Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul

Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible. Besides, business is good, at least at selective schools. The notion, floated now in certain quarters, that students and parents will turn from the Harvards and Yales in disgust is a fantasy. As long as elite institutions remain the principal pipeline to elite employers (and they will), the havers and strivers will crowd toward their gates. Everything else—the classes, the politics, the arts and sciences—is incidental.

Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education. They just aren’t happening, for the most part, on campus. People write to me about this: initiatives they’ve started or are starting or have taken part in. These come, as far as I can tell, in two broad types, corresponding to the two fundamental complaints that people voice about their undergraduate experience. The first complaint is that college did not prepare them for the real world: that the whole exercise—papers, busywork, pointless requirements; siloed disciplines and abstract theory—seemed remote from anything that they actually might want to do with their lives.

Programs that address this discontent exhibit a remarkably consistent set of characteristics. They are interdisciplinary, integrating methods and perspectives—from, say, engineering and the social sciences—that are normally kept apart. They are informal, eschewing frontal instruction and traditional modes of evaluation. They are experiential, more about doing—creating, collaborating—than reading and writing. They are extramural, bringing students into the community for service projects, internships, artistic installations or performances. They are directed to specific purposes, usually to do with social amelioration or environmental rescue. Above all, they are student-centered. Participants are enabled (and expected) to direct their education by constructing bespoke curricula out of the resources the program gives them access to. In a word, these endeavors emphasize “engagement.”

All this is fine, as far as it goes. It has analogues and precedents in higher ed (Evergreen, Bennington, Antioch, Hampshire) as well as in the practice of progressive education, especially at the secondary level. High schools will focus on “project-based learning,” with assessment conducted through portfolios and public exhibitions. A student will identify a problem (a human need, an injustice, an instance of underrepresentation), then devise and implement a response (a physical system, a community-facing program, an art project).

Again, I see the logic, it is just what many students want, but what bothers me about this educational approach—the “problem” approach, the “STEAM” (STEM + arts) approach—is what it leaves out. It leaves out the humanities. It leaves out books. It leaves out literature and philosophy, history and art history and the history of religion. It leaves out any mode of inquiry—reflection, speculation, conversation with the past—that cannot be turned to immediate practical ends. Not everything in the world is a problem, and to see the world as a series of problems is to limit the potential of both world and self. What problem does a song address? What problem will reading Voltaire help you solve, in any predictable way? The “problem” approach—the “engagement” approach, the save-the-world approach—leaves out, finally, what I’d call learning.

And that is the second complaint that graduates tend to express: that they finished college without the feeling that they had learned anything, in this essential sense. That they hadn’t been touched. That they hadn’t been changed. That there is a treasure out there—call it the Great Books or just great books, the wisdom of the ages or the best that has been thought and said—that its purpose is to activate the treasure inside them, that they had come to one of these splendid institutions (whose architecture speaks of culture, whose age gives earnest of depth) to be initiated into it, but that they had been denied, deprived. For unclear reasons, cheated.

I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.) They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for. Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

That student’s name was Matthew Strother. It was through Matthew—he was in his early thirties by this point, and still seeking—that I learned about perhaps the two most prominent initiatives to have sprung up off-campus of late in response to the hunger for serious study.

by William Deresiewicz, Persuasion | Read more:
Image: Matthew Strother (courtesy of Berta Willisch).