The Beleaguered College: Essays on Educational Reform.(Review)

The Beleaguered College: Essays on Educational Reform, by Joseph Tussman. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of Governmental Studies Press, 1997, 208 pp., $14.95 paperback.

It is a jubilee year in educational writing when a book appears that is distinguished by personal passion, pedagogic wisdom, circumstantial pathos, and pleasantly pungent prose, all at once. The collection of essays by Joseph Tussman, the founder of a promising but short-lived reform program for undergraduates, is of this sort. Although its five pieces are not all new or previously unpublished, there is nothing dated or redundant about them; the thinking is still fresh and the essays together make a whole. Tussman's book should certainly be on the education shelves of every university library, but it also makes gripping reading for the laity.

That said, I should confess to a bias of interest. As a forty-three-year-long tutor at St. John's College, I follow with avid engagement the fate of kindred programs, and as Tussman's friendly references to St. John's show, he would acknowledge the kinship. Not only is there always something to be learned along practical lines, but with each advent of such a program, there stirs the hope that one tide may float all our boats, and with each demise the fear that there, but for the grace of God, go we.

The reference to luck and to circumstance is not idle. Tussman's first essay, so far withheld from publication, deals with the causes of the failure of his Experimental College. "Failure" is really the wrong word. The college didn't survive; the program was discontinued--by Tussman's own decision--after four years and two cycles of graduates (1965-1969). The failed programs I know of have usually been half-measures, not so much misconceived as unconceived, born of ungrounded longing for a better way married with timid compromise. But Tussman is right in ending the essay defiantly: "These convictions, with which I began, survive in me unimpaired, although shadowed now by frustration and defeat." His program was a principled plan, a radical departure from the standard ways of universities, a good and a practicable conception. I am thoroughly persuaded that it was done in by recalcitrant conditions and unlucky circumstances. His college was indeed beleaguered from its inception.

Tussman did well to put his account of the end of the Experimental College first, where friendly observers, who have long wondered what the inside story really was, would quickly become absorbed in it. Yet it might be more helpful to the reader to say something first about the Tussman program (and, incidentally, similarly conceived programs).

The second essay, a shortened version of Tussman's Experiment at Berkeley (1969), sets it out. It is a reform program in the sense that its tenets were derived from a keen critique, still perfectly applicable (since the changes of the last four decades have not often been for the better), of the undergraduate education administered by universities. To put concisely a weary tale vividly told by Tussman: The university teacher "gives" courses; the student "takes" them. Good teaching consists of laying out authoritative, well-arranged subject matter, delivering it in attention-sustaining lectures, and making tangible demands on the students' time. The students take an aggregate of these independent course units, not often well sequenced or integrated, and develop evasive strategies for appearing to meet the professor's demands; success is expressed in grades. What goes by the board is the students' education as a whole and leisurely, mind-expanding reflection.

Hence in the Experimental College there were no professing experts, no course units, no students driven to mimic the modes of specialized scholars. This is what there was to be instead: a corps of collegial, inquiring teachers jointly responsible for a cohesive non-cellular curriculum; students "liberated from the thralldom of [their] so-called interests," free to pursue issues without anxiety, "docile" in the best sense; without the self-protective armor of resistance to learning, a coherent two-year, all-required curriculum not based on disciplines but on issues--two years so that students could still benefit from the more professionally directed courses of the university.