In “Making decisions: Choosing a major and living up to a moment,” (From the Lilly Pad, March 15) Sarah Turner raises questions central to the college’s discussion of its “strategic objectives.” And at the heart of Sarah’s essay is the problem which every college like Macalester, and its students, faculty and staff, must necessarily confront: how does one get an education?

Sarah rightly recognizes that solving this problem involves making decisions which help us to continue to live with our selves. In seeking to be educated we are “living up to” our deepest aspirations, that “profound sense of being called” she eloquently describes, not in terms of mere issues, but in the image of holding a baby in an orphanage in Haiti. Some sense of calling anchors most searches for education. A good education can not only enable a calling, it can also continually enrich and extend it.

The Strategic Objectives study describes Macalester as a “community of learners.” As such, the college should nurture every member’s efforts to live up to his or her life’s calling. As a long-time member of this community I am dismayed that we seem only to have given Sarah the college catalog and urged her to choose a major.

The catalog does tell you how to construct a “major concentration,” but an old academic adage warns against relying on that good book for much else: using the catalog to find out how to get an education, it says, is like using the manual that comes with your car to learn how to drive. (Think about it.)

Sarah is certainly not alone in feeling the urgency of finding a major. There is considerable evidence that Macalester students are in a “rush to major.” Following a study I did for the external review of the English Department, I looked at the course selections made by 181 current juniors majoring in one of seven departments: two in natural science, two in social science, and three in humanities and fine arts. I recorded only the number of courses, including supporting courses, taken for the declared major concentration in the first four semesters. I found that on the average these juniors took 54 percent of the courses required for their major(s) by the time they declared that major at the end of their fourth semester.

I also examined in more detail the course selection of a sub-set of 35 academic records, five from each department. I found that in its first two years this group took eight to nine courses for its declared majors, cores and minors, two in a second language, three toward the distribution requirement, and two to three as free electives. These findings confirmed that the “rush to major” dominated the educational decisions this group made in its first two years.

In the light of Sarah’s essay, the “rush to major” may prevent students (and their faculty mentors) from engaging the more important question of getting an education by reducing it to how to construct a major. The connection between an individual’s calling or life aspirations and being educated in support of it is thus broken, replaced by the more urgent but less important need to “fill in the blanks” of the major plan(s). Getting an education is a continuous process, not the act of choosing and declaring a major. This process involves many “decisions,” large and small. What gets lost in the “rush to major” are many (most?) of the opportunities students and their mentors have to discuss the more important considerations of education for calling, discussions in which the sense of vocation itself undergoes important changes and refinement.

The headline, “Task forces plan your future,” (Weekly, April 18) seems to me either very ironic or wishful thinking. Sarah Turner’s essay suggests, to me, two questions that need to be prominent on the Academic Quality Task Force’s agenda:

How might the College begin to take more seriously first and second-year students’ aspirations so as to make them (and not filling in the blanks) the beginning of a continuing conversation with faculty and staff about getting an education?

How might the college begin to take more seriously its own aspirations for students in search of an education so as to make the senior year a confirmation that that education is well begun?

Sarah Turner concludes her essay by encouraging students who “search for their life’s calling to listen to the voices that have spoken to their hearts and to trust that those voices will help to guide them on whatever path they choose to take.” Surely those voices should include some heard at Macalester. If they do, Sarah will have more moments to live up to when she graduates.