Serious donors to universities cannot be blamed for wondering if their money is actually doing much to prepare young minds for the future. Nor is anyone who is a stakeholder in the system–including students, parents, donors, faculty and employers of graduates–gaining anything from the tired debate over whether colleges should prepare students for the real world with preprofessional courses or for a life of the mind through liberal studies. A more fundamental problem is that even the best schools are unwilling to judge what it actually means to be educated. In the past five years, no one at Harvard–president, dean or faculty committee–has coherently argued that some subjects are more worth knowing than others. Universities need leaders who can explain what is important to a good education and what is not.

Great presidents build consensus around educational ideals. We had those ideals in the post-World War II era, when American society felt it had almost lost civilization itself. In 1945, the classic Harvard report General Education in a Free Society emerged from the fear that civilization would again be threatened if we did not teach both facts and values to a newly diverse student body. We have broadened our offerings greatly since then, providing a wide variety of choices to an increasingly diverse student body. But Harvard now describes "breadth" and "opportunity" as goals in themselves. Proud statements about students’ freedom of choice mask a void when it comes to promising that they will truly learn something.

What we are seeing today is university administrations catering to the demands of students-as-customers on the one hand, and, on the other hand, demands of professors to teach what they wish. The result is a curriculum that looks like a restaurant menu. A degree certifies the completion of so many courses with at least so many in a major, but offers no assurances about shared knowledge or values. A liberal education at Harvard today means a broad general education as opposed to one aimed at developing professional skills; in short, an education defined more by what it is not than by what it is. If we bother to ask students some pointed questions about why they want to take, for example, accounting, they may respond with: "We might as well become prepared for a career, because we do not see another rationale for our education."

Basic Training
Suppose the best universities were to make it clear that certain areas of study are crucial to a good education. One way to do this would be to appoint a broadly based faculty committee to design a curriculum containing exactly 10 general education courses, of which a student needed any five to graduate. Western intellectual history might be one. The evolution of life might be another. Gender theory or number theory could be included, but probably would not make the cut if they had to compete for places among the top 10. Less universal subjects would be left as electives. They could even be courses for majors, as long as the students also completed the five required areas of study.

The proposal would force tenured faculty to view education as a zero-sum game in which they would have to recognize certain books, theories and ideas as having priority. As it stands, students can assemble a superb educational program from the academic cornucopia, particularly if the student has educated parents willing to make value judgments about what to study. Although individual professors may be good advisors, they have not collectively agreed on what an education should provide.

Harvard recently spent three years reviewing its curriculum only to suggest in its final report that students should be free agents. That conclusion abrogates educational responsibility. Left to their own devices, students tend to avoid the courses that would teach them the most. With many tenured professors only too happy to exercise their own freedom to do as they please, the result is an easy compromise between faculty and students in the name of freedom for both.

Harry R. Lewis, a Harvard professor and former dean of Harvard College, is the author of Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.