What is the purpose of a College? We all have personal answers, and so do all colleges. Saint Anselm College’s answer as to its own purpose is, according to the Student Handbook, “(to) encourage the lifelong pursuit of the truth and foster intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth to sustain and enrich it’s graduates’ personal lives, work, and engagement within local, national, and global communities.” A noble aim.  In other words, the goal of the College is to best arm its students with the knowledge and skills required to live a good and fulfilling life. 

Now, the primary mode of transferring knowledge in college is through courses. In our time here, the average student takes 32 courses, four a semester. It used to be that students took 40 courses, five a semester, before the college moved to just four. The goal with the shift was to allow students to dive deeper into each given subject and take on more concentrated work. However, we have seen a depreciation in the intensity and content of courses over the past few years. Don’t believe me? Ask any professor if classes are as hard as they used to be.  

Now where does this leave the student out questing for knowledge in pursuit of the good life? If the value of college isn’t in possessing a degree but rather in what is learned, if that is the true goal and gain, then this student is left worse off than the Anselmian of yesteryear. They leave the table without having been fed, and the College has a moral obligation to correct course. If the college is to fulfill its aim of “fostering intellectual, moral, and spiritual growth,” to the best of its ability then it must allow its students to learn more. 

But how? It’s laughable to propose raising the number of courses back up to five a semester. To increase the difficulty of courses would both raise complaints and fail to improve student’s ability to access the liberal arts ideal of a broad and deep education. The solution I posit is to allow students to, with the prior consent of the instructor, to audit courses without having to pay extra for the privilege. This is a simple solution that allows students to tackle more areas of knowledge while saving administration any nasty paperwork, benefiting both parties. Don’t believe me? Let me elaborate. 

To make this a fair process the school should take two actions; not placing audits on a student’s transcript and letting auditing be at the discretion of the teacher. This way the student has no gain from the course outside of the knowledge being imparted, meaning that by doing so they are not gaining any marketable record that buys into the college brand. By having it at the professor’s discretion this means that it is a choice by the professor whether or not to allow the student to use their teaching materials, which are their own. This way knowledge may be distributed to those willing, and those brave few who hunger for a deeper liberal arts education for its own sake may, to paraphrase visiting professor Vincent Colapietro’s lecture on the Poetics of Self-Governance, “partake fully in the chorus of the humanities: in life’s multitudes of meanings.”