What’s Right With Remedy: A College Try

At the time of his inauguration two weeks ago, Vartan Gregorian, the new president of Brown University, assailed American schools that do not adequately prepare students for higher education.

“Everybody wants to put as much as possible on the shoulders of the university,” Gregorian told an interviewer. “The first two years, colleges are expected to do remedial work for the whole nation.”

“Remedial work.” Correcting somebody else’s mistakes. Gregorian is a bit extreme (though not alone) in viewing as remedial the first two years of college courses, but the gist of his complaint is much with us these days. Courses and programs in writing, mathematics, the sciences, learning and study skills, critical reasoning aimed at preparing students for the demands of higher learning are routinely vilified.

Many college presidents, legislators and commentators on culture talk this way about remediation: urgent, apocalyptic, angry--just anger, the anger of men at the bastions watching civilization decay.

Gregorian is Brown’s 16th president. Its fourth, Francis Wayland, also an outspoken man, complained in 1841 that “students frequently enter college almost wholly unacquainted with English grammar.” In 1896 the Nation ran an article entitled “The Growing Illiteracy of American Boys,” which reported on a study of underpreparation at Harvard. The Harvard faculty lamented the spending of “much time, energy and money” teaching students “what they ought to have learnt already.”

And so it goes. Academicians have been talking about the decline of higher education for a long time, even though colleges and universities have been growing in remarkable ways. There is a certain kind of talk, a crisis talk, serious and powerful. And troubling. It distorts the historical and social reality of American higher education, quelling rather than encouraging careful analysis of higher learning in a pluralistic democracy.

It is important to get a sense of the history of the preparatory and remedial function in American higher education, for we are not facing a new and unprecedented danger. Colleges were in the remediation business before they had yell leaders and fight songs.

The history of American higher education is one of expansion: in the beginning, the sons of the elite families, later the sons of the middle class, then the daughters, the American poor, the immigrant poor, veterans with less-than-privileged educations, the racially segregated, the disenfranchised. The economic and educational environments from which these students came varied dramatically; if they were to be given access to higher education, much would have to be done to ensure their success. The remedial function, then, has been a force within the college to advance our version of democracy.

To temper any idealism sparked by this broadening of opportunity, let us also remember that the history of the American college from the early 19th Century on could also be read as a history of changes in admissions, curriculum and public image in order to keep enrollments high and institutions solvent.

One reason U.S. colleges and universities increased admissions of “non-traditional” students in the early 1970s was because campuses had grown so rapidly in the ‘50s and ‘60s that, after the peak of the postwar student influx, administrators had to scramble to fill classrooms. American institutions of higher learning as we know them are made possible by robust undergraduate enrollments. And if we’re going to admit people, for pure or pragmatic reasons, then we’re obliged to do everything we can do to retain them.

In saying this, I am not trying to be cynical or dismissive about standards and requirements. Much work needs to be done to improve the education of school teachers, the curricula they’re given and the conditions in which they teach. But university officials are shortsighted and simplistic when they brush aside responsibility for remedial courses and programs: The overlap of secondary and higher education has been, and remains, necessary in an open educational system.

Academics need, as well, to check their apocalyptic, angry, dig-in-the-heels language, for it narrows discussion of the function of higher education in American society. Let’s engage this issue by sketching out some of the things a good freshman education should provide.

Young people entering college need multiple opportunities to write about what they’re learning and to develop what has come to be called critical literacy: comparing, synthesizing, analyzing. They need opportunities to talk about what they’re learning: to test their ideas, reveal their assumptions, talk through the places where new knowledge clashes with ingrained belief. They need a chance, too, to talk about the ways they may have felt excluded from all this in the past and may feel threatened by it in the present. They need occasion to rise above the fragmented learning encouraged by the lower-division curriculum, a place to reflect on the way particular disciplines conduct their inquiries and the way seemingly isolated disciplines can interconnect.

The fact is that one of the few places in the first year of college where a student gets a chance to do such things is precisely in those programs and courses labeled preparatory or remedial: tutoring centers, writing labs, remedial classes. Seen in this light, the word remedial tells only half the truth. It carries the implication that colleges are correcting someone else’s mistakes, are “remedying” the deficiencies and deficits of the schools or of the students themselves.

So-called remedial work, when well-applied, also helps to make up for the weaknesses in the way higher education is dispensed to its initiates. It enables students to do what all the current blue-ribbon reports on liberal education say they should do: engage ideas, use language, develop a sense of how intellectual work is conducted, test personal values against a tradition. Freshmen don’t get much chance to do these things in their standard fare of distant lecturers, large classes and short-answer tests. Ask them.

It’s clear that remedial courses help students. What we fail to see--for it is so often castigated--is that such work can also yield rich information for our colleges and universities.

Remedial courses and programs are a kind of boundary area, a transitional domain that allows us--if we are willing to look and listen--to get a keen sense of what it means to do certain kinds of intellectual work. We could gain significant knowledge, for example, about the social and cognitive processes involved in the complex literacy tasks we routinely ask our students to do: interpret literature, analyze a political or philosophical argument, synthesize a range of sources. Such knowledge would assist institutions in examining the uses of--and assumptions about--writing in the college curriculum. And everyone would benefit from that.

We need to think about our colleges and universities today in deep and generative ways. What does it mean to enter higher education in America? What truly is the relationship between the research and undergraduate teaching missions of the university? How is knowledge best developed and incorporated into the social structure of a pluralistic democracy?

What we hear instead are impatient, contemptuous calls to kick remediation off campus. If the hope is that such an action will straighten out secondary schools, then we have an act of either great hubris or great innocence: Pressure from the college is but one of many problems--and hardly the greatest--that schools face today. Kick remediation off campus and the primary thing you will achieve is the greater exclusion of American youth from higher education.

We need remedial programs. They are a part of our history. They are necessary if we want to further develop our democracy. They serve as a corrective to the impersonal dispensary that lower-division education has become. And, if we are wise enough to see, they can be a source of rich information.

At heart, the issue of remediation is embedded in two central questions: How is higher learning best pursued in a pluralistic democracy, and how many or how few do we want to have access to that learning? We are talking, finally, about the kind of society we want to foster.