Bureaucracy, Standardization, and Liberal Arts

Abstract

T HOUGH we have been engulfed in waves of controversy concerning the liberal-arts college, there has been little analysis of the way in which its organizational structure defeats the educational aims it purportedly serves. Higher education has become a leading example of the bureaucratization of personality which it supposedly makes manifest to the student in order that he may combat anti-democratic influences. In sum, higher education has become part and parcel of that social process which it is its very business to transvaluate, criticize, and establish on sound liberal principles. It is time to return to first principles by relating the organizational structure of the liberal-arts college to the aims and purposes of higher education. Such education is peculiarly a personal relationship between teacher and student, what the sociologists call a primary-group or a face-to-face relationship. It is an intellectual adventure which goes on between a younger, less-trained person and an older, better-trained person. It should not be a cut-and-dried presentation of accumulated knowledge purveyed by individuals tired of saying the same things and anxious to get on with their own research. Nor is it-in principle and aim-a sort of totalitarian party-congress in which a leader ascends the lecturer's platform and talks past the ears, or at best into the waiting notebooks, of an assembled group, some of whom can scarcely see him but all of whom can hear him, often over a loud-speaker, and sometimes in quonset huts some acres removed from the source of inspiration in another building on the campus. The liberal-arts college has made higher education an impersonal affair in which the student is lucky if, during the course of four years of study, he gets to know one faculty member well. The faculty members, on their part, overloaded with students, treat them as members of a category, not as individuals. All sorts of devices are used to make the whole process mechanical, such as standardized true-and-false tests, fillin questions, multiple-choice questions, matching questions, and a host of other techniques which aid the teacher to mark the student without knowing whether he can think about a problem rigorously and systematically. Into the maw of this monster we call education-which has come to be governed more and more by administrators, registrars, housing