Why Edmundson is so critical of modern day higher education.

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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

-----------+ -----------

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- prehended comment can lead to difficulties. I keep it literal. They scare me a little, these kind and melancholy students, who themselves seem rather frightened of their own lives.

Before they arrive, we ply the students with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get here, flattery and nonstop entertainment are available, if that's what they want. And when they leave? How do we send our students out into the world? More and more, our ad- ministrators call the book- ing agents and line up one or another celebrity to ush- er the graduates into the millennium. This past spring,Kermit the Frogwon himself an honorary degree at Southampton College on Long Island; Bruce Willis and Yogi Berra took cre- dentials away at Montclair

State; Arnold Schwarzenegger scored at the Uni- versity of Wisconsin-Superior. At Wellesley, Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address. (Wellesley-one of the most rigorous academic colleges in the nation.) At the University of Ver- mont, Whoopi Goldberg laid down the word. But why should a worthy administrator contract the likes of Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, or Robert Hughes-someone who might actual- ly say something, something disturbing, some- thing "offensive"-when he can get what the parents and kids apparently want and what the newspapers will softly commend-more lite en- tertainment, more TV?

Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students-steeped in consumer culture before going off to school, treated as potent customers

can humility. "Do you have a moment!" "I know you're busy. I won't take up much of your time." Their presences tend to be very light; they almost never change the temperature of the room. The dress is nondescript: clothes are in earth tones; shoes are practical-s-cross-train- ers, hiking boots, work shoes, Dr. Martens, with now and then a stylish pair of raised-sole boots on one of the young women. Many, male and female both, peep from beneath the bills of monogrammed baseball caps. Quite a few wear sports, or even corporate, logos, sometimes on one piece of clothing but occasionally (and dis- concertingly) on more. The walk is slow; speech is careful, sweet, a bit weary, and with- out strong inflection. (After the first lively week of the term, most seem far in debt to

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1997

BEFORE THEY ARRIVE, WE PLY STUDENTS WITH LUSCIOUS ADS, GUARANTEEING

THEM A CROSS BETWEEN SUMMER CAMP AND LOTUSLAND. ONCE HERE, FLATTERY

AND NONSTOP ENTERTAINMENT ARE AVAILABLE, IF THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT

by the university well before their date of ar- rival, then pandered to from day one until the morning of the final kiss-off from Kermit or one of his kin-are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be placidly enjoyed or languidly cast down? Given the way universities are now administered (which is more and more to say, given the way that they are currently marketed), is it a shock that the kids don't come to school hot to learn, unable to bear their own ignorance? For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent-which is much different than simple depression-seems to me to be a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the con- fidence to acknowledge what would be

their most precious asset for learn-

N ing: their ignorance.ot long ago, I asked my Freud class a question that, however hoary, never fails to so- licit intriguing responses: Who are your he- roes? Whom do you admire? After one remark- able answer, featuring T. S. Eliot as hero, a series of generic replies rolled in, one gray wave after the next: my father, my best friend, a doctor who lives in our town, my high school history teacher. Virtually all the heroes were people my students had known personal- ly, people who had done something local, spe- cific, and practical, and had done it for them. They were good people, unselfish people, these heroes, but most of all they were people who had delivered the goods.

My students' answers didn't exhibit any philosophical resistance to the idea of great- ness. It's not that they had been primed by their professors with complex arguments to combat genius. For the truth is that these stu- dents don't need debunking theories. Long be- fore college, skepticism became their habitual mode. They are the progeny of Bart Simpson and David Letterman, and the hyper-cool ethos of the box. It's inane to say that theoriz- ing professors have created them, as many con- servative critics like to do. Rather, they have substantially created a university environment in which facile skepticism can thrive without being substantially contested.

Skeptical approaches have potential value. If you have no all-encompassing religious faith, no faith in historical destiny, the future of the

- West, or anything comparably grand, you need to acquire your vision of the world somewhere. If it's from literature, then the various visions literature offers have to be inquired into skepti- cally. Surely it matters that women are deni- grated in Milton and in Pope, that some novel- istic voices assume an overbearing godlike authority, that the poor are, in this or that writer, inevitably cast as clowns. You can't buy all of literature wholesale if it's going to help draw your patterns of belief.

But demystifying theories are now overused, applied mechanically. It's alliogocentrism, pa- triarchy, ideology. And in this the student en- vironment-Iaid-back, skeptical, knowing-is, I believe, central. Full-out debunking is what plays with this clientele. Some have been do- ing it nearly as long as, if more crudely than, their deconstructionist teachers. In the context of the contemporary university, and cool con- sumer culture, a useful intellectual skepticism has become exaggerated into a fundamentalist caricature of itself. The teachers have buckled to their students' views.

At its best, multiculturalism can be attrac- tive as well-deployed theory. What could be more valuable than encountering the best work of far-flung cultures and becoming a cit- izen of the world? But in the current con- sumer environment, where flattery plays so well, the urge to encounter the other can de- volve into the urge to find others who em- body and celebrate the right ethnic origins. So we put aside the African novelist Chinua Achebe's abrasive, troubling Things Fall Apart and gravitate toward hymns on Africa, cradle of all civilizations.

What about the phenomenon called politi- cal correctness? Raising the standard of civility and tolerance in the university has been-who can deny it?-a very good thing. Yet this ad- mirable impulse has expanded to the point where one is enjoined to speak well-and only well-of women, blacks, gays, the disabled, in fact of virtually everyone. And we can owe this expansion in many ways to the student culture. Students now do not wish to be criticized, not in any form. (The culture of consumption nev- er criticizes them, at least not overtly .) In the current university, the movement for urbane tolerance has devolved into an imperative against critical reaction, turning much of the

ESSAY 47

A WORLD UNINTERESTED IN GENIUS IS A DESPONDENT PLACE, WHOSE SAD DENIZENS DRIFT FROM COFFEE BAR TO PROZAC DISPENSARY, UNFIRED BY

IDEALS AND THE GLOWING IMAGE OF WHAT ONE MIGHT BECOME

intellectual life into a dreary Sargasso Sea. At a certain point, professors stopped being usefully sensitive and became more like careful retailers who have it as a cardinal point of doctrine nev- er to piss the customers off.

. To some professors, the solution lies in the movement called cultural studies. What stu- dents need, they believe, is to form a critical perspective on pop culture. It's a fine idea, no doubt. Students should be able to run a critical commentary against the stream of consumer stimulations in which they're immersed. But cultural-studies programs rarely work, because no matter what you propose by way of analysis, things tend to bolt downhill toward an uncriti- cal discussion of students' tastes, into what they like and don't like. If you want to do a Frankfurt School-style analysis of Braveheart, you can be pretty sure that by mid-class Adorno and Horkheimer will be consigned to the junk heap of history and you'll be collec- tively weighing the charms of Mel Gibson. One sometimes wonders if cultural studies hasn't prospered because, under the guise of se- rious intellectual analysis, it gives the cus- tomers what they most want-easy pleasure, more TV. Cultural studies becomes nothing better than what its detractors claim it is- Madonna studies-when students kick loose from the critical perspective and groove to the product, and that, in my experience teaching film and pop culture, happens plenty.

On the issue of genius, as on multiculturalism and political correctness, we professors of the humanities have, I think, also failed to press back against our students' consumer tastes. Here we tend to nurse a pair of-to put it chari- tably--disparate views. In one mode, we're in- clined to a programmatic debunking criticism. We call the concept of genius into question. But in our professional lives per se, we aren't usually disposed against the idea of distin- guished achievement. We argue animatedly about the caliber of potential colleagues. We support a star system, in which some professors are far better paid, teach less, and under better conditions than the rest. In our own profession, we are creating a system that is the mirror im- age of the one we're dismantling in the curricu- lum. Ask a professor what she thinks of the work of Stephen Greenblatt, a leading critic of Shakespeare, and you'll hear it for an hour. Ask

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1997

- her what her views are on Shakespeare's genius and she's likely to begin questioning the term along with the whole "discourse of evaluation." This dual sensibility may be intellectually inco- herent. But in its awareness of what plays with students, it's conducive to good classroom eval- uations and, in its awareness of where and how the professional bread is buttered, to self-ad- vancement as well.

My overall point is this: It's not that a left- wing professorial coup has taken over the uni- versity. It's that at American universities, left- . liberal politics have collided with the ethos of

consumerism. The consumer ethos is rJ" winning. .1hen how do those who at least occasion-

ally promote genius and high literary ideals look to current students? How do we appear, those of us who take teaching to be something of a performance art and who imagine that if you give yourself over completely to your sub- ject you'll be rewarded with insight beyond what you individually command?

I'm reminded of an old piece of newsreel footage I saw once. The speaker (perhaps it was Lenin, maybe Trotsky) was haranguing a large crowd. He was expostulating, arm wav- ing, carrying on. Whether it was flawed technology or the man himself, I'm not sure, but the orator looked like an intricate me- chanical device that had sprung into fast-for- ward. To my students, who mistrust enthusi- asm in every form, that's me when I start riffing about Freud or Blake. But more and more, as my evaluations showed, I've been re- placing enthusiasm and intellectual animation with stand-up routines, keeping it all at arm's length, praising under the cover of irony.

It's too bad that the idea of genius has been denigrated so far, because it actually offers a live alternative to the demoralizing culture of hip in which most of my students are mired. By embracing the works and lives of extraordinary people, you can adapt new ideals to revise those that came courtesy of your parents, your neighborhood, your clan-or the tube. The aim of a good liberal-arts education was once, to adapt an observation by the scholar Walter Jackson Bate, to see that "we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call 'circumstances' (social, cultural, or reduc-

tively psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what Keats calls an 'immortal free-masonry' with the great we can become freer-freer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value."

But genius isn't just a personal standard; ge- nius can also have political effect. Tome, one of the best things about democratic thinking is the conviction that genius can spring up any- where. Walt Whitman is born into the working class and thirty-six years later we have a poetic image of America that gives a passionate di- mension to the legalistic brilliance of the Con- stitution. A democracy needs to constantly de- velop, and to do so it requires the most powerful visionary minds to interpret the present and to propose possible shapes for the future. By con- tinuing to notice and praise genius, we create a culture in which the kind of poetic gamble that Whitman made-a gamble in which failure would have entailed rank humiliation, depres- sion, maybe suicide-still takes place. By re- belling against established ways of seeing and saying things, genius helps us to apprehend how malleable the present is and how promising and fraught with danger is the future. If we teachers do not endorse genius and self-overcoming, can we be surprised when our students find their ideal images in TV's latest persona ads?

A world uninterested in genius is a despon- dent place, whose sad denizens drift from coffee bar to Prozac dispensary, unfired by ideals, by the glowing image of the self that one might become. As Northrop Frye says in a beautiful and now dramatically unfashionable sentence, "The artist who uses the same energy and ge- nius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time." We ought not to deny the existence of such a place simply because we, or those we care for, find the demands it makes intimidat- ing, the rent too high.

What happens if we keep trudging along this bleak course? What happens if our most intelligent students never learn to strive to overcome what they are? What if genius, and the imitation of genius, become silly, outmod- ed ideas? What you're likely to get are more and more one-dimensional men and women. These will be people who live for easy plea- sures, for comfort and prosperity, who think of money first, then second, and third, who hug the status quo; people who believe in God as a sort of insurance policy (cover your bets); people who are never surprised. They will be people so pleased with themselves (when they're not in despair at the general pointless- ness of their lives) that they cannot imagine humanity could do better. They'll think it

their highest duty to clone themselves as fre- quently as possible. They'll claim to be happy, and they'll live a long time.

It is probably time now to offer a spate of in- spiring solutions. Here ought to come a list of reforms, with due notations about a core cur- riculum and various requirements. What the traditionalists who offer such solutions miss is that no matter what our current students are given to read, many of them will simply trans- late it into melodrama, with flat characters and predictable morals. (The unabated capitalist culture that conservative critics so often en- dorse has put students in a position to do little else.) One can't simply wave a curricular wand and reverse acculturation.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to try firing the counselors and sending half the deans back into their classrooms, dismantling the football team and making the stadium into a play- ground for local kids, emptying the fraternities, and boarding up the student-activities office.. Such measures would convey the message that American colleges are not northern outposts of Club Med. A willingness on the part of the fac- ulty to defy student conviction and affront them occasionally-to be usefully offensive- also might not be a bad thing. We professors talk a lot about subversion, which generally means subverting the views of people who nev- er hear us talk or read our work. But to subvert the views of our students, our customers, that would be something else again.

Ultimately, though, it is up to individuals- and individual students in particular-to make their own way against the current sludgy tide. There's still the library, still the museum, there's still the occasional teacher who lives to find things greater than herself to admire. There are still fellow students who have not been cowed. Universities are inefficient, clut- tered, archaic places, with many unguarded comers where one can open a book or gaze out onto the larger world and construe it freely. Those who do as much, trusting themselves against the weight of current opinion, will have contributed something to bringing this sad dispensation to an end. As for myself, I'm canning my low-key one-liners; when the kids' TV-based tastes come to the fore, I'll aim and shoot. And when it's time to praise genius, I'll try to do it in the right style, full-out, with faith that finer artistic spirits (maybe not Homer and Isaiah quite, but close, close), still alive somewhere in the ether, will help me out when my invention flags, the students doze, or the dean mutters into the phone. I'm getting back to a more exuberant style; I'll be expostu- lating and arm waving straight into the millen- nium, yes I will. •

ESSAY 49

lars a month for transportation. We also had to offer dinner or a snack, because the classes were to be held from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M.

The first recruiting session came only a few days later. Nancy Marais-King, associate execu- tive director of the Neighborhood Youth & Family Services program in the South Bronx, had identified some Clemente Course candi- dates and had assembled about twenty of her clients and their supervisors in a circle of chairs in a conference room. Everyone in the room was black or Latino, with the exception of one social worker and me.

After I explained the idea of the course, the white social worker was the first to ask a ques- tion: "Are you going to teach African history?"

"No. We'll be teaching a section on Ameri- can history, based on documents, as I said. We want to teach the ideas of history so that-"

"You have to teach African history." "This is America, so we'll teach American

history. If we were in Africa, I would teach African history, and if we were in China, I would teach Chinese history."

"You're indoctrinating people in Western culture."

I tried to get beyond her. "We'll study African art," I said, "as it affects art in Ameri- ca. We'll study American history and litera- ture; you can't do that without studying African-American culture, because culturally all Americans are black as well as white, Na- tive American, Asian, and so on." It was no

use; not one of them applied for ad-

A mission to the course.few days later Lynette Lauretig arranged a meeting with some of her staff at The Door. We disagreed about the course. They thought it should be taught at a much lower level. Al- though I could not change their views, they agreed to assemble a group of Door members who might be interested in the humanities.

On an early evening that same week, about twenty prospective students were scheduled to meet in a classroom at The Door. Most of them came late. Those who arrived first slumped in their chairs, staring at the floor or greeting me with sullen glances. A few ate candy or what appeared to be the remnants of a meal. The students were mostly black and Latino, one was Asian, and five were white; two of the whites were immigrants who had severe problems with English. When I intro- duced myself, several of the students would not shake my hand, two or three refused even to look at me, one girl giggled, and the last person to volunteer his name, a young man dressed in a Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt and wearing a cap turned sideways, drawled, "Hen-

ry Jones, but they call me Sleepy, because I got these sleepy eyes-"

"In our class, we'll call you Mr. Jones." He smiled and slid down in his chair so that

his back was parallel to the floor. Before I finished attempting to shake hands

with the prospective students, a waiflike Asian girl with her mouth half-full of cake said, "Can we get on with it? I'm bored."

I liked the group immediately. Having failed in the South Bronx, I re-

solved to approach these prospective students differently. "You've been cheated," I said. "Rich people learn the humanities; you didn't. The humanities are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking, for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force is turned against you. I think the humanities are one of the ways to become political, and I don't mean political in the sense of voting in an election but in the broad sense."·I told them Thucydides' def- inition of politics.

"Rich people know politics in that sense. They know how to negotiate instead of using force. They know how to use politics to get along, to get power. It doesn't mean that rich people are good and poor people are bad. It simply means that rich people know a more ef- fective method for living in this society.

"Do all rich people, or people who are in the middle, know the humanities? Not a chance. But some do. And it helps. It helps to live bet- ter and enjoy life more. Will the humanities make you rich? Yes. Absolutely. But not in terms of money. In terms of life.

"Rich people learn the humanities in private schools and expensive universities. And that's one of the ways in which they learn the politi- cal life. I think that is the real difference be- tween the haves and have-riots in this country. If you want real power, legitimate power, the kind that comes from the people and belongs to the people, you must understand politics. The humanities will help.

"Here's how it works: We'll pay your sub- way fare; take care of your children, if you have them; give you a snack or a sandwich; provide you with books and any other materi- als you need. But we'll make you think hard- er, use your mind more fully, than you ever have before. You'll have to read and think about the same kinds of ideas you would en- counter in a first-year course at Harvard or Yale or Oxford.

"You'll have to come to class in the snow and the rain and the cold and the dark. No one will coddle you, no one will slow down for you. There will be tests to take, papers to write. And I can't promise you anything but a

ESSAY 53

certificate of completion at the end of the course. I'll be talking to colleges about giving credit for the course, but I can't promise any- thing. If you come to the Clemente Course, you must do it because you want to study the humanities, because you want a certain kind of life, a richness of mind and spirit. That's all 1 offer you: philosophy, poetry, art history, logic, rhetoric, and American history.

"Your teachers will all be people of accom- plishment in their fields," I said, and I spoke a lit- tle about each teacher. "That's the course. Octo- ber through May, with a two-week break at Christmas. It is generally accepted in America that the liberal arts and the humanities in partic- ular belong to the elites. I think you're the elites."

The young Asian woman said, "What are you getting out of this?"

"This is a demonstration project. I'm writing a book. This will be proof, I hope, of my idea about the humanities. Whether it succeeds or fails will be up to the teachers and you."

All but one of the prospective students ap- plied for admission to the course.

Of the fifty prospective students who showed up at the Clemente Center for person- al interviews, a few were too rich (a postal su- pervisor's son, a fellow who claimed his father owned a factory in Nigeria that employed sixty people) and more than a few could not read. Two home-care workers from Local 1199 could not arrange their hours to enable them to take the course. Some of the applicants were too young: a thirteen-year-old and two who had just turned sixteen.

Lucia Medina, a woman with five children who told me that she often answered the door at the single-room occupancy hotel where she lived with a butcher knife in her hand, was the oldest person accepted into the course. Carmen Quinones, a recovering addict who had spent time in prison, was the next eldest. Both were

in their early thirties.

A The interviews went on for days.bel Lomas- shared an apartment and worked part-time wrapping packages at Ma- cy's. His father had abandoned the family

when Abel was born. His mother was murdered by his stepfather when Abel was thir- teen. With no one to turn to and no place to stay, he lived on the streets, first in Florida, then back in New York City. He used the tiny stipend from his mother's Social Security to keep himself alive.

After the recruiting session at The Door, I drove up Sixth A venue from Canal Street with Abel, and we talked about ethics. He had a street tough's delivery, spitting out his ideas in crudely formed sentences of four, five, eight words, strings of blunt declarations, with never a dependent clause to qualify his thoughts. He did

not clear his throat with badinage, as timidity teaches us to do, nor did he waste his breath with tact.

"What do you think about drugs?" he asked, the strangely breathless delivery further coars- ened by his Dominican accent. "My cousin is a dealer."

"I've seen a lot of people hurt by drugs." "Your family has nothing to eat. You sell

drugs. What's worse? Let your family starve or sell drugs?"

"Starvation and drug addiction are both bad, aren't they?"

I repeated the new presentation at the Grand Street Settlement and at other places around the city. There were about fifty candi- dates for the thirty positions in the course. Per- sonal interviews began in early September.

Meanwhile, almost all of my attempts to raise money had failed. Only the novelist Starling Lawrence, who is also editor in chief of W. W. Norton, which had contracted to publish the book; the publishing house itself; and a small, private family foundation sup- ported the experiment. We were far short of our budgeted expenses, but my wife, Sylvia, and I agreed that the cost was still very low, and we decided to go ahead.

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 1997

2 Not his real name.

ONE YOUNG WOMAN SUBMITTED A NEATLY TYPED ESSAY THAT SAID,

"I WAS HOMELESS ONCE, THEN I LIVED FOR SOME TIME IN A SHELTER. RIGHT NOW,

I AM OVER WHELMED BY DEBTS. I CANNOT AFFORD ALL THE FOOD I NEED ... "

"Yes," he said, not "yeah" or "uh-huh" but a precise, almost formal "yes."

"So it's a question of the worse of two evils? How shall we decide?"

The question came up near Thirty-fourth Street, where Sixth Avenue remains hellishly traffic-jammed well into the night. Horns honked, people flooded into the street against the light. Buses and trucks and taxicabs threat- ened their way from one lane to the next where the overcrowded avenue crosses the equally crowded Broadway. As we passed Her- ald Square and made our way north again, I said, "There are a couple of ways to look at it. One comes from Immanuel Kant, who said that you should not do anything unless you want it to become a universal law; that is, un- less you think it's what everybody should do. So Kant wouldn't agree to selling drugs or let- ting your family starve."

Again he answered with a formal "Yes." "There's another way to look at it, which is

to ask what is the greatest good for the greatest number: in this case, keeping your family from starvation or keeping tens, perhaps hundreds of people from losing their lives to drugs. So which is the greatest good for the greatest number?"

"That's what I think," he said. "What?" "You shouldn't sell drugs. You can always get

food to eat. Welfare. Something." "You're a Kantian." "Yes." "You know who Kant is?" "I think so." We had arrived at Seventy-seventh Street,

where he got out of the car to catch the subway before I turned east. As he opened the car door and the light came on, the almost military neatness of him struck me. He had the newly cropped hair of a cadet. His clothes were clean, without a wrinkle, He was an orphan, a street kid, an immaculate urchin. Within a few weeks he would be nineteen years old, the Social Se- curity payments would end, and he would have to move into a shelter.

Some of those who came for interviews were too poor. I did not think that was possible when we began, and I would like not to believe it now, but it was true. There is a point at which the level of forces that surround the

- poor can become insurmountable, when there is no time or energy left to be anything but poor. Most often I could not recruit such peo- ple for the course; when I did, they soon dropped out.

Over the days of interviewing, a class slowly assembled. I could not then imagine who would last the year and who would not. One young woman submitted a neatly typed essay that said, "I was homeless once, then I lived for some time in a shelter. Right now, I have got my own space granted by the Partnership for the Homeless. Right now, I am living alone, with very limited means. Financially I am over- whelmed by debts. I cannot afford all the food I need ... "

A brother and sister, refugees from Tashkent, lived with their parents in the far- thest reaches of Queens, far beyond the end of the subway line, They had no money, and they had been refused admission by every school to which they had applied. I had not intended to accept immigrants or people who had difficulty with the English language, but I took them into the class,

I also took four who had been in prison, three who were homeless, three who were preg- nant, one who lived in a drugged dream-state in which she was abused, and one whom I had known for a long time and who was dying of AIDS. As I listened to them, I wondered how the course would affect them. They had no public life, no place; they lived within the sur- round of force, moving as fast as they could, driven by necessity, without a moment to re- flect. Why should they care about fourteenth-

century Italian painting or truth ta-

B bles or the death of Socrates?etween the end of recruiting and the ori- entation session that would open the course, I made a visit to Bedford Hills to talk with Niecie Walker. It was hot, and the drive up from the city had been unpleasant. I didn't yet know Niecie very well. She didn't trust me, and I didn't know what to make of her. While we talked, she held a huge white pill in her

. hand. "For AIDS," she said, "Are you sick?" "My T-cell count is down. But that's neither

here nor there. Tell me about the course, Earl. What are you going to teach?"

ESSAY 55

SHE SAID, "HOW CAN YOU TEACH PHILOSOPHY TO POOR PEOPLE

WITHOUT PLATO'S ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE? THE GHETTO IS THE CAVE.

EDUCATION IS THE LIGHT. POOR PEOPLE CAN UNDERSTAND THAT"

"Moral philosophy." "And what does that include I" She had turned the visit into an interroga-

tion. I didn't mind. At the end of the conver- sation I would be going out into "the free world"; if she wanted our meeting to be an interrogation, I was not about to argue. I said, "We'll begin with Plato: the Apology, a little of the Crito, a few pages of the Phaedo so that they'll know what happened to Socrates. Then we'll read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I also want them to read Thucydides, particularly Pericles' Funeral Oration in order to make the connection between ethics and politics, to lead them in the direction I hope the course will take them. Then we'll end with Antigone, but read as moral and political philosophy as well as drama."

"There's something missing," she said, leaning back in her chair, taking on an air of superiority.

The drive had been long, the day was hot, the air in the room was dead and damp. "Oh, yeah," I said, "and what's that?"

"Plato's Allegory of the Cave. How can you teach philosophy to poor people without the Allegory of the Cave? The ghetto is the cave.

Education is the light. Poor people

A can understand that."t the beginning of the orientation at the Clemente Center a week later, each teacher spoke for a minute or two. Dr. lnclan and his research assistant, Patricia Vargas, ad- ministered the questionnaire he had devised to measure, as best he could, the role of force and the amount of reflection in the lives of the students. I explained that each class was going to be videotaped as another way of doc- umenting the project. Then I gave out the first assignment: "In preparation for our next meeting, I would like you to read a brief se- lection from Plato's Republic: the Allegory of the Cave."

I tried to guess how many students would re- turn for the first class. I hoped for twenty, ex- pected fifteen, and feared ten. Sylvia, who had agreed to share the administrative tasks of the course, and I prepared coffee and cookies for twenty-five. We had a plastic container filled with subway tokens. Thanks to Starling Lawrence, we had thirty copies of Bernard Knox's Norton Book of Classical Literature,

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 1997

- which contained all of the texts for the philos- ophy section except the Republic and the Nico- machean Ethics.

At six o'clock there were only ten students seated around the long table, but by six-fifteen the number had doubled, and a few minutes later two more straggled in out of the dusk. I had written a time line on the blackboard, showing them the temporal progress of think- ing-from the role of myth in Neolithic soci- eties to The Gilgamesh Epic and forward to the Old Testament, Confucius, the Greeks, the New Testament, the Koran, the Epic of Son- [asa, and ending with Nahuatl and Maya po- ems, which took us up to the contact between Europe and America, where the history course began. The time line served as context and ge- ography as well as history: no race, no major culture was ignored. "Let's agree," I told them, "that we are all human, whatever our origins. And now let's go into Plato's cave."

I told them that there would be no lectures in the philosophy section of the course; we would use the Socratic method, which is called maieutic dialogue. "'Maieutic' comes from the Greek word for midwifery. I'll take the role of midwife in our dialogue. Now, what do I mean by that? What does a midwife do?"

It was the beginning of a love affair, the first moment of their infatuation with Socrates. Later, Abel Lomas would characterize that mo- ment in his no-nonsense fashion, saying that it was the first time anyone had ever paid atten- tion to their opinions.

Grace Glueck began the art history class in a darkened room lit with slides of the Lascaux caves and next turned the students' attention to Egypt, arranging for them to visit the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art to see the Temple of Dendur and the Egyptian Galleries. They arrived at the museum on a Friday evening. Darlene Codd brought her two-year-old son. Pearl Lau was late, as usual. One of the stu- dents, who had told me how much he was looking forward to the museum visit, didn't show up, which surprised me. Later I learned that he had been arrested for jumping a turn- stile in a subway station on his way to the museum and was being held in a prison cell under the Brooklyn criminal courthouse. In the Temple of Dendur, Samantha Smoot asked questions of Felicia Blum, a museum

lecturer. Samantha was the student who had burst out with the news, in one of the first sessions of the course, that people in her neighborhood believed it "wasn't no use goin' to school, because the white man wouldn't let you up no matter what." But in a hall where the statuary was of half-human, half- animal female figures, it was Samantha who asked what the glyphs meant, encouraging Felicia Blum to read them aloud, to translate them into English. Toward the end of the evening, Grace led the students out of the halls of antiquities into the Rockefeller Wing, where she told them of the connec- tions of culture and art in Mali, Benin, and the Pacific Islands. When the students had collected their coats and stood together near the entrance to the museum, preparing to leave, Samantha stood apart, a tall, slim young woman, dressed in a deerstalker cap and a dark blue peacoat. She made an exag- gerated farewell wave at us and returned to Egypt-her ancient mirror.

Charles Simmons began the poetry class with poems as puzzles and laughs. His plan was to surprise the class, and he did. At first he read the poems aloud to them, interrupting himself with footnotes to bring them along. He showed them poems of love and of seduction, and satir- ic commentaries on those poems by later poets. "Let us read," the students demanded, but Charles refused. He tantalized them with the opportunity to read poems aloud. A tug-of-war began between him and the students, and the standoff was ended not by Charles directly but by Hector Anderson. When Charles asked if anyone in the class wrote poetry, Hector raised his hand.

"Can you recite one of your poems for us?" Charles said.

Until that moment, Hector had never vol- unteered a comment, though he had spoken well and intelligently when asked. He preferred to .slouch in his chair, dressed in full camou- flage gear, wearing a nylon stocking over his hair and eating slices of fresh cantaloupe or honeydew melon.

In response to Charles's question, Hector slid up to a sitting position. "If you turn that camera off," he said. "I don't want anybody us- ing my lyrics." When he was sure the red light of the video camera was off, Hector stood and recited verse after verse of a poem that be- longed somewhere in the triangle formed by Ginsberg's Howl, the Book of Lamentations, and hip-hop. When Charles and the students finished applauding, they asked Hector to say the poem again, and he did. Later Charles told me, "That kid is the real thing." Hector's dis- comfort with Sylvia and me turned to ease. He

came to our house for a small Christmas party and at other times. We talked on the tele- phone about a scholarship program and about what steps he should take next in his educa- tion. I came to know his parents. As a student, he began quietly, almost secretly, to surpass many of his classmates.

Timothy Koranda was the most professorial of the professors. He arrived precisely on time, wearing a hat of many styles-part fedora, part Borsalino, part Stetson, and at least one-half World War I campaign hat. He taught logic during class hours, filling the blackboard from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, drawing the inter- sections of sets here and truth tables there and a great square of oppositions in the middle of it all. After class, he walked with students to the subway, chatting about Zen or logic or Heisenberg.

On one of the coldest nights of the winter, he introduced the students to logic problems stated in ordinary language that they could solve by reducing the phrases to symbols. He passed out copies of a problem, two pages long, then wrote out some of the key phrases on the blackboard. "Take this home with you," he said, "and at our next meeting we shall see who has solved it. I shall also at- tempt to find the answer."

By the time he finished writing out the key phrases, however, David Iskhakov raised his hand. Although they listened attentively, nei- ther David nor his sister Susana spoke often in class. She was shy, and he was embarrassed at his inability to speak perfect English.

"May I go to blackboard?" David said. "And will see if I have found correct answer to zis problem."

Together Tim and David erased the black- board, then David began covering it with signs and symbols. "If first man is earning this mon- ey, and second man is closer to this town ... ," he said, carefully laying out the conditions. Af- ter five minutes or so, he said, "And the answer is: B will get first to Cleveland!"

Samantha Smoot shouted, "That's not the answer. The mistake you made is in the first part there, where it says who earns more money."

Tim folded his arms across his chest, happy. "I shall let you all take the problem home," he said.

When Sylvia and I left the Clemente Center that night, a knot of students was gathered out- side, huddled against the wind. Snow had be- gun to fall, a slippery powder on the gray ice that covered all but a narrow space down the center of the sidewalk. Samantha and David stood in the middle of the group, still arguing over the answer to the problem. I leaned in for

ESSAY 57

BETWEEN OCTOBER AND MAY, STUDENTS FELL TO AIDS, PREGNANCY, JOB

OPPORTUNITIES, PERNICIOUS ANEMIA, CLINICAL DEPRESSION, A SCHIZOPHRENIC

CHILD, BUT OF THIRTY STUDENTS, SIXTEEN COMPLETED THE COURSE

arnornent to catch the character of the argu- ment. It was even more polite than it had

been in the classroom, because

A now they governed themselves.ne Saturday morning in January, David Howell telephoned me at home. "Mr. Shores," he said, Anglicizing my name, as many of the students did.

"Mr. Howell," I responded, recognizing his voice.

"How you doin', Mr. Shores?" "I'm fine. How are you?" "I had a little problem at work." Uh-oh, I thought, bad news was coming.

David is a big man, generally good-humored but with a quick temper. According to his mother, he had a history of violent behavior. In the classroom he had been one of the best students, a steady man, twenty-four years old, who always did the reading assignments and who often made interesting connections be- tween the humanities and daily life. "What happened?"

"Mr. Shores, there's a woman at my job, she said some things to me and I said some things to her. And she told my supervisor I had said things to her, and he called me in about it. She's forty years old and she don't have no so- ciallife, and I have a good social life, and she's jealous of me."

"And then what happened?" The tone of his voice and the timing of the call did not por- tend good news.

"Mr. Shores, she made me so mad, I wanted to smack her up against the wall. I tried to talk to some friends to calm myself down a little, but nobody was around."

"And what did you do?" I asked, fearing this was his one telephone call from the city jail.

"Mr. Shores, I asked myself, 'What would Socrates do ?'"

David Howell had reasoned that his co- worker's envy was not his problem after all, and he had dropped his rage.

One evening, in the American history sec- tion, I was telling the students about Gordon Wood's ideas in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. We were talking about the revolt by some intellectuals against classical learning at the turn of the eighteenth century, includ- ing Benjamin Franklin's late-life change of

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! SEPTEMBER 1997

- heart, when Henry Jones raised his hand.

"If the Founders loved the humanities so much, how come they treated the natives so badly?"

I didn't know how to answer this question. There were confounding explanations to offer about changing attitudes toward Native Amer- icans, vaguely useful references to views of Rousseau and James Fenimore Cooper. For a moment I wondered if I should tell them about Heidegger's Nazi past. Then I saw Abel Lo- mas's raised hand at the far end of the table. "Mr. Lomas," I said.

Abel said, "That's what Aristotle means by incontinence, when you know what's morally right but you don't do it, because you're over- come by your passions."

The other students nodded. They were all inheritors of wounds caused by the inconti- nence of educated men; now they had an ally in Aristotle, who had given them a way

. to analyze the actions of their rJ'" antagonists. .1hose who appreciate ancient history un-

derstand the radical character of the humani- ties. They know that politics did not begin in a perfect world but in a society even more flawed than ours: one that embraced slavery, denied the right's of women, practiced a form of homosexuality that verged on pedophilia, and endured the intrigues and corruption of its leaders. The genius of that society origi- nated in man's re-creation of himself through the recognition of his humanness as ex- pressed in art, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, and the unique notion of freedom. At that moment, the isolation of the private life end- ed and politics began.

The winners in the game of modern society, and even those whose fortune falls in the mid- dle, have other means to power: they are in- cluded at birth. They know this. And they know exactly what to do to protect their place in the economic and social hierarchy. As Allan Bloom, author of the nationally best-selling tract in defense of elitism, The Closing of the American Mind, putit, they direct the study of the humanities exclusively at those young peo- ple who "have been raised in comfort and with the expectation of ever increasing comfort."

In the last meeting before graduation, the

Clemente students answered the same set of questions they'd answered at orientation. Be- tween October and May, students had fallen to AIDS, pregnancy, job opportunities, perni- cious anemia, clinical de- pression, a schizophrenic child, and other forces, but of the thirty students admitted to the course, sixteen had completed it, and fourteen had earned credit from Bard College. Dr. Inclan found that the students' self-esteem and their abilities to divine and solve problems had significantly increased; their use of verbal aggres- sion as a tactic for resolv- ing conflicts had signifi- cantly decreased. And they all had notably more appreciation for the con- cepts of benevolence, spir- ituality, universalism, and collectivism.

It cost about $2,000 for a student to attend the Clemente Course. Com- pared with unemployment, welfare, or prison, the hu- manities are a bargain. But coming into possession of the faculty of reflection and the skills of politics leads to a choice for the poor-and whatever they choose, they will be dan- gerous: they may use poli- tics to get along in a soci- ety based on the game, to escape from the surround of force into a gentler life, to behave as citizens, and nothing more; or they may choose to oppose the game itself. No one can predict the effect of politics, although we all would like to think that wisdom goes our way. That is why the poor are so often mobilized and so rarely politicized. The possibility that they will adopt a moral view other than that of their

mentors can never be discounted.

A And who wants to run that risk?n the night of the first Clemente Course graduation, the students and their families filled the eighty-five chairs we crammed into the con- ference room where classes had been held. Robert Martin, associate dean of Bard College, read the graduates' names. David Dinkins, the

former mayor of New York City, handed out the diplomas. There were speeches and presen- tations. The students gave me a plaque on which they had misspelled my name. I offered a

few words about each stu- dent, congratulated them, and said finally, "This is what I wish for you: May you never be more active than when you are doing nothing ... » I saw their smiles of recognition at the words of Cato, which I had written on the blackboard early in the course. They could recall again too the moment when we had come to the denouement of Aristotle's brilliantly constructed thriller, the Nicom.achean Ethics-the idea that in the contemplative life man was most like God. One or two, perhaps more of the students, closed their eyes. In the momen- tary stillness of the room it was possible to think.

The Clemente Course in the Humanities ended a second year in June 1997. Twenty-eight new students had enrolled; fourteen graduated. An- other version of the course will begin this fall in Yucatan, Mexico, using classical Maya literature in Maya.

On May 14, 1997, Viniece Walker came up for parole for the second time. She had served more than ten years of

her sentence, and she had been the best of prisoners. In a version of the Clemente Course held at the prison, she had been my teaching assistant. After a brief hearing, her request for parole was denied. She will serve two more years before the parole board will reconsider her case.

A year after graduation, ten of the first six- teen Clemente Course graduates were attending four-year colleges or going to nursing school; four of them had received full scholarships to Bard College. The other graduates were attend- ing community college or working full-time. Ex- cept for one: she had been fired from her job in a fast-food restaurant for trying to start a union. _

ESSAY 59