Saturday, November 11, 2006
(12:02 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Bérubé Event: An Oblique Offering
The Valve is having an event on Michael Bérubé's book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? My contribution will be minimal; in fact, it will, sadly, address only one paragraph in Bérubé's very interesting and readable work, the whole of which I commend to everyone.Turn with me, if you will, to page 133 of What's Liberal? There we find the following:
Even America's elite conservatives know this [namely that the US university system is the best in the world]. They may talk a good game about liberal indoctrination here and leftist domination there, but when it comes time to send their own kids to college, do you imagine for a moment that they're looking over the brochures for Olivet Nazarene University....?As many readers know, Olivet Nazarene University is my alma mater and that of several regular commenters here; my co-blogger Anthony Paul Smith also went there for two years, though he had the good sense to transfer to and graduate from DePaul University. Hence I took this reference as a "shout-out" to The Weblog, primarily since I have no idea what else could've motivated it, unless Bérubé is a huge Chicago Bears fan. In point of fact, at least one of "America's elite conservatives" did look over the brochures for Olivet Nazarene University -- Dr. James Dobson's son went to Olivet, and there are all manner of amusing and vicious rumors about that upstanding young man for those who are interested. This may be an exceptional situation: Dr. Dobson himself is Nazarene and is in fact the holder of an honorary doctorate from Olivet (I was playing in the band on the excruciating occasion of its conferral); I feel like he also went to Olivet in his youth, but can't confirm that presently.
In any case, the reference to Olivet has the clear implication that an education at Olivet is inferior to that at a mainstream institution. Much as I hate to defend Olivet, I don't think that is necessarily the case. First of all, a motivated student will be able to get a good education anywhere, even if the options as regards subject matter will be somewhat constricted. In terms of vocational-oriented programs, Olivet does very well -- their nursing and education programs have strong reputations, their social work program qualifies graduates to skip directly to the second year of an MSW program, and engineering graduates seem to have a high rate of job placement. In terms of more "pure" academic programs, Olivet until recently had a very high rate of placement in graduate programs in theology, not only at seminaries but at reputable institutions such as Vanderbilt or University of Virginia. (Sadly, they have since decided to revamp the religion program into a more practically-oriented vocational program for aspiring ministers in the Church of the Nazarene.)
More to the point, however, is the program to which I devoted my undergraduate career: English literature. Bérubé's accounts of classroom discussions and dynamics were actually not completely foreign to me. Although the balance at Olivet would obviously tip more toward the conservative side, there were still many students who leaned liberal and were only at Olivet due to their parents' insistence (usually in the form of refusing to offer financial support if they chose to attend any other university). Additionally, there were many who came to Olivet as conservatives and were convinced to become more liberal, simply due to the process of education itself. This may have been especially the case in the English department, as the faculty was made up almost entirely of women, and obviously highly educated women are going to have less incentive to identify strongly with the ethos of a conservative religious institution that still, when I was there, regarded the "MRS degree" as a primary goal for women students.
The course offerings in literature were necessarily not as broad at Olivet as at the University of Pennsylvania, but it offered a solid enough grounding for those who wished to go on to graduate school -- I did not ultimately end up entering an English graduate program, but I was accepted to some, and I know of several of my fellow students who are pursuing graduate study in English. The general drift was toward traditional topics: surveys in British, American, and world literature, seminars on Shakespeare and the novel. But there were also seminars on literary theory and on multi-ethnic and Third World literatures, which generated the same types of classroom dynamics as Bérubé describes -- even in a very conservative environment, there is likely to be only one student who both objects in principle to the "controversial" or "political" material being assigned and decides he is entitled to dominate the discussion, and it really only takes one to completely hijack the class.
Interestingly, in most of the upper-level seminars, this dynamic didn't arise simply because the majority of students were women; the obnoxious student was usually me, and usually because I was frustrated that my fellow students didn't seem to be reading as carefully or participating as enthusiastically in discussion as they should be (i.e., my fellow students were undergraduates). In the area of diversity, my experience was definitely lacking, though I am now making up for it at the seminary. Part of the problem was that the Church of the Nazarene is a majority-white denomination. Most of the African-American students had been recruited to play on the football team, and there was very pronounced de facto segregation -- there was one dorm that was unofficially designated for the black football players, and they tended to sit together in a certain area of the cafeteria. I don't know for sure what majors, if any, the African-American students tended to gravitate toward, but in any case it wasn't English. Beyond that, the main source of ethnic diversity was a handful of international students, who seemed to be either religion or business majors.
All that being said, I am basically satisfied with the education that I received at Olivet, and at least in the English department, I think that any motivated student will receive an education that they will have found to be worth their time. People who are specifically looking for career-oriented training would be well-served by Olivet -- and in fact, students looking to get involved specifically in Republican politics have ample opportunity to go to Washington DC for study, internships, and general networking. (I know of several liberal students who have taken advantage of this as well.)
To the degree that Olivet offers an unsatisfactory experience, that seems to me to be not strictly because it is an evangelical institution -- the disadvantages associated with that being mainly petty things like stricter rules around drinking or required chapel attendance -- but simply because it is a small institution in a rural area. There are students who find the general evangelical orthodoxy to be a huge distraction -- I know that I personally dropped out of Olivet's education program because a professor used classroom time to rail against evolution and something called "secular humanism."
If students in mainstream universities really are subjected to a liberal orthodoxy -- something of which I have no real experience and for which I have to rely on Bérubé's account -- I'd imagine that it's the same kind of thing, petty annoyances and distractions that most students can get past as they try to make the most of their opportunities. There were some students who let their opposition to the general evangelical atmosphere consume them, and sometimes I gave into that temptation as well -- but it was okay. I made good friends, I learned a lot, and I've been able to pursue my professional goals without facing insurmountable obstacles. Perhaps it would've been better for me to go somewhere else, but what I had was good enough.
