When I was a greenhorn reporter for THE HOYA a few years ago, my editor assigned me a story about Georgetown students applying for Rhodes, Mitchell and Marshall Scholarships. I sat in on mock interviews of the applicants conducted by professors, Jesuits and policy experts, and I was routinely impressed by the capabilities and passion of these students.
At one point, an administrator asked me if I was interested in applying for a fellowship. Flattered, I told him that I would have been but that I was just an average Georgetown student: not at the top of the class and already busy in a number of clubs. That would have been a good time for a “do the best you can” moment and a pat on the back. But something stranger happened.
“You should spend the next few years bringing up your GPA,” he told me, without knowledge of my grades.
“After you graduate,” he said, “you become just another number.”
Shortly thereafter, this administrator and many others issued a report on the intellectual life of Georgetown. They characterized the relationship between students and faculty as one of frustrated instructors trying desperately to motivate an apathetic group of partiers and careerists brown-nosing their way to good grades. To them, students quantify knowledge as one of so many items on a checklist that are required to have been crossed off before that dream job accepts them.
Indeed, many students feel – just as the faculty seems to believe – that a genuine celebration of knowledge and human flourishing is wanting at our school. To a degree, this is a superficial complaint. Georgetown remains the best university in the most powerful city that has ever been created, and the opportunities that it gives to its students have never really been greater. But the suggestion that students don’t care about knowledge is disturbing nonetheless.
About a month ago, I tried to argue that the report missed the mark altogether, placing the blame for this problem at the feet of students where it may not really belong. Last week on this page, Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., offered a suggestion: Make it more difficult for students to get good grades (“Intellectual Life at GU Lacks Scholarly Spark,” THE HOYA, Feb. 1, 2008, A3).
Fr. Maher argues that many students view the whole “school” thing as not much more than grades, transcripts and resumes. And up to a point, he’s right.
Some do.
aher believes that, by making that academic carrot just a little bit farther away, students will work harder and rekindle the flame of academics. And, maybe, they’ll accidentally learn more along the way.
But a simpler solution might be for the university to, well, stop telling students that their grades are the only things that really matter.
The administrator who described me as “just another number” merely echoed a common theme in higher education today. Most of our students come from a world where rankings, Advanced Placement classes and standardized tests provide incentives to cheat “the system.” These programs care less about what a student knows (or, more importantly, what a student thinks) than about whether or not a student looks educated on paper.
Again: You don’t have to be smart to get into Georgetown (or any college, for that matter) – you have to be the right number.
The culture of academic indifference may have been formed before students arrived at the Hilltop. But it was welcomed. Those with the right numbers are given credit for their troubles. Somehow, Georgetown decided that high school AP exams are as good an indication of a student’s understanding of important subjects as courses taught by our faculty, a cadre celebrated as one of the best in the country. Making students try harder to get their grades is a moot point when the school doesn’t make them take the class and prove their mettle on our campus in the first place.
This problem exists across the country, not just at Georgetown.
But in spite of the incentivized complacency, students do make efforts to expand their abilities to create and learn. Recent improvements to the university’s performing arts program is an example of an area where the love of learning is being recognized for its intrinsic value, and not because it lands good jobs. But there are also dramatic examples of administrative barriers, perhaps inadvertent, to worthy intellectual pursuits.
Bereft of a journalism program or an independent newspaper, the staff of THE HOYA has tried for several years to break free from the obstructive administrative procedures of the university and develop an independent publication where students can learn about their industry. Rather than be proud of its students’ desire to work and grow as people and improve a Georgetown tradition, the university has prevented these developments with threats of lawsuits, choosing to place a higher value on the university’s alleged rights to the name of a newspaper than on the needs and goals of its students.
Starting two years ago, the Philodemic Society, an organization that teaches its members to use the weapons of logic, grammar and rhetoric in intellectual combat, was prevented from meeting in its own room because of a decision by the president’s office to host receptions. It has been displaced from the facility on a monthly basis to make way for functions hosted by the administration.
These were perhaps the most glaring examples of a reality in which the university oftentimes seems to thwart the same passionate pursuit of knowledge that we now claim is wanting. These are some of the areas where the intellectual spark is trying to take root, if only the university would let it grow.
The university has poised itself to become the preeminent school for international affairs and a host of other disciplines, but has done so at the cost of its soul. Sure, we want good grades. And Fr. Maher’s suggestions may help. But, more concerned with its own rankings and fundraising efforts than with the morale of its students and faculty, Georgetown has led its students by an example that needs to change.
Our university needs to stop seeing its students as numbers, but rather as minds. Then its students may do the same.
D. Pierce Nixon is a senior in the College and contributing editor for THE HOYA. DAYS ON THE HILLTOP appears every other Tuesday.
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