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have, in one way or another, troubled higher education for genera–
tions." He concedes that the belief that colleges could ever come to–
gether on "the larger, more transcendent issues" may, "at first blush,
seem quixotic ." For "not only has cultural coherence faded, but the
very notion of commonalities seems strikingly inapplicable to the
vigorous diversity of contemporary life. Within the academy itself,
the fragmentation of knowledge, narrow departmentalism, and an
intense vocationalism are, as we have acknowledged, the strongest
characteristics of collegiate education."
Yet instead of seeing that these very conditions require a new
approach, Boyer's argument follows the time-honored logic of Gen–
eral Education philosophy: is the college curriculum in a state of dis–
order? Have the humanities in particular lost touch with any con–
ception of what their central values are? Then the obvious solution
must be to work back to first principles, to ask what it is that human–
ists think is most "general," and therefore most worth knowing, in
their disciplines rather than what is merely accidental or ancillary.
The logic seems reasonable, but why does something always seem to
go wrong along the way?
A good place to look for answers to this question is with the
anecdotes that run through
College,
several of which are open to
different interpretations from those Boyer gives them. Take the case
of a prestigious Eastern college "with about two thousand students
and more than a century of tradition behind it." There the college
registrar told Boyer's staff:
We've had a half-a-dozen committees at different points in the
past looking at what our goals are, were, and should be . Then,
sometimes, they get as far as making a statement, which doesn't
provide for any action, and of course is lost or forgotten by the
time someone else decides in a year or two that we really need a
committee to set goals .
Boyer never pauses to reflect on these brief glimpses of concrete real–
ity which appear from time to time in his book. Here, for example,
while he faults the failure to come up with a statement of past and
present goals for the college, he does not say what kind of statement
the committee
might
have drafted. Anyone who has served on such
committees will know the feeling of hopelessness at trying to formu–
late a nontrivial statement of goals that a college faculty will likely
accept.
It
is no wonder that when such statements do get formulated
