Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 115

Somewhere Between a Jeremiad and a Eulogy

At my little college, notwithstanding the national noise to the
contrary, I find myself surrounded by incredibly hardworking,
conscientious, bright, creative, curious students-anything but
the slacker or snowflake or sheep-like images of college millennials you see portrayed by professional cynics and anti-education
propagandists. I'm also surrounded by many fellow professors
who are intensely dedicated, principled, broad-minded classroom
teachers who see their job not primarily as a job but as a vocation
(even as that term clinks antique elsewhere). My on-the-ground,
in-the-hallway reality thus contravenes the prevailing narrative
depicting professors as a bunch of pampered partisan prigs. Go
ahead, troll me, if you must. But I know what I know. Something
tremendously right, something inextinguishable, something akin
to a spark of sacred sentience or thereabouts, abides in many
out-of-the-way college classrooms today, and methinks we need
to dwell and build on those quietly catalytic encounters.
My boosterism has its limits, and its object. I'm an outspoken,
latter-day, and self-appointed apostle for the small liberal arts
college (SLAC) form of education, a distinctively American institution.1 But that distinctively American institution is falling fast into
desuetude. Only one hundred to two hundred colleges in the U.S.
can still be called small and liberal artsy (and it probably takes
some Procrustean stretching to cover even that number).2 Only
about 1 percent of the nation's twenty million undergraduates
are educated these days in a SLAC. Maybe I'm whistling past the
graveyard, or going down with the sinking ship, or living on an
isolated island as a blinkered holdout after the war is long over,
but I still assert that the small liberal arts college form of education ought to be recognized (because it is so in fact, sotto voce,
even if in dwindling numbers) as the gold standard, the summum
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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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Contents
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