Last week I finally decided to go to my history class. I hadn’t been in nearly two weeks, despite the absence policy, for a few reasons: first, because I am a senior and refuse to accept the reality that I am still obligated to attend classes when I do not wish to; second, because the class is at 9 a.m. and I rarely go to bed early enough to feel like getting up in time for it; and, third, because whenever I ignore the first two reasons and do go to class, no sooner do I take my seat than I regret my decision and resume a study of the insides of my eyelids, an activity of which I never tire and which is, I think, more profitable than listening to the lecture.
But last Friday, remembering that I had turned in a paper the week before (via Bb), I decided to make an appearance. After all, I reasoned, it is a fairly large class and if by chance the professor hasn’t noticed my absence yet, I don’t want to bring attention to myself by not coming to retrieve my paper.
To my relief, she had not yet handed them all back. After class I came up and got my paper and flipped to the last page to see what she’d given me. The assignment was one of those ridiculous scenarios asking you to address a book-worthy topic in 4-5 pages. I’d written on the American Revolution which, being an American and a senior in college, I figured I could expound upon without much effort or forethought. I thought I’d done all right.
But instead of a grade, on the last page I found a note—“Please see me after class.” I approached her; she gave me a coldly polite smile. “Could you come up to my office?” she asked.
“Well,” I thought as I walked upstairs, “it’s no mystery what this is about. Guess she noticed my absences.”
We went up to her office and sat down facing each other. I smiled insincerely. She gestured to my paper. “In some ways this was an amazing paper. Very interesting.”
I nodded, trying to understand what she meant by those adjectives.
“But certain… certain words and phrases… raise the question of how much of it is your work.”
My head reeled. Up to that point I had still been half-asleep; suddenly I felt I had just taken three shots of espresso, and I swallowed accordingly, feeling my face redden. I realized this probably made me appear even guiltier, so I grew still more uncomfortable.
“So,” she continued, “I just wanted to find out a little about your background.”
I gave a brief history of my education—English-turned-Spanish major, with a lot of history courses in between. Apparently she wasn’t satisfied.
“Well, like I said, when I read your paper, some bells went off. I gave it to another professor, and some bells went off there, too. So, I wanted to talk to you in private and ask…”— she cocked her head— “is there anything you want to tell me about your paper?”
I stared at her a moment, thinking. She had asked me as if she knew beyond any doubt that I was guilty and was only giving me a chance to make a fool of myself by trying to lie about it. The beauty of the situation, I realized, was that I had nothing whatsoever to hide. The paper was entirely my work and she had nothing on me. Part of me wanted to draw this out and really make a scene, just to glory in her mistake.
“No, nothing at all,” I answered finally, and then asked her what, specifically, led her to believe I was plagiarizing.
“Well, it’s just not the kind of writing you normally see in a 400-level history class, when students are still trying to find their…style.”
I nodded. Her confidence in my incredibility stirred equal doses of flattery, amusement, and burning anger in me.
“For instance,” she said, sitting up and scanning the paper, “what does the word ‘ontological’ mean?”
I told her what it meant, and then said “Look, I can guarantee this is my work. I can write well. If there’s nothing else I can do, I can write.”
She still didn’t seem convinced so I offered to let her see some of my other essays.
“No, no,” she said, “I’ll take your word for it.” Then, clearing her throat, she leaned forward and looked at me. “Now. What will happen is we’ll pretend we never had this conversation. I will go back and grade your paper for content and argument, so I can’t guarantee an ‘A,’ but I don’t think you’ll have to worry about failing.”
She looked at me as if she had just offered me a once-in-a-lifetime deal.
“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Go screw yourself,” and getting up from my chair, I calmly walked over to her bookcase and shook it violently by the shoulders till it vomited all of its contents onto the floor. Then I balled up my paper and bounced it off her face, picked up my chair, and chucked it through her office window.
Not really, though I certainly considered it. Actually, I told her I didn’t blame her for thinking as she did.
What’s sad about this situation is not that she suspected me of plagiarism simply because I write a good paper. What’s sad is that my paper was not, in fact, that great; it only seemed so because everyone else’s was, at best, completely ordinary; at worst, completely inarticulate. I know this because of her reaction, and because I have read other people’s papers plenty before, and because in almost every class I take I get this sort of reaction, though to be accused of plagiarism was something new to me. The thing is, fifty years ago there would be nothing exceptional about my writing.
This entire incident only served to confirm my suspicion that our higher education is a joke. Believe me, I do not harbor any conviction that I am smarter than everyone else. I merely think that as a senior in college I am right where I should be, intellectually speaking—that is, I can write proper English and have a reasonably solid understanding of literature, philosophy, science, math, and history.
No—I take that back. I am ashamed to say that despite great effort, passion, and a deep sense of an obligation to be intelligent, I still have not read the great works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, Hume, Nietzsche; or most of Shakespeare; or War & Peace, Crime & Punishment, Portrait of a Lady, Return of the Native, Ulysses, or so many of the great works of Western thought that were once par-for-the-course in a liberal education. And the few students who have read these works and the many others deemed “classics” have been so inculcated with postmodern precepts and have written so many essays on them that any instinctive enjoyment or truly deep thoughts on them will remain just that—deep, buried under the shallow soil heaped upon them by academia, in which nothing new or fresh can take root despite the bottomless pool of knowledge lying just below it.
This is, of course, why so many of our greatest, most original writers and thinkers never began a college education or, if they did begin one, cut it short: because they recognized its superficiality and had no use for it. This problem is nothing new, but now things are undoubtedly worse than they were then. Now, when we have more universities than ever in our history and more people going to them, college graduates are somehow less literate than ever. As a British historian, G.M. Trevelyan, put it, “Education…has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.” This creates a vicious cycle, because many of those graduates go on to receive another degree, and another, as many as it takes until they can get a teaching job with a nice cozy office, where they can fill shelves with all the books they’ve never read and frame all the pieces of signed paper they’ve acquired to authorize themselves as the very thing they are not, which is, in two words, intellectually accomplished. Thereafter they fill their days writing grants for research funding so they can write “scholarly” articles and publish “scholarly” books—“scholarly” being an adjective used here to describe obscure works with comically arcane titles like “postmodern pre-feminist racial sexuality in Maldivian literature,” inevitably published by University presses and read only by other professors who also write books that nobody reads.
To me, this is somewhat akin to a person filling their house with bought taxidermy and, when a new visitor, seeing the mounted heads of moose and deer, says, “Oh, you’re a hunter!,” replying: “Oh, yes. Well, I’ve never actually killed anything myself, but I’m extremely intrigued by it and I’ve read all about it. And I have this theory about hunting…Actually, I wrote a dissertation on it. So, you see, I may as well be a hunter,” and so on, until the visitor dozes and the already-dead moose head jumps off the wall to its death. Maybe the person even has framed pictures of trips they’ve taken to see where great hunters once lived and hunted.
And so what we have in the modern university is an entire institution of these non-hunting, hunting enthusiasts, who devote entire classes to a study of hunting; of its colorful history; of its great innovators; of all the different kinds of hunted species, and where those species lived, and how; of what weapons and methods hunters have used, and of how they have overhunted certain species, and abused others; and of all the psychological theories that have been developed on hunters and why they hunt…and all of this taught by people who have never even fired a gun or, if they have, couldn’t hit a damn thing with it… so that in the end no one wants to hunt anyway, and everyone knows everything there is to know about hunting except how to actually do it and do it well.
Now I realize that of all the people who are reading this article more than a few have no idea what I am talking about, and that not everyone will have followed all of what I am saying; but those who have followed will understand that I am talking mainly about the humanities departments, the English department in particular, and that hunters, in this case, are writers, or thinkers, and hunting is writing. And very likely many of those who have followed my argument will shake their heads and deny it and say, “This is absurd, this doesn’t make any sense.” They are exactly right, though it is not absurd because it is wrong, but because it is true.
I see it every day in my classroom discussions. Last week I listened amazed as my Spanish teacher explained to my group partners what similes and metaphors are and how to look for them in a poem (despite spending most of their lives in classrooms, teachers, especially teachers of foreign languages, are still under the delusion that working in groups fosters an exchange of good ideas, when in reality all that get exchanged are a few awkward glances and half-baked clichés). One day I awoke for a few seconds from a mid-class nap to a picture of The Declaration of Independence on the overhead projector and my history teacher saying, in perfect seriousness, “Now, some of you might say that this document is old and outdated because it’s over 200 years old; but I’m going to argue that it’s a pretty important document.” I looked around at the freshmen taking diligent notes. “Wow,” I felt like shouting, “Great scott! How absolutely revelatory! I am so glad I woke up early to come hear you tell me that the Declaration of Independence is a ‘pretty important document.’ I would never have realized it otherwise.” Then I went back to sleep.
A few classes later the same professor was talking about the First World War and the advent of chemical warfare and mustard gas. After giving a brief overview of its effects, she thought to make a joke: “I don’t think I could eat mustard for a while after that, right? No more mustard on your sandwiches!” Silence…save for the sound of her joke shattering on the floor. “Maybe that was a little light,” she conceded. A little light? If I were not already offended by the taste of mustard, I would certainly have lost any appetite for it after that piece of humor. I am the last person to cry out for political correctness, and this has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with stupidity and, even more than that, with the ever-increasing gap between what is said in the classroom and what goes on in real life.
It’s more than just the bad jokes, which are just one of many manifestations of a larger deficiency of wit; it’s a general thoughtlessness and inarticulateness that I see especially among younger professors, many of whom cannot deliver a sentence without saying “uhh” or “umm” at least a few times. Of course I understand the difficulty of speaking coherently in front of a room full of people, but if you can’t do it, find another line of work. In my college experience I have had maybe three professors to whom I thought it worthwhile to listen, and they were all old or older. There are sometimes exceptions, of course, but in general this pattern only gives more evidence of the late decline in the quality of higher education.
This brings be back to my beginning and to the issue of plagiarism. A week after that “step into my office” episode, I decided to go to class again. This time the professor announced in a very grave and disappointed tone that the midterm (which was given online) would take longer than expected to get back to us because she had found a case of blatant copy-and-paste plagiarism.
“There is no excuse for that,” many would be quick to say, and they would be right. But there is an explanation. It is my conviction that if these kids were receiving a good education— if they were assigned entire books to read rather than excerpts of essays in an anthology, and if they had learned at some point how to formulate an original idea and put the proper words to it, then they would not feel cornered and defenseless when confronted with the pathetic questions teachers use to test students these days.
I hope, again, that I have not given the impression of believing myself smarter than, or superior to, other students, because that is simply not the case. On the contrary, it is that I fully realize my ignorance and cannot understand for my life how people can sit around and talk about philosophy and literature and take themselves so seriously without having read much of the Western canon. Because when I do read those works, all I can do during class is picture the author sitting amongst us in utter disgust or boredom at our petty conjecturing and theorizing.
There are for me only a few moments of genuine education each day, and they are nearly never in the classroom. They occur in conversation with friends, and in the brief respite before I sleep at night, when I listen to the whispered desires of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, still sharp and fresh as first-told secrets, not stale from too much airing in a thought-deprived classroom or blunted from dull regulated discussion. I urge you to sit back and listen to what is being said in your classes- chances are it is either some pedantry about the evils of intolerance, a stretched connection between an old text and pop culture, or an amusing incoherency containing at least three instances of the word “like” or the phrase “I mean,” or both, and pronounced in the valley-girl accents that seem to have infiltrated a majority of the female sex and some males besides. Please, do not say something just for the sake of a participation grade, which is not a reflection of your contributions to the class but a measure of your success in abating the teacher’s insecurities on a daily basis. And, finally, if you have any true intellectual curiosity, do not content yourself with earning the approval of a self-important system.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,” wrote Mark Twain. Every day that I go to class I find myself wishing I could say the same.
I completely agree that grammar is not taught earlier on, which was what my criticism of education was. The problem is not necessarily at the college level, but that we are not adequately learned by the time we get to college. I was fortunate enough to go to a public school that taught Latin and I took it for four years there. I will completely agree with you, in today's education, that is one of the only ways to learn grammar well. It is definitely where I learned most of my grammar.
I appreciate what you're saying. Let's take your skating analogy as an example. When I read that sentence, almost immediately I was reminded of two sections of two books I have recently been reading. The first is a sentence from E.L. Doctorow's latest novel, Homer & Langley. I am not a big fan of Mr. Doctorow's philosophies but a sentence on the first page of his novel has for some reason stuck with me and just now resurfaced. The scene is being narrated by a man who is gradually losing his sight and, in order to keep track of how much his sight dims daily, begins going to a lake in Central Park where people ice skate:
"All I could see were these phantom shapes of the ice skaters floating past me on a field of ice, and then the white ice, that last light, went gray and then altogether black, and then all my sight was gone though I could hear clearly the scoot scut of the blades on the ice, a very satisfying sound, a soft sound though full of intention, a deeper tone than you'd expect made by the skate blades, perhaps for having sounded the resonant basso of the water under the ice, scoot scut, scoot scut." The second section is a scene from Anna Karenina in which a character named Levin goes down to a skating lake to find the young woman with whom he is deeply in love, and who may or may not love him. He is a habitually nervous man and he is trying at this moment to calm himself and gain composure so that he can skate out to her and comport himself calmly and smoothly: "He stood up, took off his overcoat, and having given himself a start on the rough ice near the shelter, glided down to the smooth surface of the lake, increasing and diminishing his speed and shaping his course as if by volition only. He approached Kitty timidly, but her smile again tranquillized him." A few paragraphs later, Levin has openly admitted his feelings to Kitty, only to receive an awkward cold shoulder. One senses, reading this scene, that a tension is building up inside of Levin and that he is on the verge of trying something desperate. That desperate action will take place later when he asks her to be his wife, but for a present release of energy he decides to attempt a new skating trick, one that goes over well for him in comparison to the larger, clumsier leap he will make a few pages later when he pops the question: "Levin went up the path as far back as he could get up speed, and then slid downwards, balancing himself with his arms in this unaccustomed movement. He caught his foot on the last step, but, scarcely touching the ice with his hand, made a violent effort, regained his balance, and skated away laughing." Now those are three beautiful passages triggered by the mere mention of ice skating as metaphor- beautiful for their perfect representations of the rhythms of skating against the parallel paces of life's isolated vignettes, and beautiful for their place in the larger contexts of the respective stories. My point here is that, had I relied only on the studies required of me for academics, I would have read neither of these books and your analogy would never have had the dimension or depth or emotional weight that it had for me because of the associations that surfaced when I read it. Here is the problem: the average college student who does little or no more intellectual work than is required of him/her either: (a) has not read either of those books because they were not required, or (b) has read them, but was likely too busy looking for things like "misogynistic marginality in Anna Karenina,” or whatever the assigned essay topic happened to be, to notice the fine art in those sentences and their significance in the story as a whole. As a result, most students will go on skating, as you say, and have a splendid time and even get some good exercise, and they will hear the "scoot-scut" of their blades against the ice, but for them it will be a shallower and flatter sound, and the whole experience will never satisfy or move them as deeply as it could have if they had "sounded the resonant basso of the water under the ice."
1st Student: “Reason!” Teacher: “Yes, that’s right!”
2nd Student: “Vol-tay-ur!” Teacher: “Voltaire! Yes!”
3rd Student: “Day-car!” Teacher: “Descartes! Great job!” While I sat there ducking these clumsy lobs and frantic tosses it occurred to me that of the few people in the room who had read any of Descartes or Voltaire, chances were that what they’d read was limited to a small excerpt required of them in introduction to philosophy. Now if you want to talk about people not being qualified to say things, I suggest we start right here, because this is essentially the daily routine in the average liberal arts classroom.
I completely agree with you here. I am a junior currently in 2 400 level classes and 1 700 level class. The pace at which the 400 level classes move, is even too slow for most of the freshman in attendance to the class. I would lean to think the decline is in earlier education, however. We do not receive adequate preparation for college because the teachers are looked down upon for using age old methods that worked, such as strict memorization. They are more concerned about merging work and play. I actually had a debate with someone last week about students' unpreparedness for college. I have a class where we have to turn in a paper hand written. The class was complaining about grammar and spelling. I commented that anyone who did not know basic grammar and spelling should not be at a university. This student contradicted me saying, "But basic grammar is hard!" I think that adequately sums up where our education is going.