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"But you lose much more than you gain. If you believe, as I do, that education is a collaborative exploration of ideas, you've immediately restricted the class's ability to explore a subject together. You've determined the course in advance, so students will not be able to make any meaningful contributions to its direction. If you stumble onto an interesting detour in your thinking, you might be able to veer off for a while, but the inexorable pull of the fixed list's itinerary will ineluctably drive you on."

"That's what happens to the majority of undergraduate projects in the humanities. Heroic research is undertaken, and the student suffers mightily during the writing process. But after being submitted for a grade, the results of all that work are filed away, never to be read again. (Of course, the same could be said of most dissertations and many academic monographs.) It's as if we've entered the print revolution while most of us are still illuminating manuscripts. What are we doing all this work for-one might ask-if not to make some kind of impact on the world? And why should anyone continue to pay for it?"