Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten notes that the U.S. News college rankings have become one of those deeply resonant sites where our putatively classless society ruthlessly establishes and enforces rigid hierarchies of status: "For all the social mobility of our society," he writes, "one's college is the marker of one's class. The U.S. News guide is our democratic answer to Debrett's Peerage."

He also has some choice and challenging words for ACTA's new, rival rankings site, WhatWillTheyLearn.com:

The newest entrant in the ranking game is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which has the quaint notion that a university be judged on what it teaches its students. At the group's Web site, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, schools are given grades based on the extent to which students are required to take classes in the core subjects of a general education, such as math, literature, science and history. Their effort to change the focus to learning is no doubt an admirable one, but I suspect that it will have a limited effect. Any grading scale that gives an "A" to the University of Arkansas and an "F" to Yale may prove too contrarian to capture the public imagination.

Which is a shame because the Council has a point. The irony of modern education is that the faster the world moves the more value there is in the dusty old undergraduate curriculum. Train for a specific technology and chances are it will be obsolete before the ink is dry on the diploma. Indulge in the academic fad of the moment and you may find it hard to change your bell-bottomed intellectual wardrobe when styles shift. Who wants an education with an expiration date?

When I was teaching, the most popular course I offered was a course called "Dickens." Emails would roll in months ahead of time from students all over the university, from all manner of majors, from nursing and business students, from incoming freshmen, from Penn staff enrolled in continuing education programs, from older area residents participating in Penn's free course audit program for seniors, all expressing their desire to devote a semester of study to the great Victorian author, and all hoping to secure a spot in what they assumed would be a massively overenrolled course. The Dickens course never drew the crowds that these "early adopters" feared it would--but it did draw a great, varied group of students who really loved the idea of immersing themselves in the work of this particular Great Author.

The courses themselves were a joy to teach. There was a real sense of shared interest, a clear communal purpose, and, most remarkably, genuinely playful, joyful intellectual work. Along the way, we read tens of thousands of pages of Dickens, studied his life, studied his historical moment, studied the remembered and forgotten writers who surrounded him, studied his influences and his influence, and generally moved together well beyond the static notion of Great Writer to something approaching a genuinely textured understanding of the artist, his work, and his world. We all learned, we all discovered, we all laughed, and we all happily came back for more.

This isn't to say that the only successful courses are courses on canonical writers and texts, but it is to say that there was something special about the Dickens course, and qualitatively different from other successful courses I taught. The students chose the course because they wanted to have some sustained contact with a figure they recognized as of vital importance to literary history; they brought with them a readiness to focus, explore, learn. And--just as crucially--Dickens rewarded them, just as Shakespeare, that other perennially popular favorite, does. That's kind of the whole point of studying the canon. It gives back.

And it keeps giving. Readers of this site know I've been revisiting Hawthorne in recent months. I read plenty of Hawthorne in high school, college, grad school; I've taught Hawthorne, too. But good writers grow with you, and change as you do. The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables were completely new novels to me this time around; I found different things in them, felt I came to know the writer in different ways, and wondered how I could ever have missed the fact that so many of his obsessions are mine (or, perhaps, how it came to be that my own obsessions about genealogy, and historical legacy, and inherited family dysfunction, and the terrible danger of groupthink, are patterned after his -- in what may be an inkling of how national literatures work and why they matter).

It's not just that colleges and universities are failing to educate students when they fail to decide what they should learn, and to register those decisions in the form of a core curriculum. It's also that they are missing out on one of the most obvious and effective ways to get college students--who today spend more time going to parties than studying--hooked on learning.