A Practical Education, page 20
Some of Stanford’s computer science professors were no less alarmed about the campus’s shift away from the humanities. Jennifer Widom, the chair of the computer science department, expressed concern about the growth of computer science enrollments that was hard to distinguish from Rakove’s:
There’s a major question of, what does Stanford want to be? Does Stanford want to be a school comprised 40 percent of engineers and half of those in computer science? That’s fine if that’s what Stanford wants to be, but Stanford has always been such a broad school. If half the students are majoring in engineering or some large fraction, I just think it will change the character of the University a little bit, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.”12
Eric Roberts, who had been CS+X’s primary advocate, was concerned as well about the impact of students stampeding into computer science courses.13 “We don’t want to be in a position at Stanford, which is a general institution, where everyone somehow associates with Stanford only the technical majors and science and engineering, and increasingly that seems to be happening,” he said in 2015. “It’s important to me that Stanford be a general intellectual environment, and I think that it’s in danger of ceasing to be so.”14
Faculty members in the humanities deployed different kinds of appeals to prospective students. One line of argument was that a bachelor’s degree should not be viewed as a terminal degree. Debra Satz, a professor of philosophy who was the senior associate dean for the humanities and the arts, told students, “You can major in French and still have a completely different career.”15
Another tack was to describe the all-purpose utility of what was learned with deep study of the humanities. When Karen Wigen, the chair of the history department, asked students to look at her department’s new “Global Affairs and World History” track, she made a case for it that could have been adapted for other humanities subjects: “Acquiring deep knowledge about multiple parts of the globe, learning to ask probing questions and construct arguments, evaluating evidence and writing and speaking effectively are all timeless skills in a globalizing world.”16
As well-crafted as this rationale was, it did not answer the question that students and parents wanted answered: Did employers value these things, too? The faculty hoped that employers did, but had varying success in showing that this was so. In 2011, Richard Martin, the professor of classics who had taught Andrew Phillips’s freshman seminar, told the Stanford Daily that students majoring in the humanities “can do a liberal arts degree and still get a job. And I don’t mean like working in a library or going to grad school and wasting five years of your life.” It was well-intentioned but lacked illustrative details. Martin may have been including himself when he went on to say, “Professors don’t like to deal with the idea of having to market their field,” but they had been forced into this uncomfortable position. “We’re fighting an anti-intellectual and vocational mentality,” he explained.17
The most well-prepared—and philosophically provocative—response to the vocationalism that was destroying student interest in humanities majors was delivered by Joshua Landy, who was a professor of both French and comparative literature. It came in December 2010 at the tail end of the last class meeting of his The Art of Living class. Though he was speaking nominally just to the class’s students, the mini-lecture was captured on video, and it was a riveting performance.18
“I want to give you a piece of advice straight from the heart,” Landy opens. “Don’t major in economics.” He pauses, while the students laugh uneasily. “Let me rephrase that: do major in economics if you love economics,” he said. “But don’t major in economics if it’s because your parents told you to, or if it’s because you think you can’t get a good job without it.” Professors of economics agreed with him, he said, and if anyone doubted this, they should go ask them.
Everyone in his class would end up with a good job, Landy said, even those who were majoring in history, psychology, or French studies. “In certain fields, it turns out, a background in the humanities is a positive advantage,” he said. “Whether rightly or wrongly, folks out there think we humanists have good communication skills, rich imaginations, intellectual agility, and flexibility.”
He showed a slide of Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT’s Media Lab, with a Negroponte quotation: “Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. The ability to make big leaps of thought usually resides in people with very wide backgrounds, multidisciplinary minds and a broad spectrum of experience.” Below, Landy had added, “NB: We love engineers. Especially double majors,” with a smiley-face emoji.
Landy asked students to note that he was not saying that they should become humanities majors, only that they should feel that they could do so, if that is what held their interest. “I hereby give you permission to study something you are actually interested in, including economics,” he said.
“If you’re a humanities major, there’s one question that people always ask you: ‘What are you going to do with that?’ And what they mean by this is, how are you going to make money?” Landy allowed that this was “a thoroughly fair question.” But he pointed out that he wanted to ask the students who did not major in the humanities a question: “When you make money, what are you going to do with that? . . . How are you going to spend it? What would be the best way of making yourself happy and fulfilled?”
He flashed a picture of Paris Hilton dancing in a nightclub as an illustration of life choices that did not show money spent wisely. He asked the students,
What is actually going to make you happy? Are you going to avoid making mistakes that you’ll regret for a very long time and you’re at least going to learn to learn from your mistakes? Are you going to be able to stave off that midlife crisis? To quote W. E. B. DuBois, “The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning. It is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment that forms the secret of civilization. The true college will ever have but one goal: not to earn meat but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”
Landry closed by imploring students, “Please don’t waste your four years of freedom; don’t waste them on learning breadwinning when you could be learning the aim of life.” Should their parents give them a hard time about this, “send them to me.”
It was a bravura performance, but students continued to pick fewer majors in the humanities and more in engineering. Five years later, Persis Drell, the dean of the School of Engineering, reported to Stanford’s Academic Council on the state of her school. In her presentation, she opposed the suggestion to put “gateway” courses in place to restrict the inflow of students seeking an engineering major. Unlike many schools of engineering at other universities, which could control enrollment by raising standards for high school students who had to apply for admission to the engineering school, Stanford admitted students through a single, centralized process, and once admitted, they were free to choose whatever major they wanted, which was good. She wanted her school to provide the students who chose engineering or other STEM disciplines with the best course experiences possible.
Yet Drell did confess to uneasiness about the day that seemed to be coming ever closer when the percentage of students at Stanford who majored in engineering would exceed 50 percent. She worried aloud that too many of those majors were selecting engineering for the “wrong reasons,” that they thought, erroneously, ‘I have to do a certain route because that’s the route to a job and my passion will be my hobby.’” This orientation toward future employment, in turn, prevented students from taking advantage of what she said were “so many interesting things to do at Stanford.” Hans Weiler, the academic secretary who recorded the meeting’s minutes, drily noted, “She agrees that Engineering is interesting, she doesn’t think that it’s that interesting (an observation to which the Senate reacts with some amusement).”19
Joshua Landy had given his blessing to a double major encompassing the humanities and engineering, and Persis Drell also advocated for an undergraduate experience that encompassed the two areas, but she did not press for the major in engineering. She suggested that students consider taking, say, CS 106A, the introductory course to programming, and then, perhaps, a second computer science course, then go on to do a “computational track” in political science, which would be the student’s sole major. Such a plan would free students from feeling stuck in a predicament, forced to choose “between getting a job and following their passion.”20
A defense of the increase in the number of engineering majors that went well beyond what the dean of engineering or the engineering faculty voiced was presented by a professor of microbiology and immunology in the School of Medicine, Philip Pizzo. A specialist in pediatric infectious diseases who had recently concluded twelve years as the dean of the School of Medicine, Pizzo had no professional connection to the School of Engineering. And when he had been an undergraduate at Fordham University, he had spent more time taking humanities courses than many of his future medical-school peers: he majored in philosophy as well as in biology.21 But when Stanford’s Academic Council took up a discussion after Drell’s presentation of what to do, if anything, about “the 50 percent problem,”22 Philip Pizzo made a case for what he knew was a contrarian view, for more engineering education, not less.
“We shouldn’t get trapped into thinking that we’re doing something wrong if our students want to do Engineering,” Pizzo told the faculty. He mentioned that he had been speaking recently with many professionals who were in mid-life—after leaving the deanship, Pizzo had founded the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute that brought to campus cohorts of resident fellows with twenty to thirty years of achievements—and had been amazed at how many of them had engineering backgrounds even though their careers had spanned diverse fields.23 Engineering prepares students for many areas, not just engineering, he argued. Given that students themselves choose their major, and engineering is what they care about, then the flow of students into engineering should be viewed as a positive trend for the university and not something to be contained or curtailed.24
Following Pizzo’s remarks, Persis Drell said politely that she appreciated his argument, but she returned to her concern that students were choosing to major in engineering for the wrong reasons. Pizzo granted that it was possible that students were choosing the major for reasons that they, the faculty, might see as the wrong reasons—that is, without genuine interest in engineering. But that should not be concerning, he argued, because the degree may equip the students “for things that they may not be able to envision for many years to come.” He had the last word, at least for the day, as the discussion ended there. But had he not co-opted the best argument for a liberal education, to equip students for the not-yet-envisioned?25
At the same time that the humanities were losing majors, they also suffered a blow that, while not quite as visible, was no less impactful. This was a change in 2012 made in Stanford’s general education requirements, removing the three-course Introduction to the Humanities that all freshmen had taken since it was put in place in 1997. The end of Introduction to the Humanities marked another victory for the advocates of professionally oriented education.
Perhaps its end should be seen as another step taken to return Stanford University to its founders’ definition of a “practical education.” David Starr Jordan had taken pride in barring, with the sole exception of an English composition course, the imposition of any general education requirements. He viewed these as a vestige of the older “aristocratic” tradition from which he wanted to distinguish Stanford. To Jordan, general or core courses were only for personal cultivation, a project in which he had no interest. He did not want the Stanford graduate to end up as a “stoop-shouldered grammarian” but as a “leader of enterprise, the builder of states.”26
General education came to Stanford in 1920, only after Jordan had retired. Before then, students were admitted to a major department, which dictated the coursework for all four years. In 1920, Stanford adopted the system that state universities had put into place, designating the first two years as the lower division, a time for those who were not certain of their choice of major to explore, and a time for every student to take broadly preparatory courses, which Stanford now prescribed. The specialization of the major was postponed until the junior year.
Ray Lyman Wilbur, a medical doctor by training and the university’s president at the time,27 wanted to eliminate the lower division and to move Stanford to a two-year upper-division-only curriculum for undergraduates. He believed that “other institutions”—high schools or junior colleges—should teach the classes of the lower division, leaving Stanford to handle the upper division and, immediately following, graduate studies.28 In 1927, Wilbur managed to persuade Stanford’s Board of Trustees to agree to restrict admission of freshmen to clear room for transfer students, but the initiative would fade, leaving no enduring traces.29 Wilbur understood that he faced opposition from students, who did not want to give up what Wilbur called “four years of so-called college life.”30 And he recognized that, student opposition or no, the odds of success in changing a long-established curriculum would be long in any case. “There is almost as much conservatism in changing the social phases and the curriculum of a college as there is in moving a cemetery,” he wrote in 1930.31
When Stanford introduced general education in 1920, the new requirements included math, English, foreign languages, physics or chemistry, and history, some of which could be fulfilled at the high school level, and the course Problems of Citizenship, which would be required of all first-year Stanford students.32 The San Francisco Chronicle described the bundle of requirements as the broad foundation designed not only for the university education that would follow but also for “later in business or professional life.”33 The faculty committee that made the recommendations said that the university was not retreating from the university’s founding grant, with its invocation of the commitment to “direct usefulness,” but merely finding a better way to fulfill that purpose. “There never was a time when the advantages of liberal education were so vigorously proclaimed as today,” the committee wrote. “The engineering societies vie with the bar associations in asserting the importance of a broad liberal education as a foundation for the most useful professional careers.”34 (Perhaps 1920 should be deemed the Golden Age of the Humanities!)35
Problems of Citizenship evolved into the sequence Western Civilization, eventually becoming the three-course Introduction to the Humanities, or IHUM, which offered students many options. The university catalog for 2008–09 listed these among the two-quarter thematic sequences: Epic Journeys, Modern Quests; Mass Violence from Crusades to Genocides; World History of Science; Rebellious Daughters and Filial Sons of the Chinese Family: Present and Past; The Fate of Reason; Art and Ideas; and A Life of Contemplation or Action? Debates in Western Literature and Philosophy.36 How far the curriculum had traveled from the days of Problems of Citizenship.
What had been created was beautiful, at least on the pages of the course catalog. Alas, many students disliked IHUM—strongly—and as the years passed, the ranks of the unhappy grew to the point at which the faculty was pressured into dismantling the program. What did the students dislike? It seems the answer was, just about everything. They did not like being required to take any courses. They especially did not like being required to take courses whose immediate utility was not evident. Even though the students also were required to fulfill communications requirements (Program in Writing and Rhetoric),37 those were not resented the way the humanities courses were because they were focused on writing, research, and speaking skills explicitly, making them appear to students to be more practical.
Students also did not like the large class sizes of IHUM’s thematic lecture courses—typically 150 to 250 students—an understandable complaint.38 Attendance at lectures was spotty. But students also had complaints that grading was not as generous as they wished, and they expressed their unhappiness with low course evaluations. They also coined a phrase of derision, “IHUM kid,” for their few classmates who were genuinely excited by what they were learning in their IHUM courses and were so foolish as to bring the subject matter up in casual conversation outside of class.39
The Stanford students who could not abide three humanities courses in their freshman year were influenced, no doubt, by the location of their institution, in the center of the entrepreneur’s dreamscape, Silicon Valley. “It’s in the air we breathe,” said David Kennedy, a historian and Pulitzer Prize winner specializing in twentieth-century U.S. history. “It’s an atmosphere that can be toxic to the mission of the university as a place of refuge, contemplation, and investigation for its own sake.”40
Even before the students had arrived at campus, however, they had absorbed what Lanier Anderson, a professor of philosophy, called in 2012 “an overly instrumental attitude toward what their education should be about.”41 But Anderson, who was a member of the faculty task force that reviewed IHUM and proposed its replacement in 2012, was also sympathetic with students, whom he could see were squeezed by majors, some of which had implicit course prerequisites as well as explicit ones. He said, “The real change over the last fifteen years has been that lots of majors have expanded. . . . They’re reaching down into the freshman year.”42 The freshmen attempting to keep pathways to two or more possibilities for majors open must attend to prerequisites. “Freshmen get here, and we tell them it’s a liberal education, you’re supposed to explore, and they feel they have zero degrees of freedom.”43
