Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In an interview, she describes how she almost left academia because of her dislike of the entire ethos that existed there. The last paragraph is telling.

I teach at a university where the preponderance of our undergraduates go into finance, consulting, and tech jobs that they are recruited for almost the moment that they arrive in Cambridge, and whose time, instead of being devoted to academics, is devoted to securing positions in those industries. The pleasing of their parents, and the pleasing of those students, is the economic engine of the college and therefore of the university, in a way that I do not think is consistent with what a university is for. There are universities now that are creating centers for open inquiry. What is a university if not a center for open inquiry? Why would we need such a center? That anyone suggests such a center should raise a lot of eyebrows.

One can understand that given the high cost of a college education in the US, students (and their parents) worry about getting a job after they graduate that will enable them to get out of debt. But many of the students who go to elite universities like Harvard already come from wealthy families who do not have that worry. For them, they see an elite college education as merely a ticket to rise even higher up the socio-economic ladder.

I am reading at the moment Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. In it he says that back in the days of the ancient Greek philosophers, many of them were itinerant teachers and students would pay them directly for their teaching, though some philosophers would teach for free. Since there were no grades and credentials awarded, the motivation for the students must have been simply the desire to learn from those they considered wise and knowledgeable.

I must say that it made me wistful to think that in the modern age, we may not be able to recover that attitude in academia. We seem to have gone too far down the road into making universities into one more branch of the corporate, capitalist world. Of course, the world where people are willing to pay simply to learn still exists but is outside universities. People are willing to pay for classes and courses to get knowledge and learn skills for which no grades are awarded, simple because of the desire to know or to be able to do things.

In my own teaching career, I often encountered faculty members who had become cynical about students, seeing them as only interested in grades. I did not share that attitude. I always went into my classes assuming that students were there because they wanted to learn and taught accordingly, with as few requirements as I could get away with, consistent with the overall policies of the university. Although I am sure that some students came into my courses merely seeking a grade, I refused to further feed that mindset and I hope I was able to change a few attitudes.