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Wednesday, February 18, 2004
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The Dumb that Dare Not Speak its Name
A Kinsley Gaffe - named after the journalist Michael Kinsley - occurs when a politician speaks the truth. A Sechrest Gaffe - named after Professor Larry J. Sechrest, who in a recent essay called the students at his university “appallingly ignorant, irrational, anti-intellectual, and, well, ... just plain stupid” - is the same thing, for professors. Not all American universities have stupid students and despairing professors (Sechrest notes that “Half the teachers in my department don’t give final tests, so that means they just take an extra week off.”) but some do, and even though it’s obvious to everyone that they do, few people say it out loud. A lot of dumb people are dumb, and we can thank Sechrest for reminding of us this. But a lot of smart people are dumb too. I’ve been around smart people all my life, and they’re often strikingly dumb. They got high SATs. But they believe in astrology, vitamins, and witches. They are attracted to people who abuse them. They think there should be a violent overthrow of the American government. They think Castro’s fabulous. They’ve been married four times and are studying Hopi vows in preparation for five. They are unable to distinguish between their child and a god. They are in debt up to their asses and teach all summer to dig their way out but they never dig their way out. They go to cheesy psychotherapists and follow their advice. They play no musical instrument of even the rudest kind and do not know the meaning of the word “notation.” They cannot speak or read even one foreign language. Their travel outside of the United States consists of Caribbean islands (see UD’s recent Teaching Today and De Profundis posts) and alumni tours of the Hebrides. They think the film Death in Venice is brilliant. They think The Sopranos is brilliant. This country has scads of junior colleges, colleges, and universities, and it’s easy to pick up your New York Times and sneer about lowbrow places like Sechrest’s Sul Ross University. It’s easy to laugh at Randy Newman when he sings about “college men at LSU who went in dumb and come out dumb too.” But it doesn’t get appreciably better as you go up. It just goes from lowbrow to middlebrow. Not until you get way up does it begin to look highbrow, and even there it’s spotty. Students at Harvard and Princeton are unhappy enough about the absence of intellectual life on their campuses that committees have been formed to investigate the problem. A cultured, inquiring, and idea-generating intellect is a rare thing, and all sorts of topflight, expensive, self-satisfied American universities lack any. Their faculties include technicians, motivational speakers, administrators, summarizers, pop-culture addicts, profit-generators, workforce trainers, grammarians, and politicians. Don’t go looking for Goethe. |