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.

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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… ]