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March 16, 2009

Dear Colleague:  

   Somerville, the last women's college at Oxford, finally surrendered to the times and became co-educational. Are there any all-women colleges left in the UK and USA? For that matter, all-men colleges and universities? In the States, even the Citadel collapsed under the assault of political righteousness. Historically black universities remain, however, largely black, and they want to keep it that way.

   The argument for same sex or same ethnicity institutions is that students do better academically. They do better because they can concentrate on academic achievement without worrying about dating, courtship, and sexual harassment that are the bane of co-educational campuses, or the racial slurs that must be endured and the ethnic pride that must be maintained on multi-ethnic campuses.

   The best European and North American schools used to require the wearing of uniform. The best British universities did not so require, but they did—in my time—require the academic gown, which was a sort of uniform. Why this insistence of uniformity? Why make young scholars look alike, as though they are soldiers? Soldiers are deliberately made to wear the uniform—to conform; they are not supposed to be individuals able to think for themselves and do their own thing. Soldiers are not therefore a good analogy for students. Members of a religious order—monks and nuns—are better. They also wear a uniform. Outwardly they too all look alike, but with this important difference: their religion explicitly teaches that each member of the order is an individual, uniquely beloved of God. Why, then, the uniform—the drab robe? Answer: so that the monks and nuns can forget their social and cultural differences and concentrate all their will and intelligence on God.

   Now, historically, schools and universities have a religious foundation: they were outposts of monasteries and convents. Boys were dressed alike, as were girls, in imitation of monks and nuns. The rationale was this: once the children entered the gate of their school, they were to forget the status of their parents, whether they lived in a mansion or in a cottage. None of these social and cultural differences mattered. What did matter was their intelligence, which was to be placed in the service of Truth.

   American public schools have, from the start, distanced themselves from religious institutions. From the start, their purpose was and is to teach citizenship in an immigrant, multi-ethnic society. How to get along with one another, rather than God or Truth, was and is the primary goal. A novelty of recent decades is that this public school ideal has moved up to public universities. In public universities, too, more and more emphasis is put on creating diversity and a multi-cultural environment so that students, upon graduation, can cope with the turbulent world. Given the time and energy devoted to developing social skills on campus, it is hardly to be wondered that students have little time and energy left for calculus and other purely intellectual pursuits. In this respect, we humans are moving closer to our cousins the apes and chimpanzees. They show amazing powers of abstract thought in the artificial environment of the lab, but not in the complex environment that is their natural habitat, where their brain power is totally consumed in two basic activities: the social skills of getting along and the technical skills of finding food.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu