On the uses of a liberal education mark edmundson

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SALMAN RUSHDIE ON WRITERS AND THEIR NATIONS

HARPER'S MAGAZINE/SEPTEMBER 1997 $3.95

ON THE USES OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students

By Mark Edmundson at the University of Virginia

II. As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor By Earl Shorris on New York's Lower East Side

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MEAN SEASON In Northern Ireland, the Troubles Come as Regular as Rain

By Adrian McKinty

THE LAKE A story by Anthony Giardina

Also: Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, and Mark Leyner ------------ + ------------

E S SAY

ON THE USES OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION

I. AS LITE ENTERTAINMENT FOR BORED COLLEGE STUDENTS

By Mark Edmundson at the University of Virginia

Today is evaluation day in my Freud class,and everything has changed. The classmeets twice a week, late in the after- noon, and the clientele, about fifty undergradu- ates, tends to drag in and slump, looking discon- solate and a little lost, waiting for a jump start. To get the discussion moving, they usually re- quire a joke, an anecdote, an off-the-wall ques- tion-When you were a kid, were your Hal- loween getups ego costumes, id costumes, or superego costumes! That sort of thing. But to- day, as soon as I flourish the forms, a buzzrises in the room. Today they write their assessments of the course, their assessments of me, and they are without a doubt wide-awake. "What is your evaluation of the instructor?" asks question number eight, entreating them to circle a num- ber between five (excellent) and one (poor, poor). Whatever interpretive subtlety they've acquired during the term is now out the win- dow. Edmundson: one to five, stand and shoot.

And they do. As I retreat through the door-I never stay around for this phase of the ritual-I look over my shoulder and see them toiling away like the devil's auditors. They're pitched into high writing gear, even the ones who struggle to squeeze out their journal en- tries word by word, stoked on a procedure they have by now supremely mastered. They're play- ing the informed consumer, letting the

- provider know where he's come through and where he's not quite up to snuff.

But why am I so distressed, bolting like a refugee out of my own classroom, where I usu- ally hold easy sway? Chances are the evalua-

. tions will be much like what they've been in the past-they'll be just fine. It's likely that I'll be commended for being "interesting" (and I am commended, many timesover) , that I'll be cited for my relaxed and tolerant ways (that happens, too), that my sense of humor and ca- pacity to connect the arcana of the subject matter with current culture will come in for some praise (yup}. I've been hassled this term, finishing a manuscript, and so haven't given their journals the attention I should have, and for that I'm called-quite civilly, though-to account. Overall, I get off pretty well.

Yet I have to admit that I do not much like the image of myself that emerges from these forms, the image of knowledgeable, humorous detachment and bland tolerance. I do not like the forms themselves, with their number rat- ings, reminiscent of the sheets circulated after the TV pilot has just played to its sample audi- ence in Burbank. Most of all I dislike the atti- tude of calm consumer expertise that pervades the responses. I'm disturbed by the serene be- lief that my function-and, more important, Freud's, or Shakespeare's, or Blake's-is to di-

Mark Edmundson is a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine. He is the author of Nightmare on Main Street, a study of the gothic in contemporary culture, forthcoming in October from Harvard University Press.

ESSAY 39

UNIVERSITY CULTURE, LIKE AMERICAN CULTURE WRIT LARGE,

IS EVER MORE DEVOTED TO CONSUMPTION AND ENTERTAINMENT,

TO THE USING AND USING UP OF GOODS AND IMAGES

vert, entertain, and interest. Observes one re- spondent, not at all unrepresentative: "Ed- mundson has done a fantastic job of presenting this difficult, important & controversial mater- ial in an enjoyable and approachable way."

Thanks but no thanks. I don't teach to amuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, to be merely interesting. When someone says she "enjoyed" the course-and that word crops up again and again in my evaluations- somewhere at the edge of my immediate com- placency I feel encroaching self-dislike. That is not at all what I had in mind. The off-the- wall questions and the sidebar jokes are meant as lead-ins to stronger stuff-in the case of the Freud course, to a complexly trag- ic view of life. But the affability and the one- liners often seem to be all that land with the students; their journals and evaluations leave me little doubt.

I want some of them to say that they've been changed by the course. I want them to measure themselves against what they've read. It's said that some time ago a Columbia University in- structor used to issue a harsh two-part question. One: What book did you most dislike in the course?Two: What intellectual or characterolog- ical flaws in you does that dislike point to? The hand that framed that question was surely heavy. But at least it compels one to see intellectual work as a confrontation between two people, stu- dent and author, where the stakes matter. Those Columbia students were being asked to relate the quality of an encounter, not rate the action as though it had unfolded on the big screen.

Why are my students describing the Oedipus complex and the death drive as being interest- ing and enjoyable to contemplate? And why am I coming across as an urbane, mildly ironic, endlessly affable guide to this intellectual terri- tory, operating without intensity, generous, funny, and loose?

Because that's what works. On evaluation day, I reap the rewards of my partial compli- ance with the culture of my students and, too, with the culture of the university as it now op- erates. It's a culture that's gotten little explo- ration. Current critics tend to think that liber- al-arts education is in crisis because universities have been invaded by professors with peculiar ideas: deconstruction, Lacanianism, feminism, queer theory. They believe that genius and tra-

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! SEPTEMBER 1997

- dition are out and that p.e, multiculturalism, and identity politics are in because of an inva- sion by tribes of tenured radicals, the late mil- lennial equivalents of the Visigoth hordes that cracked Rome's walls.

But mulling over my evaluations and then trying to take a hard, extended look at campus life both here at the University of Virginia and around the country eventually led me to some different conclusions. Tome, liberal-arts educa- tion is as ineffective as it is now not chiefly be- cause there are a lot of strange theories in the air. (Used well, those theories can be illurninat- ing.) Rather, it's that university culture, like American culture writ large, is, to put it crude- ly, ever more devoted to consumption and en- tertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. For someone growing up in Ameri- ca now, there are few available alternatives to the cool consumer worldview. My students didn't ask for that view, much less create it, but they bring a consumer weltanschauung to school, where it exerts a powerful, and largely unacknowledged, influence. If we want to un- derstand current universities, with their multi- ple woes, we might try leaving the realms of ex- pert debate and fine ideas and turning to the

classrooms and campuses, where a

E new kind of weather is gathering.rom time to time I bump into a colleague in the corridor and we have what I've come to think of as a Joan Lee fest. Joan Lee is one of the best students I've taught. He's endlessly cu- rious, has read a small library's worth, seen every movie, and knows all about showbiz and entertainment. For a class of mine he wrote an essay using Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus to analyze the pop group The Supremes. A trite, cultural-studies bonbon? Not at all. He said striking things about conceptions of race in America and about how they shape our ideas of beauty. When I talk with one of his other teachers, we run on about the general splen- dors of his work and presence. But what in- evitably follows a JL fest is a mournful reprise about the divide that separates him and a few other remarkable students from their contem- poraries. It's not that some aren't nearly as bright-in terms of intellectual ability, my stu- dents are all that I could ask for. Instead, it's that Joan Lee has decided to follow his inter-

ests and let them make him into a singular and rather eccentric man; in his charming way, he doesn't mind being at odds with most anyone.

It's his capacity for enthusiasm that sets [oon apart from what I've come to think of as the reigning generational style. Whether the students are sorority/fraternity types, grunge aficionados, piercer/tattooers, black or white, rich or middle class {alas, I teach almost no students from truly poor back- grounds}, they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days they display a light, ap- pealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there's little fire, little pas- sion to be found.

This point came home to me a few weeks ago when I was wandering across the university grounds. There, beneath a classically cast portico, were two students, male and female, having a rip-roaring argument. They were incensed, bellowing at each other, headstrong, con- fident, and wild. It struck me how rarely I see this kind of full-out feeling in students anymore. Strong emotional display is forbidden. When conflicts arise, it's generally understood that one of the parties will say something sarcastically propitiating ("whatever" often does it) and slouch away.

How did my students reach this peculiar state in which all passion seems to be spent? I think that many of them have imbibed their sense of self from consumer culture in general and from the tube in particular. They're the progeny of 100 cable channels and omni- present Blockbuster outlets. TV, Marshall McLuhan famously said, is a cool medium. Those who play best on it are low-key and nonassertive; they blend in. Enthusiasm, a la [oon Lee, quickly looks absurd. The form of character that's most appealing on TV is calmly self-interested though never greedy, attuned to the conventions, and ironic. Judicious timing is preferred to sudden self-assertion. The TV medium is inhospitable to inspiration, improvi-

Illustrations by Jeremy Wolff

sation, failures, slipups. All must run perfectly. Naturally, a cool youth culture is a marketing

bonanza for producers of the right products, who do all they can to enlarge that culture and keep it grinding. The Internet, TV, and magazines now teem with what I call persona ads, ads for Nikes and Reeboks and Jeeps and Blazers that don't so much endorse the capacities of the

product per se as show you what SOftof person you will be once you've acquired it. The Jeep ad that features hip, outdoorsy kids whipping a Fris- bee from mountaintop to mountaintop isn't so much about what Jeeps can do as it is about the kind of people who own them. Buy a Jeep and be one with them. The ad is of little conse- quence in itself, but expand its message expo- nentially and you have the central thrust of cur- rent consumer culture-buy in order to be.

ESSAY 41

Most of my students seem desperate to blend in, to look right, not to make a spectacle of themselves. (Do I have to tell you that those two students having the argument under the portico turned out to be acting in a role-play- ing game?) The specter of the uncool creates a subtle tyranny. It's apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, this Letterman-like, Tarantino- like cool, but once committed to it, you discov- er that matters are rather different. You're in-

new product, a new show, a new style, a new generation-it must be good. So maybe, even at the risk of winning the withered, brown lau- rels of crankdom, it pays to resist newness-wor- ship and cast a colder eye.

Praise for my students? I have some of that too. What my students are, at their best, is de- cent. They are potent believers in equality. They help out at the soup kitchen and volun- teer to tutor poor kids to get a stripe on their re-

sumes, sure. But they also want other people to have a fair shot. And in their commitment to fairness they are discerning; there you see them at their in- tellectual best. If I were on trial and innocent, I'd want them on the jury.

What they will not gen- erally do, though, is indict the current system. They won't talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and near- ly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash. For the pervad- ing view is the cool con- sumer perspective, where passion and strong admira- tion are forbidden. "To stand in awe of nothing, Numicus, is perhaps the one and only thing that can make a man happy and keep him so," says Horace in the Epistles, and I fear that his lines ought to hang as a motto over the university in this era of high consumer capitalism.

It's easy to mount one's high horse and blame the students for this state of

affairs. But they didn't create the present cul- ture of consumption. (It was largely my own generation, that of the Sixties, that let the counterculture search for pleasure devolve into a quest for commodities.) And they weren't the ones responsible, when they were six and seven and eight years old, for unplugging the TV set from time to time or for hauling off and kicking a hole through it. It's my generation of parents who sheltered these students, kept them away from the hard knocks of everyday life, making them cautious and overfragile, who demanded that their teachers, from grade school on, flat- ter them endlessly so that the kids are shocked

hibited, except on ordained occasions, from showing emotion, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. You're made to feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code will get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

Am I coming off like something of a crank here? Maybe. Oscar Wilde, who is almost never wrong, suggested that it is perilous to promiscu- ously contradict people who are much younger than yourself. Point taken. But one of the lessons that consumer hype tries to insinuate is that we must never rebel against the new, nev- er even question it. If it's new-a new need, a

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1997

STUDENTS WILL NOT INDICT THE EXIGENCIES OF CAPITALISM.

FOR THE PERVADING VIEW IS THE COOL CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE,

WHERE PASSION AND STRONG ADMIRATION ARE FORBIDDEN

if their college profs don't reflexively suck up to them.

Of course, the current generational style isn't simply derived from culture and environment. It's also about dollars. Students worry that tak- ing too many chances with their educations will sabotage their future prospects. They're aware of the fact that a drop that looks more and more like one wall of the Grand Canyon sepa- rates the top economic tenth from the rest of the population. There's a sentiment currently abroad that if you step aside for a moment, to write, to travel, to fall too hard in love, you might lose position permanently. We may be on a conveyor belt, but it's worse down there on the filth-strewn floor. So don't sound off, don't blow your chance.

But wait. I teach at the famously conservative University of Virginia. Can I extend my view from Charlottesville to encompass the whole country, a whole generation of college students? I can only say that I hear comparable stories about classroom life from colleagues everywhere in America. When I visit other schools to lec- ture, I see a similar scene unfolding. There are, of course, terrific students everywhere. And they're all the better for the way they've had to strive against the existing conformity. At some of the small liberal-arts colleges, the tradition of strong engagement persists. But overall, the stu- dents strike me as being sweet and sad, hovering in a nearly suspended animation.

Too often now the pedagogical challenge is to make a lot from a little. Teaching Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," you ask for comments. No one responds. So you call on Stephen. Stephen: "The sound, this poem real- ly flows." You: "Stephen seems interested in the music of the poem. We might extend his comment to ask if the poem's music coheres with its argument. Are they consistent? Or is there an emotional pain submerged here that's contrary to the poem's appealing melody?" All right, it's not usually that bad. But close. One friend describes it as rebound teaching: they proffer a weightless comment, you hit it back for all you're worth, then it comes dribbling out again. Occasionally a professor will try to ex- plain away this intellectual timidity by describ- ing the students as perpetrators of postmodern irony, a highly sophisticated mode. Every- thing's a slick counterfeit, a simulacrum, so by

- no means should any phenomenon be taken se- riously. But the students don't have the urbane, Oscar Wilde-type demeanor that should go with this view. Oscar was cheerful, funny, con- fident, strange. (Wilde, mortally ill, living in a Paris flophouse: "My wallpaper and I are fight- ing a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.") This generation's style is consider- ate, easy to please, and a touch depressed.

Granted, you might say, the kids come to school immersed in a consumer mentality- they're good Americans, after all-but then the university and the professors do everything in their power to fight that dreary mind-set in the interest of higher ideals, right? So it should

be. But let us look at what is actually

O coming to pass.ver the past few years, the physical lay- out of my university has been changing. To put it a little indecorously, the place is looking more and more like a retirement spread for the young. Our funds go to construction, into new dorms, into renovating the student union. We have a new aquatics center and ever-improving gyms, stocked with StairMasters and Nautilus machines. Engraved on the wall in the gleam- ing aquatics building is a line by our founder, Thomas Jefferson, declaring that everyone ought to get about two hours' exercise a day. Clearly even the author of the Declaration of Independence endorses the turning of his uni- versity into a sports-and-fitness emporium.

But such improvements shouldn't be surpris- ing. Universities need to attract the best (that is, the smartest and the richest) students in or- der to survive in an ever more competitive market. Schools want kids whose parents can pay the full freight, not the ones who need scholarships or want to bargain down the tu- ition costs. If the marketing surveys say that the kids require sports centers, then, trustees willing, they shall have them. In fact, as I be- gan looking around, I came to see that more and more of what's going on in the university is customer driven. The consumer pressures that beset me on evaluation day are only a part of an overall trend.

From the start, the contemporary universi- ty's relationship with students has a solicitous, nearly servile tone. As soon as someone enters his junior year in high school, and especially if

ESSAY 43

THE SOCRATIC METHOD SEEMS TOO JAGGED FOR CURRENT

SENSIBILITIES. STUDENTS ARE INTIMIDATED IN CLASS; THE THOUGHT OF BEING

EMBARRASSED IN FRONT OF THE GROUP FILLS THEM WITH DREAD

he's living in a prosperous zip code, the infor- mational material-the advertising-comes flooding in. Pictures, testimonials, videocas- settes, and CD ROMs (some bidden, some not) arrive at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the student and his tuition cash. The freshman-to-be sees pho- tos of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate phys-ed facilities; of fine dining rooms; of ex- pertly kept sports fields; of orchestras and dra- ma troupes; of students working alone (no overbearing grown-ups in range), peering with high seriousness into computers and micro- scopes; or of students arrayed outdoors in at- tractive conversational garlands.

Occasionally-but only occasionally, for we usually photograph rather badly; in appearance we tend at best to be styleless-there's a profes- sor teaching a class. (The college catalogues I received, by my request only, in the late Sixties were austere affairs full of professors' creden- tials and course descriptions; it was clear on whose terms the enterprise was going to un- fold.) A college financial officer recently put matters to me in concise, if slightly melodra- matic, terms: "Colleges don't have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing depart- ments." Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come in thinking that the Freud and Shakespeare she had signed up to study were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part the an- swer is a matter of demographics and (surprise) of money. Aided by the G.I. bill, the college- going population in America dramatically in- creased after the Second World Wat. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them, schools continued to grow. Universities expand easily enough, but with tenure locking faculty in for lifetime jobs, and with the gener- al reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it's not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through-like a fat meal digested by a boa con- strictor-the colleges turned to energetic pro- motional strategies to fill the empty chairs. And suddenly college became a buyer's market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken more and more into account. That usually meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 1997

- no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.

Just as universities must compete with one another for students, so must the individual de- partments. At a time of rank economic anxi- ety, the English and history majors have to contend for students against the more success- insuring branches, such as the sciences and the commerce school. In 1968, more than 21 per- cent of all the bachelor's degrees conferred in America were in the humanities; by 1993, that number had fallen to about 13 percent. The humanities now must struggle to attract stu- dents, many of whose parents devoutly wish they would study something else.

One of the ways we've tried to stay attrac- tive is by loosening up. We grade much more softly than our colleagues in science. In Eng- lish, we don't give many Ds, or Cs for that mat- ter. (The rigors of Chem 101 create almost as many English majors per year as do the splen- dors of Shakespeare.) A professor at Stanford recently explained grade inflation in the hu- manities by observing that the undergraduates were getting smarter every year; the higher grades simply recorded how much better they were than their predecessors. Sure.

.Along with softening the grades, manyhu- manities departments have relaxed major re- quirements. There are some good reasons for in- troducing more choice into curr icula and requiring fewer standard courses. But the move, like many others in the university now, jibes with a tendency to serve-and not challenge- the students. Students can also float in and out of classesduring the first two weeks of each term without making any commitment. The common name for this time span-shopping period- speaks volumes about the consumer mentality that's now in play. Usually, too, the kids can drop courses up until the last month with only an innocuous "w" on their transcripts. Does a course look too challenging? No problem. Take it pass-fail. A happy consumer is, by definition, one with multiple options, one who can always have what he wants. And since a course is some- thing the students and their parents have

bought and paid for, why can't they.l do with it pretty much as they please? ....L~ sure result of the university's widening elective leeway is to give students more power

over their teachers. Those who don't like you can simply avoid you. If the clientele dislikes you en masse, you can be left without students, period. My first term teaching I walked into my introduction to poetry course and found it in- habited by one student, the gloriously named Bambi Lynn Dean. Bambi and I chatted ami- ably awhile, but for all that she and the plea- sure of her name could offer, I was fast on the way to meltdown. It was all a mistake, luckily, a problem with the scheduling book. Everyone was waiting for me next door. But in a dozen years of teaching I haven't forgotten that feel- ing of being ignominiously marooned. For it happens to others, and not always because of scheduling glitches. I've seen older colleagues go through hot embarrassment at not having enough students sign up for their courses: they graded too hard, demanded too much, had be- liefs too far out of keeping with the existing disposition. It takes only a few such instances to draw other members of the professoriat fur- ther into line.

And if what's called tenure reform-which generally just means the abolition of tenure-is broadly enacted, professors will be yet more vulnerable to the whims of their customer-students. Teach what pulls the kids in, or walk. What about entire departments that don't deliver? If the kids say no to Latin and Greek, is it time to dissolve clas- sics? Such questions are being enter- tained more and more seriously by uni- versity administrators.

How does one prosper with the present clientele? Many of the most successful professors now are the ones who have "decentered" their classrooms. There's a new emphasis on group projects and on computer-generated exchanges among the students. What they seem to want most is to talk to one another. A classroom now is fre- quently an "environment," a place highly con- ducive to the exchange of existing ideas, the students' ideas. Listening to one another, stu- dents sometimes change their opinions. But what they generally can't do is acquire a new vocabulary, a new perspective, that will cast is- sues in a fresh light.

The Socratic method-the animated, some- times impolite give-and-take between student and teacher-seems too jagged for current sensi- bilities. Students frequently come to my office to tell me how intimidated they feel in class; the thought of being embarrassed in front of the group fills them with dread. I remember a stu- dent telling me how humiliating it was to be cor- rected by the teacher, by me. So I asked the logi- cal question: "Should I let a major factual error

go by so as to save discomfort?" The student-a good student, smart and earnest-said that was a tough question. He'd need to think about it.

Disturbing? Sure. But I wonder, are we really getting students ready for Socratic exchange with professors when we push them off into vast lecture rooms, two and three hundred to a class, sometimes face them with only grad stu- dents until their third year, and signal in our myriad professorial ways that we often have much better things to do than sit in our offices and talk with them? How bad will the student- faculty ratios have to become, how teeming the lecture courses, before we hear students right-

eously complaining, as they did thirty years ago, about the impersonality of their schools, about their decline into knowledge factories? "This is a firm," said Mario Savio at Berkeley during the Free Speech protests of the Sixties, "and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, ... then ... the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material. But we're a bunch of raw material that don't mean . .. to be made into any product."

Teachers who really do confront students, who provide significant challenges to what they believe, can be very successful, granted. But sometimes such professors generate more than a little trouble for themselves. A contro- versial teacher can send students hurrying to the deans and the counselors, claiming to have been offended. ("Offensive" is the preferred term of repugnance today, just as "enjoyable" is the summit of praise.) Colleges have

ESSAY 45

brought in hordes of counselors and deans to make sure that everything is smooth, serene, unflustered, that everyone has a good time. To the counselor, to the dean, and to the univer- sity legal squad, that which is normal, healthy, and prudent is best.

An air of caution and deference is every- where. When my students come to talk with me in my office, they often exhibit a Francis-

sleep.) They are almost unfailingly polite. They don't want to offend me; I could hurt them, savage their grades.

Naturally, there are exceptions, kids I chat animatedly with, who offer a joke, or go on about this or that new CD (almost never a book, no). But most of the traffic is genially sleepwalking. I have to admit that I'm a touch wary, too. I tend to hold back. An un-

guarded remark, a joke that's taken to be off-col- or, or simply an uncom- pr