THE BEST OF ONE’S KNOWLEDGE

I have not had the opportunity to read “Education Without Compromise,” but I think that from the perspective of my past service as an alumni Regent of the University of California I can fairly comment on the principal point made by your Prof. Cooperstein.

Prof. Cooperstein is right in the abstract, but dead wrong in reality. If he denies that the curriculum has become chaotic, lacking both coherence and meaning, he needs to come down from his ivory tower.

For several decades, students have been urged to design their own programs, any way they liked, and the result has been far too many incompletely educated, inadequately informed and sometimes incompetent graduates. It is well and good to talk about the necessity of debate in the academic setting, but debate without the facts necessary to take informed positions and to perform an informed analysis is nothing but noise. . . .

I have never understood how the academic establishment could concede to 18- and 19-year-olds the power to choose all of their courses when it is manifest that the knowledge and experience necessary to make those choices resides in the professoriate and not in the student body. Let us therefore make sure that the standard program for the first few years of a university education is broad enough to encompass many views, and let us make absolutely certain that each student is required to comprehend this foundation, not merely to accept it and to parrot it back. We can and should argue about the contents of a basic curriculum, but we must give every student a solid one- or two-year basic education, not to be accepted as gospel but as a point of departure, and then let the debate begin.

If that is the point of Vice Chancellor Schaefer’s book, then it is a very valuable one indeed.

JAMES TOLEDANO, IRVINE