“A University is … an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.”—John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

“We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’”—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I  guess I  always knew that parenting was different than grandparenting, but it was a sign like this on my parents’ wall that made the difference come to life. You see, when I was growing up, our house looked nothing it looks today. We didn’t have cable TV, sugar cereal, or multiple deserts. We were not allowed to watch TV all day, so we occasionally went outside for something vaguely resembling exercise. And dinner consisted, usually, of some kind of meat and some kind of vegetable. Lots of vegetables. And we had to eat them.

These days, when I bring my own children to visit my parents, they go straight to the back bedroom to watch cable TV for the entire visit, to be interrupted only by occasional bowls of ice cream or platters of baked goods. You want gumdrops for breakfast sweetie? No problem. Pizza for lunch and dinner? Fine. Let me change the channel for you so you don’t have to get up.

“Mom!” I once shouted in frustration. “You never let us get away with stuff like this. What’s happened to you?” ”Nothing dear,” she replied wisely. “Your job is to raise them; my job is to spoil them.” And that’s about right. Parents and grandparents are both nurturers, but they nurture differently. The grandparent sees to it that the children eat well; the parent must see that they eat right.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about in this post, which is the book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the recent bestseller by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roska. This is a dense, data-driven study of college learning based on longitudinal assessment data mined from the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) and the National  Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Though only a few people in the country seem to have read the book, excerpts and reviews in USA Today, NPR, and other high-profile news sources have set off all of the usual alarm bells. One need only browse the comments section of the Chronicle of Higher Education to see the standard battle lines being formed:  1) “yet another failure of our liberal and coddled professoriate to work for a living”; vs 2) “further proof that assessment is evil; and that standardized tests are intellectually impoverished, culturally biased, and ideologically suspect.” Both sides of this debate are so well scripted by now that we could just program computers to yell at each other for the next year or so before moving on to the next predictable controversy.

But we are still fighting the last culture war. Arum and Roska are not Alan Bloom and E.D. Hirsch. They aren’t trying to save white male culture from African- and Chicano-Studies programs or beat rock music back to the ghetto. They are serious sociologists who have had unprecedented access to some very good data. This data shows, among other things, that something very close to a majority of American college students do not experience significant gains in critical thinking skills during their first two years and that around a third do not gain substantial ground over four full years of college. Colleges administrators are, rightly, very concerned about these findings.

But the study shows something else too. It shows that some students DO experience substantial intellectual growth in college, and it gives us a pretty good picture of why this occurs. When all of the numbers in this study were were crunched, massaged, qualified, controlled, and regressed, one thing stood out as the principal correlative to significant student learning: high instructor expectations. Specifically, students who were asked to do at least 20 pages of writing over the course of a semester, and at least 40 pages of reading each week, demonstrated growth in critical thinking skills that could not be accounted for by any other variable, leading the researchers to what I consider to be the most stunning (and ultimately hopeful) conclusion of the entire book:

This should not surprise anyone. Learning is hard, and, to get students to learn, professors need to expect them to do hard things. Unfortunately, however, that does not appear to be happening nearly as much as it should. Fewer than one-half of the seniors in the study, for example, reported having completed 20 pages of writing for a course during the previous semester. Thirty-five percent of the students reported spending less than five hours per week studying for their college courses. And only 62% of students at selective colleges and 56% of students at less-selective colleges reported taking even a single class that required 40 pages or more of reading per week (73).

Why is this so? Why have expectations for reading and writing–the only two factors that correlate consistently with student learning–been marching steadily downward for years? Much of the problem, I believe, stems from the fact that colleges and universities have confused the role of alma mater, or nourishing mother, with the role of avia indulgens, or indulgent grandmother. Weak classroom evaluation protocols have given student satisfaction surveys a disproportionate role in the tenure and promotion process–so professors who want to keep their jobs must make students happy. And  institutional retention initiatives have made it difficult for anyone to do anything that might result in student attrition. And unfortunately, assigning a lot of reading and writing can be seen as such a thing.

But a nourishing mother must concern herself with the long-term growth and development of her children, which means both vegetables and consequences for not eating them. An alma mater must do the same. Students are not well served by courses that do not make rigorous demands on their intellects and their attention, though they may certainly enjoy them at the time. Our students, like our children, deserve both our unconditional love and our high expectations. That is what it means to be an alma mater.