Our Journey, Day 70

I saw my department chair in passing yesterday. I stopped by my office because one of my students (a first-year History major) wanted to look at the books I was giving away. She took four or five. The chair said he had nothing much to report when I asked him what was new. He said he was pleased (or maybe relieved) that there was no news this week. I have not been spending a lot of time on campus, aside from my classes. When I do, I tend to park myself in the Library rather than in my office. I’m still using the inter library loan service pretty regularly. I’ll miss that when I’m no longer at BSU.

What are the features of the crisis in Higher Ed which I’ve been saying the trouble at BSU is a symptom of? One element on a national scale that gets a lot of attention is the student debt crisis. It is commonly believed that student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. This is partly true, although there are “extreme hardship” conditions under which a person who has filed bankruptcy (Chapter 7 or 13) can then seek an “adversity proceeding”. This is apparently a pretty high bar though. It is generally believed that the people most affected by debt are medical students or people going to extremely expensive elite schools who rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans. But the average undergraduate in America ends their bachelor’s program with $20,000 in debt and an average payment of $200 per month. Given all this, people might think, why put myself through all that? One answer is that a 2021 study found the median income for college grads age 22 to 27 in America was $52,000, vs. $30,000 for high school graduates of the same age. This is a big difference. I should also note that the bachelor’s degree, twenty-something median income isn’t that much less than I make as a university professor with a PhD! That puts some things in perspective!

As I mentioned yesterday, humanists like Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins argued that Higher Ed had already become too vocationally focused in the middle of the twentieth century. They argued that a “Liberal Education” was necessary to be both a well-rounded human and an effective citizen in a democracy. But they also believed the academy was failing (even in the 1940s!) to respond to the challenge of educating the American people. Rather than focusing on Higher Ed reform, their solution was to bypass academia entirely and take their message directly to the people. They published the Great Books series and organized discussion groups. By 1957, a survey by Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center found there were 172 Great Books groups in the US. The 1909 participants who answered the survey were described as “well educated, of high status, socially active, and young.” The report said “members became broader-minded religiously and politically” and that “Greater interest was expressed in national and world affairs” by members than the general public. They were also more “active in community organizations and programs to change or improve the community” (“A Study of Participants in the Great Books Program”). Today, in addition to extensive resources for school-teachers and a Junior Great Books program, the Great Books Foundation lists hundreds of adult discussion groups in North America (https://www.greatbooks.org/find-a-book-group/). There are eighteen in Minnesota.

In addition to the organization that began with Adler and Hutchins in 1943, there is a long history of adult education in America. In the internet age, opportunities for people to gather information and learn have increased exponentially. But they have not always included communities of learners, where people can talk with or even just work around other people reading or studying for self-enrichment. This is something I should think about, as I consider developing online "courses" for adults who aren't enrolled in a college program.