Powerful Pitch for the Humanities

By Ezra Bowen

A scholarly panel calls for a return of culture to the curriculum

The purpose of a college education was once to enlarge and illuminate one's life," declared William J. Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, last week. But according to a toughly worded N.E.H. document just released over Bennett's signature, that high purpose is all but abandoned. The study, titled To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, offers persuasive evidence that the humanities "have lost their central place in the undergraduate curriculum." At too many campuses, the report asserts, students are hustling through a "self-service cafeteria" of unrelated courses, not with the purpose of becoming illuminated but, says Bennett, "just to get a job."

Among the N.E.H. findings, assembled by Bennett and a distinguished 31-member panel of scholars and other authorities on education:

> "A student can obtain a bachelor's degree from 75% of all American colleges and universities without having studied European history; from 72% without having studied American literature or history; and from 86% without having studied the civilizations of classical Greece and Rome."

> "Fewer than half of all colleges and universities now require foreign language study for the bachelor's degree, down from nearly 90% in 1966."

> "Since 1970 the number of majors in English has declined by 57%, in philosophy by 41%, in history by 62% and in modern language by 50%."

Furthermore, a large number of top professors are concentrating on narrow, specialized fields of learning, delegating the teaching of residual first-and second-year humanities courses to "underpaid flunkies," e.g., graduate students and part-time instructors. The overall consequence, claims the study, is that millions of students have been coming out of college "lacking even the most rudimentary knowledge, about the . . . foundations of their nation and their civilization."

Bennett's scathing report, coming only a month after a much broader critique by the National Institute of Education on the decline of U.S. undergraduate learning, lays particular blame for the humanities' low estate upon "those of us whose business it is to educate these students." The academic concession to student pressures for so-called relevance or job-related courses is branded "a failure of nerve and faith on the part of many college faculties and administrators."

The N.E.H. prescription for this deep malaise is a reshaping of "undergraduate curricula based on a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person." The Bennett report makes plain its own vision:

the humanities restored as the centerpiece of a full four-year curriculum. Among the other recommendations: substantial course work on the evolution of Western civilization; "a careful reading" of masterworks of English, American and European literature; a sound grasp of the "most significant ideas and debates in the history of philosophy"; "demonstrable proficiency in a foreign language."

At colleges and universities, initial reactions to the report have been positive-interspersed with some perceptive demurrers. Chancellor Clifton Wharton Jr. of the State University of New York, for example, considers student worries about future jobs to be entirely legitimate. The difficulty, as he sees it, is "in providing job skills and occupational mobility and at the same time providing a broad general education and doing it all in four years."

Though the colleges were unlikely to come up with any quick solutions, there were signs last week that Bennett himself might soon show how a student in the humanities can find a good job after graduation. In the wake of his strong report, some Washington insiders claim that Bennett has a lock on the position of Secretary of Education, left open by the announced resignation of T.H. Bell. Bennett insists that there is "no connection" between the study and the secretaryship, adding, "It would break my heart if it were read that way." On the other hand no one, including Humanist Bennett, claimed he would be brokenhearted if he got the job.

--By Ezra Bowen. Reported by Patricia Delaney/Washington

With reporting by Patricia Delaney