I hope that everyone listens, though there’s not much chance of that. On Wednesday, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a new study—”What Will They Learn?”—accompanied by a very spiffy site of the same name. The study, timed to hit the market as the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings appear, grades colleges and universities not by easily manipulated and subjective criteria but by doing what is most damaging to academia: taking it at its word.

ACTA presents the “mission statement” of each institution it grades and assesses whether it has strong general-education requirements. This is not the same, it is careful to note, as having distribution requirements: almost every institution has those, but they are usually so broad as to require no common core of knowledge. The results, for anyone who has followed higher education, are depressingly predictable: lots of F‘s, especially for the nation’s liberal-arts colleges and elite universities.

My own undergraduate institution, Grinnell College in Iowa, gets a well-deserved straight F for requiring nothing whatsoever. Frankly, that was one big reason I went there, which only goes to show that most 19-year-olds are entirely unqualified to assess the merits of the argument for a core curriculum. But I did enjoy ACTA’s quote from Grinnell, that “the heterogeneity of good critical thinking and the free exchange of ideas militate against any single answer” to the question “What should the liberally educated person know?”

Yes indeed, critical thinking, which one might think would lead to defensible conclusions about what is and is not of value, and the free exchange of ideas, which in higher education is based on a not entirely free model of classroom instruction and grades, means that no one can say what anyone should know. Makes me wonder why Grinnell requires that its instructors have Ph.D.’s, a degree rooted in the claim that disciplines have models of inquiry that do generate teachable knowledge. The answer, maybe, is that Ph.D.’s are used to advertise the institution’s elitism and that “the heterogeneity of critical thinking” is really a synonym for the faded radical appeal of deconstructionism’s demolition of the concept of knowledge.

My other institution, Yale, also gets a big fat F, though not quite as emphatically as Grinnell. I’m not surprised, though I was delighted to see that a recent Yale graduate and friend of mine, Michael Pomeranz, was one of ACTA’s featured and most incisive speakers. As Mr. Pomeranz points out, “Most students are no more likely to choose a general education in a cafeteria-style curriculum than we are to choose only leafy greens in our actual cafeterias.” My own experience at Grinnell and at Yale testifies to the truth of that analogy.

It’s sometimes claimed by institutions that lack a core curriculum that they compensate by a careful system of academic advising. What a laugh. I advised for six years at Yale. Here’s how it works: An hour before you meet your freshmen for the first time, you get their folders and some quick advice from the dean. You have a few minutes to memorize a fact or two about each student—hopefully, that includes their name—and then you go off and have a stilted conversation with four students who don’t know you from a hole in the wall, who have no interest in your subject, and can’t imagine why they should care what you say—which is sensible, because you don’t know much about them and can’t offer any useful advice on their wildly disparate interests. A few weeks later, they materialize in your office with a form to sign. You check that it meets Yale’s immensely unconstraining distribution requirements, sign, and they disappear. They materialize again in January with another form to sign, and that is usually the last you ever see of them. Frankly, advising doesn’t work, and anyone who says it does is ignorant.

The trickier question is why it’s done this way—and “by this way” I mean not just advising but the whole curricular system. One answer is that after the 1960s and their aftermath got done demolishing the idea of knowledge and objective inquiry, it was all that was left. That’s undoubtedly part of it—maybe even the main part of it. But day to day, I tend to think it’s mostly about making life easy for the faculty; they are the ones who hire their own colleagues (the Ph.D. is, in the end, really a union card that’s useful for excluding outsiders), set their own schedules (which, if you’re tenured, increasingly doesn’t involve teaching on Monday or Friday), and pick their own classes (which for a lot of faculty involves dodging the intro courses).

The basic problem with a core curriculum is that someone would have to teach it—and because it would be core, there would be a lot of teaching to be done. That’s not what faculty at elite universities are really there for, which is why the top schools do so poorly in ACTA’s rating and why only seven schools in the entire study got an A. To an extent, this problem can be met by hiring adjuncts, which is what most faculties, in another great stab in the back to the rising generation, have already done. But if you took the model of English 101 at most universities and applied it across all the general–education subjects, you would need a lot of adjuncts indeed. Better, maybe, not to make the effort at all, or so the faculty appears to have concluded. I’m all in favor of ACTA’s efforts, but they do nothing to calm my reluctant sense that, as long as the faculty are running things—not that most of the other candidates would be any better—there is not the slightest chance that the core curriculum will make a comeback.