Parachutists, truffle-hunters and the college

Long ago, the great historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie observed that all historians are either parachutists or truffle-hunters. The former hang far above the landscape of the past, looking for general patterns; the latter sink their snouts in the tiniest details preserved in archival documents. Each has a vital perspective and can often correct the other.

Earlier this year, Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel announced that she would step down from her post at the end of the academic year. The University is searching for a new dean of the college. And I have found myself wondering less about who will take on this demanding and important job than about the structure of the University — especially that of the college. More particularly, I have found myself wondering about parachutists and truffle-hunters.

Princeton, as its website tells us, “is distinctive among research universities in its commitment to undergraduate teaching.” Certainly Princeton devotes massive resources to that enterprise. The Freshman Seminar and Writing programs, the Integrated Science curriculum and the Humanities Sequence, and the hundreds of junior papers and senior theses written at Princeton every year reveal to anyone who knows how universities work that vast amounts of faculty time are invested in teaching undergraduates at every level, and in every forum from large courses to one-on-one tutorials.

The store is rich, in other words, its shelves richly stocked with goods. The problem is that no one is minding it. In theory, the college is Princeton’s central jewel, and accordingly the faculty as a whole retains authority over the curriculum. In practice, Princeton’s intellectual life is as uncoordinated as its course offerings are rich. Faculty members’ visions of how they coordinate with one another are increasingly limited, and the curriculum itself is a mass of courses stuffed, not always appropriately, into boxes that each student must check. Back in the 1970s, when new courses and programs popped into existence, faculty debates were often detailed and sustained. A community of scholars whose members knew one another and the University, and who still felt a communal responsibility for its quality, could adopt, when necessary, the perspective of parachutists, and look at the college as a whole.

Nowadays, however, the faculty has more than 1,100 members — more than Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It would be far too large and unwieldy to administer the curriculum, even if faculty meetings were intended to promote collective deliberation and decision-making (and even if gaining consensus among faculty had less in common with gaining consensus among a group of cats). The faculty itself has also changed. Over time, science and scholarship have become increasingly specialized. Eminence in research depends on exploring the new fields that are continually opening up in every discipline. As Princeton competes to stay at the top of the world league of research universities, we regularly and necessarily recruit large numbers of new faculty and regularly and sadly lose colleagues to our rivals. The moderately stable faculty community of earlier times no longer exists.

There are of course, committees — many, many committees — that deal with central aspects of the undergraduate intellectual experience, from admissions and the curriculum to discipline. Their members work very hard. But service on these usually does not promote — and in some cases does not allow — serious consideration of general issues. The press of week-to-week business is, as always at Princeton, very heavy. As faculty and students argue through case after case, they have neither the time nor the opportunity to reflect in a more general way on what we are all doing. In short, we still have some truffle-hunters , but few or no parachutists, outside the administration.

Administrators, however talented, cannot build or rebuild a curriculum from the top down. And no group of faculty is tasked with doing the job. Should we keep up the requirement of a senior thesis for arts and sciences students? Is it still working well? Are our systems of course evaluation yielding useful results? I don’t know — and neither does the faculty as a whole, since no competent group has the time and resources to mount an inquiry.

Princeton is not the only university that cares deeply about undergraduate teaching. Any number of our sister institutions, all of which have evolved as we have over recent decades, have found creative ways to meet some or all of these problems. Mark William Roche GS ’84, a Princeton Ph.D. in German who was until recently dean of Notre Dame’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has described several experiments tried there in his recent book, “Why Choose the Liberal Arts?” My own alma mater, the University of Chicago, has a College Council, its members half elected and half appointed. For good or ill, that body has supervised a substantial revision of Chicago’s undergraduate curriculum — an enterprise that seems, for Princeton, almost unimaginable.

Until Princeton begins to think and work along these lines, we will be stuck counting our truffles. The college as a whole will remain lost from our collective sight. That’s not what our website seems to promise.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.