Newsweek’s cover story is about the possibility of a 3 year undergraduate education and a roundtable followed immediately after.  The roundtable consisted of Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University;  Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University; Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a new book on education reform; and Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and former assistant secretary of education under Lamar Alexander.

Reading the transcript of the roundtable I found that Hansen and Ravitch had really nothing to contribute to the discussion.

HANSEN: Well, I don’t disagree with any of that but I just think that students need time for reflection. Everybody in our world just is trying to pack a lot in. But what we’re also looking for as part of the educational process is time alone and time with others. Debate and listen and think and imagine and, above all, learn to love learning.

What does this mean?  Students need time for reflection?  At a cost of $1000 per reflective credit?  Hansen should be a bit more sensitive to the economic constraints for activities that require a bit more leisure than is currently available.

RAVITCH: I think it’s a bad idea. Most of the students who are going to enter college in the next few years are ill-prepared for college. I shouldn’t say most, but anywhere from a third to a half require remediation of basic skills. They’re very poorly prepared in mathematics. They know little of history or literature or science or the arts or geography. They probably have not studied a foreign language and to reduce their higher education from four years to three years means they’ll have 25 percent less education.

I think most of humanity can understand that four years to three years is 25% less.  This is just saying nothing about nothing. She continues further.

What concerns me is that the students need time to try things that are not strictly career-oriented. And that what you seem to imply is that you come into college and you have a career track and you move on after three years. But I think that that takes away the time to take the History of Art or the History of Music. And just one other caution, and that is what I see as the tidal wave of uneducated students about to land on the shores of higher education as a result of the No Child Left Behind legislation, which has so narrowed the preparation of young people in this country to reading and math, reading and math, reading and math, and to testing the lowest level of skills. So given all of these trends together, I can’t see a very good argument for saying, “Let’s cut back on higher education. We don’t need four years.”

I didn’t know that “career” oriented courses of study precluded the arts.  Perhaps she is using the term “career” as something that is more corporate, less bohemian.   There is a distinct tone that comes forth that says that higher education is basically the cultural  touchstone from which all good things flow.  Even a bit of snobbery perhaps.  An up turned nose on the “tidal wave” of rabble storming the gates of the civilized.

It is interesting that the two women on the panel espoused similar ideas on the arts or aspects of education that requires more contemplation.  One more robustly than the other.  But they seem to be coming from a college centric or undergrad centric viewpoint when in fact undergraduate education is but one piece of what should be a life time of learning as this fluidity of education should be reflected in the universities and colleges across the country.