College: What’s the Point?

By Andrew R. Heinze (Professor of History)

The last week of October 2005 will forever rank as The Absolute Worst Week in My Life as a Teacher. And what makes it worse yet: I brought it on myself.

I submitted an essay about a common classroom problem to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is a national journal for college and university teachers and administrators. I expected it might be useful to the audience I was addressing: other college teachers. What I didn’t expect was a firestorm of student indignation at USF over what I wrote.

The last thing in the world I would want to do is hurt the feelings of students. Students are precious to me, period.

So when I realized I had unwittingly offended some, I requested a forum in which they could speak directly to me and I to them. When we met, I said two things: I stood by the point of my article BUT I felt deeply, painfully sorry that my words had offended any USF students. In truth, I felt more than sorry. I felt sick about it, and more dejected than at any other time in my career as a teacher.

At the same time, I was aware that other students liked the article and saw it as a call for higher standards of education. They thought, as I do, that the people who were angry had misinterpreted what I wrote.

Let me get right to the point of the controversy. A couple of sentences were the big culprits. I wrote that “most” students at USF, like “most” students at the vast majority of American colleges, were there not necessarily because they love learning but because they have to go to college in order to be eligible for many of the better paying or more prestigious jobs in our society. I also said that “most” USF undergrads, like most undergrads elsewhere, were not academically inclined.

I believe that both of those statements are true, and I will explain why in a moment.

I fault myself for this: In my haste to get to the point of my article, and with my mind focused on what needed to be fixed rather than on what’s working well, I sketched USF too quickly and incompletely. I should have added the following statement, which is also true: USF has many highly motivated undergraduates who display the curiosity and energy one wants to see in a student, and our finest undergrads easily rival their peers at the nation's top-ranked schools.

On what do I base my belief that all of the statements above are true? On eleven years of classroom experience at USF (and seven more at other universities).

First, it’s important to look closely at what I said and didn’t say in the two controversial statements. I said “most” students. I didn’t say “all” or “almost all.” I said, “most,” which means: more than half; 51% or higher.

To me, “academically inclined” means academically excited. It refers, I think, to a combination of curiosity and energy in the classroom.

“Academically inclined” is NOT synonymous with “intelligent” or “good.” There are lots of very intelligent people who may not be inclined to do academic work. And there were academically inclined Nazis.

When I speak in my article of students who “love learning” and are “academically inclined,” I am speaking of students who are EXCITED to read and EXCITED to talk about the reading and EXCITED to see the comments their teachers write on their papers and EXCITED to improve their writing. In a class where most of the students feel this way (and which I’ve experienced at USF in upper division seminars), the room lights up with conversation as long as the teacher shows an equal interest (which teachers at USF invariably do).

In my experience, which matches the experience of virtually every college teacher I’ve spoken with over the years, most students do not read assigned texts unless they will be graded on them, do not ask for their final papers back so they can see the teacher’s comments (I was amazed, at first, to find myself writing comments on hundreds of final papers that hardly anyone came to get), do not ask how to improve their writing, and (with the exception of seminars) do not come to class ready and eager to talk about the reading, even though I organize all my classes around dialogue based on the reading.

That’s most students, not all. There is, I repeat, a vital minority of highly motivated, energetic and curious students who match the enthusiasm and energy I bring to the classroom.

Our society is set up – much more than it was fifty years ago -- so that young people must go to college to qualify for many kinds of jobs. Society doesn’t encourage the young to defer college until they might feel a real yearning for knowledge. We have no two- or three-year national service plan after high school (some societies do), which often makes people, afterwards, more appreciative of the opportunity to do academic work.

Whether or not they are in a state of mind to love learning, I like all my students, partly because I find young people fun. And I know that my speaking about this subject will win me no extra friends. But I’m not being paid to win friends. I’m being paid to expect a lot from my students and to give as much as I can to them.

If a few read this and get more fired up about their education than they might have been, and ask more of their teachers because we have a lot to give, I’ll be delighted to take whatever flack this article brings me. And if “most” of the students get fired up to prove me wrong, that would be even better.