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they are usually soon forgotten. Is it that such committees are in–
herently lacking in vision or nerve? Or might there be something
wrong with the very notion that effective education requires prior
agreement on what is worth teaching and knowing?
A similar question is raised by a second anecdote reported by
Boyer, this one concerning a "large public university." The Carnegie
staff:
.. . asked an associate dean about institutional goals . She
pointed to the front flyleaf of the university catalog and read a
statement that emphasized vaguely-worded references to "usable
skills ," "the expansion of knowledge," and "improvement of the
quality of life ."
Boyer criticizes the vagueness of this university's catalogue, but again
he fails to suggest how it could have been made less vague.
(It
is
symptomatic that the disparaged phrase "quality of life" reappears
without irony a few pages later in one of Boyer's own formulations.)
As in the first anecdote, the sympathies of anyone who has been in
the situation described are likely to go out to the administrator
rather than to Boyer.
If
you have ever been assigned to write college
catalogue copy, you will know how impossible it is to make such
material interesting: anything mildly controversial has to be sup–
pressed, because it would offend constituencies. But the problem
arises only if it is assumed that college constituencies have to agree
on a "clear and vital mission."
It
is only because catalogues are ex–
pected to express a shared, uncontroversial (and therefore dull) mis–
sion that they are condemned to be platitudinous.
These anecdotes typify Boyer's habit of stopping his analysis
short just at the point where it threatens to touch academic reality.
Boyer senses that the causes of curricular fragmentation are rooted
in structural conditions, but then he falls back on blaming the usual
suspects: administrators who put enrollments over intellectual
seriousness, turning the curriculum into a cafeteria counter; faculty
who put research over teaching, favoring specialized courses over
broadly humanistic ones; vocationalism given preference over tradi–
tion. On the one hand, "Colleges, searching for students, are adding
programs they think will sell"; on the other hand, "The curriculum is
controlled by academic departments." But to blame the thwarting of
educational commonality on these economic and professional "spe–
cial interests" is to blame constraints which could hardly be removed
