It’s a real out-there metaphor, but hell. Kentucky.

… in the Wall Street Journal today about the wee problem of ethically challenged MBA graduates. Scathing Online Schoolmarm has rarely seen deader writing, and she’s seen a lot of writing.

We need to better prepare our students for leadership. This requires creating a deeper understanding of the difficult decisions they will face, often under enormous pressure. We must make them aware that these decisions will challenge their values, and that, consequently, they need to clarify the values they stand for. We need to make sure they engage in a continuing dialogue with classmates, faculty and alumni, and learn to hold themselves and their peers accountable for the commitments they make.

This writing has You Can Safely Ignore Me written all over it. It’s empty. Vapid. Void. It’s written in response to a real problem, not an empty one: People with fancy MBA’s go out and Ponzi the country to death. But this writing, which pretends to be a real response to it, is entirely unreal, a cloudy succession of clichés: deeper understanding, difficult decision, challenge their values, clarify the values, engage in a continuing dialogue, hold themselves accountable… It’s ALL clichés.  All of it.

The writers don’t even say what they’re going to do, how they’re going to teach MBA students to avoid Ponziing us. Something about “small group structures” and “generating a deeper dialogue”…

Lazy, cynical, bullshit.

… Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

… No longer free to exercise it myself [Judt has Lou Gehrig’s disease], I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right — and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

***************************

Scathing Online Schoolmarm found a good example of nospeak in reading blogs that were responding to the recent Saudi fatwa advising women to breastfeed men.

There is of course strict gender segregation in Saudi Arabia; but if a woman suckles a man, he becomes ‘family.’ Thus, as a Saudi woman, I will now be able to interact with men unrelated to me, so long as I first breastfeed them.

Here is how one blogger responds to this grotesquerie.

I am certainly not an expert in Islamic law or religion, nor do I write this in order to contribute to the stereotypes propagated in the West or claim cultural superiority. There are cultural differences I don’t understand, thus I try to reserve my judgement.

One wonders what sort of pronouncement from a community leader would be bizarre enough for this writer to respond with something other than politically correct vacuity. What sort of statement, what sort of policy, might prevent her from retreating into know-nothingism (cultural differences I don’t understand)? Does she understand anything about how women live in Saudi Arabia?

If she really can’t understand the difference between women told to breastfeed all unrelated men with whom they come into contact and women not told to do that, I think it would be better for this writer to retreat all the way, into silence. Certainly if she thinks withholding any judgment of this fatwa is enlightened, that judging a cleric who tells women to do this would express an unacceptable sense of cultural superiority, she would best say nothing at all.

As it is, her nospeak conveys not merely the intellectual insecurity Judt describes. It conveys the utter erosion of moral capacity.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm very much likes Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on music, The Unanswered Question. She especially likes the way he explains musical modernism as having introduced, among other things, a striking chromatic ambiguity into composition. Take Chopin’s Etude in Thirds:

Are we in the major or minor? Or in the Phrygian mode? Is this music tonal or modal? Are we to infer ninth chords, or diminished sevenths?

This sort of ambiguity, Bernstein remarks, is intriguing – even exciting – in art forms like music and poetry.

*******************************

But SOS is here to tell you that being up in the air like this for extended periods of time does not work very well in the essay.

Certainly readers are willing to be confused or disoriented for awhile in reading essays – the writer might be drunk or dreaming or just mentally drifting at the beginning of an essay – but pretty quickly the form needs to find its dominant, its key, its voice, its mood, its argument. If it starts with an anecdote, it has to tell us why it starts with an anecdote, where that anecdote stands in relation to the subject around which the essay is organized… If it doesn’t do this sort of thing, it’s not really an essay — it’s a prose poem, maybe, but not an essay.

A glance at Wikipedia yields, among others, this definition of an essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. We can of course think of ways in which essayists can depart from this emphasis on steady focus and dominant subject matter; but SOS would suggest the nature as well as the strength of the essay as a distinct mode of writing involves its relative non-ambiguity. It tends to want to argue something clearly, or make you see what it’s like to be inside of a particular experience clearly. And even when we’ve got the second sort of essay – call it a narrative essay – that narrative is still, almost always, in the service of some sort of cultural or spiritual or political argument.

***********************************

One of the signs of a very bad essay is indeed an unpleasant interminable ambiguity. The writer doesn’t allow you to get a foothold in the writing. You’re not sure what she’s on about. What is she urging that you believe, or feel?

Where, for that matter, is she? It’s not that bad essays lack a voice; typically they have all too many voices, a sort of confused, insecure trying on of many tones, attitudes, and dialects.

You never know what key you’re in. The feeling grows upon you, as you read, that you are in an emotionally and intellectually muddled world; and since you have entered the essay for the dual pleasures of good writing and clarified perceptions, you are eventually put off by the essay, and you probably stop reading it.

*************************************

Carlin Romano’s recent essay about Christopher Hitchens exemplifies the failure of the form.

Its title – No One Left to Pray To? – poses a question that – like the essay that follows – seems to come from a person at once insecure about his hold on his subject and boastful about his superiority to it (the subject here being a human being, Christopher Hitchens). One of Hitchens’ books – the one about Bill Clinton – is titled No One Left to Lie To, and, as that title makes clear, it’s a strong polemic arguing that Clinton is so intense and inveterate a liar that eventually no one believes anything he says.

Romano’s title is a question rather than a statement – a move that ushers us in to the vagueness and timidity of his essay’s assertions. Hitchens may be dying and doesn’t believe in God, so … he has no one to pray to. Is that it? Okay. But why put the twist on his title in the form of a question? If your essay is going to be about how sad or strange or ironic it is that Hitchens is dying and, since he doesn’t believe in God, God won’t keep him from doing that — a not very generous thought on Romano’s part, but let’s go with it — then why not put the title in the affirmative? Why the weaselly question mark?

Or is Romano simply trying to be clever? Where is his conviction in this matter? We assume, from the title on, that Romano is a religious person. We’re prepared, having been signaled by this title, for an essay in which Romano will, let us say, lament the desperation and sterility of this atheist’s last days. But we’re not fully prepared, because the tentativeness of that question mark puts us someplace ambiguous.

First paragraph:

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

Are we being funny? Is this an effort at the folksy humor of the preacher, or is it the insouciant observation of a secular sophisticate? What’s the key?

As organs go, it’s long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can’t swallow me? You won’t swallow anything!

Since this last statement is about as funny as God saying to a woman with breast cancer You don’t enjoy breast feeding? You don’t even get a breast! the reader right away dismisses the possibility that this essay means to be somehow lighthearted and witty as well as serious. The vulgarity of the piece suggests that the writer wishes to be seen as… brash? We’re not sure.

For atheist apostle and recent memoirista Christopher Hitchens, who announced on June 30 that he’d cancel the rest of his Hitch-22 book tour to undergo chemotherapy on said cancerous organ, the argument for such personalized intelligent design presumably doesn’t hold. Hitch does recognize the role of vengeance and resentiment in believer/nonbeliever relations, but only in fueling institutions established by believers further down the Great Chain of Being. “Religion,” he wrote in God Is Not Great, “does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths.”

By this point the careful reader has stepped pretty far into that sense of reading unpleasant interminable ambiguity I described earlier. It’s not that the reader takes offense at any particular position in regard to Hitchens — she’s ready to read someone hating or pitying him or admiring or taking energetic issue with this or that position of his. It’s rather that the reader is beginning to take offense at being asked to remain within the prose world of a person whose writing is confusing rather than enlightening.

To be sure, there are many cutesy words and turns of phrase here (apostle; memoirista; said organ) that continue to make us play with the idea that this means to be a lighthearted and ultimately charitable take on the bad turn in Hitchens’ life; yet these words seem a strained effort at lightness, and when we get to the writer’s use of Hitch – a nickname – we wonder why he uses it. Yes, the Hitchens memoir (Is this supposed to be a book review?) titles itself with that name; yet Romano seems to use it in the way of an intimate. This comes across as pretentious, or at least as weird, especially since the essay is beginning to look unfriendly. Maybe.

We also note that Romano has misspelled ressentiment, which makes us wonder why he uses the French version of the word resentment. What did he think was gained by the French spelling? Since his subject is an erudite man who would not make this mistake, Romano’s foray into French makes him look inferior to Hitchens, whereas his rhetoric, to the extent that we can understand it, suggests a self-appraisal as superior. Romano also spells god is Not Great incorrectly.

One thing’s for sure—Hitch is not in great health. Indeed, he faces the possibility of not being at all if the chemo proves useless. Should believers pray for him, a man celebratedly insensitive to norms of politeness and acts of altruism?

Not being at all. Romano’s essay turns out to be a jig atop a grave-to-be.

At this point, the reader – this one at least – turns away from the prose in embarrassment.

*********************************

SOS has often said on this blog that bad writing is, among other things, writing that cannot help betraying things the writer clearly does not mean to betray to the reader. This is one of the things we mean by saying that good writing is about control.

It does Romano no good that he goes on, in his essay, to pretend a sort of even-handedness about his subject. He has betrayed his hatred. Nor is it the honestly and sometimes wittily proffered hatred of certain ideas and people for which Hitchens is notorious. It is the unpleasant inchoate passion of a writer who has not learned to master himself or his prose.

… very much enjoying the Vancouver Sun’s analyses of the Gibson Tapes.

From the Washington Post:

The Republican candidate for President Obama’s old Senate seat inaccurately claimed to have received the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award for service during NATO’s conflict with Serbia in the late 1990s.

Rep. Mark Kirk, a Navy reservist elected to Congress in 2001, acknowledged the error in his official biography after The Washington Post began looking into whether he had received the prestigious award, which is given by top Navy officials to a single individual annually…

Kirk, an Appropriations Committee member, changed his Web site last week to incorporate a different account of the award. Kirk wrote on his blog that “upon a recent review of my records, I found that an award listed in my official biography was misidentified” …

Eric Elk, a spokesman for Kirk’s campaign, would say only that “we found the award was misidentified and corrected the name.” …

Here is a rare example of absolutely empty writing.

The quality of writing, the writing style, the structure, is fine. The piece begins, develops, ends. It moves from point to point using transitional phrases. It closes with concern and hope.

But it has nothing to do with reality. It is an argument about the future that at no point touches on any possible future. And the writer must know that.

SOS applauds the fortitude that allowed this editorial writer to get up out of bed and type out these paragraphs.

Via Eric, a reader, SOS relishes the retro

pleasures of a wonderfully written

– handwritten – letter.

It’s by a Chicago blogger whose gym’s

cancellation policy insists that you send

them a letter you penned yourself.

(Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Like Simon Liebling, Tyler Rosenbaum is a precocious social critic. Both Liebling and Rosenbaum are undergrads at Brown, and both, in the pages of the university newspaper, go after aspects of the school they find unpalatable. They do so with confidence, clarity, and charm.

Someone on the Brown admissions committee knows good writing when she sees it.

Rosenbaum has an easier task than Liebling, since Liebling took on the complex matter of the relationship between Brown’s president and Goldman Sachs; but Rosenbaum does beautifully with his more modest target: the university’s student fees.

… Last month… The Herald reported that the Organizational Review Committee, which President Simmons appointed to look for ways to cut $14 million from the University’s budget, would be recommending the creation of a $65 fee which would go to the Department of Athletics. … Perhaps sensing that $65 was excessive, the Corporation cut the final version to $64.

But why would a committee charged with cutting the budget recommend the creation of a new fee? Evidently, of the 12 subcommittees that investigated various areas of the University to trim down in light of the recession, the athletics subcommittee was “the only one that did not meet its savings goal.”

This strikes me as quite unfair. Apparently, every area of the University has to make its fair share of sacrifice — except the athletics department. This is despite the fact that a poll conducted by The Herald at the end of last semester found that half of students had not gone to a single sports game that semester, and in total nearly four-fifths had attended two or fewer such games.

Brown is not a “sports school” [Scathing Online Schoolmarm would remove the quotation marks.] like Duke, or even Cornell for that matter. Most students here don’t care about athletics — universities are for higher education, after all, not athletic endeavors…

But, as this new fee aptly demonstrates, athletics at Brown are a financial drain on the University’s budget. The question, then, is why in these tough times the Corporation decided essentially to exempt the athletics department from the shared sacrifice in which every other facet of this University was expected to take part…

I laud the Corporation and the administration for making this subsidy to athletics readily visible as a separate fee and not hiding it in the general tuition increase. This should spur a campus-wide debate about the place of athletics at our institution.

Should a financially non-self-sustaining program that is completely extraneous to the purpose of a university, and about which the vast majority of Brown students are apathetic at best, be sheltered from the tough decisions the rest of us have to make? …

Completely extraneous. Universities are not for athletic endeavors. UD admires this writer’s outrageously contrarian ways.

… this is excellent writing. Not the initial email from the student. The initial email’s okay, but nothing special.

Galloway’s response. Read that one.

Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.

Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.

Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.

An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.

***************************

I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn’t going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I’m busy doing the Lord’s work!]

I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source — a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that’s a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]

… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we’re right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she’s saying? I can’t. It’s absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …

… OrthoGynol.

… [Arguing before the Supreme Court,] University of Michigan law professor Richard D. Friedman [said in answer to] a question from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, … that [something] was “entirely orthogonal” to the argument he was making…

… Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stopped him.

“I’m sorry,” Roberts said. “Entirely what?”

“Orthogonal,” Friedman repeated, and then defined the word: “Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.”

“Oh,” Roberts replied.

Friedman again tried to continue, but he had caught the interest of Justice Antonin Scalia, who considers himself the court’s wordsmith. Scalia recently criticized a lawyer for using “choate” to mean the opposite of “inchoate,” a word that has created a debate in the dictionary world.

“What was that adjective?” Scalia asked Monday. “I liked that.”

“Orthogonal,” Friedman said.

“Orthogonal,” Roberts said.

“Orthogonal,” Scalia said. “Ooh.”…

A Baltimore Sun blogger is just the ulltimate.

The one thing you can always depend on when it comes to the classics, is that not everyone has actually read them, and those who have don’t remember much about them.

Everyone’s heard the jokes (and we’ve discussed the truths) that no one actually reads James Joyce’s “Ullysses.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at an opinion piece in the Texas A&M student newspaper.

Most Aggies pride themselves on the aesthetic appeal of campus. Both antiquated and modernly [Antiquated and modernly are weird choices. Antiquated sounds critical, and I don’t think the writer means to be critical. Modernly is a word, but a very awkward one. How about old and new?] designed [Drop designed.] buildings are surrounded by large open cobblestone walkways and courtyards dotted with old growth trees, at least for now. [The meaning of at least for now is obscure. Until the sun explodes and destroys the earth?] But this lovely campus has a dark side some will find hard to swallow. [The combination of abstract figurative language — light and dark — with the homely, physical hard to swallow is unlovely. Also, since the opinion piece is about to be about oral and other forms of sex, hard to swallow is not a good choice.] Often as most students go about their business, illicit and anonymous sex occurs publicly in the very buildings we call home.

A quick search through the personals section of Craigslist might [will would be better] reveal more of this world than readers [might] care to know. The use of study rooms in Evans for sex is better known, but these activities spillover into every corner of the University. To truly realize the extent of what goes on behind closed doors, visit the men’s bathroom on the second floor of the Academic Building.

A casual observer might never notice the walls separating the bathroom stalls across campus are made of incredibly hard material, largely stainless steel or some form of faux marble. But a few weeks ago, the walls of the aforementioned [Drop the evil aforementioned.] bathroom were replaced with thick plastic. In a shorter period of time a large 8″ hole along with several smaller peep-holes have been cut and melted into the walls. [New paragraph for next sentence.]  As early as the eighties, anonymous public sex has been happening on campus, and a lot of it. Even older generations of Aggies know about the reports and rumors about various places on campus being used for public anonymous sex. [Anonymous public sex, public anonymous sex — we’re getting redundant. Need to find different ways to say this.]

During an interview with a professor who wished to remain anonymous, the seriousness of these sexual exploits became obvious. The professor told a harrowing tales [Tales should be singular.] about one night in the late 80s, when he and his three young children were in the Academic building and went to use the restroom. Upon entering in [Drop in.] the restroom he encountered several males openly performing various sex acts. Needless to say he was mortified. In fact, the older classroom doors that [Drop that.] had grates in them making it very easy for one to bend wide enough to reach through and unlock the door for larger “engagements.” [Why quotation marks around engagements? Is he afraid we’ll think he’s talking about people thinking of marrying?] Decades later, the glory hole carved into the second floor of the bathroom of the same building tells the same story.

Efforts to curb public cuckolding [You can sort of see why he used cuckolding, which means the act of cheating on your spouse. Cuckolding sounds a lot like cockholding.] on campus seem to have been, at best, modestly successful. Online posts and personals provide countless chances for a homosexual encounter, and the details of even browsing these messages are too graphic to repeat or even believe. But since these sexual opportunities seem to attract largely the gay community, the situation begs the question: why Texas A&M? Our school is ranked the 8th most conservative school in America by the Princeton Review, and seems like an improbable location. To answer this question, I interviewed a poster of a similar craigslist.org advertisement. [The writer, with his hard to believe and improbable, reveals a rather loose grip on the situation.]

The poster spoke only on the condition of anonymity, and so will be referred to as Mike. Mike is 26 years old and a life long resident of Bryan and he does not, nor ever did, attend any higher education. Mike responded to the question of why Texas A&M campus with several explanations. The main point was that College Station is the perfect distance between Dallas, Austin and Houston. As for the location, it would not seem odd to anyone to see people of all ages walking around campus all hours of the night.

Also, perhaps due to the aforementioned conservative tendency of the towns, there seems to be a larger number of homosexuals in the area than the general population realizes. Most have not come out yet and many have no intention of doing so. [Wonder why not.] Mike added there is no fear that they will be caught, and because of that he is able to “meet up with” up to 15 new partners a semester. I concluded by asking Mike why this anonymous sex had to be on campus. Certainly there were more safe and sanitary places for men to enjoy each other’s company than a bathroom. Mike told me that there was more thrill in using public facilities and that he has a “good thing going” with no intention of ever stopping.

There will always be people like Mike who take advantage of an open door policy, [Comma should be a semi-colon.] a larger question is where are the University Police who patrol campus 24 hours a day? [Check the stalls.] Public sex has occurred long enough at A&M, and instead of simply fixing vandalized facilities, our fees and tuition should go towards stopping it. The University needs to put back those fancy non-permeable walls, and actually make their security employees do their job to protect the students, faculty, and staff from having to be subjected to these seedy and illegal sex acts.

************************************

By the way, the op/ed’s headline:

A HOLE DIFFERENT WORLD.

The Open Letter form is treacherous. Scathing Online Schoolmarm herself would never use it. If you’re going to use it, be careful.

SOS featured one of these years ago, by the poet Michael Blumenthal. Addressed to his creative writing class, it attained a certain notoriety. SOS admired its honesty, its capture of the emotional sleaze at the heart of some writing programs… But it carried the same sense of off-putting personal grievance most of these things carry, and therefore wasn’t really effective.

Here’s a more recent open letter to one’s students, with commentary in bracketed blue by SOS.

**********************

Empathy, Not Apathy
An open letter to my students.
By Karla Jay

[Terrible title. Lame. The words empathy and apathy are constantly coupled in writing, because they share athy, and because they’re both affective states. So the title’s a cliche. But worse than this, the title’s emotional. It’s mushy, without substance. And since the biggest problem with open letters tends to be their self-involved, self-righteous, prescriptive feel, the title does not bode well for the writer’s argument.]

[The writer begins with a summary of her letter:]

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the the street. The Internet has turned you away from the world. [The initial cliche is just asking for it. It’s old-fashioned to use cliches, and this writer has therefore copped to being archaic in her first phrase. She’s also factually incorrect. While this new technology won’t save the world, it has been very effective in a number of venues at gathering up large numbers of people.]

Dear Students,

Where have we—your elders-failed? [Do you really want the biblical elders? And do you really want the  where did I go wrong thing?  The hand-wringing Jewish Granny rhetorical question thing?]

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University uprisings. The students had many grievances, including the university’s attempt to build a private gym in a public park and its involvement in the war in Vietnam, as well as the war itself and the unpopular draft. This year marks the 40th anniversary of both the Stonewall uprising and Woodstock. My involvement with a radical feminist group, Redstockings, also began four decades ago. I emerged from these events and groups as a radical lesbian, feminist and pacifist, committed to a lifetime of global struggle and local issues. [Weird list. Begins with the private gym and then throws in the Vietnam War. After that begins the overstuffing which only makes things vaguer and less substantive — Woodstock, Stonewall, Redstockings, and patting herself on the back for her lifetime of struggle as a … and here’s another list – lesbian, feminist, pacifist. All of these things are good things. The point SOS is making involves the writer throwing all she’s got at the reader from the get-go.  It’s both intellectually confusing, in that there’s too much going on, and unpleasantly boastful: Look at all I’ve done! Look at how little you’re doing!]

Reflecting back [Drop back.] on these catalytic events, I wonder why you, my beloved students in women’s and gender studies at Pace University, aren’t out at the barricades in the fight against the interminable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, widespread genocidal acts against women, the lack of equality for the queer community and evildoing by the banking industry. [More undifferentiated listing. Most people – certainly most of this woman’s students – have complex affiliations, positions, commitments. They may oppose Iraq but not Afghanistan, may not believe that genocide is the right word to use in discussing women’s issues, may not believe bankers satanic. This early in the essay, it reads like personal articles of faith rather than arguments about the world directed to other people. Beloved embellishes our portrait of the writer as Sardonic Granny.]

I have tried to interest you in local crises through involvement in community outreach courses in which you work two hours or more per week in battered women’s shelters, at food pantries, in homeless shelters and with underprivileged children. I want you to become the next generation of activists. About one third of you enjoy your stint and get over feeling that community service is for felons. [This is good. Funny. Should have done the whole thing like that.] You stay on because you’ve bonded with your new community, knowing deep down that somehow you got more out of it than they did. (When I lost most of my eyesight and became a recipient of social services myself I found out that “it’s easier to give than to receive” is not a cliché but a hard truth.)

It seems to me, [Drop the comma.] that many of you don’t see current “issues” as connected to you. [Why the quotation marks around issues?] That nothing is “real” unless you’ve seen it on reality TV. [And why around real? Just makes it seem the writer herself questions the existence of reality.] The violence in the world can’t match the latest hit film. [Lame. See how abstract it is? Like the title? The writer can’t come down from her speech-making and talk in specific, human terms to people.] Since there is no draft, attending college is no longer a prelude to going to Iraq or Afghanistan, except for those on ROTC scholarships. You think feminism is passé. For those of you who are white, racism is over, too, because Obama is president. There is no gender or racial gap at your minimum wage jobs at Abercrombie, The Gap and as student aides, but you haven’t entered the real work force yet. There’s a Stonewall Coalition at the university, but you don’t need that because New York City has so many queer bars and you have the fake I.D. to get in. You’re oh-so-out, though most of you can’t apply the LGBTQ words to yourself in my queer courses. [Way, way bad. Again the listing, but here it’s transparent petulant complaint. The world isn’t the way I want it. People aren’t doing what I tell them to do. And if you think the election of a black president means shit you’ve got your head up your ass.]

I observe your lives. [At this point in the letter, the reader is correct to doubt this assertion.] You are smart and can do things via computer I can only dream of. But few of you read a newspaper or even online news sites. However, you are constantly texting and twittering—opening e-mail seems too dated. You want the news to be as brief and fast as Twitter; you would like classes to move along in some more amusing format like animé. You avoid doing research if it involves books; the text you read is on your cell.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that blogging or texting will get hundreds of thousands of people out in the street. If Martin Luther King, Jr. had blogged “I have a dream” on Facebook, how many would have twittered back, “Yeah, dude, I had a dream last night, too.”

Life online has turned you away from the world around you. This virtual life is more real to you than planet Earth. [The writer makes a clear distinction between the bracing reality of her world and the pointless narcissistic unreality of her students. But because she has failed to establish her world’s stronger reality in her opening paragraphs — because it seems in fact rather unreal, dated — the distinction fails.] As Taylor McHugh, one of my activist students put it, “Students feel apathy, not empathy.” [The writer has no empathy with her non-activist students — the sort of empathy that would be plenty critical, but would also exhibit nuanced understanding. So her apathy/empathy thing doesn’t come off.]

When I was a student, the mimeo and ditto machines were the closest thing we had to going viral. Maybe some of us went out because we had nothing else to do, but there was only so long we could stay inside scrutinizing our Ché Guevara and Madame Binh posters. It was also so much less dangerous back then to risk losing a college degree over an uprising. [I don’t understand this final sentence.]

I understand how different your world is from mine. [No, she seems not to.] I know how much harder many of your lives are than mine was 40 years ago. My total undergraduate education at Barnard cost approximately $16,000, which my scholarship covered part of. According to US News and World Report, for example, the average indebtedness of a 2008 Pace graduate was $29,622. The minimum wage jobs that I worked at for $4.00 per hour should be $16 by now, not $7. 25. I shared an apartment on the Upper West Side with three other students for under $75 each per month.

I know that some of you have one job on the weekends, another at night; some of you work late as waiters, showing up the next afternoon to class hardly able to stay awake. (I know one of you worked all night at a supermarket, studying by sitting between the plastic bag holders when there were no customers.)

[These paragraphs, while not very well-written, are good faith efforts to sympathize. They do not really empathize.]

Some of you help support a single mother or siblings, but most of you simply have other priorities. You want things: brand-name clothes and shoes, iPods, iPhones, flat-screen TVs, fast laptops. Acquiring them takes weeks of work. Your drug of choice is consumerism, and you are its slave: You are Gen C, not Gen Y. [Way to retain the one or two students still reading at this point. Call them slaves, drug addicts.]

If I blame anyone, though, it is my colleagues and those of us on the Left who fail to lead and involve you. [Sardonic Granny again. Spends hours beating you over the head for your failings and then shrinks back into the chair and pretends she thinks it’s really her fault.]

I could blame the recession, but even in times of prosperity, most faculty members teach and go home. For most, there’s no sense of responsibility to students outside the classroom. Some, mostly from the humanities and social sciences, supported an SDS uprising against Pace University’s former president a few years back and helped oust him. It’s easier and more lucrative for faculty to research, teach extra courses or become a consultant on the side. For some, teaching IS the other job. [Teaching, says SOS, primarily involves presentation and discussion of important ideas and phenomena. Dispatching students to the ramparts is something else.]

We on the Left haven’t done our jobs. Some organizations, such as the Left Forum, Third Wave Feminism and NARAL, encourage on-campus recruitment and participation. But we probably would be appalled if our students wanted to do more than simply support our efforts. [Why does she use the word appalled?] We have not encouraged them to become leaders, instead of followers. In our early twenties, many of us founded or led organizations. Now we are still leading them, while the young remain powerless. They are the new women, relegated to making sandwiches and answering phones or e-mail rather than taking charge. The more Left groups became organized, the less the young were to be found in the hierarchy. Many groups suffer from “founders’ syndrome,” in which the original leaders are still there and not planning to step aside any time soon.

If we cherish our goals more than our own prowess, it is time for activists and tenured radicals to see ourselves as mentors and partners rather than leaders. This is how I now approach education, but shifting my attitude meant that I had to relinquish much of my power in the classroom. And that in turn has forced the students to take charge of some of the teaching, to abandon their comfortable passivity. It was and still is scary for all of us to some degree, but my battle-wise colleagues and comrades need to understand not only how much we can teach the young, but also how much we can learn from them if we will only listen. [This is just confused. It’s just a very confused essay. It begins by establishing the writer’s belief that her students are confused and out of control — drug addicts, slaves. It ends by shifting its grievance from students to battle-wise colleagues. They need to understand how much they can learn from these lost souls… ]