Thinking back to when I was an undergrad almost nothing fundamental has changed. Yes, schools teach more Chinese and less French, but that’s not much of a transformation. Computer Science departments are bigger and more common, but if we had discovered ways to sail among the stars in handmade baskets a Department of Wicker Engineering would fit just as well as anything else. If you assume an almost psychotic opposition to change of any sort among the Hedgehog faculty you could imagine a school that really did get frozen in the 60’s, but what does imagining that get you? Vulpine has a lot of features (like the emphasis on student choice) that are worth thinking about, but unless you are at St. Johns or Ave Maria there is not much point (that I can see) in thinking about a place where the faculty not only police boundaries to the extent of “should we have a History department” but ‘should we allow young professor Burke to talk about that radical Annals school in front of young minds.’

Curricular and organizational structure does not have to change very much for a place to become quite different. Swarthmore has a History department now, and they had one in the 50’s, and they may be very different places intellectually, but institutionally I would bet that they fit in the system about the same way. You are probably even in the same building, and when you die/retire your picture will go up on the wall with all the other ones and you will fit in just fine.

I don’t think it’s as much excessive hedgehogery that makes it “impossible to talk of change except as loss and violation, makes all planning into trauma.” It’s the fact that we talk about change in the abstract, but it happens in the particular. Any faculty can have a dispassionate debate on adding a new department of Arabic or Chinese. Any faculty -should- find it hard to discuss firing all the German teachers and replacing them with Chinese teachers. (If you really are a faculty, these are your colleagues.) So we mostly don’t do that and let the Classics department slowly slink from a big major to a small one to a minor, to gone. I presume this process will continue. I would go farther than you and say that basically everywhere “institutional decision-making ends up producing a sort of ungainly Frankensteinian jumble of fox parts and hedgehog parts” and I’m pretty sure it can’t be any other way.

And of course, for the really important question, if Vulpine is -3 on the road against Hedgehog, do you take the points?

In answer to this, one of my colleagues in Classics gave a brilliant faculty lunch talk explaining that Archilochus, unlike Berlin, almost certainly meant fox and hedgehog to be metaphors for genitalia, not intellectual types.

It was a nice demonstration that asking young people what they think is often less interesting — let alone less funny — than talking to people with deep learning and a sense of humor.

On the one hand, if you give students a free choice, their choice will probably be framed in terms of established expectations about what kinds of courses and disciplines might exist. I tend to think that these might well be less vulpine, interdisciplinary, and surprising than current offerings are likely to be. In other words, I think you might still teaching the history of Africa, but I don’t think that you’d be teaching “History of the Future.”

On the other, no matter how strict Hedgehog College tries to be, “keeping up with the field” is necessarily going to involve a transformation constantly sneaking in through the back door, since these things can’t be hermetically sealed. The course title, subject matter, required work, etc. might remain the same, but the approach would become very different over time. Only by artificially restricting the material to the kinds of study that *can* be fixed could one avoid that. I’m willing to bet that in Dr. Burke’s personal teaching, similar themes probably crop up over superficially different subject areas, and that these are not the same as they were 10 years ago.

(This is, in the spirit of the post, assuming that all Hedgehog faculty are making a good faith effort to comply. In practice*, some faculty would probably teach with the aim of driving students away and having as little grading as possible.)

* That is, as far as “in practice” is a sane thing to say here…

The author is correct in outlining (though too quickly) the desiderata towards which a college should direct its education but he (that’s the old-fashioned ungendered “he”) fails to analyze the means by which those virtues are developed. Vulpine and Hedgehog are both too constrained by the fragmentation produced by the rigid definition of the curriculum by courses and also by the political consequences of organization by departments. Both these hypothetical colleges continue to treat what is taught as means by which the faculty score points toward tenure, raises, promotions, and that supreme folly, endowed chairs.

Hedgehog is the preferable alternative, but only because it is the less damaging. The author seems to regard St. Johns (and there are others–such as Shimer) as the perfect examples of this mode of education, but I would devise a rather different approach. It is not acquaintance with the great books or great thinkers per se that qualifies as education but an understanding of the assumptions underlying those “greats” and of how their expression is shaped and given force by historical evolution. And instead of calling upon students who bring the more or less meaningless detritus accumulated through a disastrous educational system and the rot of popular culture to consideration of these seminal ideas, it should be the faculty who, through sophisticated argument, demonstrate their vitality and far-reaching implications.

There are strengths and weaknesses of that approach, but it seems worth at least talking a little bit about the lessons one can draw from existing experiments before jumping directly to the reductio ad absurdum — though I do understand the point you’re trying to make by discussing the problems of the two extremes.