Where You Are

Assignment: Andrew Delbanco, “What is College For?” Continuing Higher Education Review, Vol. 76 (2012); Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (Introduction & Chapter 1)

This class asks what kind of place a university is, and what kind of formation should happen here. Delbanco’s piece (excerpted from a book of the same name) offers a broad account of liberal education as more than credentialing, job preparation, or the transfer of information. College, on this view, should help students ask larger questions about meaning, responsibility, judgment, and the common good. Stanley Fish pushes in a different direction, warning that professors and universities distort their proper work when they turn the classroom into a vehicle for moral, political, or civic transformation. Together, the readings ask us to think carefully about the purposes and limits of higher education.

One important theme from today’s class that will reemerge throughout the semester is that the university is not a neutral backdrop. It shapes what can be said, who feels welcome, what counts as knowledge, and which forms of argument receive institutional approval. We will ask whether college should make students better citizens, better workers, better thinkers, better neighbors, or something else—and whether those goals can be separated. We will also consider what responsibilities students and professors have to one another in a classroom marked by deep difference.

Is the classroom a place for advocacy, inquiry, formation, disruption, professional preparation, or shared pursuit of truth? Or some combination of these? Your answer will shape how you understand the rest of the course.