College-Level Classics Trashing Cuts Credibility, Bennett Warns

Higher education is losing credibility because of “faculty trashing of Plato and Shakespeare” in trendy, soft-headed courses that are displacing the classics, Education Secretary William J. Bennett said Thursday.

Bennett, who addressed about 400 presidents and deans at the National Assn. of Independent Colleges and Universities, warned that the nation’s campuses are “at a crossroads (and) may soon face a day of reckoning. The American people are beginning to wonder whether the emperor--higher education--has any clothes.”

He said newspapers are “chock-full of truly astonishing accounts of curricular debasement at our colleges and universities,” including Stanford University’s debate over whether to alter a Western civilization requirement.

Bennett also cited a Wall Street Journal article that quoted an assistant English professor at Duke University as saying students are no longer taught “there is such a thing as literary excellence.”

Worth $18,000 a Year?

“Is this what parents are being asked to pay $18,000 a year for?” Bennett asked.

He called some colleges “filthy rich” and stood by his assertion that federal student aid has encouraged the tuition price spiral.

Bennett said a university president defended rising prices because “new knowledge costs more than old knowledge. Is the faculty trashing of Plato and Shakespeare the kind of new knowledge to which he was referring?

“George Orwell once referred to nonsense so bad only an intellectual could believe it. Welcome to some of our universities,” he said.

George A. Drake, president of Grinnell College in Iowa, told Bennett: “I suppose every one of us in this room has faculty members that we think speak nonsense.

“It wouldn’t be a college or a university unless we provided an arena where nonsense could be spoken . . . debated and, conceivably, refuted,” Drake said. If the college atmosphere is right, “students will stand up in class and say it’s nonsense.”

Calls Criticisms Misleading

Ladell Payne, president of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., said some of Bennett’s criticisms were based on “misleading and inaccurate information.” They “leave us less than comfortable with the notion that you are seriously interested in the problems.”

Bennett charged last month that “academic intimidation” was going on at Stanford, where officials are considering changing the Western Culture course requirements. The main proposal before the Faculty Senate is to drop the core reading list, add a requirement to s1953850489to change the name from Western Culture to “Cultures, Ideas and Values.”

“No one here is talking about trashing Shakespeare or Plato or any of the other fine authors,” Stanford news director Bob Beyers said. “They are talking about how best to incorporate the intellectual interests of women and minorities in our curriculum in ways that will benefit all students.”