On May 30, Fan Xinjian, president of Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, was investigated on suspicion of corruption in construction of a new campus.

The fall from grace had serious consequences. In an emergency move, diplomas stamped with Fan’s signature already conferred on graduates were revoked, and replaced by new versions blessed with the signature of Zhang Zhongyuan, the Party secretary of the university.

But on July 24 Zhang was also fired for corruption, meaning the diplomas would be revoked again.

Corruption charges are fairly common among ambitious bureaucrats, but traditionally we do not number college presidents and professors among the common run of greedy bureaucrats.

We expect presidents and professors to contend over hairsplitting ideological differences, principles, curricular arrangement, but not money. Unfortunately, this diploma incident is not isolated.

On May 10, Zhou Wenbin, president of Nanchang University, was investigated for corruption. Zhou had also been enthusiastic about building a new campus.

On March 19, Chen Yingxu, professor of Zhejiang University, was officially accused of privatizing more than 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) in research funds, by falsifying invoices, contracts and accounts. The whistleblowers were his disgruntled colleagues who failed to get their fair share from the shady dealings.

Scandals like these are tragic, and force us to revisit the big question: What is a college for, and what has gone wrong?

Reflective citizenship

Andrew Delbanco’s “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be” can help answer that question, from the perspective of a prominent American cultural critic offering a trenchant defense of the value of liberal arts education. That kind of education is now largely a thing of the past.

As Kathleen Daley wrote in her succinct appraisal of the book in the Newark Star Ledger, the “Was” part is an “illuminating reminder of the Puritan origin of early colleges,” where religion, literature and philosophy reigned supreme.

The “Is” section deals with “the prohibitive cost, the woefully underprepared applicants, the self-centered teachers, and the dominance of research over instruction of undergraduates at today’s colleges.”

The “Should Be” part is Delbanco’s cry for change, or call to arms, as he envisions a time when competent teachers are back in the classroom.

Delbanco starts by depicting the forces inside and outside colleges that conspire to bring about the demise of traditional liberal arts education.

As he writes, “The American college has always been about more than the transmission of information or the inculcation of skills.”

At its best, the mission is about “helping young people prepare for lives of meaning and purpose.”

He points to the false choice between vocational and liberal studies, for students in programs focused on specific job skills need to have their minds “stretched by the big questions raised by history, science, philosophy, and the arts.”

Delbanco believes colleges should help students develop certain qualities of mind and heart requisite for “reflective citizenship.”

These qualities include:

1. A skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past.

2. The ability to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena.

3. Appreciation of the natural world, enhanced by knowledge of science and the arts.

4. A willingness to imagine experience from perspectives other than one’s own.

5. A sense of ethical responsibility.

As none of these qualities lend themselves to quantitative assessment, one of the hallmarks of the degradation of colleges is their eagerness to rank their students, and themselves.

In the collapse of consensus about what students should know, schools vies with each other in delivering marketable skills, as commodities to be purchased by students-consumers.

ìFor many more students, college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, under-resourced institutions, where little attention is paid to that elusive entity sometimes called the ëwhole personí,î writes Delbanco. Increasingly students attend college in the hope of becoming financially successful.

For all the allure of high prestige, colleges or universities today offer students neither a coherent understanding of the meaning of a college education, nor any guidance on how they might find for themselves purpose in life beyond money.

This shift has led to some deep changes: the advent of elective courses, end of compulsory chapel, and abandonment of parietal rules. Few required courses are now required for graduation, and ìthe course catalogue is likely to be somewhere between an encyclopedia and the proverbial Chinese menu ó from which students choose a little of this and a little of that ...î writes Delbanco.

The dictates of the market, cost-efficiency concerns and the use of technology led to a phenomenon called the ìcasualizationî or ìadjunctificationî of the faculty.

In many universities, ìindependent-operator professorî ó those who shape a course around his interests and sensibility ó has long been a thing of the past.

Renewed commitment

The new norm is the instructor-for-hire, whose job is to monitor standardized content over some ìdelivery system.î

Most professors, seeking and enjoying fame in the realm of research, no longer care about teaching undergraduates.

In cases where they still teach, they take care not to antagonize the students, or they would risk a poor score on the end-of-semester evaluations of professors by students.

So a successful lecture today is more about PowerPoint, handouts, amusing anecdotes, rather than deep engagement. It is by no means rare for some students to fill a lecture room for the sake of entertainment.

Except in the ìhardî sciences, academic failure is rare;  cheating tends to be treated as a minor lapse.

The students now live in an ocean of digital noise, logged on, online, 24/7, linked to one another through an arsenal of gadgets.

Today going to college means more to be released into a playground of unregulated freedom. A couple of years ago, the Office of Residential Life and Learning at one well-regarded northeastern college felt compelled to institute a rule banning ìany sex act in a dorm room while oneís roommate is present,î Delbanco writes.

But true freedom can be elusive.

Going to college for the sake of impressing prospective employers can result in more pressure than traditional ìhard reading and high thinking.î

One reason is that students find themselves under constant pressure to prepare for ìcompeting with graduates of comparable colleges once they get out.î

Gone is the role of the college as arbiter of values, as colleges evolve from engines of social mobility in American life, to a system for replicating inherit wealth.

Delbanco believes that evolution is endangering basis of democracy, for the best chance to maintain a functioning democracy is a citizenry that can tell the difference between demagoguery and responsible arguments.

Hence the urgency to retrieve fundamental values of education and renew our commitment to them.

And it is not just American colleges that should be seriously engaged in self-examination in their quest of meaning.