May 10

The Sense of College

By UD

“No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to [university] classes they cannot possiblypass,” writes an anonymous adjunct English professor in the June 2008 Atlantic magazine (far as I know, it’s not available online). He teaches in two “colleges of last resort,” where local, often older, students, go to rack up credits so they can move along a career track.

But they can’t pass the anonymous professor’s required course, because it’s not about memorizing practical vocational information. It’s about thinking and writing coherently, and having a point of view of your own. Many of his students don’t know how to analyze anything, let alone take a polemical
position relative to it. They can’t use prose coherently, and they don’t know what it means to set out a grounded, rational argument. Worse, the professor’s other course asks them to write a formal paper about a work of literature. They’ve read almost nothing.

“The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces — social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need... [Yet although] more-widespread college admission is a [financial] bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment.”

Despite the degrading and pointless activity many of his students find themselves in, the anonymous professor confesses to a bit of sentiment about the moral uplift of the literature he’s trying to teach, a moral uplift he’d like these future police officers and nurses to experience, because it may make them more compassionate at their job: “I can’t shake the sense that reading literature is informative and broadening and ultimately good for you.” But serious literature isn’t at all necessarily good for you; much of it conveys a moral complexity that borders on the immoral or amoral. And in any case, these students have already encountered The Grapes of Wrath and To Kill a Mockingbird in high school; they’ve already gotten tons of lectures about interpersonal sensitivity, cultural competence, and the like.

Beyond marginal literacy, the professor’s students “are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.”

Note what the author isolates as the key intellectual trait of authentic college students: They have already learned something by the time they get to college, and the most important thing they’ve learned is a sort of rough intellectual history, an early but functional sense of the categories by
which we organize and understand various human expressive acts — this is literature and these are its traits; this is the legal tradition and these its salient features. The serious college curriculum builds upon this foundation by adding not merely more information to it, but more complexity to its categories. The best-educated college graduates move easily among categories to make important intellectual connections — they put science and theology into play in order to think at a high level about empirical and non-empirical truth claims. They read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mimesis in order to ask not merely what a particular theory or novel means, but what
the fact of our having evolved particular standards of scientific legitimacy, and a particular ethos for fiction, means.

This is what university education is about — the disciplined assimilation of information into historically established categories which allow us to regulate and embellish thought about the world. This professor’s English comp and Intro Lit courses are primitive stages in this education: they ask students to convey only the most basic sense of categorical awareness, the shakiest intimation that there are contexts that connect what would otherwise be arbitrary bits of information, random creative eruptions. A few of this professor’s students will be able to do this, but most will not, and it is a cruel and expensive hoax to fail them repeatedly on their efforts.

Comments

Wow.

Thank you for posting this.

I have been in this professor’s exact position before...and most likely will be again.

The_Myth, at 9:40 pm EDT on May 12, 2008

Sense

By aptitude and preparation the students you describe encompass perhaps 10 or 15 percent of the population. A similar proportion of graduates receives the education you describe.

For the other 85 or 90 percent “higher education” is simply more of the same as high school, and not very good high school at that.

Orwell, at 8:20 pm EDT on May 13, 2008

Wait a minute!

The ready implication of this article is that these students are hopeless and doomed to failure. I will grant everything the author stated about lack of preparation and the huge intellectual gulf separating these students from the ones we wish were teaching.

Bridging that gulf, however, is what education is all about. With all the new brain research and cognitive science pointing to lifelong possibilities for awakening and growing the mind, let’s not lament and give up. It may take a gigantic effort to move a new learner, especially one in midlife, from Point A to Point B, but it’s more exciting as watching an SAT genius learn to wash his undies. And it’s our responsibility to figure out how to do it.

Lee, at 6:50 am EDT on May 16, 2008

Link to The Atlantic Monthly article

The article is now available at http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/college

CCPhysicist, at 12:45 pm EDT on May 16, 2008

Educable or Ineducable

Thanks for the link to the article, and thanks for the other thoughtful comments.

As to optimism about brain research, and our obligation as teachers to reach everyone — I’d have to disagree. We’re not really talking here about the capacity to absorb information — in terms of raw brainpower, I’m sure many of this guy’s students are smarter than a lot of fancy, highly-selected four-year college students.

We’re talking about a desire to have higher level knowledge — a desire to be truly college educated. Many of these people don’t have that desire, and don’t see why they should.

They’re right in this. There’s nothing much wrong, it seems to me, with the anti-intellectual culture they come from, and it’s absurd to try to make them resemble bookish college students.

UD, at 4:40 pm EDT on May 17, 2008

That’s the truth. This society is wealthier than any other in history, but it’s still not wealthy enough to give everyone a real college education. I don’t know if I can even imagine a society structurally capable of supporting that much education. Maybe Marx’s communist utopia. For anything short of that, I’m worried that the egalitarian aspiration to widespread college education has to go unfulfilled. To obscure that, we will have places that call themselves colleges, but aren’t really, and people that call themselves professors, but aren’t really.

Werther, at 5:15 pm EDT on May 19, 2008

Umm....okay.

The intellectual framework of this article—I’ll look at the Atlantic article after finals—assumes automatically that being a certain kind of person is desirable, and that the primary way one becomes that sort of person is through a particular kind of “liberal arts” education. It also seems to assume that “freshman comp” and “Intro to Lit” are preferred means of getting there. Inherent in this “becoming” are a number of values and intellectual perspectives one uses to distinguish the “mature” from the “ineducable.”

What if all those assumptions are either wrong or the result of our “inside the beltway” perspective? Look at this phrase for a moment: “the disciplined assimilation of information into historically established categories which allow us to regulate and embellish thought about the world.” Whose categories? And in what sense do we mean “regulate"?

In another lifetime, I was a U of I English Ph.D., where what was contested were the categories of Herbert Marder, Daniel Madjiak, Jack Stillinger, Howard Cole, Milo Kauffmann, Charles Shattuck, Cary Nelson, Gary Adelman, Jim Hurt, Judith Dundas, John Dussinger, and Alan Holaday.

I’m suspicious of phrases like “The best-educated college graduates move easily among categories to make important intellectual connections” or the well-educated study “in order to ask not merely what a particular theory or novel means, but what the fact of our having evolved particular standards of scientific legitimacy, and a particular ethos for fiction, means.” It sounds a lot like the “well-educated,” those who win our approbation, resemble all of us in higher education perfectly, and particularly those in the humanities.

And what if we’re wrong?

RJS, at 8:45 am EDT on May 21, 2008

“For anything short of that, I’m worried that the egalitarian aspiration to widespread college education has to go unfulfilled. To obscure that, we will have places that call themselves colleges, but aren’t really, and people that call themselves professors, but aren’t really...”

What do you mean, “will"?!

Donna, at 8:55 am EDT on May 28, 2008

A Certain Kind of Person

RJS: As my earlier comment suggests, there’s nothing here about the intrinsic desirability of being a certain kind of person. As I say in that comment, I see no reason why we should make a person who’s happy living an unintellectual life miserable by attempting to cram him or her into a four-year college setting.

As to whether we’ve been wrong all along about what we consider our intellectual history, about what we think seriously educated people should know, and about how we think seriously educated people should be able to think — The only way to answer the question “What if we’ve been wrong?” is to use precisely the methods and the history of liberal thought. The people you mention on your list in no way fall outside that tradition.

UD, at 10:40 am EDT on May 29, 2008

Cruel & Expensive Hoax

The obvious solution to this “cruel and expensive hoax” perpetrated on academically talentless students is “distance learning.” With distance learning, who the student IS doesn’t really matter. The student at the other end of Professor X’s computer could be anybody. Or a whole team. Instructors are relieved of guilt, and the hoax is less cruel and less expensive.

dick bentley, at 5:10 am EDT on May 30, 2008

Cookie-cutter courses

I neglected to mention in the above comment: It seems, from the article, that Professor X was simply teaching The Standard Freshman English Writing Course —- stories like Araby, Barn Burning available in all the standard textbooks no matter who the publisher is. Araby requires a special Irish sensibility and knowledge of history. The second sentence of Barn Burning is 118 words long and meanders erratically around the subject of cheese (mostly). The story is tough reading (fortunately there’s an excellent video of Barn Burning with Tommy Lee Jones that would’ve helped his students immeasurably.)

I don’t know what else Professor X gave his students, but with “non-traditional” students in his classroom, a more imaginative selection of reading assignments might have have been called for.

Dick Bentley, at 8:40 pm EDT on June 1, 2008