Editor,
What is a college education?
A. Means to a lucrative job.
B. The minimum requirement for any job — lucrative or not — in this economy.
C. Something that happens to you between the ages of 18 and 28.
D. An intellectually transformative learning experience.
If you answered “A,” you are pragmatic and optimistic. If you answered “B,” you are pragmatic and pessimistic. If you answered “C,” you are an existentialist, and if you answered “D,” you are an imaginary dragon, a professor who came of age in the 1960s, or a delusional graduate student.
Although I neatly fit into the category of delusional graduate student, I share much, ideologically speaking, with the professors who came of age in the 1960s. See, I graduated in the late 1990s, but for all my college experience has in common with the experience of the undergraduate students I encounter, it might as well have been the 1960s.
Facebook had not been invented. There was no such thing as “texting.” More significantly, I thought about college in a way that now seems silly — if not ludicrous — to most of my students.
College, to me, was a time for watching art house movies, attempting to understand post-structuralism, getting involved in the highly politicized tenure battles on campus and aspiring to be a person who grasped things, who had knowledge (and no, I was clearly not thinking about a lucrative job).
When I read the Daily Lobo letter, “Politics class needs more teaching, less preaching,” I realized that I had one experience in common with some current UNM undergraduates: I took a memorable course from a Marxist professor.
The class was called “The American Dream,” and the basic thesis was that the American dream was dead. This class was memorable because I had never encountered a Marxist before, nor had I heard a cogent argument against the narrative of “American Exceptionalism.”
To my way of thinking, the whole college project was precisely about coming into contact with such people — people who thought differently than I did. I mean, why would I pay thousands of dollars to have someone tell me what I already believed or what I already knew?
The just published book, Academically Adrift, and a recent op-ed in the Washington Post by the former U.S. Congresswoman Heather Wilson suggest undergraduate students are not learning much, or rather, learning less than they used to learn.
Both critiques are leveled based upon a certain set of values — a set of values I share — but a set of values that appears to be largely irrelevant to undergraduates today. In other words, the clash of values described by the frustrated student in the Lobo op-ed appears to be only marginally over the merits of Marxism or capitalism as ideas at work in politics.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
As a community of stakeholders, maybe it’s time to explicitly debate and decide what constitutes — and what should constitute — a college education.
Valerie Kinsey
UNM student
