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INDEPENDENT LEARNING AND THE LIBERAL ARTS

Remarks by Dr. Ernest L, Boyer

President

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Independent Learning Conference The College of Wooster

April 15, 1988

INTRODUCTION

Independent learning has been a pillar of intellectual

strength for The College of Wooster in Ohio for four decades. It

has also been a symbol of excellence for the nation. I thank you

for sustaining on this campus a special blend of scholarship and

teaching at their very best.

In 1972 I was sitting in my office in Albany, NY. It was a

dreary Monday morning in Albany, and to avoid the pressures of

the day I turned instinctively to the stack of third-class mail

that I keep on the corner of my desk to create the illusion of

being very, very busy. On top of the heap was a student

newspaper from Stanford University, and I was struck by the

headline which announced that the faculty at Stanford, in a burst

of creativity, was reintroducing a required course in Western

Civilization after having abolished all requirements just three

years before. But the students at Stanford were offended by the

faculty's brash act, and in the front-page editorial they

declared that a required course is "an illiberal act." The

editorial concluded with this blockbuster question: "How dare

they impose uniform standards on nonuniform people?"

Frankly, I was at first amused and then somewhat troubled by

that statement. It has nagged me to this day. I was troubled

that some of America's most gifted students had not learned the

simple truth that while we are nonuniform, we still have many

things in common. They had not discovered the fundamental fact

that while we are all autonomous human beings with our own

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aptitudes and interests, we are at the same time deeply dependent

on each other.

This brings me to the central theme of my remarks. I happen

to believe that all worthy goals we pursue in education are best

expressed in two simple words: independence and connections.

Our first priority in education is to prepare students to

live independent, self-sufficient lives so they can be

intellectually and socially empowered. But education also should

help students to go beyond their private interests and put their

own lives in historical, social and ethical perspective. To put

it simply, students should discover themselves and discover their

connections.

And I should like to focus briefly on four examples from the

Carnegie report—College: The Undergraduate Experience in

America—to illustrate the point.

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I.

We begin our report by affirming the centrality of language,

for it is through symbol systems that we are connected. We say

in our report that the sending and the receiving of messages is

our most essential human function, and we conclude that the top

priority of collegiate education must be to help all students

become proficient in the written and the spoken word.

But I do not have to remind you that language begins long

before the student marches off to college. In fact, my wife, who

is a certified nurse midwife, insists that language begins in

utero as the unborn infant monitors the mother's voice. For the

skeptics, let's agree that language surely begins with birth—

first with gurgles, then with phonemes that are crudely formed,

and next with words, and finally with complicated syntax and

subtle shades of meaning. And it is through this process that we

are both individually empowered and socially connected.

Consider the miracle of this very moment. I stand here

vibrating my vocal folds; molecules are bombarded in your

direction; they touch your tympanic membranes; signals go

scurrying up your eighth cranial nerve; and there is a response

deep in your cerebrum which, I trust, approximates the images in

mine. But consider the audacity of the moment. My assumption is

that, through symbols, we are intellectually engaged. It is a

huge and audacious leap of faith.

I am suggesting that, through language, we are personally

and socially empowered. And every college student, to be truly

educated, should learn to write with clarity, read with

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comprehension, and effectively speak and listen. Indeed, these

essential skills provide the tools for independent learning, and

in the Carnegie report, we recommend that all freshmen complete

an English course with emphasis on writing, since it is through

clear writing that clear thinking can be taught. We strongly

urge that good writing and good speaking be taught in every

class—from business to literature, from science to mathematics.

We also propose that all seniors be asked to write a thesis

on a consequential topic. Such a project would demonstrate the

capacity of each student to gather information, integrate ideas,

write with clarity and coherence, and have the capacity to go on

learning long after college days are over. If after 16 years of

formal learning, students are not able to demonstrate those

fundamental skills, then we should close the doors of schools and

colleges and start again.

One other point. In the Carnegie report, we suggest that

seniors be organized in seminars of no more than 20 each to

present their theses to their fellow students, defend in the

presence of their colleagues what they have written, and critique

the work that they have done—a modern version of the old-

fashioned declamation.

Then we introduce a brash proposal. We suggest that

colleges may wish to introduce a senior colloquium series on

campus. Instead of inviting experts on leave from Mt. Olympus to

speak, why not ask students about to leave the college to

demonstrate in a public forum their capacity to think, to speak

and respond to questions from the students and faculty as well.

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Perhaps six graduates each year could speak. And is it

unthinkable to suggest that they be selected randomly from the

graduating class? After all, seniors all look the same on

commencement day. I assume they are all adequately prepared.

Details of selection aside, a senior colloquium series would

be a powerful symbol to students of what it means to be an

educated person and it would demonstrate the students' capacity

to think critically about issues of transcendent value.

I'm suggesting that proficiency in language, if it means

anything at all, means teaching students to think critically, to

listen with discernment, and to speak and listen effectively.

But in our dangerous and interdependent world, with its bellicose

communication, it is also important for students to learn that

language is a sacred trust and that good communication means not

just cleverness, not just clarity of expression, but integrity as

well.

I find it enormously distressing that during the Iran

hearings, some of our nation's most trusted leaders, when under

oath, engaged in what can only be described as endless

obfuscation. I'm suggesting that in the teaching of language, we

help our students understand that truth is the obligation they

assume when they are empowered with the use of symbols.

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III.

This brings me to priority number two, which touches

directly on the second theme: connections.

In the Carnegie report we say that to be truly educated,

students need not just symbols? they need substance, too. This

means a curriculum in which students are introduced to the major

fields of study, but are also helped to see connections that put

their learning in perspective.

Today, most colleges have a general education requirement

for all students, but all too often this so-called "distribution

requirement" is a grab bag of isolated facts. Students get their

general education courses "out of the way," but what they fail to

see are connections that would give them a more coherent view of

knowledge and a more authentic, more integrated view of life.

Albert Einstein wrote on one occasion that all religions,

all art, all sciences are branches of the same tree. Frank

Press, the president of the National Academy of Science, captured

this same spirit when he said that scientists are, in some

respects, artists, too. Press went on to observe that the

magnificent double helix, which broke the genetic code, was not

only rational, it was beautiful as well. While reading this, I

thought of the occasions when I watched the successful liftoffs

at Cape Kennedy. Invariably, the TV cameras would zero in on the

control room and capture the expressions on the faces of the

engineers. As they went from 10 to 9 to 8 to 7, I saw the

tension grow. When they got to 3, 2, 1, liftoff, and the shuttle

would go rocketing into space, the anxiety would drain from the

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face and out through the toes. Smiles would break across the

faces of the engineers. Then, without exception, as I read the

lips, not once did they say, "Well, our formulas worked again."

Without exception, they would say, "Beautiful!" They chose an

aesthetic expression to describe a technological achievement.

Barbara McClintok, the Nobel-winning specialist, said on one

occasion that "everything is one." There is, she said, "no way

you can draw a line between things." I wonder if Professor

McClintock has looked recently at a college catalogue. And when

the physicist Victor Weisskopf was asked on one occasion "What

gives you hope in troubled times?" he replied, "Mozart and

quantum mechanics."

Today, the most exciting scholarship is going on in what I

would call the "hyphenated fields"—in bio-physics and psycho-

linguistics and the like, in what has been called the

"overlapping neighborhoods." Today, we are redefining the

typologies of knowledge in ways that are as vast and as

consequential as the curriculum transformations that occurred a

century ago, when the sciences and the humanities were realigned.

I am suggesting that the goal of college must be to give all

students a core of knowledge to gain cultural literacy, to use

E.D. Hirsch's helpful formulation. But students urgently need to

go beyond the isolated facts to gain a more comprehensive, more

coherent, and, if I may say so, more reverential understanding of

our world.

How does this relate to the theme of independent learning?

While reflecting on this topic, it occurred to me that what we

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need perhaps are more independent projects—even in the freshman

and sophomore years. What if we were to interlace small projects

as a part of the core of common learning? What if we ask

students to reflect on the relationship of one seminar to another

or, perhaps, relate courses to a problem of great consequence?

I'm suggesting that independent learning that helps students make

connections does not have to be deferred until the junior or the

senior year.

Nearly 50 years ago Mark Van Doren wrote that "the

connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the

limit of his capacity." Van Doren concludes by saying that "the

student who can begin early in life experience to think of things

as connected has begun the life of learning."

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III.

This brings me to the classroom, to the teacher and the

student.

Colleges can have a well-shaped curriculum. They can have a

wonderful syllabus and courses in the catalogue. But, in the

end, undergraduate education will be renewed by outstanding

teachers who integrate ideas and encourage students to learn

creatively on their own. To put it another way, in my priority

of things, the central question we face is not "what should we be

teaching?" but "how can students learn?"

During our work on the undergraduate college, we spent

thousands of hours on campuses and hundreds of hours in

classrooms from coast to coast. We were struck time and time

again by the passivity of students, by the lack of intellectual

discourse, and by the fact that when students did speak up in

class, they asked "Will we have this on the test?"

The focus in most classrooms was persistently on process,

not on independent learning. We have enormous nonengagement in

classrooms from coast to coast. We are teaching lethargy, not

leadership in education.

Just before we arrived on one campus, a professor surveyed

the senior class. He asked the following question: Could you

spend four years on this campus, complete all of the course work

for the baccalaureate degree, and never speak in class? Seventy-

five percent of the students at this prestigious institution said

they could attend four years, complete a baccalaureate degree,

and never say one word in class. A few students did say they

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would have to avoid a few meddlesome professors but, by and

large, they could make it through.

The greatest challenge in American education at both the

school and college level is not adding more academic credits, but

helping students become more self-reliant. And if after 16 years

of formal education, students are still sitting passively in the

classroom, still lethargically taking notes, still recalling

isolated facts and putting check marks in little boxes on a piece

of paper, (which even chimpanzees can be trained to do), then

education will have failed at its most fundamental point.

When I became Chancellor of the State University of New

York, we had 64 institutions, each with its own campus, its own

library, its own classroom cluster, and each with a style of

learning in which most teachers were lecturing to the students.

In 1970 I proposed to the university trustees that SUNY launch

one more higher learning institution. But this one, I said,

would be a college without a campus. This non-campus college

would focus not on the teacher, but on the student; it would

focus not on the classroom, but on independent study. And so

Empire State College became SUNY's new institution with faculty

as mentors, with students completing learning contracts that had

been negotiated collaboratively with the professor, and with

students studying largely on their own.

Having watched my wife, Kay, complete that program, I can

tell you I was elegantly inspired as she worked with a mentor—a

woman who was both visionary but also hard-headed and

disciplined, and who kept saying, "I'm sorry, this is your job,

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not mine." The discipline of working hard with a tough,

committed, and empathetic mentor, made this an exhilarating

experience of intellectually growing up. Today, thousands of

Empire State students have defined their own goals, completed

their own projects, and they have been carefully assessed. Many

have gone on to complete with distinction graduate and

professional degrees, and to succeed in the academy and industry

and in government as well. No one could convince me that that

learning in any way was inferior to what we like to call the

"traditional" mode of learning.

I have one further observation regarding this term

"independent learning." Let's acknowledge that today, on most

campuses, we not only have a climate of passivity, but we have a

climate of competition, too. Students compete for grades. They

withhold information from one another. On many campuses, there

is a climate of cheating among students so they can maintain

their competitive advantage. And yet, our most consequential

human problems will be resolved, not through competition, but

through collaboration. And what we need in education are

communities of learning in which truth emerges as insights are

cooperatively examined.

During the past four or five years I have been teaching at

the Woodrow Wilson School in Princeton and discovered myself

behaving in a way that violated all of my pedagogical practices

of the past. In the Woodrow Wilson School, a public policy

institution, undergraduates are asked to tackle a policy

question. Currently the theme of my seminar is literacy in the

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United States. At the beginning of each seminar I define the

issues, introduce the students to the experts and identify for

them relevant sources of information. But by midterm, students

are in charge. For the remainder of the course, they are

expected only to prepare a paper of their own—that is,

independent study; but they are also to prepare a group report—

that is, independent study working as a team. Independence, I'm

suggesting, does not mean an isolated effort. We should, I am

convinced, give further thought to the issue of collaborative

projects, because in the end, this is how the most consequential

problem-solving will be settled.

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III.

This leads me then to say a word about the quality of campus

life. The research by Arthur Chickering and other distinguished

higher education scholars convinced me long ago that the most

consequential impact of college life occurs not only in the

classroom, but in libraries, in the lounges, and in informal

conversations with professors. And yet, during our study, we

found that there is a great division between the classroom and

the rest of campus life. Faculty view them as two separate

worlds, and so do students. Within the classroom, there is an

ordered arrangement as to how students are expected to behave.

Outside the classroom, there is low-grade decadence, and the two

do not seem to intertwine.

In our study, we found that 20 percent of the students

surveyed said they never used the library from beginning to the

end of the academic year; 40 percent said they are in the library

less than five hours every week and then they said they used the

library to find a quiet place to study. Host disturbing perhaps,

we found that 40 percent of today's undergraduates say they feel

like a "number in a book" on the campus. About the same

percentage say there is no sense of community at their

institution.

Here, disaggregation is important. While about 70 percent

of the students at research universities say they feel like a

number in a book (which I assume means they feel a climate of

anonymity) only 8 percent of the students at liberal arts

colleges feel that way. And time after time, we found that the

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small liberal arts college broke out of the pack, in a most

satisfying way. So I conclude that many of the myths about the

liberal arts colleges happen to be true.

I do not wish to romanticize the notion of community in

higher education. And yet, in the Carnegie report, we say that a

college should be held together by something more than a common

grievance over parking. We suggest specifically that the

building of community should begin during the first days and

weeks on campus. We call for an expanded orientation program,

one in which all students would be briefed not only on such

concerns as alcohol and drug abuse, but also on the academic

traditions of the institution, and above all on the need to

become self-reliant learners.

There is an enormous marketing going on to attract students

to the campus. But once enrolled, they often are ignored.

Freshman orientation frequently is trivialized, when in fact it

could be a high moment of special celebration. Strange that we

have more ceremony when students leave the campus—at graduation-

-than we do when they arrive. Alexander Astin's data show that

95 percent of all freshmen say that they intend to graduate from

the college in which they have enrolled, The truth is, of

course, that over half of them have left by the end of their

sophomore year. And during interviews, students said they were

hugely disappointed in college life, especially during the first

weeks after they arrived.

What is, then, the nature of community on campus, and how

can it be built? In the award-winning Broadway play Fiddler on

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the Roof, the peasant dairyman who raised five daughters with

considerable help from scriptural quotations, many of which he

himself invented, says that the thing that makes life tolerable

for the hard-working Jewish families are the old laws, the

customs and the feasts that are handed down from one generation

to another. "Without these," the dairyman declares, "life would

be as shaky as the fiddler on the roof."

So it is with college. While professors teach and carry on

research, and while students live individual lives, I believe

that at a great college, life is still made tolerable by shared

rituals, remembrances and traditions, and by the building of

community in which students and faculty work together in a quest

for common learning.

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III.

I have one final observation. It occurs to me that the

theme of this conference, independent learning, also may apply

not only on campus, but beyond the campus, too. During our

recent studies, I became increasingly concerned that many

students in colleges and schools seem unconnected to the larger

world. They all too often see little connection between their

course work and the realities of life.

The problem of detachment began to emerge during our study

of high school when we found teenagers who felt unconnected and

unrelated to the larger world. I concluded that we have not just

a school problem, but a youth problem in this country—no sense

of belonging and no way to define one's worth. One student in a

high school in Ohio said to one of our researchers "I got a job

last summer working at McDonald's. It didn't pay very much, but

at least I felt needed for awhile." I have nothing against Big

Macs, but I find it a poignant comment on the culture that

teenagers define feeling needed as pushing Big Macs at

McDonald's. Frankly, I do not see how one can have confidence in

oneself, how one can be an effective learner if there is

rootlessness and ambiguity as to relationships with others.

In response to this sense of academic alienation we propose

in the Carnegie report more off-campus study, more internships in

the city, more field projects. We also suggest a service term

for students, an independent learning project in which students

could work in day care centers, in retirement villages. The aim

would be to help students see connections, to form a value system

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of their own and, in the process, begin to engage even in

intergenerational linkages that allow them to discover the values

beyond their peer relationships in which they often are trapped

from day care centers right through college.

I think there is something unhealthy about the

intergenerational layering of our society in which three-year-

olds talk only to three-year-olds, and 16-year-olds talk only to

16-year-olds and we have retirement villages where the average

age is 80. I am not a sociologist, but I do wonder whether the

healthy culture is not one that is vertical, but horizontal. If

campuses, school or college, become places of isolation, it seems

to me there is something powerfully denied as intergenerational

relationships are diminished.

Some wag said recently that the reason grandparents and

grandchildren get along so well together is they have a common

enemy. That may not be fair to the middle ground, but I think

there is something about the interrelationship of the

generations. One of the reasons I celebrate the coming back of

older people to campus is that we have the potential of creating

a more authentic community around age and experience as well as

race and ethnicity.

I am suggesting that the college, at its best, is not only a

community of learning, but it is also a staging ground for

action.

President Henry Copeland has recently written that the

inherent goal of liberal learning is to enlarge our capacity to

be "distinctly human." Is it too sentimental to suggest that the

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greatest tragedy of life is to live with commitments undefined,

with convictions undeclared, and with service unfulfilled? Thus,

I conclude that independent learning at its best is not an end,

but rather it is a means to serve these larger, more humane ends.

We in higher education endlessly work with this marvelous

tension and integration, the affirming of the individuals and the

connections to the community at large. This is done through the

affirmation of the centrality of language, through a coherent

curriculum that shows connections, through the building of

community, through the development of independent study, and

finally, through service helping students see a connection

between what they learn and how they live.