Life, Liberty, and an Above-A verage Grade
I provocative
In 1975 the college class of 1984 is already pursuing happiness through the wilder reaches of our junior highs. The Bicentennial Year also falls midwav between the time when Sputnik, quickly followed by chemical education, went into orbit and the day when, presuming I last so long, I shall he put out to pedagogic pasture. In short, intimations of mortalitv and that h a ~ p vlahoratorv-in-the-skv begin to crowd in. i)uring this t i ~ c o l l e g echkmistry has undergone two traumatic changes: one in the particular chemistry to be taught to the student, the other in the student's attitude to working at anything intellectual including, in particular, chemistry. Like the curate's egg, both changes are good in part. The first of these traumas is the more easily described. Under the post-Sputnik backlash the content of chemistry courses was dramatically changed. This was good since much useless lumber had accumulated and prudence dictates that lone established oractice should not be changed for light and transient causes. However, the ensuing rapid escalation of the intellectual level of underaraduate chemistry courses soon reached the point where students and even teaching assistants were frequently out of touch with reality. Unknown facts were being explained in terms of inscrutable theory and varying degrees of incomprehension resulted. Indeed the guns were soon elevated so high that manv students were onlv mildly intimidated hv the lofty messages passing overhead. Y e t strangely, ten ;ears late;, this aeneration of students appears creatures of a golden age, even though a t the time ~>ofessorialgrumhlinG were a t close to normal levels. Today the guns have been lowered on almost all fronts though there remain a few privileged institutions and courses where students are selected with assiduity normally reserved for athletes and where the old standards survive. In spite of the lowering of the guns a fair fraction of today's students are not merely not intimidated, they are, in their single-minded pursuit of the holy grade, almost unaware they are being fired upon. The more successful of the current textbooks are either riddled with relevance or are intellectually untaxing. Often they are both. I t is true they have regained the common touch, but a t what cost? Is not the university supposed to encourage the uncommon? The second and.more recent of these traumas has been the changes in student attitude. Keats once cried: "0 for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts" and though they may never encounter Keats in an era which hoasts courses in the Poetry of Bob Dylan (as opposed to the mere verse of Rod McKuen?) many of today's students, in science as well as in the humanities, would agree with him. Their inchoate thoughts and feelings about a subject are more important to them than is their knowledge of that subject. Professors of English can be heard encouraging students to "invent your own vocahulary" and the chemist begins to feel like King Canute faced with a rising tide of incoherence. The feet grow damp and the heart grows chill. As scientists we mav reeret this change in attitude but i t is real and we must learn to cope with it. There are two ways of doing this. One is to attempt to meet the students on their terms and risk making a middle-aged fool of yourself. The other is t o coerce and charm the students into meeting you on yours. Can this he done?
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782 / Journal of Chemical Education
In early post-Sputnik years "rigour" was, as we have seen, the magic word; of late this has changed to "relevance." One almost envies Thomas Cooper, who, in opening his 1812 lectures in chemistry a t Carlisle (later Dickinson) College, could firmly assert Knowledge is threefold: Physical, Moral and Religious. Physical is that which explains the laws, etc., of matter. Moral explains the laws which rule men as sociable and gregarious beings. Religious teaches man his duty to God. We shall treat only of the first. Our sociahle and gregarious students would scarcely vote such a man a distineuished teacher. For students in the humanities a case can be made (though not a totally compelling one) for strongly relevant courses but there is a sad tendency for these to descend t o the Sunday supplemental level. Fortunately hiology is more prone t o self-dilution than is chemistry hut the dangers are real even for us. Emotionally air pollution is an attractive suhject and it is not hard to raise the flag against the evils of corrupting industries. Indeed, anything t h a t can give rise in conscience, let alone in law, to Gary, Indiana, does not show a decent respect t o the opinions of mankind. However, once stripped of its emotional wraooines .. " air oollution is revealed as an extremely complex subject, particularly to freshmen who can't tell an acid from first base. Relevance for seniors with a strong professional grounding in science or engineering is not merelv desirable. it is essential. But for freshmen and others, thk ABC's of'chemistry presented with flair a t the appropriate level seem more in order. After all an age which will buy several million long-playing albums of monosvllahic sinaers bemoaning the ills of this commercial age H i more in need-of ideas than of ideologies. and A not entirelv facetious definition of a college education might he: "preparation for a life-time of hull-sessions." Colleges will not achieve this end by offering hull-sessions for credit. Further difficulties arise with the alarming inflation in grades which has taken place. One would think that everyone is now entitled to life, liberty, and an above-average grade. At Yale, Honor or A-level grades rose from 21% of the total in 1968 to 35% in 1973. At the University of Wisconsin the average grade index went up hy ahout half a unit in one year-and a rather trouhled year a t that. Recently a t Purdue I attended a reception for 5,500 superior students. Yes, 5,500! Superior to what one wonders? This inflation of grades seems to be steeper in the humanities than in the sciences but a t both undergraduate and graduate levels the grade averages of chemistry students march ever upwards. In Alice's Caucus-race, participants started and stopped when they liked and ran a t their own sweet pace (just like the Keller Plan) and as the Dodo said: ''Everybody has won, and all must have prizes." Is the challenge, the goad even, of failure to follow the Dodo into extinction? A recent Op Ed article in the New York Times had the delightful This article is adapted from an address given by the author at the spring 1974 meeting of the Manufacturing Chemists' Associstinn. Dr. Davenport was the recipient of one of the 1974 MCA Awards for excellence in chemistry teaching.
title: "If At First You Don't Succeed, Quit." Now that a student can drop a course on Christmas Eve without penalty and try, try, try it again forever after we may have reached the ultimate in academic refluxing: an educational column with a vanishing number of theoretical plates. I t has been said that the emphasis on "popular education with its assumption that many important things can be widely taught has distracted attention from the truth that not all such ideas can he easily understood." I do not advocate merely an elitist education for I believe that the Land Grant College has been America's greatest contribution to higher education. But I do object to the idea that college courses should be adult Sesame Streets, with the professor no doubt as Big Bird. A dean a t a distinguished west coast university is recently reported as having hired a T V gagwriter to supply jokes for "typically inept professors" to use in their lectures. No school with such a dean is without its share of the comic. Who says that learning chemistry should be fun? Or even particularly pleasant? The word "discipline"-in its several s e n s e e i s not a common one in the current pedagogic lexicon. I t is well to remember that "no one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no i n t e r e s t f o r i t is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude." Our job as teachers is only incidentally t o excite and to entertain. Our main purpose
surely is to instruct a t a level which the student finds reachable, palatahle, and hopefully, in later years, useful. Teaching is certainly an embattled profession (and there are days when one is tempted to redefine Avogadro's Number as 6 X loz2and relax and enioy it), hut i t is not vet a doomed one. As teachers we are subject to overt and rovtrt pressures from legislators, administ rawrs, some colleaeues. and many students to compromise with the univer&ty's quest for competence a t worst and excellence a t best. We are still very far from the 1984 world of Big Brother hut one of Orwell's first signs of trouble was the corruption of language. Words-"grades," "pre-requisites," "honors," "requirements," "failure rate3'-change their meanings to suit the occasion, euphemisms abound, and the model is increasingly that of Humpty Dumpty who said: "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less." ~ e c e npuhlic t events should have reminded us that those who deliberately misuse words are quite capable of misusing almost anything. In such times silence is no longer golden. Silence is acquiescence. Silence auementeth
Derek Davenport Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana 47907
Volume 52, Number 12, December 1975 / 783
