This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, April 11, 2004

SUNDAY MORNING

is the title of one of America's great twentieth century poems, by Wallace Stevens, in which he follows the vague thoughts and sensations of a woman as she awakens on this day traditionally devoted to rest and spiritual meditation. A typical secular American, the woman is stirred occasionally, in an inchoate, rather frightened way, by thoughts of her mortality and by the question of life's ultimate meaning. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark/ Encroachment of that old catastrophe...

No one says you have to spend any time in your life reflecting upon your being-toward-death until you perhaps attain a little more focus and depth and emotional control than this woman; no one forces you - indeed everything in contemporary American cuture encourages you not to - think seriously about the ground of existence and maybe evolve some degree of clarity, nuance, and self-consciousness about it.

Yet even as Jacques Barzun notes that "as to what a college is, there is no agreement; it is not even discussed," we know that when the definition of a college is seriously discussed, the sort of descriptive language produced almost invariably features college as the locus of significant, sustained ontological thought on the part of students and faculty.

For instance, today's New York Times quotes the president emeritus of Dartmouth complaining that "students have been so programmed that they haven't had time to be reflective, which gets in the way of their education. ... [A] liberal education is about grappling with life's most important questions as preparation for the moral dilemmas and disappointments of life beyond the college years. The 'hyper-managed lives of contemporary students' get in the way of these questions, Mr. Freedman said." Nick Bromell, in Harper's Magazine [February 2002], writes that "the most fundamental value of higher education is the perspective a student gains by stepping outside the play of market forces and inhabiting, if only for four short years, what Yale president A.Bartlett Giamatti called 'a free and ordered space.'"

This difficult and often - as the University of Chicago's Faculty Handbook describes it - "upsetting" four-year activity of actual ongoing consideration of being is largely restricted to America's best institutions. Most of our thousands of colleges and universities make no pretense to intellectuality. Here, for instance, is the university webpage description of the English major at Penn State Altoona (a campus that recently fired a professor for being critical of one of its sillier programs):

The English major can provide students with highly marketable skills in critical thinking, writing, verbal communciation, and research. The major offers emphases in literature or writing. Students can incorporate a writing portfolio into their course of study, which will generate written examples of their work for prospective graduate schools or employers. All students complete the capstone seminar, in which they research and write a publishable paper that draws on their particular field of study. Internships allow students to discover whether or not a particular field is right for them and to develop skills and knowledge that many gain only after graduation.

It's all about how "highly marketable" your activity in an English department is, you see. Most American colleges and universities, writes David Harvey, are about "converting knowledge into information and students into consumers, and transforming the ability to think into a capacity for information processing." The serious consideration of human being demands human interaction with human intellectuals -- and the reason on-line learning is so popular in this country is because the words I just used at the beginning of this sentence are gibberish to the majority of university administrators, instructors, and students in this country.

Yet in the New York Times piece this morning, what the writer is noticing is the evaporation of serious intellectuality even at our best schools. Students are hyperbusy preprofessionals interested only in grades and the market from day one; they've come out of a hyper-active careerist milieu and that's really all they've ever known. A high-ranking administrator at Bennington College once described the student body there, writes Gillian Rose, as composed of "the cubs of our most successful predators." While shouting into their cell phones about real estate deals, the overworked parents of these students watched them, when younger, play hyperorganized soccer games.

For the half of these children whose parents got divorced, their lives became even more strictly organized -- they lived in two households, and their lives came to resemble the lives of traveling salesmen: pack for house one on Wednesday; repack to return to house two on Saturday...No time to rest and reflect at ease, and all in the context of emotional turmoil and bargaining...

The serious university should understand that it's admitting these sorts of people and ask itself whether it wants to deepen this desperate sense of hyperactivity (much of the activity an understandable escape from the inner chaos of a terribly depressing emotional landscape), or whether it wants to be a beacon of calm meditation not upon the self and its traumas but upon a world of thought and experience - embodied in philosophy, music, novels, history - broader than one's own, indeed liberatingly not at all one's own -- some of which might eventually be brought to bear on the question of how to conduct one's life.