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BOOK EXCERPT
�Declining by Degrees�
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From �THE CURRICULUM AND COLLEGE LIFE: CONFRONTING UNFULFILLED PROMISES�
by Leon Botstein
Campus life, even at the most selective and prestigious institutions, reveals a Jekyll and Hyde�like dichotomy. We encourage idealism, ambition, seriousness of purpose, and hard work in our students in the classroom. Yet the demands on students to do well, however time-consuming, leave more than ample downtime, hours if not days in which nothing is required�no labs, lectures, or deadlines�even for the most ambitious and talented.
The problem could reasonably be identified as one of thwarted expectations. The underlying and optimistic belief behind the effort to make access to higher education as universal as possible is a traditional conviction that there must be a causal link between education and human progress. The notion of progress can be defined in various ways, in terms of civility, understanding, tolerance, ethics, aesthetic judgment, or citizen participation. One of the sharp ironies of contemporary life is that although more Americans are completing more years of formal schooling than ever before, including time in college, we find ourselves confronted, it seems, with an absence of progress in these arenas. One needs only to cite the declining quality of public political debate, lapses in integrity and standards in professional and business practices, public entertainment (e.g., reality television), precollege school achievement, and what the eighteenth century called civic virtue.
Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College since 1975, where he is the Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities. President Botstein�s writings about education have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Harper�s Magazine, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. He is the author of Jefferson�s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture.
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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