Greatness Visible
The University of Texas has more going for it today than ever before: unregulated tuition, unfettered diversity, smart students, winning sports teams, first-class cultural facilities, academic programs with buzz, and finally, an administration with realistic goals. So why isn't it living up to its potential? Good question.
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The main reason it doesn't is lack of money. The state's contribution to the UT budget, which used to be as high as 49 percent in the mid-eighties, has slipped to 20 percent (the rest comes from tuition, fees, research grants, and donations), and the effect shows up in the rankings. In the category of Financial Resources—how much the university spends per student—UT ties for 127th place with such luminaries as the state universities of New Hampshire and Nebraska, and it is hardly better in Faculty Resources (salaries, benefits, student-faculty ratio, and class size) at 115th. Both UT and Texas A&M get clobbered in Class Size. UT ranks seventh from the bottom in the percent of non-lab classes with more than fifty students (24 percent), and A&M is dead last (33 percent). The competition? Virginia is at 15 percent, Michigan at 16, Berkeley at 17. The trouble with large classes—and at UT, they can be very large in introductory courses, with as many as five hundred students—is that they are typically taught in a lecture format with machine-graded exams. They test students' ability to memorize, not their ability to think or write, the way essay tests and research papers do. Let's not be innocents about this: A lot of students are all too happy with minimal demands. But the U.S. News rankings correctly penalize schools that limit opportunities for students to learn how to think.
The other major ranking of universities is virtually unknown by the public. Called Research Doctorate Programs in the U.S., it is compiled once a decade by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies, whose members are the top researchers in science, engineering, and medicine. The main difference between the two rankings, aside from frequency of appearance, is that U.S. News is primarily concerned with undergraduate education and the overall reputation of a university, while the National Research Council is mainly concerned with graduate-level research and the reputation of a university in 41 individual fields of learning. Because the graduate level is where reputations count the most in winning federal grants and wooing top graduate students and faculty, the National Research Council rankings are the bible of academia. The rankings are heavily dependent upon surveys and questionnaires and thus are largely subjective. High rankings beget an elite reputation, which perpetuates itself in more high rankings. This is the cycle that UT is trying to break—and it isn't succeeding. In the 1995 ratings, the only one of its programs to make the top ten was classics (eighth). Linguistics and Spanish, two of the areas Robert King had wanted to emphasize so that UT could build on its strengths, had slipped to eleventh and twelfth, respectively. History and English were twenty-first.
The problem for UT, as King had tried to explain to the centennial committee, is that the schools ahead of it aren't going away. It's not like football, in which the quarterback can get hurt or the coach can retire or Notre Dame can lose a couple of close ones and fall out of the top ten. In academia, Harvard and Stanford and Princeton never get upset.
At least the UT leadership is now willing to say publicly that UT can't be Harvard and shouldn't try. "There's a reason only one third of the top fifty schools in the U.S. News rankings are public," says Mark Yudof, the chancellor of the UT System, which includes nine academic institutions and six medical schools. "We can never do what the privates do. We can't admit only those with 1400 SAT scores and teach everybody with real professors. We can't emulate the atmosphere of the privates either, where most of the students live on campus. We'll never have the academic profile of a Harvard or a Princeton. But we can get to the same level as a Michigan, a Virginia, or a North Carolina." Unfortunately, the rankings show that UT is going in the wrong direction.
IN LATE JUNE I WENT back to school. Don Graham, a writer-at-large for this magazine, is a faculty member in the English department at UT, and when he heard that I was working on this story, he invited me to his class. This summer he was teaching English 316K, Masterworks of Literature, a sophomore course required of all UT students. Graham covers American literature; other options are British and world lit. For non-English majors, this course is likely to be their first and only exposure to great books and the ideas in them—unless, of course, they took a standardized test and earned credit for the course without ever interacting with a professor. I am old-fashioned enough to think that this is a terrible state of affairs, that a standardized test is no substitute for reading a great book and hearing a professor talk about it, but that's the way of the world in higher education these days. The hour and fifteen minutes I would spend in Graham's class would reinforce my opinion. This isn't UT's fault alone. Great books by DWMs (dead white males) are out of favor in the academy these days, and so are required courses; the trend is toward specialization in one's major, particularly in career-track areas like business, science, and engineering.
The DWM of the day was Walt Whitman, a mid-nineteenth century poet who brought back memories of why I don't read poetry: Somebody has to tell me why it is good before I can understand it. Graham told us. Before going through Whitman's masterpiece, a lengthy poem called Song of Myself, he put Whitman in context: a New Yorker, growing up free of the Puritan legacy, at the time when New York was displacing Boston as the nation's leading commercial and cultural center. Suddenly lines from the poem made sense; Whitman was flinging challenges in the face of Puritanism:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them.
But Song of Myself is not anti-religion. It is anti-elitist. It represents, Graham told the class, Whitman's mystical experience—a sudden influx of knowledge, an insight into the ultimate nature of reality. The hegemony of New York over Boston was not just a defeat of Puritanism but part of a much larger event, the triumph of the individual. "Whitman today is regarded as the American poet around the world," Graham said. He is the voice of democracy and egalitarianism:
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.
The class of 37 students listened and took notes, but they didn't ask many questions. "Whitman is a hard sell," Graham told me after class. But he had been a good salesman. After noting that Whitman was the first poet to break free of rhyming, he had cited Robert Frost's dictum that writing in blank verse is "like playing tennis with the net down." And in our jaded, take-things-for-granted world, he helped the students—and me—feel the power of the idea of democracy, and all that it meant, in a totally fresh way.
Classes like Graham's are what a college education is all about. Unfortunately, his summer class is not the norm for Masterworks of Literature; instead of 37 students in an intimate classroom, the typical class is 250 students in a large lecture hall. John Trimble, who has been teaching the course since he arrived at UT 33 years ago, recalls that the typical class size was 30 students until 5 or 6 years ago—small enough for daily discussions led by a professor. Now, once a week, the big classes break up into smaller discussion groups led by graduate students. Trimble, who is a member of UT's Academy of Distinguished Teachers, loved teaching the course in the old days. "Students came into the class anticipating it would be boring and tough," he says. "They had had bad experiences with English in high school. They thought they wouldn't enjoy the reading, and they didn't like subjective grading. If the university didn't require it, ninety-five percent wouldn't take it. My challenge was to convert them to the idea that reading literature can be enormously fun and challenging in a good way."
Trimble taught a large section of Masterworks of Literature once and says it was the toughest experience of his career at UT, physically and emotionally draining. "My temperament wasn't right for that kind of venue," he says. "You need a professor who has a bit of ham in him. It favors people who are oratorical, witty, and who like to talk for an hour and a half. Small-classroom teachers are more interested in moderating a discussion. They don't see themselves as performers."
Nor could he design the course the way he wanted to—as a writing course. In small classes, he can assign three papers, critique them, and return them without a grade for students to rewrite. In big classes, the number of bodies in the classroom makes that approach impossible. Most professors don't even try to include writing in big sections of Masterworks, but Trimble did require that students keep a journal of two or more pages on every major selection they read: lists of new words, three great sentences, a page or two of commentary. Because of the class size, however, he could not grade the journals himself; that chore fell to seven teaching assistants, who also led the weekly discussion sections. "I had minimal quality control," Trimble laments. "I was relying on people who were strangers to me and to each other until the course started."
My Library
