The Point of Undergraduate Education

Bibliography Formation

I said in my interview with Leon O'Flynn that the point of undergraduate education is learning to form a bibliography. I’d like to say more about that claim.

Specifically, let me address four points. First, it’s clear that society has changed since 2004, when I graduated from Harding University, and having become an undergraduate educator since then, I can assure you that the university has changed too. Second, I work in a particular segment of education, namely, the humanities, so what does bibliography have to do with the rest of the curriculum? Third, as I’ve returned to teaching undergraduates this month, I’m reminded of the many other serious components of their education that require attention and make me wonder how much my generalization is worth. Fourth, despite these caveats, my opinion remains the same.

Some Things Never Change

Society has changed. More specifically, freshmen have changed, which means the baseline has changed. This has ripple effects for the whole four-year education process.

I don’t need to argue that the American primary education system is failing to assert that the level of difficulty freshmen these days can handle, on average, is lower than it once was. What do I mean? The amount of reading that students can manage—or will deign to do—is lower. The ability to read and think critically, organize thought, and communicate with standardized English is weaker. The expectation that effort (“I tried hard”) merits more than performance is higher. The sense of entitlement to good grades is far stronger. I’m speaking in averages. Averages tell us a lot.

Yes, society has changed, but some things never do.

One of those immutable things is what a well-educated university graduate is capable of. The university is not a vocational school. It is not a technical school. It is where students enroll to learn how to think about diverse dimensions of reality, determined by the universitas (community of scholars) one enters. So the well-educated university graduate is capable of thinking about many dimensions of life represented by the university curriculum. Breadth is a key characteristic of the qualifier well-educated.

This does not mean the university produces encyclopedic minds. Regurgitation is not the objective—not least because one learns at university that the relevant bodies of knowledge are constantly changing and expanding. One cannot graduate with enough factoids to justify the title ‘educated,’ much less with comprehensive knowledge of even one’s major field of study. The ultimate standard of education in the university is not what you know but how you think.

The starting point may have changed, but the goal has not.

Liberal Arts Education Is Still the Gold Standard

The ability to form a bibliography pertains especially to the humanities dimensions of university education. The ability to run an experiment, prove a mathematical theorem, build a piece of technology, create a piece of art, or examine a feature of society have their own standards of excellence.

Still, all of these areas of expertise belong to the university’s overarching ambition to create well-rounded humans and well-formed members of society. The humanities have a special place in this economy of formation because every field of study depends on a view of human being, an ability to communicate, and a sense of meaning.

The upshot is that university students are challenged to learn to think more broadly than their field of specialization requires.

The Exceptions Prove the Rule

Many aspects of the learning process are vital for students. Reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing come quickly to mind. I’m not claiming that forming a bibliography is the only thing that matters. Liberal arts education already entails a far broader set of capacities (even if I would personally—for reasons of extreme deficiency—like to do without mathematics). Obviously. So why the generalization?

The reason is simple. After all the educational dust settles, the most urgent issue is whether graduates are able to handle the onslaught of information—disciplinary or otherwise—they will confront in the world. Reading comprehension depends on a prior decision about what is worth reading, critical thinking at best engages ideas deemed important (or at least sorting the wheat from the chaff), and writing worth its salt engages responsibly with sources that merit attention.¹

Every art or science is a part of the whole of human life. Every discipline exists in relation to human society. The need to connect our particular works to the rest of human being is serious. Every area of study ultimately proves this rule.

Bibliographic Formation Is the Point

For all these reasons, I conclude that the formation of bibliography is the point of undergraduate education. True specialization comes later, if at all. At the elemental level of undergraduate education, the key question is whether students are learning how to decide what kinds of information sources deserve attention.

In other words, undergraduate education is fundamentally epistemic (having to do with how we know what we know). Students should learn how to determine what determines what they know. Regardless of one’s major, the ultimate question for university education is what counts as good information. Graduates who cannot tell the difference between good and bad information represent the failure of the university.

Epistemic formation happens in a few key ways, all of them involving modeling: exposure, critique, and assessment. Exposure refers to the selection of texts for syllabuses, which models discretion. Critique refers to the processing of sources, which models discernment. Assessment refers to feedback on coursework, which models dialogue about discretion and discernment.

The foundational building block of bibliographic formation is the way that professors expose students to reliable sources. Note that the importance of selected readings is not found in the information they convey (indeed, readings with conflicting perspectives are often read together). Importance is found, rather, in the student’s engagement with a particular kind of source, in multiple courses each semester, for multiple years. This persistent exposure builds familiarity with professors’ selectivity, implicitly conveying the discretion that comes from expertise. Graduates cast back into the real world should be able to smell the difference when they come across questionable sources.

The next layer of formation is the student’s guided engagement with selected readings. From this process, the student learns to assess legitimacy by attending to a variety of questions: What kind of work is this? What is it trying to do? How does it go about its purpose? What sources does it engage? Is it from a reputable publisher? Who is the author? How current is it? How does it compare to related sources?

Again, many of these questions are the consequence of cumulative engagement with a whole degree’s worth of readings. In some classes—particularly those that require research papers, book reviews, reading reflections, and so on—critical reading and source selection are part of the learning experience. But beyond focused critical reading, all use and discussion of selected readings in a course contributes to the student’s ability to discern the nature of high-quality sources of information.

Finally, professors form students through direct feedback on their exercise of discretion and discernment in the use of sources—again, particularly as they write their own arguments. Does the student’s work demonstrate an ability to identify legitimate dialogue partners? Does it engage these sources critically? These core assessment questions result in a dialogue between professor and student that should (ideally!) encourage greater attention to the largely implicit formation that syllabus writing and reading discussion have already produced. Some classes—perhaps too few—make this dialogue primary. In any case, liberal arts degrees should produce graduates who have experienced this kind of overt formation. The result is an ability to detect and deploy legitimate sources of information for the rest of students’ lives.

This is what I mean by bibliography formation: not a set list of acceptable sources but a capacity to select and assess sources wisely over and over. I can’t express strongly enough how important this capacity is. It always has been, but these days, with the unfathomable deluge of information we all face, I believe more than ever in the slow, intentional formation of discretion and discernment in as many society members as possible. To the extent that the university fails to produce this capacity, it should be reformed or abandoned for a better alternative.

1. True enough: there are no sources referenced in this piece of writing, and many such articles, well worth reading, exist in the world. Writing from experience can also be valuable and interesting. But don’t miss the point. More often than not, a worthwhile opinion engages with others. But whose opinions? An idea that merits consideration depends on others. But what ideas? Thinkers, including authors, are engaged in a community of discourse. But which community?