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( OOO (TTrQ N
INDEPENDENT LEARNING AND THE LIBERAL ARTS
Remarks by Dr. Ernest L, Boyer
President
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Independent Learning Conference The College of Wooster
April 15, 1988
INTRODUCTION
Independent learning has been a pillar of intellectual
strength for The College of Wooster in Ohio for four decades. It
has also been a symbol of excellence for the nation. I thank you
for sustaining on this campus a special blend of scholarship and
teaching at their very best.
In 1972 I was sitting in my office in Albany, NY. It was a
dreary Monday morning in Albany, and to avoid the pressures of
the day I turned instinctively to the stack of third-class mail
that I keep on the corner of my desk to create the illusion of
being very, very busy. On top of the heap was a student
newspaper from Stanford University, and I was struck by the
headline which announced that the faculty at Stanford, in a burst
of creativity, was reintroducing a required course in Western
Civilization after having abolished all requirements just three
years before. But the students at Stanford were offended by the
faculty's brash act, and in the front-page editorial they
declared that a required course is "an illiberal act." The
editorial concluded with this blockbuster question: "How dare
they impose uniform standards on nonuniform people?"
Frankly, I was at first amused and then somewhat troubled by
that statement. It has nagged me to this day. I was troubled
that some of America's most gifted students had not learned the
simple truth that while we are nonuniform, we still have many
things in common. They had not discovered the fundamental fact
that while we are all autonomous human beings with our own
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aptitudes and interests, we are at the same time deeply dependent
on each other.
This brings me to the central theme of my remarks. I happen
to believe that all worthy goals we pursue in education are best
expressed in two simple words: independence and connections.
Our first priority in education is to prepare students to
live independent, self-sufficient lives so they can be
intellectually and socially empowered. But education also should
help students to go beyond their private interests and put their
own lives in historical, social and ethical perspective. To put
it simply, students should discover themselves and discover their
connections.
And I should like to focus briefly on four examples from the
Carnegie report—College: The Undergraduate Experience in
America—to illustrate the point.
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I.
We begin our report by affirming the centrality of language,
for it is through symbol systems that we are connected. We say
in our report that the sending and the receiving of messages is
our most essential human function, and we conclude that the top
priority of collegiate education must be to help all students
become proficient in the written and the spoken word.
But I do not have to remind you that language begins long
before the student marches off to college. In fact, my wife, who
is a certified nurse midwife, insists that language begins in
utero as the unborn infant monitors the mother's voice. For the
skeptics, let's agree that language surely begins with birth—
first with gurgles, then with phonemes that are crudely formed,
and next with words, and finally with complicated syntax and
subtle shades of meaning. And it is through this process that we
are both individually empowered and socially connected.
Consider the miracle of this very moment. I stand here
vibrating my vocal folds; molecules are bombarded in your
direction; they touch your tympanic membranes; signals go
scurrying up your eighth cranial nerve; and there is a response
deep in your cerebrum which, I trust, approximates the images in
mine. But consider the audacity of the moment. My assumption is
that, through symbols, we are intellectually engaged. It is a
huge and audacious leap of faith.
I am suggesting that, through language, we are personally
and socially empowered. And every college student, to be truly
educated, should learn to write with clarity, read with
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comprehension, and effectively speak and listen. Indeed, these
essential skills provide the tools for independent learning, and
in the Carnegie report, we recommend that all freshmen complete
an English course with emphasis on writing, since it is through
clear writing that clear thinking can be taught. We strongly
urge that good writing and good speaking be taught in every
class—from business to literature, from science to mathematics.
We also propose that all seniors be asked to write a thesis
on a consequential topic. Such a project would demonstrate the
capacity of each student to gather information, integrate ideas,
write with clarity and coherence, and have the capacity to go on
learning long after college days are over. If after 16 years of
formal learning, students are not able to demonstrate those
fundamental skills, then we should close the doors of schools and
colleges and start again.
One other point. In the Carnegie report, we suggest that
seniors be organized in seminars of no more than 20 each to
present their theses to their fellow students, defend in the
presence of their colleagues what they have written, and critique
the work that they have done—a modern version of the old-
fashioned declamation.
Then we introduce a brash proposal. We suggest that
colleges may wish to introduce a senior colloquium series on
campus. Instead of inviting experts on leave from Mt. Olympus to
speak, why not ask students about to leave the college to
demonstrate in a public forum their capacity to think, to speak
and respond to questions from the students and faculty as well.
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Perhaps six graduates each year could speak. And is it
unthinkable to suggest that they be selected randomly from the
graduating class? After all, seniors all look the same on
commencement day. I assume they are all adequately prepared.
Details of selection aside, a senior colloquium series would
be a powerful symbol to students of what it means to be an
educated person and it would demonstrate the students' capacity
to think critically about issues of transcendent value.
I'm suggesting that proficiency in language, if it means
anything at all, means teaching students to think critically, to
listen with discernment, and to speak and listen effectively.
But in our dangerous and interdependent world, with its bellicose
communication, it is also important for students to learn that
language is a sacred trust and that good communication means not
just cleverness, not just clarity of expression, but integrity as
well.
I find it enormously distressing that during the Iran
hearings, some of our nation's most trusted leaders, when under
oath, engaged in what can only be described as endless
obfuscation. I'm suggesting that in the teaching of language, we
help our students understand that truth is the obligation they
assume when they are empowered with the use of symbols.
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III.
This brings me to priority number two, which touches
directly on the second theme: connections.
In the Carnegie report we say that to be truly educated,
students need not just symbols? they need substance, too. This
means a curriculum in which students are introduced to the major
fields of study, but are also helped to see connections that put
their learning in perspective.
Today, most colleges have a general education requirement
for all students, but all too often this so-called "distribution
requirement" is a grab bag of isolated facts. Students get their
general education courses "out of the way," but what they fail to
see are connections that would give them a more coherent view of
knowledge and a more authentic, more integrated view of life.
Albert Einstein wrote on one occasion that all religions,
all art, all sciences are branches of the same tree. Frank
Press, the president of the National Academy of Science, captured
this same spirit when he said that scientists are, in some
respects, artists, too. Press went on to observe that the
magnificent double helix, which broke the genetic code, was not
only rational, it was beautiful as well. While reading this, I
thought of the occasions when I watched the successful liftoffs
at Cape Kennedy. Invariably, the TV cameras would zero in on the
control room and capture the expressions on the faces of the
engineers. As they went from 10 to 9 to 8 to 7, I saw the
tension grow. When they got to 3, 2, 1, liftoff, and the shuttle
would go rocketing into space, the anxiety would drain from the
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face and out through the toes. Smiles would break across the
faces of the engineers. Then, without exception, as I read the
lips, not once did they say, "Well, our formulas worked again."
Without exception, they would say, "Beautiful!" They chose an
aesthetic expression to describe a technological achievement.
Barbara McClintok, the Nobel-winning specialist, said on one
occasion that "everything is one." There is, she said, "no way
you can draw a line between things." I wonder if Professor
McClintock has looked recently at a college catalogue. And when
the physicist Victor Weisskopf was asked on one occasion "What
gives you hope in troubled times?" he replied, "Mozart and
quantum mechanics."
Today, the most exciting scholarship is going on in what I
would call the "hyphenated fields"—in bio-physics and psycho-
linguistics and the like, in what has been called the
"overlapping neighborhoods." Today, we are redefining the
typologies of knowledge in ways that are as vast and as
consequential as the curriculum transformations that occurred a
century ago, when the sciences and the humanities were realigned.
I am suggesting that the goal of college must be to give all
students a core of knowledge to gain cultural literacy, to use
E.D. Hirsch's helpful formulation. But students urgently need to
go beyond the isolated facts to gain a more comprehensive, more
coherent, and, if I may say so, more reverential understanding of
our world.
How does this relate to the theme of independent learning?
While reflecting on this topic, it occurred to me that what we
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need perhaps are more independent projects—even in the freshman
and sophomore years. What if we were to interlace small projects
as a part of the core of common learning? What if we ask
students to reflect on the relationship of one seminar to another
or, perhaps, relate courses to a problem of great consequence?
I'm suggesting that independent learning that helps students make
connections does not have to be deferred until the junior or the
senior year.
Nearly 50 years ago Mark Van Doren wrote that "the
connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the
limit of his capacity." Van Doren concludes by saying that "the
student who can begin early in life experience to think of things
as connected has begun the life of learning."
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III.
This brings me to the classroom, to the teacher and the
student.
Colleges can have a well-shaped curriculum. They can have a
wonderful syllabus and courses in the catalogue. But, in the
end, undergraduate education will be renewed by outstanding
teachers who integrate ideas and encourage students to learn
creatively on their own. To put it another way, in my priority
of things, the central question we face is not "what should we be
teaching?" but "how can students learn?"
During our work on the undergraduate college, we spent
thousands of hours on campuses and hundreds of hours in
classrooms from coast to coast. We were struck time and time
again by the passivity of students, by the lack of intellectual
discourse, and by the fact that when students did speak up in
class, they asked "Will we have this on the test?"
The focus in most classrooms was persistently on process,
not on independent learning. We have enormous nonengagement in
classrooms from coast to coast. We are teaching lethargy, not
leadership in education.
Just before we arrived on one campus, a professor surveyed
the senior class. He asked the following question: Could you
spend four years on this campus, complete all of the course work
for the baccalaureate degree, and never speak in class? Seventy-
five percent of the students at this prestigious institution said
they could attend four years, complete a baccalaureate degree,
and never say one word in class. A few students did say they
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would have to avoid a few meddlesome professors but, by and
large, they could make it through.
The greatest challenge in American education at both the
school and college level is not adding more academic credits, but
helping students become more self-reliant. And if after 16 years
of formal education, students are still sitting passively in the
classroom, still lethargically taking notes, still recalling
isolated facts and putting check marks in little boxes on a piece
of paper, (which even chimpanzees can be trained to do), then
education will have failed at its most fundamental point.
When I became Chancellor of the State University of New
York, we had 64 institutions, each with its own campus, its own
library, its own classroom cluster, and each with a style of
learning in which most teachers were lecturing to the students.
In 1970 I proposed to the university trustees that SUNY launch
one more higher learning institution. But this one, I said,
would be a college without a campus. This non-campus college
would focus not on the teacher, but on the student; it would
focus not on the classroom, but on independent study. And so
Empire State College became SUNY's new institution with faculty
as mentors, with students completing learning contracts that had
been negotiated collaboratively with the professor, and with
students studying largely on their own.
Having watched my wife, Kay, complete that program, I can
tell you I was elegantly inspired as she worked with a mentor—a
woman who was both visionary but also hard-headed and
disciplined, and who kept saying, "I'm sorry, this is your job,
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not mine." The discipline of working hard with a tough,
committed, and empathetic mentor, made this an exhilarating
experience of intellectually growing up. Today, thousands of
Empire State students have defined their own goals, completed
their own projects, and they have been carefully assessed. Many
have gone on to complete with distinction graduate and
professional degrees, and to succeed in the academy and industry
and in government as well. No one could convince me that that
learning in any way was inferior to what we like to call the
"traditional" mode of learning.
I have one further observation regarding this term
"independent learning." Let's acknowledge that today, on most
campuses, we not only have a climate of passivity, but we have a
climate of competition, too. Students compete for grades. They
withhold information from one another. On many campuses, there
is a climate of cheating among students so they can maintain
their competitive advantage. And yet, our most consequential
human problems will be resolved, not through competition, but
through collaboration. And what we need in education are
communities of learning in which truth emerges as insights are
cooperatively examined.
During the past four or five years I have been teaching at
the Woodrow Wilson School in Princeton and discovered myself
behaving in a way that violated all of my pedagogical practices
of the past. In the Woodrow Wilson School, a public policy
institution, undergraduates are asked to tackle a policy
question. Currently the theme of my seminar is literacy in the
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United States. At the beginning of each seminar I define the
issues, introduce the students to the experts and identify for
them relevant sources of information. But by midterm, students
are in charge. For the remainder of the course, they are
expected only to prepare a paper of their own—that is,
independent study; but they are also to prepare a group report—
that is, independent study working as a team. Independence, I'm
suggesting, does not mean an isolated effort. We should, I am
convinced, give further thought to the issue of collaborative
projects, because in the end, this is how the most consequential
problem-solving will be settled.
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III.
This leads me then to say a word about the quality of campus
life. The research by Arthur Chickering and other distinguished
higher education scholars convinced me long ago that the most
consequential impact of college life occurs not only in the
classroom, but in libraries, in the lounges, and in informal
conversations with professors. And yet, during our study, we
found that there is a great division between the classroom and
the rest of campus life. Faculty view them as two separate
worlds, and so do students. Within the classroom, there is an
ordered arrangement as to how students are expected to behave.
Outside the classroom, there is low-grade decadence, and the two
do not seem to intertwine.
In our study, we found that 20 percent of the students
surveyed said they never used the library from beginning to the
end of the academic year; 40 percent said they are in the library
less than five hours every week and then they said they used the
library to find a quiet place to study. Host disturbing perhaps,
we found that 40 percent of today's undergraduates say they feel
like a "number in a book" on the campus. About the same
percentage say there is no sense of community at their
institution.
Here, disaggregation is important. While about 70 percent
of the students at research universities say they feel like a
number in a book (which I assume means they feel a climate of
anonymity) only 8 percent of the students at liberal arts
colleges feel that way. And time after time, we found that the
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small liberal arts college broke out of the pack, in a most
satisfying way. So I conclude that many of the myths about the
liberal arts colleges happen to be true.
I do not wish to romanticize the notion of community in
higher education. And yet, in the Carnegie report, we say that a
college should be held together by something more than a common
grievance over parking. We suggest specifically that the
building of community should begin during the first days and
weeks on campus. We call for an expanded orientation program,
one in which all students would be briefed not only on such
concerns as alcohol and drug abuse, but also on the academic
traditions of the institution, and above all on the need to
become self-reliant learners.
There is an enormous marketing going on to attract students
to the campus. But once enrolled, they often are ignored.
Freshman orientation frequently is trivialized, when in fact it
could be a high moment of special celebration. Strange that we
have more ceremony when students leave the campus—at graduation-
-than we do when they arrive. Alexander Astin's data show that
95 percent of all freshmen say that they intend to graduate from
the college in which they have enrolled, The truth is, of
course, that over half of them have left by the end of their
sophomore year. And during interviews, students said they were
hugely disappointed in college life, especially during the first
weeks after they arrived.
What is, then, the nature of community on campus, and how
can it be built? In the award-winning Broadway play Fiddler on
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the Roof, the peasant dairyman who raised five daughters with
considerable help from scriptural quotations, many of which he
himself invented, says that the thing that makes life tolerable
for the hard-working Jewish families are the old laws, the
customs and the feasts that are handed down from one generation
to another. "Without these," the dairyman declares, "life would
be as shaky as the fiddler on the roof."
So it is with college. While professors teach and carry on
research, and while students live individual lives, I believe
that at a great college, life is still made tolerable by shared
rituals, remembrances and traditions, and by the building of
community in which students and faculty work together in a quest
for common learning.
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III.
I have one final observation. It occurs to me that the
theme of this conference, independent learning, also may apply
not only on campus, but beyond the campus, too. During our
recent studies, I became increasingly concerned that many
students in colleges and schools seem unconnected to the larger
world. They all too often see little connection between their
course work and the realities of life.
The problem of detachment began to emerge during our study
of high school when we found teenagers who felt unconnected and
unrelated to the larger world. I concluded that we have not just
a school problem, but a youth problem in this country—no sense
of belonging and no way to define one's worth. One student in a
high school in Ohio said to one of our researchers "I got a job
last summer working at McDonald's. It didn't pay very much, but
at least I felt needed for awhile." I have nothing against Big
Macs, but I find it a poignant comment on the culture that
teenagers define feeling needed as pushing Big Macs at
McDonald's. Frankly, I do not see how one can have confidence in
oneself, how one can be an effective learner if there is
rootlessness and ambiguity as to relationships with others.
In response to this sense of academic alienation we propose
in the Carnegie report more off-campus study, more internships in
the city, more field projects. We also suggest a service term
for students, an independent learning project in which students
could work in day care centers, in retirement villages. The aim
would be to help students see connections, to form a value system
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of their own and, in the process, begin to engage even in
intergenerational linkages that allow them to discover the values
beyond their peer relationships in which they often are trapped
from day care centers right through college.
I think there is something unhealthy about the
intergenerational layering of our society in which three-year-
olds talk only to three-year-olds, and 16-year-olds talk only to
16-year-olds and we have retirement villages where the average
age is 80. I am not a sociologist, but I do wonder whether the
healthy culture is not one that is vertical, but horizontal. If
campuses, school or college, become places of isolation, it seems
to me there is something powerfully denied as intergenerational
relationships are diminished.
Some wag said recently that the reason grandparents and
grandchildren get along so well together is they have a common
enemy. That may not be fair to the middle ground, but I think
there is something about the interrelationship of the
generations. One of the reasons I celebrate the coming back of
older people to campus is that we have the potential of creating
a more authentic community around age and experience as well as
race and ethnicity.
I am suggesting that the college, at its best, is not only a
community of learning, but it is also a staging ground for
action.
President Henry Copeland has recently written that the
inherent goal of liberal learning is to enlarge our capacity to
be "distinctly human." Is it too sentimental to suggest that the
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greatest tragedy of life is to live with commitments undefined,
with convictions undeclared, and with service unfulfilled? Thus,
I conclude that independent learning at its best is not an end,
but rather it is a means to serve these larger, more humane ends.
We in higher education endlessly work with this marvelous
tension and integration, the affirming of the individuals and the
connections to the community at large. This is done through the
affirmation of the centrality of language, through a coherent
curriculum that shows connections, through the building of
community, through the development of independent study, and
finally, through service helping students see a connection
between what they learn and how they live.