George Leef

Strange as it may seem, it is quite possible for someone who has never gone to law school to be a good attorney.

An article that appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal makes that exact point. In “Meet the Clients,” (available here) New York attorney Cameron Stracher writes, “One of the biggest problems with the current state of legal education is its emphasis on books rather than people. By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about.”

What follows are descriptions of four college courses. Three of them are real courses and one is not. Can you identify the fake?

A. The Adultery Novel. Students will read a series of 19th and 20th century works about adultery and watch several films about adultery. They will apply critical approaches to place adultery in its aesthetic, social and cultural context, including: sociological descriptions of modernity, Marxist examinations of the family as a social and economic institution, and feminist work on the construction of gender.
B. Queer Musicology. This course explores how sexual difference and complex gender identities in music and among musicians have incited productive consternation during the 1990s. Music under consideration will include works by Franz Schubert, Holly Near, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, and Pussy Tourette.
C. Whiteness: The Other Side of Racism. This course will spark critical thinking on these questions: What is whiteness? How is it related to racism? What are the legal frameworks of whiteness? How is whiteness enacted in everyday practice? And how does whiteness impact the lives of both whites and people of color?
D. Foodways, Heteronormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian Writing. This course will analyze foodways in recent Chicana lesbian literature, examining writings that illustrate the cultural endurance of heteronormative constructions of gender even as they demonstrate how these beliefs are disrupted, destabilized, and transformed in queer literary kitchens.

One of the phrases we hear over and over again from the American higher education establishment is that it’s “the envy of the world.” I have never actually seen evidence to back that contention up, like a statement from the German Prime Minister saying, “We Germans are so envious of your fantastic higher education system in America!” I have, however, seen quite a lot of evidence that Americans aren’t terribly impressed with the results of our colleges and universities.

On October 2, The Conference Board, an organization of American businesses, released a survey entitled “Are They Really Ready for Work?” The report, which was based on responses from 431 employers, hardly gives a ringing endorsement of our education system. Only 10 percent of the employers said that they find graduates of 2-year colleges “excellent” in terms of their overall preparation for work and only 24 percent rated graduates of 4-year colleges as “excellent.”

The greatest area of deficiency identified by the business respondents was in communications. Roughly half of new workforce entrants with 2-year degrees and more than a quarter with 4-year degrees were rated as “deficient” with regard to their ability to write and understand written material. That finding is not surprising, given the results of last year’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy, which concluded that literacy among college graduates was shockingly low – and falling.

One of the phrases we hear over and over again from the American higher education establishment is that it’s “the envy of the world.” I have never actually seen evidence to back that contention up, like a statement from the German Prime Minister saying, “We Germans are so envious of your wonderful higher education system in America.” I have, however, seen quite a lot of evidence that Americans aren’t terribly impressed with the results of our colleges and universities.

On October 2, 2006, The Conference Board, an organization of American businesses, released a survey entitled “Are They Really Ready for Work?” The report, which was based on responses from 431 employers, hardly gives a ringing endorsement of our education system. Only 10 percent of the employers said that they find graduates of 2-year colleges “excellent” in terms of their overall preparation for work and only 24 percent rated graduates of 4-year colleges as “excellent.”

Concern that American college students may not be learning much during their years in school is not new; nor is it confined to think tanks like the Pope Center. Back in 1999, the Pew Charitable Trusts made a grant to Indiana University to develop a means of probing the question of student achievement. What emerged was the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a program designed to measure the extent to which students are active participants in their education. If there is evidence that students are really engaged in their college work, that is at least indicative of educational progress – and vice versa.

NSSE accumulates data by sending a questionnaire to a large number of college freshmen and seniors. For the 2006 survey, more than one million were sent to students in the US and Canada. The schools those students attend range from the most prestigious to the least. Institutions, however, have to choose to participate and not all do. In North Carolina, all of the UNC campuses participated, along with 24 of the independent colleges and universities. (The two best-known of the independents, Duke and Wake Forest, chose not to participate.) Results are based on approximately 260,000 randomly selected responses.