. Their conclusions derive from a decade of research, from 1999 to 2010, conducted on the basis of very extensive interviews and surveys with panels of students and alumni of Hamilton College, supported by a series of major grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and using multiple methods of social science—methods of collection, evaluation, description, and analysis. How College Works was awarded the Harvard University Press Stone Fund Prize for an outstanding publication about education and society. The purpose of the authors, using their own college as a typical private liberal arts college, was to establish how college education actually takes place as a social and socializing process. They are quite frank that their study is limited to one college and one type of college. But they hold that the process of education itself contains some universal elements. Their research demonstrates that college education is in essence a particular form of association among persons.

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As Chambliss and Takacs put it in the conclusion to chapter 1: “In one sentence: what really matters in college is who meets whom, and when.” Anyone who has gone to college knows this is true. Social science, more often than not, reflects what is already present in common sense. The chapters take the reader through the stages of socialization in college from freshman to senior year. The fundamental features of college are that one makes several friends fairly quickly, who often become lifelong friends, and that one finds one or two members of the faculty who become mentors and exert a lifelong influence. There is no set way in which these associations come about, but a college can promote the right opportunities by organizing dorms to function in a communal manner, encouraging campus organizations, and making faculty available, none of which requires special budgets or funding to accomplish. Thus, “college works by selecting certain people, putting them in one place for a few years, and giving them a regular framework for routine meetings, formal and informal, centered on academic topics.” Chambliss and Takacs are strong on social relationships, and the reader can wish they were stronger on the role of “academic topics.” College is not simply “a structure of

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special human relationships.” What makes these relationships have purpose is what is studied and taught. A college education is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have the freedom and leisure to read the great books, acquire a knowledge of science, mathematics, and logic, develop an appreciation and understanding of the arts, and obtain a grasp of historical periods and social and psychological theories. While doing this, college is the opportunity to learn the rhetoric of the written and spoken word—how to embody distinctions of thought in language and how to develop and employ an intellectual vocabulary and to grasp what it is to know a language or languages other than one’s own. The content of a liberal education is the complement to its social form. The authors may likely presuppose all of this, but certainly more might be said about it without becoming bogged down in disputes about curricula. In the final chapter, Chambliss and Takacs make suggestions about what works to make college work. Here administrators, program promoters, accrediting agency committee members, and those addicted to assessment and accountability will be greatly disappointed. The authors politely say there may be some benefit to such approaches, but their real advice is simple and true: “Honestly, after

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a decade of work, we came away skeptical of the entire assessment enterprise.” And: “Finally, keep assessment simple. Too many people think that more assessment is better assessment….What you should aim for ideally, in fact, is the least assessment work for the most information gained.” What they are really saying is that nothing is ever improved by assessment. It is a means to give agencies and administrations power and something to do. Without it they are without raison d’être. Chambliss and Takacs see little to no value in “the whole ‘assessment and accountability’ movement. But one recently popular category of proposed solutions—online education—exemplifies what is wrong with almost all of the others: it ignores the central importance of student motivation.” The authors’ sensible advice is for a college to strive to schedule its best courses at the best times, taught by the best professors. This is the key to education and to a good college. No big program initiatives are needed. It is a principle known to every successful enterprise: select good people and let them do what they can do, and things will flourish. “The most efficient method for dramatically improving college education is basically to help the right students and teachers get together.” There is, however, in this manner of education a downside

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for administrators and the staff with which they surround themselves: there is not much, then, for them to do except to ensure that the college is open every day and that the semester progresses, that the dorms are well run

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and the campus activities function. The rest is done by the teachers and the students, seeking the light that flashes forth and nourishes the soul, of which Plato, the founder of the first educational institution, speaks.