The Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Today's Would-Be Students

I shuddered as I recently saw the new student dorms being built in places like the University of North Texas and North Carolina State University.

(see them here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/22/living/dorm-rooms/index.html)

I say shudder, though I didn't actually physically tremble so much as I seethed with moral indignation and outrage, two emotions well-internalized after years of higher education training therein. You see, as you get more and more education, the more you are supposed to shudder and feel outrage as beings lesser than yourself make decisions that you in your infiniter wisdom would never have made. But that is a topic for consideration another time, and a matter of private repentance for me to consider, well, in private.

I am still legitimately troubled, though, by this latest attempt to draw "students" to these desperately pandering universities. Adolescents they may draw, but true students probably not. Universities are now becoming, in the wise words of Mark Edmundsen, "retirement spread[s] for the young," with all of the country-club amenities that a young person who has never worked for them could want.

And why shouldn't universities provide these things? Thanks to decades of thorough corporatization, the American University (Inc.) after all has now long been in the business of providing customer satisfaction for its many eager clients. Who cares about the integrity of the product? It's what the focus groups say the students want, so let's give it to them, and at ever-increasing prices. If they want Economics Lite, or Diet Physics, or watered-down history and literature offerings, then let us give it to them. With the vast student loan and Pell Grant programs, we'll even have American taxpayers (and two-thirds of Americans never graduate from college, so think of who exactly is paying for much of this) underwrite the cost for all those climbing walls, those tanning salons, those flat screen tv's, those luxuriating campus dining halls. We may have to cut professors' salaries and increase tuition rates so that all but a few may attend this great carnaval of learning we have created, this confused circus of curricula we have constructed, but, hey, the customers are happy, so let's keep forging ahead. Bring on the monster stadium, multiply the army of invading bureaucrats, throw endless money into the pit of losing sports teams. That is what the customers want, and we will give it to them.

And since shopping is what they like, let's have them "shop" for courses, too. (Note: some students actually use the term "shopping for classes" and Princeton even has an offical "shopping period" when students can do said "shopping"-- this is language that speaks volumes). The courses that don't do well in this free-market forum, well, we'll just have to mold them according to the focus groups, or else get rid of them altogether. Little matter if students actually need some of these courses as an integral part of their education-- the product must suit the consumer, and what the consumer wants unfortunately often has little to do with education.

So what does the consumer want? I recently attended a roundtable for faculty members, where six students described what they liked about attending the university. They were explicitly told not to mention "it will help me to get a job," which made me very interested in what else they might have to say. Half of them basically still said that college would help them get a job, and the other half basically said that they liked having four years of a transition period before adulthood. No mention of education, broadening horizons, developing critical thinking skills, learning. Many (most?) do not come to college for those kinds of things. They come for the rite of passage, for entrance to the middle class, to enter softly into adulthood, to get a better-paying job.

But why?

Because we are a bourgeois nation, and that is what bourgeois nations do. I have been recently re-reading with my students one of my favorite plays, Moliere's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" i.e. "The Bourgeois Gentleman" or the middle-class gentleman, an ironic, nonsensical title inasmuch as gentlemen are noble and therefore not bourgeois, or middle class. Most English translations render it "The Would-Be Gentleman." The story concerns a well-to-do merchant whose money, he hopes, will allow him to purchase a new social status for himself. He is the stereotypical buffoon of "new money," the arriviste and social climber who hopes that his money will somehow magically buy him the taste, attitudes, and experiences that will give him easy access to the upper class or nobility. He is, of course, mercilessly ridiculed throughout the play, inasmuch as Moliere recognized that there are some things that money just can't buy. The bourgeois, you see, knows the price of everything and the value of nothing because to him, the value is the price (channeling Nibley here). To have and to be are near-synonymous to those whose petty possessions are life itself.

Most of our college classrooms are veritably overflowing with the bourgeois spirit. Monsieur Jourdain, Moliere's protagonist in the play, hires tutors to teach him, but he does not want to learn what they have to teach. He wants to be taught only what interests him, and unfortunately only elementary spelling and superficial writing skills interest him. He does not want his tutors to question the existing structures he has created for himself, to introduce him to new structures or ways of looking at the world. His interest in learning is not even for the joy of learning itself, or for the opportunity to learn new things, or to learn old things in a new way, or to enrich his mind and thus his experience with the world. He simply wants wants to be seen as learned, to wear all the superficial trappings of educated finery without too much of the substance of it. He wants status. He wants position. He wants to seem and appear rather than to be.

Our corporate university model, which gives the student only what s/he wants, operates much in the same way. Like Jourdain, undergraduates pay exorbitant amounts of money to be taught what they want to be taught, not what they ought to be taught. And thanks to the customer satisfaction surveys/student evaluations to which faculty members are beholden, professors with any hope of tenure, renewal, or even a workable classroom atmosphere take note of what the students want and say they need. Like Jourdain, so many of our students want a college degree because it is seen as some kind of entrance ticket to the middle class, to a social status, and not primarily because of how their education can help to enrich their world view. Students and their parents, as we have seen, are often more than eager to pay enormous amounts of money for this kind of social status.

Only when America ceases to be a bourgeois nation, only when we willingly leave off the status-driven life, can the situation change. Learning must be pursued for reasons more eternally significant and ultimately transcendent than mere mortal, myopic, petty social ambition.