A Practical Education, page 6
David Starr Jordan had his own ideas about how to make a college education practical. One of his innovations was put in place when the university opened: teaching law to undergraduates, not as a replacement for post-graduate study but as a way to give students a start on such a course.32 The other innovation that he sought, whose implementation he could never convince the trustees to support, was to make the university devoted exclusively to “technical and professional work” and to research. What he proposed was eliminating all introductory courses and instead requiring that all students complete two years of college at another institution before coming to Stanford.33
Jordan oversaw a faculty that held a range of mutually antagonistic opinions about professional specialization in undergraduate education. A debate played out in full public view in the form of thematically provocative commencement addresses given by Stanford faculty members. In 1895, when the first class to have spent all four years at Stanford graduated (they called themselves “the Pioneers”), John Maxson Stillman, a professor of chemistry, shared his thoughts on “specialization in education.” The speech was a full-throated appeal for early and narrow specialization, commencing when the undergraduate student arrived on campus.
No student could master all that needed to be known, Stillman argued. The professions had become specialized: lawyers practiced only a particular branch of law; doctors specialized in a single subdivision of medicine; engineers did the same. So too should students. “Knowledge is indeed power—not, however, the superficial knowledge of a multitude of things, but the thorough knowledge of some useful thing,” he said. Yes, graduate work provides for specialization, he granted, but it would be best if all students got its benefits. He argued, “It is better to make some sacrifice of general studies rather than to deprive the many of the benefits that arise from thus focusing their energies on some congenial subject.” In his view, it was better to be narrowly trained, “out of touch perhaps with the common thought of the leaders of humanity” but able to do “useful work” in one’s chosen field, rather than being “the highly cultured and accomplished college graduate with a smattering of twenty -ologies and -isms, but with not enough useful knowledge of anything to enable him to find a place in the world’s work.”34
The students that Stillman was addressing at that commencement ceremony did not see the world as he did. They had for the most part eschewed the majors that were most specialized, engineering and law, in favor of the humanities. Among the self-anointed Pioneers, 15 percent were English majors, 10 percent history, 13 percent foreign languages; 3 percent drawing, and a smattering in philosophy. The social science majors consisted only of economics (6 percent) and psychology (less than 1 percent). Law accounted for 9 percent. In the sciences, physiology constituted 8 percent of majors. Stillman’s home department, chemistry, drew 4 percent, less than the 6 percent that Latin attracted; physics, botany, zoology, hygiene, and entomology shared a few percentage points among them. Most students steered well clear of engineering, the area that was the most professionally specialized. Electrical engineering had 7 percent, civil engineering 5 percent, mechanical 4 percent, and mining 2 percent. The combined total for engineering, 20 percent, was less than half of those who had majored in the humanities.35
The Pioneer Class was not a uniformly distinguished one. In the view of one graduating senior who had served as the editor of the student paper, many of the students who had come to Stanford would not have been admitted elsewhere because of “their mental and moral disqualifications.” Many had been expelled, or as this observer put it, “plucked by the score.”36 (“All who have failed and have been sent home are rich men’s sons,” said one student at the time.)37 Nor was the quality of the teaching uniformly high. The senior recounted hearing of the instructor who spoke of “when the particle A has been drug along to here” or “Now, class, see what I have did.” A course offered in corporate industry used Bible stories to illustrate points—Adam and Eve were held up as “the first co-operators in clothes-making.” Most concerning to the former editor was the way that students despised those among them who showed interest in their classes. The most socially successful among students was the one who did not study and avoided class, the “quadrangle dawdler.”38
One positive change that the senior had noticed since the university’s opening four years earlier was the steady increase in the percentage of women in the student body. In the initial year, one out of every four students was a woman, but in the most recent year, the proportion had risen to one out of three. “The most logical assumption is that Stanford is better suited for ladies than other colleges since they do not show so rapid an increase in lady attendance,” he surmised.39
Three years after Stillman’s call for more specialization, when the graduating Class of 1898 assembled for its commencement ceremony, Walter Miller, a thirty-four-year-old professor of classical philology, took the stage and delivered an impassioned case for an education that was not specialized. He was not afraid to target in particular the keystone maxim of the university’s late founder. “The world’s call is for the man of learning who knows better than any one else how to do some one thing,” Miller said, “but he cannot meet the requirements if he knows nothing but that one thing.” Far superior, he continued, is an education that allows the graduate to see one thing in relation to other things and to see all “in their proper proportion.”40
Miller acknowledged that four years was not long enough to provide for grounding in the humanities and preparation for a profession. The solution was to discard the idea that the bachelor’s degree was a terminal degree and instead think of graduate education as the final stage for all educated people, and not an elective stage only for some.41
Then, as now, Stanford’s humanities faculty was placed on the defensive by the demand not to waste students’ time with anything that was not immediately practical. Miller pushed back:
Those who look upon knowledge only from the standpoint of “practical” utility are likely to see in the university only a bureau for the delivery of special information, a mere warehouse for literary, medical, or legal merchandise, instead of a temple of knowledge and truth. The enrichment of knowledge and power is not considered and therefore not desired. Too general is the conception in our land that nothing is practical, nothing is useful, even in matters of pure intellect, unless it can be translated into dollars and cents.
With an intuitive understanding of the power of the word practical, Miller wrested the word back: “In the truer sense of the word, anything is practical that makes a man or a community or a state or a nation stronger or better or wiser, anything that helps a man to live up to the best that is in him.”42
At a superficial glance, Miller and the others on the humanities faculty seemed to be in the enviable position of drawing the most students. English, history, and foreign languages accounted for 22 percent of the graduating Class of 1898. The sciences had made gains and now were 19 percent, but engineering had lost a little ground, now totaling 15 percent. Education had been added and drew 5 percent; economics also drew 5 percent; law had edged up to 10 percent from 9 percent. Another new major was “bionomics,” experimental biology that the Stanford registrar explained was synonymous with “Evolution,” which had 2 percent.43
What the university’s tallies for the individual majors did not show, however, was the split among men and women. In 1907, the professional fields were almost exclusively male. Engineering majors consisted of forty-four men and no women; law had thirty men and one woman. In the humanities, women predominated: Latin majors consisted of eighteen women and one man, English had identical numbers, and German had sixteen women and four men.44
The pattern suggests that men were specializing early and electing vocational paths, while women were receiving the broad liberal education that was expected to be put to use not in the paid workplace but in the way that Leland and Jane Stanford had envisaged, at home in the care of infants and young children. When John C. Branner, a professor of geology, addressed the Class of 1898, the same group of seniors as had Miller, he praised the senior women: “Members of the Faculty know that the women in the class are smarter than the men.” But he did not give the women valedictory encouragement to go forth and make their mark on the world. He only told them and the men to “get married as soon as you can afford to do so.”45
The women of Stanford were much on the mind of Jane Stanford as well. One year later, when she formally transferred more than $10 million worth of real estate, stocks, and bonds to the university, she requested from the trustees, and received, a change in the university bylaws that placed a limit of five hundred on the number of women who could be enrolled simultaneously at the university. At the time, there were 480 women among the 1,100 students.46 “I have watched with interest the large growth in the attendance of female students,” Jane Stanford told the trustees, “and if this growth continues in the future at the same rate, the number of women students will, before very long, greatly exceed the number of men, and thereby have it regarded by the public as a University for females instead of males. This was not my husband’s wish, nor is it mine, nor would it have been my son’s.”47 She died in 1905 at the age of seventy-six, but the cap of five hundred was not lifted until 1933.48
By limiting the number of women who would be enrolled, the university would take in more male students whose interest in studying was marginal or nonexistent, and the longer it would take for the wider world to perceive a university that produced well-educated graduates. In the 1907–08 academic year, almost one out of every five male students, but only 2.5 percent of the women, were thrown out of the university for “delinquent scholarship.”49
Having an artificially higher percentage of men also meant the university would have more demand for engineering and law, the professional tracks, and less for the humanities. It was only when the limit was removed—that is, only when the directive of Jane Stanford was nullified and women could be admitted without imposition of a cap—that the undergraduate curriculum could outgrow the effects of earlier stunting. Without the rebalancing of the gender ratio before World War II, professional narrowing would have been much more pronounced, decades before the present tendencies in that direction manifested. It is the flourishing of liberal education that would follow in the mid-twentieth century, and the broad embrace of that education by prospective employers of new graduates, that shows us an encouraging example of liberal education being recognized by all parties as practical.
CHAPTER 5
A FOOT IN THE DOOR
WHEN LELAND STANFORD VIEWED the typical college student of his time as “void of such practical knowledge of any calling as will enable them to earn their living at once,” he could have been referring to a history major like Stephen Hayes, who graduated from Stanford in 2010. At that point, the subject that Hayes knew best was the history of South Africa. Yet the education embodied in his history major is demonstrably practical, if understood not primarily for subject matter but as marking a process of honing how to learn, how to analyze the unfamiliar, how to write well, how to speak persuasively.
Hayes grew up in Arlington, Virginia, without television and video games. His parents were liberal arts majors who got law degrees and who wanted their three children to spend their free time with things other than screens. Hayes became a voracious reader who developed a special love of history, beginning with a Civil War phase, then a World War II phase. When he arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2005, he walked into an introductory freshman seminar on the politics of contemporary South Africa and became fascinated with that country’s history. He spent one quarter in his junior year studying in Cape Town, and when he returned to campus, he took a passel of courses in African history and spent long hours in the stacks of the university’s libraries. One of his seminar papers, on the Natives Land Act of 1913 that stripped black South Africans of land ownership, was selected for inclusion in the history department’s student journal, Herodotus.1
Outside of his classes, Hayes enjoyed working for Stanford as a tour guide, especially when leading tours for prospective students and their parents. He was one of about thirty guides, chosen from about two hundred students who apply each year.2 The guides stock up on Stanford trivia to dispense (“We have 8,100 acres of land here; to put it in perspective, we can fit twenty-six Disneylands right here on campus”). They also field substantive questions about the university, from general education requirements to university policies governing underage drinking. At the start of every tour he thought to himself, “Game time!” He also worked as a tutor in the university’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric, helping students improve their oral communication skills. His summers during college were occupied with internships in Washington, DC: in the first, he worked in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, doing research on carbon cap-and-trade legislation; in the next, he worked in the Washington office of California utility PG&E; and in the third, he was a White House intern in the first year of Barack Obama’s administration.
By the fall quarter of his senior year, about one-third of his Stanford friends already knew what they would be doing after graduation. These were the students who had done an internship the previous summer that converted into a job offer. Hayes was not paying a great deal of attention. He had taken Introduction to American Law, which he had much enjoyed, and he thought he would go to law school eventually, viewing a law degree as useful in a number of careers, including government or business. But he was not anxious about what he would do immediately following graduation. He was occupied with classes, continuing to take almost twenty units each quarter as he had since he had arrived, well more than the fifteen units in a normal load. One day, as he was crossing campus, he came upon the fall career fair and had a conversation with a person representing the consulting firm Monitor, who took pains to say that the company welcomed a humanities major. But Hayes was not excited about working in a job where he would live inside spreadsheets all day, so he did not pursue consulting possibilities.
The next quarter, Hayes applied to Teach for America, which ran a campus recruiting operation no less sophisticated than those of the consulting firms and investment banks. There were deadlines and interviews and winnowing. Its national acceptance rate was 15 percent,3 which gave those who were selected a feeling of belonging to an elite. The consulting firms and investment banks wanted to be affiliated with TFA. One of Hayes’s friends, who had done an internship at Bain after his junior year, applied to both Bain and TFA, and Bain offered him a job with a start date that was deferred two years so he could first be a TFA volunteer. About 10 percent of the senior class at Stanford applied for TFA when Hayes did.4
Hayes was accepted into TFA, which would start in the fall. He still planned to eventually go to law school. At the end of his winter quarter in his senior year, he had enough credits to graduate, so he spent the spring quarter at “Camp Stanford,” the students’ name for the quarter in which, for payment of a nominal sum, a student remains officially a student and can live on campus but does not take courses and does not pay tuition. Hayes used the quarter to study for the LSAT.
Hayes received a high LSAT score, but when he looks back at his time at Stanford, he has a regret: that he had done whatever would optimize his chances of getting into a top law school and avoided anything that would hurt those chances. In retrospect, he wishes he had done more academic exploring. He regrets in particular not taking the introductory course in computer science, CS 106A, to avoid a risk of hurting his GPA.
Hayes got off to a good start at TFA. He was sent to a crash course in Los Angeles to learn some rudiments of teaching and was assigned to a kindergarten class at a charter school. “I was bright-eyed and full of optimism about the experience I was about to embark on,” he recalls. His assignment for the school year would be teaching seventh-grade English and social studies at a charter school in San Jose, where the reading level of the typical seventh-grader was at the fourth-grade level. He taught three two-hour classes each day. The first two classes went well, but not the third, which was in a stiflingly hot classroom, without air conditioning, the perfect incubator for what the teaching world calls “behavior management” problems. When he turned to the school principal for assistance, he not only failed to get help, he found himself marked for transfer or dismissal. He decided he would end his TFA stint after one year and began applying to law schools for the class that he would enter one year later.
Hayes needed an interim job for the intervening year, and he sent out applications to a variety of companies, small and large. He was living in Mountain View in an apartment; his roommate, a Stanford friend who had been his roommate in their freshman year, was working at Google and put in a good word for him there. When Hayes was invited for an interview, he discovered that his prospective employer was not much interested in the courses that he had taken at Stanford. What he was asked about most was his recent job experience at TFA. But he was able to talk about the relevance of his academic experience at Stanford in general terms, highlighting the training that gave him the ability to present ideas effectively, whether orally or in writing. The one time in the interview when he got to talk about specifics was when the interviewer asked, “What are you passionate about? What do you enjoy doing when you’re not within the walls of this office?” Here Hayes talked about his interest in South Africa, his studying abroad there, and his seminar paper that had been published in the history department’s journal.
Google gave him a job as a contractor in the People Operations group, its human relations department. Hayes’s contract position was to last six months; no promises were made that he and his fellow contractors would be offered permanent positions. The only permanent Google employee in his team was the manager to whom the contractors reported. But contractors nonetheless got to enjoy some of the amenities of working at Google. Hayes felt dizzy at the change, going from the decommissioned motel in San Jose that had housed the charter school at which he had taught to Google’s gleaming campus, with its cafeterias, gym, laundry pickup service, and other luxuries.
