Review & Reaction: Excellence Without a Soul (Harry Lewis)

I was assigned this book for a course entitled "Critical Thinking of University Leaders" and it has been by far the best book I've read this semester. The course, in it's entirety, revolves around why universities still need liberal education and how leaders of universities are working either for or against that ideal. We have read other works such as Nussbaum's "Cultivating Humanity", Newman's "The Idea of the University", Kerr's "The Uses of the University" and Allen Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind. Excellence revolves around why the professoriate is failing to educate its students for the challenges of tomorrow.

Lewis defines liberal education as "a period in which young people can be freed from the presumptions and prejudices with which they were raised, freed by the power of ideas to pursue their own path in life" (p.10). Personally, my undergraduate experience provided none of these things but my graduate education has. This revelation led me to consider the reasons why this might be so and I have come to the conclusion that graduate school focused much more on discourse and less on factual knowledge. The knowledge came from aggregating personal opinions, sources, and arguments from all sides rather than at the undergraduate level where the knowledge came from the most high authority: the professor (or in most cases the graduate teaching assistant).

There has been a shift in my thinking from one "right" way to the viewpoint of possibilities. Students who don't receive this opportunity are missing out on a wonderful chance to explore themselves.

For those of us in the academic advising field, I found the following quote to be particularly thought-provoking: "Students tend to have broad interests, and if their minds are already made up about what to study, their decisions should be challenged, not accepted at face value" (p.95). I find myself guilty of this on a regular basis. A student walks into my office and says that they want to pursue Business Administration and I immediately start in on the core requirements without ever really questioning how they got to this realization.