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 HAS HIGHER EDUCATION ABANDONED ITS STUDENTS

by William H. Willimon

 

William H. Wllimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is the author, with Thomas Naylor, of The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education (Eerdmanns, 1996).

 

A chaplain at Duke University, assigned the task of looking into the relationship between students' academic and social lives, says yes, we have abandoned students. In an effort to give students their freedom, he explains, we have neglected to give them their roots.

 

It is 2 A. M. I am standing next to a Duke University public safety officer on the guad amid a crowd of exuberant students who are watching embers die in a bonfire. The fire, fueled by a couple of benches dragged from various locations on campus, has been extinguished by the safety officers. During the waning hours of this night I talked with a number of students, most of whom were inebriated. I accompanied an officer as he broke up two fraternity parties for violating noise restrictions. We escorted four football players out of a party where they were not wanted. We interviewed a student who had been chased back to his room by lead-pipe-swinging community hooligans. Then we answered an anonymous complaint that some one was "beating up his girlfriend in the room next door." By the time we arrived, no one wanted to talk. We left.

An argument ensues between a young public safety officer and a couple of students. One of the students, obviously intoxicated, curses.

 

"Don't talk like that:" says the officer. "That's no way to talk to people. Besides, the chaplain is here."

"What chaplain?" asks the student.

"The preacher. From the chapel," says the officer.

The student fixes his unsteady gaze on me. He straightened himself up and indignantly asks, "If you're a preacher, what the hell are you doing out this late on a Saturday night?"

Not a bad question, that one. Why am I standing in subfreezing temperatures as Saturday becomes Sunday? Why am I standing here, with people like this, on a night like this?

 

I'M ONLY THE CHAPLAIN - WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT THIS?

 

A short time ago I had been summoned to the office of the president. There I encountered the provost, the vice president for student affairs, and the president. I of course thought what you would have thought in similar circumstances: I am about to be fired. But President Brodie told me he was increasingly concerned about student life at Duke&emdash;about alcohol abuse, residential life, students' personal safety, social activities, fraternities, and sports, particularly have these expressions of student life helped or hindered the school's academic mission.

 

I'm only the chaplain, I thought. What can I do about all that?

Perceiving a gap between students' academic pursuits and their life after dark and on weekends, President Brodie asked me to listen to the students, to gather information on the relationship between their social and academic activities, and to report my findings.

As providence would have it, the day after my project began, Duke alumnus and professor-novelist Reynolds Price, in a Founders' Day speech in Duke Chapel, delivered a broadside in which he challenged his audience to "stand at a bus stop at noon rush hour; roam the reading rooms of the libraries in the midst of the term and the panic of exams. Last, eat lunch in a dining hall and note the subjects of conversation." Listeners would hear one sentence more than any other: "I can't believe how drunk I was last night."

 

A senior told me that when he arrived at Duke, " I quickly found myself caught up in the fraternity rush, in the keg scene. I changed my wardrobe, my hairstyle to suit the image I was trying to adopt. Then, when I went home over the holiday break, it hit me. The conversation around my family dinner table was better than any conversation I had had all semester at Duke. You see, my family loves to talk and debate around the table. I said to myself, 'This isn't you. What are you doing? You want something else.' So I decided then and there that I would have to move off campus if I were to have the intellectual life I wanted."

 

Then he said something that lodged in my mind for the next few months." Duke students say, 'We work hard and we play hard'&emdash;but do we think hard? Arc we really developing the critical thinking skills we need?" He and some other students decided to start a "critical thinking group" in which they would debate, research and reflect on current issues on and off campus.

 

"We work hard and we play hard. But do we think hard?" In her 1987 book Campus Life, a history of undergraduate culture on American campuses, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz predicted that students entering college in the 1990s would bring with them "an assertive independence" and "heightened consciences." These students, children of the college rebels of the 1960s, would be a new generation of college rebel; they would want to learn and they would believe in academic accomplishment but be free of the mindless grade chasing that consumed students in the 1980s. Horowitz predicted that these students would soon be "transcending the tired plots of the past to create new scenarios."

 

Horowitz's predictions are unfulfilled. Instead, students seem to believe that the university is merely a step on the way to law school a necessary evil to be endured before Wall Street. They are here because they want power&emdash;as defined in this society's conventional terms&emdash;not because they want Duke to change or themselves to be changed for the better. Why?

 

STUDENTS NEED US TO BE MORE THAN ONLOOKERS

 

Most students it seems believe that "academic" applies only to what one does in a classroom a few hours per week. Ironically the faculty have the same perception and take little responsibility for anything that goes on outside the classroom. After class he students are left to the "student-life administrator," a university professional who takes care of all aspects of student life beyond the classroom.

The faculty assume that they have no responsibility for student life other than to attend to the students' brains: in all other areas, students are left either to their own devices or to those in the role of "student life professional." I believe that faculty must recover their care for other aspects of students' lives, that they must question the neat separation they have made between the academic and the social the intellectual and the physical the classroom and the dorm. In my report I told the faculty that we would do well to ponder questions like What conditions shaped your own intellectual development? Who changed you and how?

 

It may be possible for a generation to move into adulthood with a minimum of adult interaction but let the record show that we are the first culture to try it. Most societies have known that it is crucially important to recognize young adults as apprentice adults, as those who need to look over the shoulders of adults and thereby get all the clues they can for adulthood. A first-year student from a small town in North Carolina spoke of himself as "floating" since his arrival at Duck, as not really being engaged by his studies. One night a popular professor spent four hours in the new student's dormitory commons discussing various matters particularly race relations in America. The professor was African American, unlike most of the students. When the new student asserted that he had overcome his earlier racist feelings and was able to accept black people the professor challenged him by asking who his three best friends were on campus. Who had he gone to the beach with over fall break?

 

"It realty hit me," said the student. "My actions did not match my ideals. I decided that I wanted more of an education than I was getting. I therefore intentionally went out and made contact with a couple of black students. I am determined to overcome my past."

Such is the potential of personal interaction between faculty and students. Enlightenment notions of education have conditioned us to step back from ideas, to view them and those who hold them "objectively." Thus we turn specifics into generalities and particularities into abstractions. Philosophers have spoken of the development in modernity of the "onlooker consciousness" whereby we are taught to assume the stance of the professional tourist, just passing through, never really engaging, never settling down anywhere long.

 

We have structured the modern university in such a way that the chances of faculty befriending students are slim. When asked why they had never invited a student to share a meal with them some faculty even cited fears about being accused of sexual harassment. Detachment is the ruling mode. Forgetting the etymology of the term professor as "someone who professes something," we are more inclined as faculty to say "the data show..." than "I have found ..." or "l believe that...." Classes and curricula are structured so that faculty and students will be as much strangers to one another when they leave the university as when they arrived.

In the last few years our rationale for our behavior as faculty and administrators has been to say that we are disengaged from our students' lives because we "trust them," we "give them responsibility," or we "allow them to be adults." This is a rather thin rationalization for the simple fact that we have abandoned them. We use the students to finance our writing and research, as a base from which to promote ourselves within our professional guilds and disciplines.

 

In an extended conversation with the women's studies faculty I was told that the primary reason that twelve women students transferred from Duke the year before was the "anti-intellectual climate" at the university. (In my own observation far more women than men criticize this aspect of the school.) The women's studies professors believe there is far too little appreciation for the learning that occurs outside the classroom. While the students receive a certain education outside the classroom it may not be one that we want to support.

 

"What could we do better to process in the class room the events outside the classroom?" these faculty asked. "The students crave to have more of us." Undergraduate education in America could be improved if more attention were given to the emotional and social development of students. This is an area that faculty could influence and not relegate only to student affairs staff.

Abandonment aggravates our struggle with alcohol on campus. I first attributed our students' alcohol abuse to simple rowdiness ant regarded it as an example of typical adolescent exuberance. But I found that alcohol appears to fulfill certain "social functions" beyond the simple narcotic effect of taking away adolescent social anxiety.

 

Alcohol serves to demarcate certain social groups. When I asked African American students why they had chosen to live together on central campus I expected to hear them say that they prefer an Afrocentric environment Instead they cited alcohol abuse in the dorms. The vomit on the floor during the entire weekend and the condition of the restrooms after a night of partying send a signal: "This is an exclusive, white drinking club. You are not wanted here."

Women students are also threatened by this alcoholic environment. One woman challenged me, "You ought to come over and spend a night in our dorm and listen to the sort of things that I have to listen to every weekend night. It's scary." I did. It was.

 

I do not say that college drinking is worse today than yesterday. However, the consequences of alcohol abuse are no longer considered socially unacceptable. Furthermore increasing numbers of us are realizing that a number of contributing factors over the last decades have greatly aggravated the alcohol problem: few classes on Friday and before noon on Monday, too much discretionary time on students' hands, a sad perversion of the women's movement in which binge drinking by women is seen as a mark of "liberation," and other factors.

 

WHAT CAN WE DO? WE'RE NOT THEIR PARENTS

 

Those who work with students frequently recall the in loco parentis ( in place of parents) policy the alleged modus operandi of colleges and universities until at least the early 1960s. I remember a conversation I had with the student affairs committee during a meeting some of us cynically referred to as "damage control," the mopping-up action after a weekend of student carousing and vandalizing. A newcomer to the scene I blurted out "Can't something be done about this? Don't you think it is a shame that these people come to us with such potential and then waste themselves with alcohol?"

A dean of students responded, "But what can we do? After all we are not their parents."

"We are not their parents," I agreed, "but could we at least be their older brothers and sisters? Could we be their friends?"

Might the modern university consider playing the role not of substitute parent but of wise friend?

"It is important that we give students their freedom," many respond. "Freedom is developmentally important. We need to treat students like adult, relying on them to make mature decisions for themselves."

But students are not adults. At best a student is in Daniel Levinson's words "a novice adult" (1979). According to him, few students are capable of making their own decisions or thinking for themselves. Leaving them to themselves with no skills for discernment meager personal experience and a narrow world view, they become the willing victims of the most totalitarian form of government ever devised&emdash;namely submission to their peers obeisance to people just like them. This is not freedom.

How do people grow up and develop social skills and critical thinking ability? Not by exercising some abstract "freedom" but rather by observing, imitating, confronting and arguing with those who have more experience in life. Neil Postman (1992) urges all teachers no matter what their subject to regard themselves as historians: those who initiate the young into adulthood by sharing with them what humanity has learned thus far. Unfortunately most faculty are absent from campus especially during evening hours and weekends when students are most socially active. Even during lunch hours faculty eat in their offices or in the restricted faculty commons. Thus opportunities for students to observe their elders are virtually nonexistent.

 

Could it not be argued that there is an interesting relationship between good teaching and good parenting? Rejecting in loco parentis has rendered the university a sterilized community without the "diversity" we say we crave. Diversity the ability to be different, to enjoy one's differences to stand alone against the crowd if needed to exercise bold thought and judgment may be in great part fostered by the values that our elders demonstrate in their lives and teaching. Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Americans created a culture in which everyone was free to say whatever he wanted&emdash;yet unfortunately everyone chose to say the same thing. Freedom and individuality are complex. What conditions help to create free people?

 

A person who has spent many years counseling students on our campus noted that a better empirical case could be made for supporting in loco parentis during the 1990s than during the 1950s. Increasing numbers of our students have been inadequately parented. They arrive on campus having missed important aspects of human development: interaction and conflict with their parents over values. They were left to their own devices. These are not people yearning to be left alone by adults. In my first-year seminar I ask students to write a short "personal history paper." This past year out of the sixteen papers I received seven mentioned that the most determinative, life-changing event for them was their parents' divorce. Only one paper mentioned a father. It was as if these young people were orphans.

 

One of my explanations for the current state of universities is that they are being run by people my age. They are being administered by people who were students in the 1960s when their supreme value was an abstract notion of freedom. I'll admit it. I was one of those student activists who fought for and achieved the abolition of rules and structures and who removed faculty and administrative interference in student life. Now that we are in positions of power we run the university much as we wanted it to be administered when we were students.

 

Unfortunately many of us "tenured radicals" fail to realize that we are dealing with a very different generation of students&emdash;those whose developmental and educational agendas are very different from the ones we had when we were students. Today's students do not seem obsessed by the search for freedom. They seem much more interested in the search for roots stability, order and identity. Many of them are convinced that modern life is chaotic, essentially unmanageable. Perhaps one of the causes of their passivity is that they have no memory, no real awareness of history so they have lost hope that anything they decide or do can possibly impact the shape of the world.

 

We cannot reinstitute in loco parentis. Yet might it be possible for the university to act as a wise friend?

 

Loneliness appears to be built into our present system. What can we do at the modern university to nurture friendship between adults and those who are becoming adults, to explore friendship as the normative means of education? Aristotle noted in his Nicomachean Ethics that friendship "holds states together." Today's university (a misnamed institution if ever there was one) is neither unified or coherent. We desperately need, as a glue to join parts into a whole, some commonly affirmed goals and means. Although Aristotle was skeptical that true friendship could occur among the young &emdash;because "their lives are guided by emotion and they pursue most intensely what they find pleasant and what the moment brings," so they "become friends quickly and just as quickly cease to be friends"&emdash;he did believe that friendship was one of the supreme intellectual virtues to be cultivated. "Time and familiarity are requires" for Aristotelian friendship.

 

Might it be possible for the university to become as place where people are allowed the time and the space for friendship to develop, where the virtues required of friends are cultivated and where we all become more adept in the art of relating to one another not as strangers, clients, customers, or caregivers, but as friends? This approach can be applied to the problem of alcohol abuse. "friends don't let friend drive and drink," says the advertising slogan. The thought is not trite. What might it mean if we viewed alcohol use, for example, not as an issue of rules and regulation, as solely an administrative responsibility, but as an issue related to friendship?

Hannah Arendt noted that, missing the "political" implications of friendship "we are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy, in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands." She challenges this view as a modern perversion, defending the "Aristotelian idea that friendship is the basis of the polis." Arendt recalls the relationship between friendship and conversation:

 

For the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse. They held that only the constant interchange of talk united citizens in a polis...The Greeks called this humanness which is achieved in the discourse of friendship philanthropia, "love of man," since it manifests itself in a readiness to share the world with other men. Its opposite, misanthropy, means simply that the misanthrope finds no one with whom he cares to share the world, that he regards nobody as worthy of rejoicing with him in the world and nature and the cosmos. [pp. 24-25]

 

After my experience with the students, sharing their lives after dark and on weekends, I feel we are at a turn in the road in American higher education and in student life. The time has come to recover the classical ideas of higher education, to reclaim a sense of the campus as a environment meant to foster friendship between the generations and to recognize the specific educational needs of this particular generation of students. I dream of a university where mature adults eagerly share with those on their way to maturity the discourse of friendship.

 

"I changed my wardrobe, my hairstyle, to suit the image I was trying to adopt. Then, when I went home over the holiday break, it hit me. The conversation around my family dinner table was better than any conversation I had had all semester at Duke."

 

It may be possible for a generation to move into adulthood with a minimum of adult interaction, but let the record show that we are the first culture to try it. Most societies have known that it is crucially important to recognize young adults as apprentice adults.

 

We have structured the modern university in such a way that the chances of faculty befriending students are slim. When asked why they had never invited a student to share a meal with them, some faculty even cited fears about being accused of sexual harassment.

 

Even during lunch hours, faculty eat in their offices or in the restricted faculty commons. Thus opportunities for students to observe their elders are virtually nonexistent.

 

NOTES:

 

Arendt, H. Men in Dark Times. Orlando, FL.: Harcourt, Brace, 1968.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics. NY.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962.

Horowitz, H.L. Campus Life. NY.: Knopf, 1987.

Levinson, D.J. The Seasons of a Man's Life. NY.: Ballantine, 1979.

Postman, N. Technopoly: The Surrender of Society to Technology. NY.: Knopf, 1992.

Tocqueville, A. de. Democracy in America. NY.: Vantage Books, 1954.

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