There’s A Way Out For American Higher Education

American colleges and universities are still in crisis. The Oxbridge tutorial model is part of the solution.

The humanities at America’s universities have long been in dire straits, assailed by both external cultural and economic forces along with internal bureaucratic failures. At smaller schools, programs are being cut and departments rolled together. Classes at elite institutions suffer from a lack of academic rigor, with students reading less now than ever before. Artificial intelligence threatens to undermine long-standing teaching structures like essays and exams.

Failing humanities programs aren’t just a problem for the students who pay six figures to study at top colleges. Familiarity with our national past and a common ability to reason—skills that a humanities education ought to teach—are essential for the preservation of self-governance. Even while most Americans are not directly affected by the ways the humanities are taught at our universities, the methods and ideas taught in the academe inform our national political imagination. We risk more than tuition fees when we turn a blind eye to the collapse of the liberal arts.

Amid this crisis, however, reformers of higher education have a chance to profoundly affect the way we teach the humanities today. Unlike STEM and technical educations, the threats that the humanities face are often ones that university administrations can deal with, even if they have not been willing to do so before. A nationwide shortage of engineers is a problem best solved at the national level, but a lack of deep literacy in English departments can and should be addressed by universities.

Many on the Right, including some at institutions like the Heritage Foundation or American Enterprise Institute, focus mostly on requiring quotas for “ideological diversity” or punishing universities that don’t provide an adequate “return on investment.” But neither of these address the deeper purpose of a humanities education, nor ensures that our universities teach students to think critically in the long term. Instead, higher-education reformers who want free inquiry and academic rigor in the humanities ought to look toward another, much older model of university education: the Oxbridge tutorial model.

For centuries, Oxford, Cambridge, and other ancient universities have prioritized debate through small group discussions, guided by professors or graduate students and based on a weekly assignment of reading and writing. Students are expected to know the week’s material well enough to defend their positions about the texts in class discussions, even against their professors. The effect is a competitive atmosphere that compels students to actually learn in order to participate in their education. As a humanities student at a school with a long-standing tutorial system, I can attest to the ways in which the system incentivizes critical thinking and deep engagement with the canon.

A Viable Foundation

It was this system, or something like it, that taught the greatest minds of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and many of our Founding Fathers. As universities gained more students in the early modern period, the medieval tutorial model was steadily replaced by the lecture we associate with higher education today. It was through lectures and formal class debates that America’s oldest universities taught the seven liberal arts, rather than small-group discussions. The Victorians, inspired by the ancient Platonic academy, revived the tutorial in Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century.

With characteristic pragmatism, American university administrators instead leaned into the German polytechnic model of teaching with lectures and exams rather than discussion. This model was better suited to a rapidly growing population and a more democratic ethos, able to instruct a large number of students in scientific and technical matters in one large hall. It was less suited to teaching the humanities, dependent as they are on careful reading and discussion.

There have been periodic calls to introduce American humanities to the tutorial model, which were stalled by a number of objections. On the Left, progressive commentators have raised concerns about fairness and minority representation, arguing that the open nature of the tutorial marginalizes students who don’t have the confidence to participate in group discussions in a space where they might not feel included. The anonymity of the lecture hall, by contrast, somehow ensures that minority students can learn on equal footing with their peers, as these proponents claim. A more conservative critique holds that this teaching style teaches “blagging”, an Oxbridge term for artfully concealing one’s ignorance, rather than genuine knowledge. In this view, good blaggers are rewarded in tutorials rather than honest participants, in contrast to the supposed meritocracy of lecture-hall education.

Such concerns miss the benefits of the tutorial system, both for minority students and more broadly. As a history and philosophy student at the University of St. Andrews, a school with a strong tutorial system, I find that the most active students in a group discussion are those that are best prepared, regardless of tutorial demographics or blagging skill. When I’ve done the readings, I feel confident enough to make an argument where I would otherwise stay quiet. My peers of different backgrounds are often better prepared for topics I wouldn’t otherwise be confident in, such that different people end up driving the discussion each week.

The small tutorial size actually brings minority voices to the front, both in terms of demographic minorities and intellectual ones like college conservatives. In a surprising number of cases, these voices agree. Tutorials offer a place for free dialogue with a largely random group of peers. College students today, especially in the humanities, report frequent self-censorship for fear of the wrath of their peers. But there is much less of a risk of chastisement or cancellation in a room of eight people than there is in a lecture hall of eighty, especially if you’ve come to know those eight people over a semester.

Students are also more likely to critically examine what their professors say in a small group. In my first year, one of my tutors in an ethics class self-identified as a utilitarian and an effective altruist. I am not a utilitarian. But over a semester in a small group, my peers and I had the chance to engage with his line of argument and articulate our own convictions in response to his. Had he been only a lecturer, we might have taken utilitarianism to be part of the dogma of the philosophy department, and resolved to think like he did in order to pass the final exam.

Not Oxbridge Prices

Depth is the tutorial’s other great strength. For a long time, American academics have been complaining about how little they can expect students to read. Harvard history professor Jim Hankins writes that he once assigned students 300 pages of reading a week, where 75 pages are “an unmanageable burden” today. Academics have responded by offering shorter and easier readings and assignments, prioritizing modern material over the traditional reading list, and relying more heavily on lectures. Fewer, easier readings don’t promote deep literacy or critical thinking. Instead, they cheapen the academic experience for a generation that is paying more for college than ever before.

Part of the reason for this decline in academic standards is a deeper crisis of literacy in America, but it is also a problem of university culture. Reliance on lectures and exams, together with less rigorous classes, removes an incentive to engage with the material through reading. One way of rebuilding those incentives is by providing students with ways of using that reading beyond essays and exams, such as in group discussion. With tutorials, I feel a pressure to read in order to participate in a way that I don’t for lectures. My peers feel the same way—St Andrews still assigns the hundreds of pages of reading per week that Hankins laments losing. I can’t say I read all of them, all of the time, but I know my full participation is dependent on my familiarity with those pages.

The high volume of reading that the tutorial promotes also means that students and professors are less likely to be caught up by academic fads. There probably aren’t enough sources, primary or secondary, on “Queering Ancient Egypt” for a single tutorial, much less an entire class. Students interested in that material might instead take a broader class on the ancient eastern Mediterranean, reading accounts from Herodotus and twentieth-century archaeologists. The depth of tutorial reading means that it tends toward the traditional, time-tested canon of texts written about a subject, such that students learn to evaluate modern trends in scholarship by the history of their discipline.

The biggest practical objection to the tutorial is its cost relative to models in which teaching is done only by lecture. Oxford and Cambridge, with endowments of roughly $9 and $6 billion respectively, can afford extremely small tutorial groups. And so can the Ivy League schools, worth $23 billion on average. But what about regional schools like East Tennessee State University? Or even private liberal arts colleges like Drake University in Iowa that exist without state funding?

In fact, smaller American universities are arguably better poised to put tutorial systems in place than most British schools. On average, the humanities in America are better funded than in Britain. We offer around three times the number of courses to undergraduates relative to most British universities, and we maintain similar average teaching staff to student ratios as Oxford.

Even regional American schools like East Tennessee State often have about the same per-student endowments as St Andrews and other UK tutorial universities outside of Oxbridge. As Princeton professor Gregory Conti points out, much of these endowments have been spent on unproductive higher administration in recent years. But provided these and other structural concerns be addressed there is no reason why small-group teaching couldn’t be introduced to both public and private universities across the country.

Teaching the humanities well and widely are not incompatible goals. In fact, Americans were once renowned for it. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut,” Alexis De Tocqueville wrote in 1832, “which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Tocqueville’s surprise reflects the novelty of finding learning among the common man, outside of the aristocratic structure of knowledge he knew in Europe. It was part of the Founders’ hopes that the virtuous republic could sustain itself on broad literacy. Since their time, however, our attempts to ensure democratic university education have often placed veneers over elite institutions rather than meaningfully reforming them. Today we’re left with the detritus of these efforts: a nineteenth century German lecture-hall system, high administrative costs, and humanities courses devoid of substance and depth.

Tocqueville’s Shakespeare-reading frontiersman need not be a historical anomaly. The cultural fluency and deep thinking that the humanities are supposed to deliver are more likely to be found in small groups at St John’s College in Maryland or Williams College in Massachusetts than in Ivy League lectures. In true American fashion, it’s small, heterodox institutions like these on the outside of public life that are most capable of fostering the studia humanitatis. Restoring the university to free inquiry and intellectual depth begins with making these models mainstream.