Essay #5: Why is a University?

Begin by reading:

• “Ignorance Vs. Reason in the War on Education” by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• “Making the Grade” by Kurt Wiesenfeld
• Jeff Mann on modern students

Discussion:

We are at the end of your first semester of college, and it’s time to look back and do some thinking. These three authors (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jeff Mann, and Kurt Wiesenfeld) all speak from deep experience with higher education, and all, especially Mann and Wiesenfeld, seem somewhat burnt-out and grumpy. These pieces were all written before Artificial Intelligence began writing such a huge number of college freshman essays; I suspect they would be even more burnt-out today.

Most college instructors have similar stories: the students begging for one more point on an essay because they added a comma that I marked on their draft, the student arguing loudly for points on a homework assignment even though the product was nowhere near what was asked for, or the student filing a formal protest because another student brought the teacher a cup of coffee. (Apparently they think we teachers have such low ethical standards that we will change someone’s grade for the sake of eight ounces of Starbucks.) All of these are drawn from my own experience.

In the writings of these authors and in my own experience I see three major streams of thinking about college education:

1. College is a set of meaningless activities, and if you do enough of them, you get some letters behind your name which will get you a good-paying job. It really doesn’t matter whether you are honest or dishonest; it doesn’t matter if you actually know anything as a result of taking the course; if the person giving out the points is willing to give you the grade, you have won. Teachers, in this view, are somewhat stingy vendors of essay scores.
2. The point of a college education is to teach students to do a set of specific tasks—take blood pressure or enter items in a spreadsheet or whatever—so students can walk into a company and do a specific job. (One local two-year college guarantees that its graduates are occupationally competent for tasks in their field—and will retrain them if they are not. It’s like the guarantee on a new toaster.) The whole idea is somewhat mechanical: college instructors train students to tighten a particular bolt, and when they can tighten that bolt successfully, they are educated.
3. And then there is a third philosophy, which is the point of this paper.

As Abdul-Jabbar points out, number two is a legitimate aim for education. I don’t want my surgeon wondering exactly where my liver and spleen should be, and I hope my accountant has a decent grasp of how to file Mansfield City Income Tax. There seems, however, to be a number three in the back of these teachers’ minds.

So here is your task:

1. These three authors seem to share a philosophy about the real purpose of education. What is it? What is college really about according to them?
2. Do you buy that idea? Why or why not?

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 8/11/26 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.