College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is often loosely cited to support even looser claims that America is declining. But Gibbon’s observation that in ancient Rome “a cloud of critics, compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning” does resonate with something that’s gone wrong in American liberal-arts education. In his telling, Rome’s loss of its republican virtues had left its later writers and orators in “very unequal competition with those bold ancients” who had expressed “their genuine feelings in their native tongue” and, “living under a popular government, wrote with the same freedom as they acted.”
For nearly a decade Andrew Delbanco, a professor of English at Columbia, has been following our own dark cloud of jeremiads, elegies, manifestos, analyses, and investigations concerning universities. His review-essays, each prompted by other people’s books, have appeared in The New York Review of Books under headlines such as Colleges: An Endangered Species?, The Endangered University, Scandals of Higher Education, and The Universities in Trouble.
In 2005, Delbanco decided that, for all the noise and number-crunching, the essential “question of what an undergraduate education should be all about is almost taboo.” So now he has written his own book, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, to answer that question.
Traditional liberal-arts colleges are buffeted by swift cultural, scientific, economic, and ideological currents that at least one old Roman, Gibbon’s “sublime Longinus,” would have recognized as hastening “the degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, enervated their courage, and depressed their talents.” Unfortunately, College itself is far from sublime; nearly every page recycles a sentence or anecdote from one of Delbanco’s reviews of 2005, 2007, and 2009. These read like set-pieces woven into an essay whose obvious decency is seldom carried with passion.