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Macrorie, Ken, Ed.The Graduate Experience in English; Ten PersonalCase-Histories.National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign,Ill.Dec 6444p.College Composition and Communication; v15 n4p209-52 Dec 1964

EDRS Price MF-$0.25 HC-$2.30*Case Studies (Education), College Instruction,*Curriculum Evaluation, Degree Requirements, EnglishCurriculum, *English Programs, *Graduate Students,Graduate Study, Individual Development, Morale,*Participant Satisfaction, Role Conflict, SelfActualization, Success Factors, Teaching Assistants

ABSTRACTTen graduate students in English attack their

graduate (M.A. and Ph.D.) experiences which they consider to benarrow and demeaning. They point to intellectual, financial, andpersonal difficulties which beset them, as well as petty, unnecessaryrigors and delays to which they are subjected and which oftenprolonged graduation. They speak of drudgery and a worship ofscholarship which, for the most part, overlooks a personal discoveryof art and the search for meaning. The students also condemn thedilemma of the graduate student-teacher, the lack of preparation forteaching freshmen composition courses, and discrimination againstwomen in graduate schools. (MF)

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94.1924Composition.,Lom otisiondCommunication; Vol. 15,December 1964

The Graduate Experience in EnglishAN INTRODUCTION TO TEN CASE-HISTORIES

"It wastes and saps these brilliant young persons."

EVER SINCE I ENTERED graduate schoolin English in 1946, I have been calledto dark corners of corridors or asked tosit in faculty offices behind closed doorsand listen to chapters from a book Iwould title Tales of Neglect and Sadism:

CHAPTER I. The student with wife andtwo children whose graduate career wasunexpectedly prolonged for two years,not because he had failed in any way,but because his major professor wasafraid to ask for acceptance by otherprofessors in the university of the stu-dent's new linguistic work, which theprofessor had all along advocated.

CHAPTER n. A dozen students who hadlost a year or more (living without full-time employment while struggling tokeep their families with them) becausetheir thesis advisor postponed confer-ences with them and sometimes keptthem waiting two hours when they hadsecured an appointment. Often the delaywas for a year, while the professor wentabroad or on sick leave.

CHAPTER III. Scores of students whotook years writing theses ( or gave upthe thesis and the degree) because theiradvisor could not be satisfiedI knowtwo who reported that their advisor sug-gested that, for example, Chapter 5would go better as the beginning ofChapter 1; they made the change andmonths later were advised by the sameman (who had forgotten), that the be-ginning of the revised Chapter 5 wouldnow go better as the beginning of re-vised Chapter 1.

CHAPTER IV. Women students at onefamous southern university who werebullied in class by a senile professor ofAmerican literature who asked them toread sexual passages from novels and

then flayed them with quick, insistentquestions. One excellent student put herhead down on the desk in class andcried. She was later asked by an alumnigroup to contribute to a volume of criti-cal scholarship memorializing this pro-fessor when he died.

But however terrifying these revela-tions, they were expressed to me asgripes, not as evidence for action tocorrect injustices. I ask myself does thatmean the complaints were trivial, thatmost graduate experience is healthy, andthat those who complained to me havebeen the weaklings constitutionally in-capable of carrying through a difficultprogram or finishing a long piece ofwriting under any circumstances? I knowthat some of these persons unconsciouslywanted to fail; their mistaken feelingsof inadequacy were strong. One devel-oped false heart attacks every time heapproached the language examination inGerman. But most of themI would sayninety-percentwere gifted, driving per-sons who as college teachers had provedto themselves and to others their pro-fessional capacity and responsibility. Andyet they suffered these outrageous de-lays and rebuffs. The fact that a sub-merged and mistreated group does notrebel for centuriesthink of the Ameri-can NegrOdoes not prove that its com-plaints are without substance. Aftermany years of cooling reflection I havedecided that the Establishment of grad-uate schools in English is indeed rottenand that its diseases of narrowness andhypocrisy are real. The tales I hear fromgraduate schools in physical science sug-gest that doctoral candidates do notneed to be stalled and demeaned in theirwork.

209U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION & WELFARE

OFFICE OF EDUCATION

THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE

PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT. POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS

STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION

POSITION OR POLICY.

210 COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

The following ten case-histories ofgraduate school experience at the M.A.and Ph.D. levels were not hard to find.I simply asked the first ten good writersthat came to my mind, and when onereneged, another volunteered the nameof a colleague who wrote the tenth his-tory. I have known many strong grad-uate students in English; the weak oneshave been a tiny percentage. I do notneed to take a poll to find that mostgraduate students in English are lively,brilliant, and creative. Yet I know al-most none who feel that their experienceas graduate students in English waslively, brilliant, and creative. I knowonly a handful whose graduate workmade a lasting contribution to their ownprofessional work and to others in thefield of English. (I must add that al-though the graduate departments I stud-ied in were deadening and often uncon-sciously sadistic in their organizationand ritual, I was allowed to write twotheses that were of value to me through-out my professional career.)

What hurts most about the run ofgraduate work in English is that itwastes and saps these brilliant youngpersons. And in fact, many are notyoung when they begin their study; thesystem stalls them and ages them, drain-ing them of energy as they try to teachand study and go back to teach be-fore finishing their degrees. In my opin-ion the ten persons who have writtenthe following case-histories ( they rangefrom a 22-year-old to a 45-year-old)command their experience and theirsentences. They exhibit insight, matur-ity, and liveliness that shows them ontop of their materialsthe kind of pro-fessional persons Thglish departmentsdream of hiring, and yet nine out often report their graduate experiencecramping and stultifying. If the experi-ence were of high caliber it would honeand release these persons to an accomp-lishment that would aid other English

teachers. Neither they nor I ask for aneasy curriculum; no good student everdoes. But the demands made of themare too often narrow and piddling, orwide and empty.

Graduate students in English are notrespected by the system. When theyreach this ultimate position in theirstudy, they are asked to write morecribbed and cabined papers than theywere as freshmen. Neither their mindsnor their maturity is respected. Oftenstriving to maintain an edge of super-iority over his students, the graduateprofessor finds he has read more ofCrabbe or Faulkner or Shakespeare thanhis "charges," and much more criticism,and runs shouting to his colleagues thathis students have read nothing. It is tobe expected that the canon of any estab-lishment will be less known to its novi-tiates than to its establishers. A professtmay respect and challenge the graduatestudent at the same time he asks himto enlarge his reading and to learn theminor discipline of documentation ofscholarly papers.

How seriously a presupposition of in-vulnerability infects graduate professorsI remember witnessing myself. Theonly great ( or even good) classroomprofessor I encountered in my M.A.program at a distinguished universitytaught Chaucer, and with both disci-plined scholarship and a response toChaucer's humanity that appropriatelyinvolved smacking of lips and horse-laughs of appreciation. A man of power,and yet when fresh out of the army, Iwrote an attack on a famous Chaucerianscholar's dreary and obtuse analysis ofthe story in which an old man marriesa young girl because she is a succulentdish, the professor read a lecture tothe whole class about respecting dis-tinguished scholars. We were in no posi-tion, he said, to make fun of greatscholars. He did not read my paper tothe class and he did not try to rebut

THE GRADUATE EXPERIENCE IN ENGLISH 211

my argument that through his prissinessthe scholar had missed the major pointof the story.

When I was president of a graduatestudents' group in an English depart-ment, one Ph.D. Candidate told me thathis professor insisted that he enlergehis thesis ( a critical study of Frenchpoems he had translated) by treatinga number of historical parallels. Thechange in scope, the student said, wouldtake him far beyond his interestcompetence and produce a routine G.sertation rather than expose a centralproblem in translating and present tothe English-speaking world a body ofwork by a valuable poet. I called thegraduate group together and we decidedto approach the graduate professors insupport of our fellow-studentat leastto consider the case. Before doing this,I talked to my major advisor, who wasthe number two man in power in thedepartment. He said he was shockedby the suggestion of our taking such anaction; we were in no position to dosuch a thing; he was so sure the headof the department would be outragedthat he advised we drop the matterimmediately. I regret to say we lackedthe courage to proceed. Like most aca-demic men we were not willing to riskour careers for a principle. The studentgroup I presided over had been foundedby the department head as a front tosuggest to the outside world that grad-uate students there were treated as re-sponsible, intelligent adults.

The following case-histories project afeeling of immediacy because all buttwo of the writers had not finished theirdegrees when they were writing. Butfor the same reason only one documentsthe most frequent charge made by Amer-ican professors against the graduateschool: that it is cruelly slow to approvePh.D. theses, commonly allowing a stu-dent to finish his course work in twoyears and then stalling him for another

two to five in thesis throes. At the uni-versity I attended, the English graduateprofessors in power believed religiouslyin the concept of ordeal. The experiencewas to be a trial by fire and any actor word of unreasonableness on theirpart was justified by saying that ithelped the candidate suffer, and thusgrow in manhood and professionalism.They went so far as to admit that attimes they would let weak candidatesthrough faster than strong because thestrong ones needed tempering. The prin-ciple is not a bad one if it means thestrong are challenged arid stretchedmore than the weak, but it is criminalif the strong are simply 'harassed andslowed down. Most of the graduate stu-dents were mature men and women whohad left decent jobs. Their financial andemotional resources were being drainedby trips across the country and theirscratching to make a living as graduateassistants or part-time workers in thecity.

I have asked the contributors of thesecase-histories to write anonymously, bothto protect them in their careers and toinsure that readers will not recognizethe university being reported upon. Oneor two adverse statements about a grad-uate English program in a named uni-versity might unfairly damage that insti-tution if it did not have a chance toreply, and I see no end to a runningdebate of charge and counter-charge.And yet I have collected these historiesand published them here precisely be-cause the graduate student in Americahas seldom spoken in public voice. Hehas taken abuse, hypocrisy, and small-mindedness and gone back grumblingto his library carrel. It is time he spokeout. I do not believe these historiesrepresent a movement. They are not aTom Paine call-to-arms, but, I believe,solid, specific, and passionate evidenceon which a revolution might be founded.A genuine reform of the graduate ex-

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perience in English in this country willnot be brought about by resolution with-in faculties. What is needed is a massiveshake-up brought about by both grad-uate students and the professors whoteach them. The graduate departmentsreported on here are located in the mosteminent universities in the land, in NewEngland, California, the near South, theSouthwest, the Midwest. I have never

+ case-history

heard or read a word to suggest thatthe feelings expressed by these graduatestudents are not epidemic in America.

The Conference on College Composi-tion and Communication has a stakein graduate training. It is the graduatestudent, either dully going through hisrounds as student, or stale out of theuniversity, degree in hand, who attemptsto teach -freshmen how to write.

K.M.

"I could not recommend the total experience to anyone."

As I LOOK BACK ON IT I THINK whatreally signalled the end of graduatestudy for me was the unsmiling youngInternal Revenue man saying, "What wehave to determine are your motives forgetting the Ph.D. If you got it becauseyour employer specified it as necessaryfor your continued employment in yourpresent position, then you may claim thedeductions you've itemized." He pausedand glanced out the open window intothe warm late May air. "But if on theother hand you pursued the degree forpersonal satisfaction and/or self-aggran-disement, we cannot allow these deduc-tions."

If this incident ended my graduatestudy, where did it begin, and why?Perhaps when, after I had taught fouryears at a small west coast public col-lege, my superiors made it clear theywanted a faculty with doctorates andthat untenured people were being letgo if they didn't have degrees, and soI was jobless, with a wife and three kids.I was a little mad, too, and my feelingswere hurt. Even in four years I hadachieved some reputation as a goodteacher. And I had cheerfully taken on

every job that I had been asked to do.I had the choice of doing something

other than teaching to earn a living, orfacing the necessity of getting the Ph.D.I had finished an M.A. the year beforeat a distinguished private western uni-versity. I couldn't have gone there with-out the G.I. Bill. The experience waslargely unsatisfactory. I had some iirettyvague ( but brilliant, I thought) ideasabout the whole field of language, litera-ture, communication, and education. TheM.A. program seemed restrictive andstatic to me. I was one M.A. candidateamong hundreds. I could have droppeddead and no one but the registrar wouldhave noticed. I knew I didn't want todo doctoral work there.

I have asked. myself many times ifthe primary motive for working for thePh.D. was job security. I think it was.My intellectual interests could have beenvery adequately fulfilled outside thePh.D. framework, provided I could findthe universit where there would be thebroad-ranging and seminal minds thatfitted into my educational myth, a mythevolved during the long, stultifying yearsin the army. This dream of the com-

"I COULD NOT RECOMMEND THE EXPERIENCE" 213

munity of fine minds and gentle spiritsbecame in the boring grind of two anda half years on Pacific Islands my favor-ite fantasy. And it persisted after anM.A. and four years of college teaching.

I had done a number of things tomake a living and had been fairly suc-cessful at them all. Though I gave somethought to leaving teaching, I reallydon't think I ever seriously consideredit. I liked teaching. I liked being aroundyoung people and in general I liked mycolleagues.

The people I really didn't like werethe administrators. I suppose as peopleI didn't dislike them. But it takes anunusual person not to be corrupted bythe process of administration. I haveknown one or two such, and I haveknown a few fine teachers who becameadministrators and were corrupted. Ithink they came to think that administra-tion was more important than teaching.To me, that's corruption.

Because of my general dissatisfactionwith my M.A. program, I had beenshopping around for some time for some-thing more appealing in a doctoral pro-grammainly by reading college cata-logs and writing to department chair-men. I was sophisticated enough toknow that catalog descriptions are notthe programs ( like maps and territories),but there seemed no better way to goabout it. By the time my final semesterat Small Western State had ended, I haddecided to try a summer session at alarge private eastern metropolitan uni-versity. The catalog described a degreeprogram that emphasized inter-disciplin-ary studies in language, literature, com-munication, and higher education, espe-cially suitable for those who wished toteach English in undergraduate collegesof various kinds. The description madeit sound intellectually excitingand ter-ribly sensible when compared with thetwenty or so other descriptions I hadread. A summer session should indicate

something about the fit between thedescription and the program.

It was a bad June for me to leavemy family. My wife was eight months'pregnant with our third child. Shewanted me there, but realized that I wasanxious about my future and she didher best to assure me that she couldface her final month alone. I had neverbeen east before and decided to goGreyhound, four nights and three daysfrom coast to coast, very cheaply, with ahundred and fifty pounds of clothes andbooks in footlockers. This method, Itold myself, would give me a real feelfor the sweep of the land: three thou-sand miles of vibrations sent up to mefrom the asphalt and concrete surfacesof Highways 40 and 50 and others,through rubber and air and metal. Peo-ple have always thought it pretty crazyto go all that way by Greyhound, andespecially without stopovers. I arrivedin New York with something of thefeeling of the sailor coming ashoreIneeded a little time to get my landlegsand a bath and shave.

I of course was not aware of it at thetime, but the next years were to beimportant ones in my development asa person and as a teacher. My summerwork consisted of general departmentalcourses in language, literature, and com-munication courses designed to givesome indication of the flavor of theplace. The language course was an espe-cially significant experience for me. Iencountered linguistics for the first time.I read Sapir and Bloomfield. The litera-ture course was too elementary for me,and the communication course, madeup of separate lectures, though interest-ing, was mosaic in structure rather thanintegrated.

My third child and second daughterwas born on July 4. I led a lonely, in-teresting life in the green eastern sum-mer, missing my family and ( some-times ) the brown, fragrant hills of the

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west. As the academic summer closedI felt good enough about the programto return west for my family. We droveeast in September and set up, house-keeping in a run -.own veterans' villageabout an hour's commute from the uni-versity.

The family's part in the next fewyears is a separate, often poignant storythat cannot be told here. Such storiesas ours can be evaluated in two ways.As wonderfully rich opportunities fornew experiences for wife and children,or as confining times of hardship, ofyears during which almost total accom-modation is made to the husband andfather's needs. The evaluation does nothave to be made either-or, of course,but the family, it seems to me, is seldomin a very happy position. As a familywe were initially quite wretched, thehousing was wretched, the school situa-tion for the oldest child was wretched.By the following February we were ableto move into an apartment near the uni-versity. Life for the family improvedgreatly.

The first year of study, as I now thinkof it, was quite satisfactory. It was atime of getting acquainted, with a newway of living, with new people, and im-portt nily for this story, with other grad-uate students and the staff of the de-partment. There was the process of find-ing one's place in the new community,of establishing the human relationships.During the summer session I had beenquite anonymous. We are all well awareof the great difference in the academic"feel" between summer and regular ses-sions. Now I discovered, as tempera-tures fell and my family and I pleasur-ably began to experience our first easternautumn, that I was operating in a rathertight little community. That I was rec-ognized, identified, was signalled whenI was offered an assistantship by theprofessor who taught the introductorylanguage course.

I know of no graduate school whichprovides all the information about thedetails of a doctoral program that agraduate student needs. I found thatolder generations of graduate studentsprovide the best source of information( and often mis-information ) about theparticulars of the program. Unfortun-ately, they often bequeath along with ita tradition of anxiety and fear about thegreat array of requirements.

The degree program I finally settledon ( there were several patterns) in-volved interdepartmental cooperation.This suited my notions about the inter-disciplinary studies. Though this ar-rangement perhaps contributed to myeducation in some minimal way, itdid not contribute to my getting thedegree. Not that I was entirely naiveabout interdepartmental matters. I sup-pose I had (and still have) faith thatmen of reason and good will can riseabove narrowness of vieweven admin-istrators.

Anyway, that first year was spent instudy, in learning the dynamics (not. tosay politics) of the department in w:nichI worked. I liked and respected mostof the people I met, both students andstaff. As the shortcomings of the staffbegan to emerge, as scholars, teachersor administrators, it seemed to me thatI could find redeeming characteristicsin them. Most of my courses and sem-inars furthered my education. Somewere duds, but where would one notfind a dud now and then? Of greatimportance was the fact that I had aplace in the department. I was recog-nized as a person of some promise inthe program and though no formal (orinformal) document stated this, I knewill

As the first year ended I began toanticipate the demands of the secondyear. I hoped to have the degree bythe end of the year. I didn't have it andwas not to have it for an additional four

"I COULD NOT RECOMMEND THE EXPERIENCE" 215

years. I thought so then and feel so now:it was through no fault of my own thatI didn't get the degree at the end of thesecond year of work.

I had settled on a dissertation topic,had taken preliminary examinations, hadpassed one foreign language examina-tion, and had completed almost allcourse work, before the second year be-gan. I had a genuine sense of securityabout being "on schedule." I also hada good fellowship, which helped thefamily economy.

I began to realize there were certainhazards in the situation. Other doctoralcandidates, I discovered, had been work-ing on the degrees for long periods oftime. They referred to other candidateslikewise stalemated. Others and I be-came interested in the ratio of com-pleted degrees to uncompleted degreesover a fairly long period of time, sayten years. It soon became apparent thatmany started but few finished. I becameaware of something else: that my experi-ence of a fairly smooth, routine first yearwas not unusual. It was in the conclud-ing year that trouble developed. At firstI felt that I merely needed to plan care-fully, to anticipate fully in order to finishon schedule. I was naive.

The difficult thing was to discoverwhy the situation was the way it was.I'm not sure I ever have. Some thingswere obvious. The staff was conscien-tious. As a matter of fact, they were allover-worked, over-committed. Each onehad in addition to a large load of advis-ing, classes to teach, research to carryforward, consultancies, and other dis-tractions. They just had no time to dothe close, careful advisory work thathas to be done with a doctoral student.It was difficult to get appointments andwhen one did get them, advisers wereill-prepared to advise or didn't havesufficient time. They were usually apol-ogetic about it. My dissertation involvedinter-departmental negotiations and the

cooperation of a national professionalorganization. I needed staff assistanceand advice. I got little or none. Inter-departmental negotiations were post-poned. The whole year seeped awaywithout the dissertation even being ap-proved. I spent much of my time gos-siping and complaining with other doc-toral candidates. I finished all stepsexcept the dissertation. At the year'send I received word that the dissertationtopic had been approved but that Iwould need additional course work incertain research procedures, since myrecord showed none, and my proposedtopic :.--emed to necessitate course workof this kind. I was stunned. Coursework was long past me. I tried tonegotiate with the official whose decisionit was but I got nowhere and got littleif any support from the members of mydissertation committee. My topic hadbeen proposed a year before. I had adissertation committee who approvedmy topic. Supposedly they knew whatresearch techniques were appropriate.Now another person in the universityhierarchy was telling me ( and them )that I must do more course work.

That's exactly what I did during thesummer. I was out of money. I hadno job for the coming year. I hadcounted on the new degree for turningup something attractive. I generally feltpretty sour about the whole experience.I wanted to blame someone or something, yet I still felt a sense of loyalty,and affection even, for the members ofmy department. They hadn't plannedthis to happen to me. But my experi-ence, I had discovered, was usual.

I have talked as if getting a degreewere primarily a matter of negotiationrather than education. I'm afraid it toooften isand I doubt that it makes anycontribution to one as a teacher or schol-ar. My education as a doctoral studentwas fairly satisfactory, particularly dur-ing the first year. Negotiation and arkx-


ieties in connection with getting finisheddistracted me from study during thesecond year.

Late in that very unpleasant summerI got a one year appointment in an up-state college. My major advir left theuniversity. Even so, I finally zted thedissertation. The following year my fam-ily and I moved back west. So far mywork toward the degree counted fornothing in terms of salary or rank.

Eventually, after four years, a newadviser, a lost file (mine), considerableinter-departmental haggling, and cor-respondence larger than the dissertation,I flew east for final orals. They weresmooth, incredibly ( almost disappoint-ingly) easy.

With the degree came promotion.Having it has made all the difference.That seemed to be the end of the storyin a way, finally, happy enough. Butit came up again the following May. Iclaimed transportation and other ex-penses as deductions on my income tax

4, case-history 2

return. I asked the yr:ung InternalRevenue man how he proposed to deter-mine my real motive in getting thePh.D. He didn't know. I suggestedpsychoanalysis and asked if the feewould be deductible. He didn't knowabout that either. I really had hold ofthe idea and now I wanted to know whatmy real motive was. When he got histurn to speak, the young Internal Rev-enue man said they would let me knowby mail. In about a week they did. Theyallowed my deduction.

About once a year I get a letter fromthe university, sometimes the depart-ment too, urging me to recommendpromising young men and women tothem for graduate work. I wish I could.I'm sure my experience there has con-tributed considerably to me as a humanbeing and teacher, but so far, remember-ing the hazardsthe needless tielays: thenegotiationsI have not felt that I couldrecommend the total experience to any-one.

"Literature here is studied as if it were a dead cat . . ."

THE UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCE can bethe beginning or a love affair with life.It was for me. My perceptions changed;reality became a place where beautyand sensation and idea were all at oncepresent, part of the internal me and theexternal not-me. The world I moved inwas an exciting one where students andfaculty shared in the love and challengeof knowledge. I enjoyed that world andchose to remain within it. Graduateschool would be more of the same, thenext step leading me to a career as acollege teacher.

I am now a graduate student. I havefound in graduate school not the loveof learning, but the industry of scholar-ship; not ferment, but stagnation. Mymind is encouraged to move over onlythe still waters of facts, leaving un-sounded the turbulent depths of art.Literature is studied here as if it werea dead cat, something to be dissectedand described externally and internally,placed in a species and class, dated, andpreserved on a dusty shelf while filecards take up the reality of its existence.And as in biolr)gy where the creator of

"LITERATURE STUDIED AS IF IT WERE A DEAD CAT" 217

the cat, the mystery some call God, isirrelevant, so too in the study of litera-ture, the author as the mystery calledman, is forgotten. He is an object, dis-sected and described externally and in-ternally, placed and shelved, remade byscholarship. We forget that his human-ity created the piece of literature westudy, for humanity cannot be foot-noted.

I complain here about an intangibledimension, but the sense of its presencein literature, and the disturbing aware-ness of its absence in the graduate ap-proach to literature confuses me. I donot want to venerate the author's agon-ized spirit, but I do expect to rememberthat his work is a statement from himto me about life. Great literature growsfrom suffering and joy, and teaches mebecause I have known those states. Di-vorce the transcendental from literature,and it is reduced to a skillgame of words,just as life lived on only its mundanelevel is mere movement.

We had a poet on campus. Literaturefor him was part of life. He spoke tous of feelings expressed as well as tech-niques of expression, Symbols of poetryare first of all symbols from lived reality,he said; only from that origin do theymove successfully into literature. His'mind moved through the rough watersof art. He spoke from a wider perspec-tive, one that included other fieldscinema, psychology, sociologyand alsothat evasive quality, humanity. His classwas not popular, because he was notgiving out facts. Unfortunately, the feel-ing of poetry is not testable, and ourstudy here is directed toward tests.Graduate study needs to include hispoint of view, both in its approach toliterature and in its conception of thegraduate student.

For graduate school also makes a mis-take in its attitude toward graduatestudents. I agree that graduate instruc-tors should not be nursemaids hovering

over budding scholars, or graduateschools educational playpens. If any-where, undergraduate school is the placefor that. I walk alone now, and I ex-pect to be treated as a member of theacademic race, as a potential colleague.My expectation has been so unfulfilledthat I now feel guilty and presumptuousfor having even thought of it. I ammerely a thing called Master's Candi-date, something which reads at break-neck speed, writes papers, and passes arequired number of courses with A'sand B's. I appreciate the assumptionthat I can, to a great degree, absorbknowledge through lectures, and readwell enough to educate myself. But Ineed help, too. That's one reason whyI'm here. If I have a good paper or achallenging idea, I don't want to betold to write an article; I want to talkabout it. If I don't understand some-thing, I don't want to be afraid to admitit. I told one of my instructors oncethat I was having difficulty in readingthe poetry of Robert Browning. "Oh,"was his reply.

This atmosphere has led me to a kindof despair. I have felt religious despairand find it the only fit analog for thehopelessness and confusion I've felt thisyear. My doubts in my own ability tosucceed in graduate study are enormous,but I can heither justify or disprovethem. My work has received such variedand contradictory judgments here thatI no longer know what I am capable of.I see this confusion in my friends, too.Who we are, what we can do, why weare here, how we relate to the graduatemachinery, are all questions which an-guish us periodically. We contemplatechanging our schools, fields, countries.

Our complaints are often the maintopic of our conversation and they feedupon one another, bloating our discon-tent. I was talking to another M.A. can-didate the other day before our oneo'clock class. He looked especially grim


and I asked him why. He told me thathe and two other students, both grad-uate teaching assistants in English, hadsat drinking in his apartment all nightuntil seven that morning. I asked why.The other two, he said, wanted to bedrunk when they taught their eighto'clock classes. Why? Just a way ofrebelling.

That kind of protest alters nothing.But because we fear censure, becausewe are judged so abstractly, we railonly amongst ourselves or through futilefits of rebellion. I know of no studentwho has complained to a member ofthe faculty. Communication, infinitelyimportant to me, is generally absenthere. I have had one conference duringwhich I felt my instructor cared that Iwas a human being. Nothing, not evengraduate school, can kill the possibilityfor communication. But it does not en-courage it, and all my other meetingshave been brief, formal, and factual.

If the teaching attitude I see herewere the only one I knew, I would neverconsider becoming a college teacher. Myundergraduate experience convinced meof how much good a teacher can do fora student by opening his mind to ideasand art as well as teaching him facts,and graduate school has not been ableto obliterate that.

Graduate school will make me a betterteacher. Any experience which increasesmy range of knowledge will. But itscontribution could have been greater.I have learned many facts, but few writ-ing skills. In only one course this yeardid the instructor read our papers aspieces of writing. It came in my lastterm, and I realized then how unim-proved my writing has remained. Papersin other courses were judged on thebasis of length, perfection of mechanics,and materiallargely in that order. Ina system which perpetuates publish orperish, it seems contradictory that goodwriting is not more highly valued. Re-

gardless of publishing, however, weshould be writing poetry and fiction, aswell as factual papers. Only if we con-tinually know something of what itmeans to try to create literature, canwe successfully study it. I think againof our poet. But graduate school allowslittle time for creative writing.

Living in discontent has made it evenmore difficult for me to justify to myselfthis way of life. Literature is a formof reality, but the study of literature canbe highly unreal. Against the facts ofmen dying in Vietnam, of Negroes fight-ing to have affirmed their humanity, ofa man assassinating our President, thefact of the date of Doctor Faustus ismeaningless. I struggle daily to main-tain my perspective. I affirm in my lifea sense of order and continuity. I be-lieve in progress. Thus, I do understandwhy I must go through this. The goalbecoming a college teacher remainsclear, even though the means make littlesense. A man who must give the armytwo years before he can begin the seriouspart of his life must feel much the sameway. Friends who have made it through,and some who have not, urge me tostick to it, get it over with. Five yearsof sheer idiocy is worth it. The systemdemands it. I agree and I acquiesce;but I often have no appetite, and I donot always fall easily asleep. Why mustgraduate school be something to be en-dured? It could be one of the greatesttimes of our lives.

I blame some of my discontent onmyself. I do not always grasp the me-chanics of a situation quickly, especiallywhen I dislike them, and once I do seehow I must operate, I refuse to givein without a struggle. If I could swallowmy idealism and realize that in order toplay the game for the prize, the estab-lished rules must be strictly followed,I would be better off. From the momentan instructor gave me a B on a paperbecause some of my footnotes were in-

"THIS GRADUATE SCHOOL IS NO TREADMILL" 219

correct and three words were misspelled,saying "Graduate students don't do thosethings," I should have accepted the newset of values and acted accordingly.When I think about the narrow-minded-ness behind such a restricted point ofview, I'm glad I didn't. But when Iremember that money depends upongrades, I'm less pleased with my ob-stinacy.

I conclude with the one part of grad-uate school which makes all the rest ofit endurable: fellow graduate students.

÷ case-history 3

"WHEN' I GROW UP, I'm going to dothings just like Daddy. I'm going tolearn all about mining and machineryand tractors. I'm going to earn a lot ofmoney and be free and independent!It must be wonderful to be a grown-up."So, at seven years of age, I announcedto my older sister. But her superior wis-dom mocked:

"You be free and independentyoudo what you choose. You're a girl!Women can't do what they choose. Theymust stay home and take care ,of thechildren. Only men can choose theirwork."

"I won't take care of the children!I never liked dolls, anyway."

"What silly talk! You just wait andsee."

My seven-year-old wrath burned hotthat I had been born female, as I re-treated from my older sister's retort. Wasshe bitter too? Certainly she soundedno more happy about a woman's lotthan I. As a friend has said, "Womenare charming, delightfulall very wellin their way, but, after all, who would

I continue to find friends around mewhose interests, and often problems,match mine. The longer I remain inschool, the further removed I feel fromthe common concerns of ordinary life.When I ride the subway and watch andlisten to the people, I know my isolation.The ivory tower of graduate school istoo high, but if I must walk at that dizzylevel, I need people there with me. To-gether, we can endure, and await thetime when we will descend back intoreality.

"This graduate school is no treadmill . . ."

ever choose to be one?" There are wom-en who claim they would choose theirlot, but, I am sure, my sister and I wouldnot have, and my anger at seven yearsis still vivid in my memory.

Now I am, without choice, free, inde-pendent and able to choose my work.Perhaps I am playing the man's role Idesired so heatedly thirty years ago. Theintermediate years as wife, housewifeand mother have been good, much hap-pier than my wrath at seven years fore-saw. I have long thought I could notlive without my husband. He is gone,and independence, freedom to do whatI really enjoy is unexpectedly rewarding,even while I miss him on whom I wasso dependent.

I came to graduate school, frivolouslyeager to perfect myself in Englishtolearn how to write well, htw to judgegood writing, and how to read volumin-ously. My excessive love for reading hadpreviously only won reprimands andaroused my own feelings of guilt andescapism. Now suddenly it became avirtue, a source of potential profit, and

220 COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION'

my self-indulgence was praised. The artof writing had come to me only withgreat pain in high school, but the inter-vening years of letter-writing had mademe often too facile. In undergraduateschool, I studied under one who could,on one hearing, both recognize goodwriting and explain why it was good, askill baffling to me and one which, I stillfeel, is essential for any good teacher.

In graduate school I hoped to fill thisneedto learn to judge what is goodwriting and to distinguish its qualities.Perhaps this is an art which can onlybe caught, for, while some of my pro-fessors have exhibited it incidentally intheir judgments and in their dissectionsof a student's poor writing, I have neverknown a course which concentrated onthis one essential skill. I should like to.Though I did not find such a course, Ihad picked a good school, where theart of writing is understood and cher-ished. My own carelessness in writingwas not tolerated. Practical educationbegan when, in an effort to reduce a26-page paper to the requested 20 pages,I jammed as many phrases, clauses andideas as I could pile into each sen-tence, thereby "shortening" the paper, Ihoped. Some of my unwieldy sentences,strung together by semi-colons and over-worked commas, stretched over morethan a page. Faulkner's longest sen-tences had little on mine except grace,coherency and intelligibility. This strangedeviceclauses and phrases jammed to-getherdid indeed shorten the whole,for, when my indignant professor com-plained of "run-on sentences" and re-quired a complete rewriting, the re-furbished sentences added up to 29pages. From high school on, writing hadbeen my forte and I had become muchtoo sure of my ability in it. Now I haddiscovered, not only that my writingwas far from infallible, but that brevitycould be carried to an extreme.

Another professor, an admirer of clas-

sic polished and balanced sentences,demonstrated the virtues of a moderatebrevity. For the benefit of the wholeclass, he wrote on the blackboard onestudent's wordy and involved sentencefull of unnecessary phrases and clauses.By substituting a simple verb or anoun for a phrase and by omitting theunnecessary, he reduced the sentenceto one-fourth its original length andachieved force and clarity. Such a sen-tence as the following:While we often discover ourselves to be ingreat difficulty when we try to tell, in ourreading of Plato's Dialogues, which are Soc-rates' own opinions and which are Plato'ssubsequent contributions to his master'sthought, we may in general come to theconclusion that Plato developed a moreconsistent cosmology and metaphysics.

was reduced first to:While it is difficult, in reading Plato's Dia-logues, to distinguish between Socrates' ownopinions and Plato's development of them,Plato developed a more consistent cos-mology and metaphysics.

and finally to:While, in Plato's Dialogues, Socrates' opin-ions cannot always be distinguished fromhis disciple's development of them, Platodeveloped a more consistent cosmology andmetaphysics.My faulty parallelism was also checked,and so my understanding of a good sen-tence grew.

The over-all structure of a paper wasmy main problem. Enlightenment be-gan when a professor told me to readAristotle's "Poetics," and the need of abeginning, middle and end to a paperbecame concrete to me. I had beenwarned months before by a fellow stu-dent that each of my papers must haveone thesis, which I must choose and thenprove to be true. I told him, and havesince told various professors, that I willnot start any paper with a predeter-mined conclusion. I must leave my mindfree to come to any decision the evi-

4

"THIS GRADUATE SCHOOL IS NO TREADMILL"

dence seems to support in the courseof writing the paper. Never do I knowahead what my conclusion will be. Itis my ideal, in order to be as honestand unbiassed as possible, to have nopreconceptions, and, if I do have a pre-conception, then I risk failure. For Ithink as I write, and each succeedingsentence makes me think a little harder.In a long paper, I must rethink the firstpart to make it at least reasonably con-sistent with the end, and the beginningI always write last. Perhaps partly forthis reason, I was downgraded on onepaper, and that professor and I tangled.He said I must have a point and proveit. I pointed out that, as he had justmade clear, a historian with an idea toprove often distorts his material so thatit may support his particular view. Heassured me that my case and that of thehistorian were quite different, and thatmy writing would be dull. I remarkedthat many people considered the NewYork Times much duller than the DailyNews. Did he want to descend to theirlevel? My heat, I confess, was mostlydue to a suspicion, which I will discussshortly, that my grade was unfairly low.Our skirmish did not even slightly affecthis subsequent courtesy to me, and Icontinued to mull over the conflict be-tween a need for unified coherency andmy need to remain unbiassed. This con-flict was only recently resolved by aprofessor in my undergraduate school,who urged me to write first in my ownway; to discover what conclusions, ifany ( and, if none, then that fact is initself a conclusion) are valid; and, notuntil the conclusions are determined andwritten, finally to determine what thethesis may be and rewrite the wholepaper, omitting everything irrelevant tothe thesis and indicating in just whatdirection that which is relevant points,whether for or against the thesis. I amrelieved to have my impasse so clarified.

Along with good writing, academic

221

freedom is prized in this school. Justas the above disagreement in no wayaffected that professor's attitude towardsme nor the grades he gave, again I feltthe love of freedom when I tangled withanother professor on the value of intui-tion. Like any woman, I feel the in-tuitive should not be inhibited by themerely rational. He, however, insistedon facts to prove whatever point mightbe made. Certainly I feel facts are es-sential as far as they go and his emphasisis healthy and necessary. I was afraid,though, that insistence upon concretefacts might mean that no subject whichtranscended the concrete could be dis-cussedno such subject as the warmthof an author's interest in his charactersor the relative emotional insight of twoworks of art, such as Paradise Lost andthe Bible. If such subjects, admittedlymore difficult to approach, are elim-inated, our most meaningful experiencesgo with them. This professor has nouse for intuition unless it is completelyverified by concrete proof. I trust in-tuition, and, when I told him so, healmost skipped with joy at being socontradicted. We agreed to disagree,each still proselyting. This graduateschool is no treadmill, and the breathof liberty blows freshly.

Yet this English department has aserious flawprejudice against womengraduate students. I was warned of thisdanger before I came, but, as a friendof some experience said, "You'll find thatanywhere. After all, what do women dobut take up space and then go off andget married?" Is it perhaps true thatwomen, even those serious enough towant graduate school, are not as in-tensely motivated to such learning asmen, who must earn their living by theireducation? For a man his earning poweris his central contribution to the family,while a woman may be most winningif she camouflages or even suppresseswhatever earning power she might have.


Certainly she does not have the man'spractical motivation to an intensive train-ing in any profession but one. So per-haps those who are prejudiced againstwomen graduate students have a point.If, however, it be said that a womanshould not be too educated, no matterhow keen her interest and diligence,simply because she will not have a man'spractical need for advanced learning, Iappeal to Robert Frost's "Two Trampsin Mudtime." Those of us who feelour interest to be almost self-indulgent,even frivolouseven such of us have aright to that training which is our soul'sdelight. As automation frees more work-ers for longer hours of freedom, whichwill surely often include schooling, shallwe deny them advanced education ifthey want it, just because they don't"need" it?

In this English department I have feltnot only a skepticism that a womanmay be sincerely dedicated to herstudies but that she can be morallyworthy of the honor of advanced studies.This doubt is not shared by all mem-bers of the department, but it is suffi-ciently widespread so that I do not thinkthe departure of even the head, no dic-tator but a resourceful leader, wouldchange the policy. From this skepticism,I believe, springs a reluctance to gradea woman too highly lest she becomeeligible to embark on too ambitious aprogram. I am in a poor position tojudge whether my comparatively lowmarks are due to such practical consid-eration or merely to the, higher standardsof this school known for its high stand-ards. But there is inconsistency in themarks, even when given by the sameprofessor and certainly when given bydifferent professors. At first I took themarks quite seriously, and they werea spur to further effort. If marks are

too high, with no place to go but down,they become a burden of responsibility.An A is pleasant, but one of those"anaemic" B's ( as the professor mostaddicted to so honoring me termedthem) may provide an additional incen-tive. This spur remains in force as longas the grades are taken seriously, butI confess to a much less healthy angerwhen I began to suspect their validity.If grades are tampered with too fre-quently, they arouse nothing but con-tempt, and an important tool of theteacher's profession is blunted. Thatmen with such a Machiavellian attitudetowards grades also question femalehonesty and integrity is not surprising,considering that we often judge othersby ourselves. These professors, in theirzeal to protect the high standards oftheir departmentindeed one of the bestin the nationcompromise their ownintegrity and perhaps so disable them-selves from seeing the honesty that isin woman.

On the whole, however, this has beena year I would not give up. Irritated,even bitter, as I may sometimes havefelt over injustice, my resentment meltedas I sat in class beneath the spell of onewho brought out the music and mean-ing of poetry or prose, an author's over-all position in history, his meaning tous today, and the ways he can teach usto improve our own writing or to seelife more roundly. This whole year hasadded immensely to my understandingof what is good writing, and, as ateacher, I hope to explain more clearlytherefore. If I never earn much money,I will nevertheless, as I resolved at sev-en, be much better able to "do things"those things which I choose voluntarilyfor the joy they bringbecause of mytraining under good teachers.

÷ case-history 4

I THOUGHT that literature was about life,but in graduate school I found it wasabout theme, plot, structure, and sym-bol. Including the final assignment Ihave just taken from my typewriter,I can count on the fingers of one handthe meaningful learning experiences Ihad in two years of graduate school.

Seldom did I get the opportunity todiscuss or write about literature as apersonal experience. Students and fac-ulty understood that one does not askabout the impact of Raskolnikov's terror,the student's reaction to Melville's value,Samuel Butler's picture of the authori-tarian father in terms of one's ownexperience with authority, or the sym-pathy aroused by Dickens' picture ofthe child's life. In an English programthere should be a place for an honestevaluation of how literature affects thestudent. If not, literature has become avictim of the Mechanical Age and canno longer be discussed as an enrichmentof the reader's life and an enlargementof his vision. When this occurs, thegraduate program in English is deadand English majors will march in Hux-leyan lockstep, book in hand, readingand responding like machines.

Two years of graduate school mademe feel that the study of literature isatrophying. I expected that a graduatv,program in English would provide mewith both a greater number and varietyof experiences than had been previouslyoffered. It did not. Many of the pallidassignments from the undergraduatelevel were increased by one-third andgiven to me again.

223

"Consider the program as a package . . ."

I want to go to an author, book, orcharacter as I go to a friend. Each ofthese displays a set of values that throwlight on how men live, how much lifehas given or taken from them, and whatgain or loss meant to them. Since every-one's comprehension of the human con-dition is limited by his individual lifespan, the most valid goal in readinganother man's interpretation of exper-ience seems to be the addition to one'sown realization of life. Though this bene-fit is obvious, its significance makes ittoo important to take for granted. So-phistication in technical intricacies sup-ports a feeling of superiority, but servesas a poor tool for prying open the shellcovering the life-stuff.

Emphasis on formal proficiency to theextent of dehumanizing the content ofliterature dulls the sensitivity of areader's response. The way an authorperceives and organizes his world tellsme something about him as a humanbeing. This knowledge functions moreusefully for me as a whole person thanknowing where his book falls in themainstream of American or English lit-erature. Even more important than whatan author tells about himself is whatan author tells me about myself as Ievaluate what his world had done tomine. If such evaluation took placewhile I was in graduate school, and itdid, it occurred in spite of the class-rooms and the assignments.

I spent two years in English classesdoing tasks that lost their vitality fromdestructive repetition. I was not askedto deal with an experience, but with the

t.


superficialities of how and why the ex-perience came to be expressed in themanner that it was. I was not participat-ing in an experience, I was watching it,and the observation process gave off thesterile odor of the clinic. A graduateprogram should not restrict its membersfrom taking part in the life behind thewritten word, but it does if the assign-ments do not include an examinationof the value a book has for its reader,which, after all, is the only importantvalue. Reading literature with such acommitment requires some independ-ence, some time for exploration intoliterature both harmonious and disagree-able to the reader's world view. Unfor-tunately, teachers seldom recognized theneed; much less did they encourage itssatisfaction.

In one American literature class I wasable to read freely and to write aboutthe impact the literature had on me.During that semester I read more novelsthan I had ever read for any singlecourse. Having finished the reading, Iwrote a paper on the hero in Americanfiction. I described heroes in personalterms, their strengths and weaknessesas human beings, their hopes and fail-ures, and their morality. Having gaineda sense of what life meant to them, Icould integrate their experience intomine. Only at this point did the con-siderations of theme, plot, character,structure, style, etc., become importantas a means of integrating the experience:It was here that I realized that theauthor's effectiveness might depend onthe beauty of expression or on exactnessof realistic reproduction, but that theeffectiveness should be responded to be-fore an analysis of the devices. In thiscontext I was able to discuss with someexcitement and animation how poorcharacterization could restrict a writer'sstatement and the ways in which the-matic material made richer the milieu ofa book. Assignments allowing independ-

ence in approach serve not only to in-crease the depth of my knowledge aboutliterature, but challenge me to developvalues beyond the narrow range of myexistence.

I hasten, however, to suggest that thegood teacher had more to offer thanindependent study. There should be astructure to the knowledge obtainedthrough independent work, because theelements of literature must be orderedto be seen in greater dimension. Helpingthe student to order this knowledge isthe job of the good English teacher,who remembers that the techniques oforder must be used to heighten thereading experience. The teacher shouldnot ask the student to write about thetechnical aspects of literature withoutallowing the student to integrate them.with his own statement. Why cannotthe teacher ask, What did the storymean to me? Was the story real? Did itcorrespond with any meaning in myown life experience? Such questionsshould be part of the graduate experi-ence in English. Had my teachers caredenough about their subject to be con-cerned with my reaction, they mighthave elicited some sparks of enthusiasmto light my dark dissertations on thetechnical reasons a book did or did nothOld together.

If I dislike a book, I should be ableto discuss it in light of my failure toidentify with the author's values, thenpraise or damn it on the basis of theauthor's craftsmanship. When a studentof literature can say that he dislikes abook such as Moll Flanders because hedislikes being in a fictional world thathas a repulsive moral climate, he hasbeen given encouragement toward atotal involvement with literature. Withthis approach, DeFoe's skill in the char-acterization of Moll, which gives her tre-mendous vitality, can be appreciated, butonly as secondary as to his failure toestablish any positive moral code. In my

"CONSIDER THE PROGRAM AS A PACKAGE" 225

eyes Moll's unwholesome amorality de-termines the nature of the book. I'msure that the professor who insists hisstudents should admire Moll would feelonly disgust for her dishonesty if shesat in his literature class. Yet I nevercould reel entirely free to declare thatMoll stands for a dishonesty I could nottolerate, even while admitting that De-Foe's skill had made me live in herworld. The pseudo-assignments concen-trate on superficialities and, therefore,elicit superficial responses, as can beseen by student attempts to plagiarise,which should be unthinkable to anygraduate English student. People whoseemotional and intellectual energies aredirected toward a meaningful relation-ship with literature feel no need tocheat.

However, some benefit accrued fromall the assigned writing. Because everyart form has inherent restrictions, theconstant use of the essay form restrictsmodes of expression of ideas for a classassignment, and does not allow for crea-tive exploration. But it is helpful in.that such a form provides the graduatestudent with a constant reminder ofwhat he learned in undergraduateschool, and is a means of frictionlesscontact with his instructor.

The emphasis on the superficial hasgiven the superficial a place of promi-nence in graduate study. What onelearns about writing is self-taught. Themechanics of the graduate school directthe instructor's remarks toward a justi-fication of the grade rather than serveas a guide to clearer expression. The

product of graduate school would be amore capable writer if both teacher andstudent were to direct their energies tomake each student paper as good aspossible; instead the student must spendhis time discovering how to please theinstructor. Instead of a slap in the faceor a pat on the back, why not an oppor-tunity to rewrite?

For me the price of getting a degreein the area of my choosing in order toteach literature to others has been frus-tration, anxiety, and general discomfort.The discouragement grew, unrelieved byconversations with instructors who toldme to consider the program as a pack-age, that my experience was not differ-ent from theirs, and it at least got mewhat I wantedthe job of teaching Eng-lish. I am sorry that I cannot in con-science give hope to those whom Iknow still in graduate school that theyare faced with anything more than anobstacle course.

As a graduate student involved withmany bright faculty and students fromwhom I might nave benefitted evenmore, I regret that class discussions andwritten assignments rooted in life ex-perience of the personal kind happenedso few times they became a luxury. Thefaculty had apparently removed them-selves to the esoteric realm of art forart's sake, where literature is refined tothe point of brittleness. There is hope,however, for the English program.Strong demands from the total personali-ty break this brittle overlay and persistthrough to the enduring life-stuff of aliterary masterpiece.

1---------

\

÷ case-history 5

ONE OF THE TWO PROFESSORS most re-sponsible for my decision to undertakegraduate study in English once remark-ed to a class of graduate students thatin the new student union then swellingup through the trees, a 'lounge" forgraduate students should be set aside bythe authorities. The lounge, he timidlyproposed, should be lined with shelveson which would rest only one publica-tiona complete file of all issues ofPMLA. He put forth this notion withseriousness, and with proper and sinceresolemnity we nodded our wise approval.Now I realize that his vision could bematched only by Genet.

At that time (1957), however, I wasa "knowing" M. A. candidate. I hadplunged into the work with the zeal ofa madman ( who else could lounge with75 years of that esteemed publicationsurrounding him?); I had the "inside"view, I was pursuing knowledge, I wasdedicated to the cause.

The M. A. then still had its integrity,at least at my institution. The practiceof granting it freely as a sop to helplure one into Ph.D. work had not beendevised. I studied in numerous areas ina random sequence, wrote a 129-pagethesis on a relatively unexplored sub-ject, passed a language exam, underwentan oral, received my degree and thenbegan considering doctoral efforts.

It is not the M. A. work that I criti-cize here. I needed the work to com-plete my formal education because somany undergraduate semesters were lostto completing my high school education.But I emphasize that it was the termi-nal point in my education.

226

"One wins a Ph.D. by being a drudge."

Not in formal course work, however,for I dutifully trudged on to anotheruniversity and the doctorate.

By this time, I was in need of funds,and I therefore accepted a teaching fel-lowship, thus becoming the schizo-phrenic doctoral candidate: half teach-er, half student. This insidious position,invented by impoverished universitiesthat are willing to sacrifice students inorder to stretch the dollar while pay-ing administrators fancy wages, deservesmore condemnation than the term "slavelabor" contains, for it is not only ameans to procure cheap teachers forfreshmen and sophomore courses; it de-prives the student who should be pre-paring to be a teacher of the leisureand concentration required for soundadvanced study. At work full time onnothing, scurrying to classes in whichhe finds himself on opposite sides of thelectern, unable to feel in full commandof his own students, dissociated fromthe general faculty, grading papers, writ-ing papers, he has no solid identity.

The palliative thatbuck

facultiesuse to excuse this buck private. positionis that the young teacher can learn howto teach by being subordinated to acourse chairman while yet studying"practical experience" is the term. Frommy association with six universities, Iwould say that the person who fills thiscompany sergeant post is seldom (never,in my experience) a stimulating teacherhimself. He is usually kind but unin-spired, thorough but ridiculously fussyabout unimportant details ("Have youentered all the names in the grade bookyet?"), and always officious. Unlmow-

1

"ONE WINS A PH.D. BY BEING A DRUDGE" 227

ingly whittling away at the teacher-stu-dent's enthusiasm, he is not the modelto inspire and vitalize. I suspect thatthis semi-administrative position attractsthis kind of person. It offers a specialtitle, a chance to govern, and yet en-tails little responsibility or imaginativework.

Nor can I see the need to deprivegraduate student-teachers ( if we musthave them) the right to a voicesmallbut audiblein departmental policy.One of the tenets of the university, per-haps now only apparitional, is thatstandardization of courses and profes-sors does not increase but hindersknowledge. You generally do not re-member great courses but great teach-ers and great moments with them, thosetimes when you responded with yourbeing to theirs. To teach, one must sel-ect his material and his approach withcare, and a main consideration is whathe, not other members of the depart-ment, can do with it for his students.

The teacher-student, howeve r, ishanded a series of books and a syllabus,and finds himself under the direction ofa man he does not care to emulate. Heattends a weekly meeting at which ques-tions about mechanics are discussed butno issues, no ideas, no literature, andthen with dampened spirit he tramps offto grade themes on a subject he did notapprove of.

The creation of the teaching fellow-ship or graduate assistantship, however,is not my main criticism deriving frommy encounter with doctoral studies; inspite of the difficulties it creates, I thinkthat a person can still learnless well,less enjoyable, but nevertheless learn.The real problem is what he is forcedto learn, or rather the barriers thrownin his path. "Run the obstacle course,and we'll give you the right to teach".

For me, like others, the requirementscalled for sitting in prescribed classesfor several years, including one in lin-

guistics, one in the history of the lang-uage, and one in Anglo-Saxon, takinga special written examination in thesethree subjects beyond the mid-terms andfinals in each, passing exams in Frenchand German, enduring a two-hour oral( one on "English literature," one on awork in my field), and writing a lengthydissertation to the pleasure of a com-mittee.

My quarrel with doctoral work restson the premise that it largely entailswork irrelevant to the education of agood teacher and scholar; I did not havethis insight until after I had spent near-ly a year in the program, and I havefelt it has been soundly confirmed sinceby my teaching experience. I also dis-covered that some of the requirementsthat could be useful are only paper con-structions used to maintain a facade ofindustry and respectability in the uni-versity world.

No doubt French and German arehelpful to the scholar, for instance. Buthow many Ph. D's can read either lang-uage even though they have passed theexams? I know that one crams and pass-es and, except for a wish that one hadthe real thing, there's the end of it. Andit's no secret to any one. That means theuniversity is retaining what amounts toa nuisance requirement. Either the grad-uate school. should mean what it saysor withdraw it. It is pretension to dootherwise.

I faced the same useless demand withlinguistics and the history of the lang-uage. Many hours had to be allotted toMemorizing all the sound changes inEnglish from the beginning to the pres-ent day as well as the linguistic symbols,et. al., to pass five different examina-tions all given by the same instructor.Needless to say, I forgot the informationimmediately after each exam and hadto relearn it for the next one. Wouldthat today I could quiz every studentwho has been subjected to this torture


to see how much each has retainedandused. How much more worthwhile if Ihad been exposed to the concepts andphenomena, given a basic understand-ing in order that I might realize whatkind of history our language has hadand what is going on in linguistics to-day. That information I would retainand use. Instead I was racked with allthe specifics and no generalizations,while the obvious need is for the gen-eralizations with some examples.

Iconoclastically I must add that asemester or year's study of Anglo-Saxonis not vital to many non-Anglo-Saxonteachers and scholars. Interesting, yes.But so are many subjects. I should saythat two weeks introduction to this sub-ject is all that is practical. Life is toobrief; I feel that a university shouldassist one in realizing what his individ-ual potential is and then should helpprovide the means to achieve it, notwaste his time or legislate his values,A thorough study of Anglo-Saxon is notthe way to self-fulfillment for everygraduate student in English.

The course work I found unsatisfying.I had sat many years in classes and nowI had students sitting before me. I feltthat I should now be out studying andpreparing, not listening. I wanted toread Milton and scholars on Milton andbe queried individually by my professor,not listen to him ramble on for forty-fivehours spread over fifteen weeks, inter-rupted now and again with naive ques-tion by grade school teachers taking ourcourse to earn a salary increment. Suchis not the atmosphere for scholarship.In fact I seldom saw any difference inmy graduate classes from my under-graduate classes except that in the for-mer the papers were longer.

I do not condemn the dissertation; itprovides opportunity for individual workthat must be defended. Nevertheless, noone has delineated to my satisfaction itsworth to every future professor. I might

add that I have decided that in my owncase, should I ever expend such an ef-fort, I will try my hand at writing ona subject that interests me and to myown satisfaction. Then I will hope topublish it. I know too many depressedyoung people worrying out a year ortwo or three in an endeavor to produce200 pages on a useless and meaninglessand boring subject and finding it difficultto satisfy their inquisitors. They feellike Shaw's Joan of Arc: be burned atthe stake or recant and spend your lifein a dungeon.

It is just such an option that chokesthe enthusiasm of graduate students, andkilled my own. Treated like freshmen,we are made to abide regular, intermin-able lectures, the standard examinations,papers on rehashed subjects and of re-quired lengths; we must forego our cur-rent intellectual interests to take up lessrelevant ones; we must memorize, re-peat, regurgitate. And all this culmin-ates in massive dissertations of varyingworth. (How many are ever read exceptby subsequent candidates working overrelated material?) One wins a Ph.D.by being a drudge.

A friend of mine recently took hiswritten comprehensives for the degreeand failed on one question, which meansthat he must take the full two days'worth over again even though he didwell on the others. He has alreadytaught at an outstanding university forthree years. Next year he is moving toan even better one in the East. Forgraduate study he received the mostprestigious scholarship this English de-partment offers. He has published inModern Philology and in the apex, thecrown jewel, PMLA. As a teacher he ispraised from all sides, and he is re-spected and admired by his colleagues.Furthermore, the professor who failedhis answer on the exam admitted thequestion was singularly arbitrary andpenitently declared he would not use it

"OBSTRUCTED THE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS" 229

again. He then proceeded to ask thestudent to substitute in lecturing on themodern novel the next day for an assist-ant professor in the departmekit whowas ill.

This anecdote, told accurately andwithout exaggeration, confirms my ownexperience with the Ph.D. requirements.Here is a person who already has ac-complished what the Ph.D. is supposedto help prepare for. Yet he has beenrejected, at least temporarily, for the

+ case-history 6

degree. What more startling proof ofits irrelevance?

And even more astounding is the com-ment that the form of publication of thiscollection of articles makes on the peo-ple in control of the universities. Thesetestimonies must be published anony-mously because many of those dedi-cated, impartial scholars, fearlessly pur-suing truth together, would hold themagainst us.

"The graduate school obstructed the exchange of ideas."

AFTER TWO AND ONE HALF YEARS of grad-uate school, I quit. I stayed with it longenough to get an M.A. But during theyear of work for a Ph.D., I realized thatthe graduate school as an institutionactually obstructed the exchange ofideas. So I left.

Graduate school, I have come to be-lieve, should be a place where peoplewho are involved in educating them-selves can come together and exchangeideas, information, opinions, stimulation,encouragement, and the excitement ofdiscovery. If this dialogue is officiallypromoted or at least is permitted toexist, all the rest of the graduate schoolcould be absent or ineffective and therewould remain a valuable learning experi-ence. Without this dialogue, all theother components of the graduate schoolthe classes, reading lists, research as-signments, lectures, papers, etc.makeup no more than an institutional shell,of only marginal value.

I plan to return to graduate school, inspite of my feeling that it is, by andlarge, a failure. I will return because

r, 4

the completion of a doctor's degree(whatever lies behind it) is now a neces-sity for a teaching career. But I willreturn with more dread than eagerness.Dread, because I know that a graduateschool is likely to hinder one's scholarlypursuits. Exactly what it is about grad-uate school that hinders, I am not certainI can explain rationally and adequately;it is something in the aunt,. phere. Butcertain memories, or images, arise whenI think about graduate school. Theyembody the persistent, negative feelingsI have about graduate school:

I see myself late in the afternoon ona day when I have read only a fewchapters of a supplementary book orgone over a meaningless list of Germanvocabulary words five or six times, orhave taken notes on two "critical" ar-ticles, the point and utility of which Iam not convinced. It is late in the dayand I have done only a few things,learned little, and completed nothing.All is in flux. I feel somehow discon-nected from the university and have tokeep reminding myself that I am a grad-


uate student, duly enrolled. My day ispassing without celebration or genuineaccomplishment. I keep asking myselfwhat satisfaction is possible when oneprepares for class discussions that some-how never take place, and when oneis preparing for a final examination thatcan be passed without ever once attend-ing the class? I am drinking my seventhcup of black instant coffee in large, joy-less gulps. In an hour, my wife willbe home from the job she has taken tosupport my efforts. I must try to accom-plish something for her sake; I am filledwith guilt. Perhaps I will continue toread. Perhaps I will take some morenotes. Perhaps I will continue to gazeout the window and will continue toponder our graduate school situation.I experience a writhing ennui. I am try-ing to stay awake.

Or I see myself in a class. I settleonto my usual desk-chair, identifying itby a writing surface scarred and ruttedby fraternity insignia. I nod at the semi-stranger on my left. She sits there everyclass period and our relationship is de-fined by the placement of the chairs anddelimited by an occasional smile or nod.We never talk to each other. I am onmore intimate terms with the student onmy right; we sometimes exchange a fewwords. Once we walked to anotherbuilding together, discussing parts of alecture we had just heard.

The room is filled with the chatterof young girls under bouffant hair-dos.It is not clear to me what they are alldoing in what is supposed to be a grad-uate course in nineteenth-century Amer-ican literature. There must be forty orfifty of them, occupying solidly the frontfive rows of the lecture hall. They seemto divide their time between adjustingthe components of their appearance andhuddling over their notebooks, scrupu-lously transcribing the lecture of the dayinto clean, well-spaced notes. I watchtheir faces during the lecture and there

appears only rarely anything like interestin the words of the lecturer. The infre-quent questions they ask are frivolous,or so elementary as to be an insultto the lecturer. No part of the chatterthat drifts back from the front five rowsasserts an interest in or even an aware-ness of the subject of each day's lecture.I amuse myself by imagining how fruit-ful the crass might be if the enrollmentwere held down to those interested innineteenth- century American literature.

I crouch in the back of the room,straining to catch some enlighteningsnatch of the lecture. It is about WaltWhitman. I am sweating slightly andam aware of some irony in connectionwith words on Whitman in this settingand among these people. I keep askingmyself why they all come here. Whatdo they mean to do here? I am inter-ested in Whitman's life and writingand I read his work at home. The wordssent out by the lecturer on Whitmanreach me only rarely; it is almost as ifthey are weighed down in the warmth,stifled by the front five rows of teasedhair and cashmere, sterilized in beingcaptured verbatim by the fifty pens mov-ing in unison.

Or I see myself writing a paper. Thetime is always short under a quartersystem; instead of a problem presentingitself naturally out of the course mat-ter, I must decide on some likely-sound-ing subject well in advance of any realknowledge of that subject, I have ar-rived at that point where the basicresearch is done. I have pulled togethermy materials arta have found that: (a)there is no real problem. The thesis onwhich I have been laboring is one thathas a transparently obvious answer. Or:(b) there may be a problem here allright, but it is not the one I had to startwith; it is another, far more interestingand challenging thesis that has partiallyemerged from the materials I gatheredfor my original, a priori thesis. Natur-


third advisor of the year (the first twowere shot from under me by sabbat-icals).

"Hav9 you selected your courses?" heinquires.

"Yes and no," say I, "since I have somein mind, as indicated on the sheet,but . . ." A mistake. Far too compli-cated and ambiguous an answer, and Ishould have known it.

"What do you mean?" he demands.You have four courses picked out andlisted. It all looks okay from here."

"Yes, but those are tentative, you see,"I point out. "I mean those are all right,but I want to get into American litera-ture right away and I don't know whichlevel, 300, 400, 500, or 600 courses Ishould be taking now, at this stage ofthings. It's not in the catalog," I addlamely.

Dr. Aloof takes a long look at thehalf-dozen or so lines filled in on mypink copy. "Not 600," he declares. "Butwait, do you have your M.A.?"

"Yes sir.""Well then, not so many 300's either.

Unless you need them for background.""I don't know sir. No one ever tom

me which ones I will need and whichones I won't need, what the require-ments are, that is."

"Stick to the 400 or 500 level. 'Coursethe 500 seminars are pretty well filled,so . . ."

"Yes sir." He does not add that the300 and 400 courses are pretty well filledwith undergraduates, to the measure ofabout 85 to 140 per class.

Then, just as I am about to explainthat I would really like to get into someAmerican literature seminars and getaway from the large, undergraduate-infested "graduate" courses, Dr. Aloofharrumphs a couple of times and sneakshis signature onto the bottom of mypink copy.

He smiles benignly at me while waft-ing my registration form to dry the ink.

He extends it to me across his desk. Itis now official.

"Now then, no problems, eh? Thecourses you have selected look fine.Don't worry about the level. You canwork that out can't you? After all, whenyou get to graduate school you have tomake these decisions."

"Yes sir, but . . ."pt into the seminars soon

enough. Yol:ve got some good lecturersthere. He points at my pink form witha pink finger. "And these courses areall good background for your area ofinterest, now stro.n't they?"

"Well, sir, I . . ."He puts away his pen and rolls back

from the desk. My advisement is com-pleted. "What was it again, Victorianpoets?"

"Uh, no sir." I get up to leave. Atleast I got his signature. (It is supposedto indicate to The Administration en-lightened aid and counsel. They prob-ably don't believe it either.)

"S awright. Anytime you got a ques-tion or a problem, why just drop in.That's what your advisor is here for."

"Yes sir, yes sir." I back, nodding,from the room and as I gain the outeroffice I almost bump into another grad-uate student. He is sweating and smok-ing, waiting to be advised on his intellec-tual life for the next quarter. I dodgepast the secretary and out of the build-ing into the hazy violet winter afternoon.

One last image seems always to bepresent when I begin dwelling on mygraduate school experiences: I emergefrom an informative and thought-pro-voking lecture on the Transcendentalists.Following me, rushing through thecrowd of next-hour students filling thedoors and aisles, is a graduate schoolacquaintance ( one has no time really tomake friends) named Jerry. He is work-ing on a paper on Thoreau's politicalviews, or the political implications ofThoreau's philosophy, or something like

"OBSTRUCTED THE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS" 233

that. We stand together in the vestibule,pulling on caps, gloves, assorted mufflers,etc., insulating ourselves against : .,harshness of winter in the Northernplains states.

"What about that remark about 'Slav-ery in Massachusetts'?" Jerry shouts aswe step out into a frigid, gritty wind.I am unable to answer for a moment.

"I don't know. It seemed to me thatDr. Hawville was criticising an implied,potential anarchism, or something."

"I thought you'd pick that up," Jerryaffirms. "Too bad there wasn't time forquestions. Geez, it's cold!"

"Yes, I thought you'd want to saysomething about that. What a wind!"

"I think he is wrong about it. I'vebeen working in that area and I thinkthe order is there. Where are you goingnow?"

"Home, I guess. Anywhere to get outof this wind. Are you going to dealwith that in your paper?"

"I thought I'd go to the library andeat my lunch." Jerry's face is reddeningwith the cold wind. "You should see thisone study I've picked up. It concen-trates on 'Civil Disobedience' but hasimplications for all the political essays."

"Why don't you come on over to myplace for lunch? I'd like to see whatyou've got and show you the paper I didon Thoreau a couple of years ago."

Jerry shakes his head. "I can't do that.Don't forget I live clear over the otherdirection. It'd mean five or six mileswalking in this cold to get back. Myears'd fall off. I'd like to see the paperand discuss some of this with youthough. Maybe we could get togethersomeplace."

"How about the library?""No talking, except on those marble

benches and those are always filled withkids out there to smoke."

"How about the student union?""Are you kidding? About ten thous-

and people there eating lunch. They'reall over the place, with paper bags andthings. All you can hear is ping-pongand rock and roll from the juke."

"Well, there must be some place.""Yeah, I've got to get out of this wind.

What about that coffee house on FourthStreet?"

"The one with the sculpture in thewindow? Not a chance. They hiss youif you say a word while this girl is play-ing the guitar. It's no good, besides I'mbroke."

"What about a classroom?""I don't think so. Long as I've been

here, they're filled until four o'clock andthen locked up after that. Prevents van-dalism."

"Yeah? Well I don't know anyplacethen. Only place it's quiet is the in-firmary. Why don't you just bring thepaper along to Wednesday's class andyou can show it to me while we standin the hall afterwards."

"Okay, I'll do that.""Geez, it's cold.""It sure is!"These images come to mind when I

consider graduate school. But I willreturn for one more try, not at betterpreparing myself as a teacher ( becauseif I am a better teacher now, that isonly a happy, accidental side effect ofthe university's policy of hiring teachingassistants as cheap labor), not at becom-ing a more mature scholar, but only atthe getting of a doctor's degree. I canlook forward to graduate school onlyas a kind of rite of passage, an endur-ance trial that must be undertaken ifI am ever to be accepted as an adultmember of the Academic tribe.

1

\

,f, case-history 7

"an interruption rather than a preparation . . ."

THE STUDENTS of the first two freshmancomposition sections I ever taught werefifty martyrs.

After completing Ph.D. course workat a vast university in a great city, Isigned on as an English instructor at afirst-rank engineering school. AlthoughI was a fully accredited new critic,armed with the techniques of explicatingthe ironic implications of even typo-graphical errors, instead of being as-signed four sections of twentieth centurycritical method, I had to face and teachtwo sections of freshman compositionsix hours each week for forty weeks.

Since I attended a graduate schoolusing very few graduate assistants, I hadreceived no training, either direct orindirect, in teaching a subject I was ex-pected to teach half-time. I grasped atliterary straws, explicating ad nauseamthe Conradian ambivalences of Victoryand the sociological implications ofHuck Finn. Of course my studentswroteand I readweekly ( weakly?)themes. But since the majority of mystudents were neither perceptive Mar-lowes nor even semi-literate Hucks, whatI talked about in class and what theywrote about in dorm rooms were sep-aratAl.

Fortunately, the engineering school Iwas teaching in had set up a "cramcourse" for new instructors in composi-tion teaching in an effort to fill thevacuum left by the graduate schools.But the cram course met only an houra week and was led by an already over-burdened senior professor who wouldassign composition topics for our classes,exhort us to teach writing and communi-

cation rather than literature, then hastilydepart. What teaching writing, whatteaching communication really meantwas usually undefined, left up to us.

As a result I stumbled trough my firstyear teaching less composition than lit-erature, learning far more than my stu-dents about composition, but at thesame time cheating them because Ididn'tcouldn'tlearn and transmit myperceptions instantaneously. Althoughby the September of my second teachingyear I felt as confident about teachingcomposition as about teaching literatureby then I knew where I was going,knew what needed to be done withamateur writersmy first year students,the fifty martyrs, had been cheated bythe failure of my graduate school totake any responsibility whatever in help-ing me teach effectively a course thatwill probably occupy one-half of myprofessional career. I' had spent hun-dreds of hours learning to read Beowulf,but not ten minutes with a freshmantheme.

Since most graduate school training inEnglish is exclusivelyalmost snobbish-lyliterary, how might these schoolsbetter prepare their students to teachcomposition? An obvious first answerwould be for graduate professors to re-duce or modify the usual classroomslams and jokes. ("You'll probably startby teaching four sections of the fresh-man composition curse.") against thewhole idea of freshman composition.Graduate students far too often imitatethe cynicism of their professors by enter-ing their first jobs already soured onfreshman composition and expecting tobe bored by the course. They are.

234

"AN INTERRUPTION RATHER THAN A PREPARATION"

A more positive way of preparing stu-dents to teach composition would befor graduate professors to assign termpapers that introduce the concept ofaudience. ( For a class of high schoolseniors, discuss the humor in Gulliver'sTravels. How would you teach "To HisCoy Mistress" to a class of college sopho-mores?) Only once in graduate schooldid a professor of minewho was theneditor of a leading scholarly journalassign a paper that was to be writtenfor any audience than the scholarlyaudience of one that smoked a pipebehind the front lectern. But in writingthis single paper aimed at a class ofcollege sophomores, I began to get someglimmering of what it really meant tobe a teacher.

Further, graduate professors mightcomment more on their students' prosestyles instead of merely correcting M.L.A. style sheet mechanics or makingvague remarks on the adequacy of theresearch or the worth of the ideas. Andsome papers come back with only suchtwo word annotations as: "Good work"or "Not bad."

Intensive analysis of an author's prosestyle would also be excellent trainingfor the day when Joe Brown's, ratherthan Thomas Browne's, prose style needsto. be anatomized and analyzed, withits faults and virtues pointed out in clear,specific comments. For all the intensiveanalysis of poetry practiced in the acad-emies, it's surprising how little analysisof prose takes place. Never once ingraduate school did a professor of mineexplicate a prose paragraph. At most,some mention was made of one writer's"remarkable prose rhythms" or another's"poetic prose" before turning to othermatters. Yet how beneficial this wouldhave been to any embryonic compositionteacher.

At the very least, graduate professorscould indulge themselves in occasionalanecdotes on their own experiences

235

teaching composition, or the kinds ofproblems they first encountered backthen, or the common student writingproblems they hear about in faculty ban-ter. Graduate schools might even givetheir students insight into some of thepsychological problems freshmen face.When one of my friends once told mea student of his had been talking ofsuicide, I said, "Of course you sent himto the school psychiatrist." "No," he re-plied, "I would never send anyone un-der any circumstances to a psychiatrist."Depression, mental breakdown, evensuicide is not rare in college, andgiventhe peculiarly intimate nature of fresh-man compositionthe English teachermay be the only faculty member evento suspect something is wrong. I'm notadvocating a three credit course in Psy-chological Problems of Freshmen, butperhaps an informal talk by the schoolpsychologist, with a short reading listincluding articles like Dr. James A.Paulsen's "College Students in Trouble"(Atlantic, July, 1964) or Lionel Trilling'sshort story "Of This Time, Of ThatPlace" would alert teachers to studentsneeding more than academic help. Butthe present assumption in most graduateschools seems to be that their studentswould go directly into library carrelsringed by stacks of scholarly periodicalsand will only be heard from when theybelch forth a book or article ( to be dulycatalogued in the surrounding periodi-cals) while having no contact with anyhuman being later than Hart Crane.

This literary exclusiveness has anotherdebilitating influence on undergraduateteaching even outside of composition:the literature studied in graduate schoolis almost exclusively British and Ameri-can. Although undergraduate world lit-erature courses become more and moreprominent ( often replacing the impossi-ble survey ), inter-departmental coursestaught in translation at the graduate lev-el are both rare and suspect. Neverthe-


less, in my second year of teaching Iwas given a world literature course thatincluded Sophocle s, Ibsen, Camus,Mann, and Voltaire as well as Shake-speare and Chaucer. Fortunately my un-dergraduate training in comparative lit-erature had been excellent, so that twen-ty-five further martyrs were not addedto my charnel listing.

To remedy this extreme literary paro-chialism of graduate school, more atten-tion could be paid to the foreign lang-uage reading examinations. Their osten-sible purposeto enable the student toread scholarship in German or Frenchwill soon be obsolete: computer trans-lation will probably be commonplacewithin two decades. Were the foreignlanguage exams to be treated as devicesfor encouraging the close reading andanalysis of foreign literature, then thegraduate student would become a farbetter teacher of world literature. As itstands now, Spanish and Italian arescandalously cold-shouldered out of thehallowed trinity of Latin, French, andGerman. To make the foreign languageexamination part of the student's literarytraining, why not asign him the task oftranslating and defending his translationof a sonnet by Rilke, or a prose poemby Baudelaire, or a vignette by Jimenez?For professors to encourage comparativestudies of Swift and Voltaire, Camus andHemingway, or Williams and Ionescowould certainly freshen the sometimesstifling air of graduate school, with itsrigidly compartmentalized centurycourses in separate languages.

But the encroachments of the Educa-tional Testing Service, already offeringa standardized foreign language exami-nation, will probably make the foreignlanguage requirement even more sterilethan it is now.

Perhaps the best solution to this prob-lem of parochialism might be to unifyEnglish and the foreign languages into

a graduate department of literature. Af-ter all, the themes and concerns thatbind Dostoievski and. Shakespeare to-gether are of far more importance thanthe linguistic fact that they happened toexpress themselves in different lang-uages by historic accident. I once askedthe head of our German departmentwhy we weren't in a common depart-ment of literature. He said, "Well, youknow the French and Spanish teachersfought each other so hard at one west-ern college that they split the romancelanguage department into French andSpanish departments." So, to maintaininternal peace and departmental stabili-ty, the unity of literature as a disciplineis sacrificed to a departmental organiza-tion thata century agosaw literatureas a branch of history and philology.

Indeed, the very narrowing process ofgraduate study may only constrict theundergraduate teacher, stressing as itdoes exclusiveness rather than inclusive-ness. I have found successful undergrad-uate teaching to be largely the drawingof a series of analogies from the stu-dent's world and relating them to theremoter world of literature. Only aftera series of relationships is made betweenthe world the student knows and theworld the novel or poem describes, willmost students show much interest informal structure. Since most of our stu-dents' aesthetic experience now comesfrom the mass media, the exclusively lit-erary nature of graduate study inhibitsthe making of these useful analogies.No commentator I know, for example,points out the similarities in tone andplot technique between Candide andthe animated Tom and Jerry cartoon.Excellent comparative media studiessuch as George Bluestone's Novel intoFilm are still as rare as they are valua-ble.

All of us know an English teacherwho "won't have" a TV in his house.Yet by its snobbish exclusiveness, grad-

1

"AN INTERRUPTION RATHER THAN A PREPARATION" 237

uate study has done little to dispel thisattitude, and far more to encourage it.

The one window through which freshair does ventilate the graduate schoolsis linguistics, where required coursesshould do away with a great amountof the linguistic naivete literature profes-sors pass on to their graduate students,such as:

Item: The full professor of Germanwho sent back Webster's Three andhunted up a mint copy of Webster'sTwo. (How unfortunate for him thatWebster's One is wholly out of print.)

Item: The English department headof a prestigious Ivy graduate school whosaid: "A whole generation of graduatestudents has been mispronouncing thatword. I want you to learn the correctpronunciation."

÷ case-history 8

"I WANT TO COME HOME!" I heard myselfsobbing to my family over the phone.Where was Icamp? boarding school?My ageseven? eleven? No, I had justcompleted my first three weeks as adoctoral candidate in English; I wasthirty-one years old; and the only othertime in my life I had wept from sheerdismay and disbelief was the afternoonI lost a rigged election in high school.

Clearly I did not go home, or I wouldnot be writing this history. But in retro-spect the phone call became Major Rev-elation Number One: life as a doctoralcandidate not only permits but oftensponsors regression.

Just what had happened in only threeweeks to return me to adolescence, if

Item: The American literature profes-sor who wondered out loud why Mel-ville, in his travels, didn't learn one ofthe Polynesian languages, because theyare primitive and therefore simpler.

Item: The poet-professor who decrieda Mississippi dialect as "aesthetically re-prehensible."

But aside from work in linguistics,graduate study seems to me far toomuch a process of time-serving and hur-dle-crossing, jumping on too small atrack. Now that I've finished coursework and am struggling to prepare ade-quately for orals while at the same timegetting enough background on my ownso as not to cheat the students I'm paidto teach, I too often see the whole strug-gle for the Ph.D. as an interruption ofrather than a preparation for a career.

"I was regarded as an adolescent . . ."

not to outright childhood? Quite simply,I discovered, in a number of ways Ishall recount, that as a doctoral candi-date I was regarded as an adolescent. Ipossessed neither status nor autonomy(except when the institution needed me,as, for example, a grader of exams or asection man. For the length of the needand not one moment longerI stayeda colleague). And after roleplaying fora number of years, as snowingly as mostcitizens, that I was an adult, to lose thedeciding vote in my own destiny cameas an ugly shock. Psychiatrists such asErik Erikson say that in all of us livesthe child we once were, with his senseof smallness, impotence, and rage at hisinability to control his environment.


Within a short time, the studious denialof status to this doctoral candidate hadbrought that child screamingly alive.

Not only my own behavior shocked;even more shocking was that of my fel-low candidates whom I met at a depart-ment receptionthe second, third, andeighth year men. Of what did they terri-bly remind me? At first I could not re-call. I only knew that by all my testsof joy and juice they had lost more ofthe important senses that distinguish theliving from the dead: a sense of humor;a sense of the urgency of time; a senseof independence; a sense of self, whichis requisite to a sense of others. Theywere grim and sluggish and leaning andchildish and selfish. Then I rememberedwhere I had last seen a group as diffi-dent. It had been in a psych lab; afriend had been conducting an experi-ment with a group of white rats inwhich they had been systematicallyfrustrated until they no longer wantedto learn. In behavioral terms, they em-bodied that phenomenon called extinc-tion. It was when I realized that aschool was acting as an instrument ofextinction and that students could be-come as daunted as rats that I ran forthe phone and family.

An initial discounter: before makinggraduate school the total scapegoat, Ishould register my belief that most ofus do not begin a doctorate in an Ori-ginal State of Maturity, Nobility, andGrace. Especially those of us who gyredirectly from bachelor's to master's todoctor's to Carnegie's clearly exhibitsome inability to leave the academicwomb, with our success as minds oftencompensatory for our failures as wholepersons. But I am speaking in this his-tory chiefly of the students who havespent time elsewhere teaching or doingsome other form of work. What happensin graduate life to thrust us back intochildhood? Here is a brief history ofwhat I trust was an unintentional exper-

iment in regression and extinction.I began life as a doctoral candidate

conventionally enough by selecting thecourses I wanted to take, in my inno-cence reading the graduate catalogue lit-erally. (Now I know that my pre-gradu-ate standards of what constitute imagi-native literature and what literal wereaskew. College catalogues are works offiction, to be read imaginatively; to beread literally on the other hand are suchdescriptions of graduate-school actualityas Franz Kafka's The Castle, much ofHardy and Camus, and all of Alice inWonderland.)

To return to the courses: in their full-blossoming descriptions they were thingsof beauty: three seminarsin Keats,American Romanticism, and ModernPoetryand a reading course in Jameswith one of his most tender delineators.And with only two straightforward stepsthey would be mine: I needed to getthe permission of each instructor, andI needed to get the permission of myadviser, whom I had not yet met. Atthe doors of all three seminars I foundmyself shoulder-to-shoulder, Sorbonne-like, with forty to fifty of my compeers.For each seminar, the professor an-nounced he would accept only fifteenstudents, chosen on the basis of senior-ity. First-year candidates, move on. TheJames' man looked up from his LeonEdel and said, "You can't be serious."

I found myself instead in four lecturecourses, none of which enthralled or ig-nited, with 100 to 150 other graduatestudents, mostly master's candidates. Inonly one did the professor promise toread the graduate papers himself, andin none did he serve as even occasionalsection man.

However flat the courses, I still need-ed the approval of my adviser. Advisersat my university share one trait: theyare absent, geographically or emotion-ally, when needed, with one ratio assur-ed the more urgent the need, the great-

"I WAS REGARDED AS AN ADOLESCENT" 239

er their distance away. My adviser wasthe literally absentno worse, and per-haps better, than the adviser of severalfellow candidates, so unrelated to themor to anyone else, that they often sharedthe same room with him thirty-five min-utes or more before he showed enoughawareness of their presence to say hello.My adviser, said his secretaryover theyears to become one of my closest ene-mieswas in Afghanistan, whereupon Imade a pale joke that Windermere orLondon I could understand, but what-ever happened in old Hindu Kush in-volving William and Dorothy Words-worth (His People)? Unsmiling, she toldme the date of his return was unknown.As to my study cards which had to besigned within forty-eight hours, maybesomeone else around would sign them.At the end of the corridor I found aprofessor who had made the mistake ofkeeping his office hours and before heknew I wasn't one of his own, I hadsnared his signature and fled.

At study-card-signing time, at the be-ginnings of the subsequent three quar-ters, my adviser was in New Delhi,Ghana, and Honolulu. Onct, the thirdquarter, when he was not only in thecountry but in the building, we had anaccidental brief encounter by the de-partmental coffee urn when I introducedmyself. We discussed, as I remember,the new plastic spoons and their superi-ority in shape and length over those for-merly supplied by the commissary. Idid not badger him since by that timeI had learned another fact of graduatelife: an adviser must not only care, hemust have sufficient status so that hiscaring counts, and mine had just beenbypassed for tenure. Since he could giveme nothingand heaven knows I hadnothing to offer himand since it wasclear I was already in search of a newadviser, with tenure, with a certain briskdispatch, at approximately the same mo-

ment, Number One and I wrote eachother off.

For the next year and a half I took,and helped perpetrate, a series of ap-pallingly bad courses. Although I hadtaught before, no one expressed thefaintest interest in my experience, andI was regarded no differently from mywholly inexperienced colleagues whowere given no supervision or training,for anyone knows that the granting ofgraduate status is simultaneously andmystically a granting of the ability toteach.. I wondered then, as I wondernow, when college students, accustomedin the top high schools to far superiorteaching, will bestir themselves to rebel-lion and demand that college teachingat least occasionally approximate the ex-cellence they experienced in their sec-ondary education.

The worst of these courses, not un-typically, was the Freshman Composi-tion I taught. Critics advance many rea-sons for its failures, but one of the mostcrucial I have never seen presented.That is, the tension and conflict broughton by the contrast in the mode of writ-ing student and instructor-candidate arebeing asked to do.

Dissertation writing observes confi-gurations as inexorable as those of apavane, with success an impeccable trac-ing of conventions. Also, one goal ofdissertation writing in the humanities isto demonstrate that a verbal inquirycan attain the same, if not greater, ele-gance, precision, and impersonality asa quantitative inquiry. In dissertationwriting, consequently, one modulatesthe individual voice so that it does notblare out above the form. Finally, oneproceeds by the tentative, the suggested,the qualified, the possible. Stressed indissertation writing are the conventional,the classic, the cautious.

To many of us, the goals of FreshmanComposition are the very reverse. Fresh-man Composition tries to help the stu-

i


dent find his individual voice from outthe social and economic conventions thatfor most of his seventeen years haveworked to submerge it. It urges him totest his voice, or voicesplurality of sit-uations requires each of us become aone-man chorusprivately, then public-ly, perhaps for the first time in his life.Also, to students who cannot appreciatethe power of the word when set againstthe power of the equation, FreshmanComposition needs to stress the unique-ness of verbal expressionthe ability ofthe word to do what the equation can-not, in conveying our opinion, ourdream, our passion. Finally, to studentswho have been playing it as cool as theadults they emulate, Freshman Compo-sition urges commitment. Stressed inFreshman Composition, in other words,are what is individual, unique, impas-sioned.

There is then a chasm between themodes of writing student and instructorare doing. If the instructor allows him-self to become enclosed within his dis-sertationa common form of entomb-mentthere can be two effects upon hisfreshmen classes, both unfortunate. Hisenvy for the freer and more imaginativeendeavor the freshman are trying candilute his participation in this endeavor.Or, more common, the instructor caninsist his freshman follow the-same rn2d-el writing he must and become, corn--pletely irrelevantly for their needs andpurposes, undergraduate doctoral candi-dates. I often wonder if the parochial,cynical, and supercilioug grousing in fa-culty lounges about freshman illiteracydoes not arise from the understandablerefusal of the undergraduate to meet atotally inappropriate set of expectations.

During these years I did not makefriends, at least with my fellow candi-dates in English. There were, you see,more of us than there were A's to begiven out; and in our primitive society,grades, and grades only, 'coated with

the doctoral committee, so much lesssophisticated on this count than mostseventh-graders I knew. Competitionquickly did in commiseration and fellowfeeling. I sought my friends, as did myfellow candidates, elsewhere. Unfulfilledstayed one of the greatest needs we hadbrought to graduate school: a sustaineddialogue with those of similarly shapedsensibilities about our language and ourliterature.

During this period I also tried to de-cide what configuration of traitsa com-bination I obviously did not possessassured the least damaging survival asa doctoral candidate. As I studied mycompeers, it seemed the ones goingthrough most swimmingly were poor,needed, young, and reverential.

Povertyand I'm here of the straight-forward economic kindis useful. Itmakes possible the candidate's regardingas adequate remuneration for grading,section manning, and assorted grubbing,the pittances and doles many graduateschools call fellowships and scholar-ships. And only if he begins in an initialstate of poverty will the tiny salary hisdegree will achieve for him seem aston-ishing and munificent enough to act aseconomic goad.

By needed, I mean responsibled, de-pendented, family-weighted. Tradition-ally, a wife and children are regardedas encumbrances and distractions. Butsince one's own compulsions are seldompotent enough to stay full-strengththrough the ordeal, the intrusions de-pendents represent are subordinate tothe necessary pressure they exert for thecandidate to keep up steam, to finishquickly and strongly.

Youth and a sense of reverence areintertwined traits. (Youth in the UnitedStates has nothing to do with chronologysince we are perhaps the only countryin history to produce octogenarian teen-agers.) They are intertwined becausethe candidate should be young enough

"I WAS REGARDED AS AN ADOLESCENT" 241

to still believe in mystiques: of the in-herent wisdom and humaneness of hiselders; of the university that grants hisdegree; of the degree itself; of his pro-fession; of his literature; of his language;of himself. The more of these a candi-date exalts, the greater his likelihood,I believe, of attaining his degree unde-structively to himself and to others.( Multivariate analysis and twirlers ofmatrices, start piloting your study.)Since I am not poor, nor needed, noryoung - -and especially since I seem tohave been born with no sense of rever-enceI accurately anticipated, and got,a bad time.

Take the matter of my Generals. Af-ter my year-and-a-half of teaching andbeing taught, I decided I was ready forthat Marvel of Minutiae, the GeneralExamination. I filled out Form 20459-Qand sent it in to the Doctoral Commit-tee. Shortly thereafter I received a let-ter from the Committee: in reviewingthe courses I had taken, they noted Ihad not presented one in comparativeliterature before the twentieth century.The catalogue had been silent about thisrequirement, but fortunately I had takena course in comparative lit as part ofmy master's at another university. I tolda fellow candidate I was writing theCommittee to check the transcript ofmy Master's work and was given twofacts: Doctoral Committees send butdo not receive unsolicited communica-tions, and all universities are completelysolipsisticcourses at any other univer-sity, for purposes of full credit at theirsdo not exist. Fortunately, my currentuniversity's course in comparative litwas being offered the next quarter, somy Generals were put off while I tookthe course and brushed up on my Ovid,preparatory to my language exam inLatinso central to my future life as aprofessor of twentieth- century Americanliterature.

Like 50% of my fellow candidates, Idid not pass my Generals the first time.Despite several months of trying tomemorize the Cambridge Companion,at the crucial moment I could not re-member such proofs of my literacy asthe occupations of the Four P's in theplay of the same name nor the piece ofliterature that commemorated the Battleof Khartoum.

The next fall I passed, and it was onto my orals. Mine were not eventful,but those of a fellow candidate's were,since, thanks to them, he is now a huck-ster on TV instead of a professor of Eng-lish. His failures didn't relate to a lapsein a knowledge of Swift (His Man); itreally didn't relate to him at all. He justhad the misfortune to be at hand whena petty man needed an internecine wea-pon to try to shoot down a colleague.

The fuse-lighter was the sixty-four-year-old eighteenth-century specialistwhose only friend in the departmentwas, unfortunately for the candidate,the chairman. The enemy was the candi-date's adviser, a thirty-t w o-year-oldnewcomer, a fluent a id prolific eighteen-th-century specialist soon up for tenure.The three members of the Orals Com-mittee were the chairman of the depart-ment and the younger and older special-ist.

Despite curved balls and minisculecross-examinings the candidate left theorals room confident he had survived.Therefore it came as a shock when hisadviser called him into his office tosay that he had failed, 2-to-1. When heasked what recourse he had, he had aneven greater shock; for the answer was"None." At our university what occurswithin an orals room is as sacrosanctas what occurs in a confessional. Also,there are no records of what transpiresno notes, much less something as objec-tive as a tape. Finally, in this instance,the chairman of the department was al-so a member of the doctoral committee:


the candidate was not allowed to bringhis case before the rest of the commit-tee unless the chairman of the depart-ment was present, and one can imaginethe relative weighting of testimony. Andso the candidate, despte a brilliant aca-demic record and a highly regardedmonographon Stellawas out of theprofession, unless he chose to start againat another university, and, understand-ably, he did not choose. Oh, his advisergot tenure. Let's never expect logic tooperate in academe; besides, my friend'sdemise seemed adequate expression ofthe older man's hostility.

After orals for me came the choice ofthesis topic. Immediately out of theground rose the Specter of Original Re-search. Only someone who has tried tofind a wholly original thesis topic relat-ed to a major piece of American litera-ture can fully appreciate how little first-rate literature we have produced, andhow overworked the fields are. One so-lution is to turn frankly to the second-rate and to do a study, say, of the kindsof candy Hepzibah Pyncheon sold in herpenny shop. One could title such a dis-sertation "The Epihany of PrivW-1 En-terprise in Hawthorne." But at ..Ast Ifound my topicif you know of otherscurrently writing on the comparative useof dialogue in James and Howells, don'ttell me about itand I entered that darkbackward and abysm of time that thethesis writer shares with all who havetaken on the responsibility of daily,weekly, monthly, self-structuring theirfreedom. (The best description I knowin literature of this terrifying timeless-nessindeed, of the whole invitation toapathy graduate life extendsis JackBurden's career at "State" in ChapterFour of All the King's Men.) This iswhere I am now; and when I am notworking on my thesis, which is frequent-ly, I write choleric letters to deans (un-mailed) and make lists of recommenda-tions, like the following:

HINTS FOR ATTAININGAN ACADEMIC ILLYRIA

ADMISSIONS: The admission of a candi-date, particularly at the doctoral level,should be an expression of mutual commit-ment, not only of the student to the schooland, more important, to his profession, butof the school to the student. Admission isthe assumption of joint responsibility, withthe school promising to perform both thetangibles and intangibles to help the can-didate through an inevitably difficult ex-perience. And since character is clearly ascentral for survival as academic attainmentsor Graduate Records, personal intelviewsand other forms of screening should be re-garded as vital admission procedures.

ADVISERS: Advising should be regardedas so important a part of faculty responsi-bility that the duties should be a formalpart of contractual arrangements, with spe-cific hours submitted by every adviser whenhe will not only be regularly available (atleast an hour per candidate every twoweeks) but attuned and concerned. Anyfaculty member not willing to observe sucha commitment should not advise.

TRAINING OF GRADUATE ASSISTANTS: Ifacademic responsibility is to asked, formaltraining and supervision should be given.Models here, as always, are more import-ant than mouthings.

GENERALS: Eliminate the minutiae.ORALS: Tape them. In the event a can-

didate feels he has been used as an inter-necine ballistics missile or unjustly treatedin any other way, let there be a Court ofAppeals composed of faculty, administra-tion, and his fellow candidates to whom hehas recourse.

STATUS OF DOCTORAL CANDIDATES: Givethem some, such as representation on theDoctoral Committee. Shortly, they are tobe colleagues and fellow leaders of yourprofession. Treat them as such. Curiouslyenough, one does not learn to be a leaderif one is never allowed to lead. ,

DISSERTATION: Put into practice immed-iately the proposal of G. B. Harrison inProfession of English. No candidate shouldspend more than six months on a thesis.Once finished, it should be thrown on agiant pyre, the ashes rescued, and placedin an amulet the candidate wears the rest

"I WAS THROWN A BUNCH OF A's AND B's" 243

of his academic life, to ward off such evilspirits as the Pretense of Wholly OriginalResearch and the Illusion of Omnipotence.

A logical question at this point mightwell be "Why not show some guts andrebel?" I plan to, after I get my degree.A Ph.D. is a professional necessity, andit will give me the status I need to beheard and to start or, to join the foment.My only fear is that once I am out, likeso many others I will go over to theenemy instead of becoming a memberof a new generation. And one deter-mined generation is all it would prob-

+ case-bistory 9

ably take to effect a change: one genera-tion whose training in the liberal artshad truly freed them to give, where theyhad found pettiness, largesse; where theyhad met callousness, compassion; andwhere they had met empyrean ignor-ance, wisdom and simple common sense.

Writing this has been for me re-assur-ing. Clearly something I feared extinctis notyet. But I have perhaps twomore years ahead. Will motivation anda precariously maintained adulthood sur-vive the full course? Pray let them. Andto all others of like minds and no sta-tus, courage and strength.

"I was thrown a bunch of A's and B's to eat."

A RITE OF PASSAGE should take placeduring one dark, frightening phase ofthe moon, not four years of expense,attendance, practice, and test taking.Now is a good time to reflect; now, be-fore I, too, become a shareman of thedepartment, a tribal father waving mymagic totem in the face of the nextgeneration of initiates, confronting themwith the taboos, showing them by myexample how to hunt the big game.

However dark the future, the pastlooks bright. During my undergraduateyears, I met my first fine teacher anddecided, thereupon, to take his learningand his irony to be my own. The desireto imitate was strong. We sat there, ele-ven approximate sophomores, through asemester of Cicero's letters and inflictedour incompetence on him, our muddlecrass minds. I identified with his strug-gle to bring us to some sense of Latinurbanity and an experience of the fateof the Republic. So, when he did not

appear to administer the final examina-tion, I understood; I understood, anddissuaded the eight girls in the classfrom calling his number. They thoughthe must be sick or had forgotten theday and hour. Then I went for a cupof coffee and discovered my teacherat a table talking with a colleague. Imoved over to tell him we had dispers-ed, certain I was unique among the flockof unmoved drudges, and heard him sayto his friend, "Here comes one of themnow."

Nevertheless, the next semester I tooka course he offered in Greek drama. Weused the Chicago translations by Latti-more and Grene which were then pub-lished and whatever else was available.We wrote three essays for that course,and I have never had any writing sohelpfully read as were those papers. Andthere I learned to read literature, itsmotifs, its imagery, and coherence; andafter class or walking on the street I

1

1


heard the names of Franz Kafka, DjunaBarnes, Samuel Beckett.

My teacher was an unpublished assist-ant professor. Next year the course inGreek dramato which I had sent myclose friendswas taught by an ass whohad "introduced" Greek drama, who didpuppet performances of Medea for theHumanities Society, and who I am sureI heard say, "Of course it loses a greatdeal in translation."

I would never be a classicist; but Iwas determined to study and to teachliterature, and began graduate study inEnglish. That was in 1958; and it is hardto believe now, but I had no idea thatthe program of English studies was inthe hands, not of the wise dean whoencouraged the variousness of my un-dergraduate program, but of severalgentlemen called "the Malory man," "theRestoration drama man," and "the Para-dise Lost man."

As lavish as Hamlet, I met first won-ders I had never read. And I thoughtfor a while, "Tread softly, for here youstand on lira ele ground, boy." But asthe journey la. hi fore me, with its landof dreams, I discovered there was reallyneither miracles nor light. And the fa-thers, those men of the department, re-garded me as, at. t ,st, a useful palanquinbearer. They would peek out now andthen to direct me down the next alley ofinert or discontinued information. I wasthrown a bunch of A's and B'f,.. to eat.

The just due of the useful slave camenext. I was awarded a graduate assist-antship: an application for povertygranted as "an incentive and an oppor-tunity to learn by doing." As an incen-tive it was well below anything you paytaxes on as income. The opportunity tolearn came as does one to swim whenyou are thrown from a bridge. My wifewaked through the dust to the Demp-ster-Dumpster with the garbage in themiddle of three hundred acres of mar-ried-student barracks. I taught just un-

der one hundred students something ofcomposition in English for just overeighteen dollars each. And my children,who can splash in the rain of dry daysand have all the hope of vain imagina-tion, referred to the campus as "Daddy'sschool."

I was two years completing the re-quirements for the master's degree. Theconfusions and hostilities which grewduring those four semesters plus a sum-mer session were not entirely my owndoing. I left with the M.A. in 1960,aged twenty-six, feeling that graduateEnglish education, where the full pro-fessors and the new professors strugglefor the main chance and between timesread their notes at you, leaves a greatdeal to be desired.

The poor professor of English with hisaimless, hyper-national, modern disci-pline, never quite deciding whether heis a critic of art, some kind of historicalscholar, a teacher of the language, ashowman beckoning over the distance topotential customers, all or none of these.A man licensed to teach in any NationalModel department of English, but aman who will not influence it for hecannot disentangle the requirements ofany role he may assume from the re-quirements of self-promotion.

But the unkindest cut is knowing thathe appears to many who can buy books,read, and write, a strutting Ficophant,a square, a sort of voyeur watching LadyArt at her ablutions from atop a ridicu-lous portable stepladder which he hasset up outside her window. He points toan indeterminate number of lines ofmarvels and talks about fragments andthe footwear of criticism. He points toa work of whole excellence and talksabout the history of scholarship.

For the graduate professor of English,the pricks afflicting his inferiors, onlyblunted by years, continue. And to themis added an unwillingness to view him-self as a teacher of teachers. A war

t


scholar, he must publish or perish andso he specializes beyond his inclinationand resource, holding before himself thepicture of the few scholar-teachers whobless our Harvard, Princeton, and ourYale, and the carrot of a really profitableanthology. He looks on curriculumchange as other men look on pursesnatching, and with one hand writes uphis justification of The Profession ofEnglish in terms of ideals he has dili-gently abandoned to those two ranksbelow him, while with the other hethreatens to strike down candidates tohis tribe on the grounds of their inade-quate obedience.

But these are the reflections of some-one who is not much short of his thirddegree, who has accepted the professionof English as currently defined andowns a complete collection of nine dollaranthologies illustrating English literaryhistory. I keep a dog and bark myself.

My return to school came about afterthree years of full-time teaching from1960 to 1963. This teaching is relevantto my reflections because it lay betweenthe two parts of my graduate experiencelike the stuff of a sandwich; it wasnourishing.

The M.A. appeared to have qualifiedme for a job in what an American Asso-ciation of University Professors publica-tion has called a "bush league" Englishdepartment. There I became part ofwhat the same publication called "thefluid bottom." So qualifiedthat is, with-out acquaintance with semantics, stylis-tics, logic, or educational methodologyI went to teach Freshman compositionand, off my undergraduate cuff, worldliterature. There was also the usualSophomore survey of British and Ameri-can literature, but it was more familiarto me. The course anthology, in imitationof my collection of bloated universitylevel ones, ran from Beowulf to RichardWilbur, and, complete with headnotes,

was designed to defeat any but the mostfleeting experience of culture.

During those three years I learnedthat I could give myself to teaching al-most without reserve and I found thatthe courses in composition and in worldliterature could be taught with honestyand, it may be, with some effect. Thesophomore survey was a different mat-ter. This course was the English depart-ment's main dish of gruel, taught to all,whereas the other courses were ratherfreely conceived General Educationofferings in which English departmentmembers served along with a GeneralEducation staff. The survey asked nomore than a dun grey rundown of litera-ry historical commonplaces, illustrationsprovided on request. The anthology andprogress threngh the centuries were pre-scribed by the full professors in the de-partment; unlike the other courseswhich were constantly being altered, thisone was above criticism. Apparently anyanthology such as ours or the many likeit, which had been put to use on severalhundred thousand students, was abovecriticism.

So were the full professors. One ofthem wrote in a college report on ac-creditation, "The humor of the facultywith regard to change may be certifiedas optimistic." I keep the yellowing re-port as much for the sake of this sen-tence as for another section which docu-ments the proportionate decline in un-dergraduates majoring in English.

No, I disliked such surveys as a stu-dent and found them impossible as ateacher. They make their appeal to thenon-historian and to those sad pimpswho find profit in merchandising the fa-vors of a whore culture, tiny identifiablepiece at a time.

During those three years of teaching,I also learned that unless I got the Ph.D.I would forever be a suspect instructor,suspiciously uncertified, paid by halves,perhaps evenas currently defineda


fugitive from failure, at least permanent-ly nonsuited of permanent employment.So last year I enrolled in another uni-versity to complete work toward thePh.D.

Literature in English is divided, here,into seven "Groups" within the usualchronological and national boundaries. Imust fill outor "fatten up," as one pro-fessor put itmy knowledge of literaryhistory by taking courses in thoseGroups where I have previously had thefewest courses. I swell attendance, com-pleting the required hours, in threecredit hour sessions of "lecture-discus-sion" with which the graduate professorintent on his book during his wakingmomentsis filling out his requiredhours. I support Anglo-Saxon studies byperforce attending two semesters ofthat remote, thick tongue and I am onlythankful that, somehow, Scottish litera-ture and dialectology have disappearedfrom the curriculum. I have nothing tosay about the seminars for which thestudents were unprepared and whichthe professors regarded as occasions forfor reflective relaxation. They werepleasant enough; and we all preyed duti-fully for topics.

All this may be bread and butter towise and useful men; but I grind andchurn. As a program it seems neitherwise nor useful. It is not a training forteachers; few of us are proto-scholars;it is certainly not humanistic inquiry; itstunts concern for art and cheats historyof its chief focus on the public affairsof men.

Perhaps I have been too docile in tak-ing on poverty, obedience, and chastemindedness, but gestures of rebellionwere rather flops. A friend and I starteda weekly of critical opinion at the be-ginning of our second year of graduateschool. We sensedat least I did inthe English departmenta good deal ofburied outrage, and we wanted to pro-vide a place where our fellows could

point at folly. We had collected a littlemoney and arranged to print our "News-paper of Ideas and Opinions" in a shopwhich printed a country weekly there-about. It was attractive, folio size withhandset heads on newsprint. We man-aged just nine issues.

Each issue ran one hundred andeighty-five column inches of reviews ofcurrent local art and affairs along withcriticism of the university housing policy( The Student as Revenue), the univer-sity's manner of handling labor-manage-ment disputes when students were thelabor, and the typically consorious edi-torial policy of the university daily whichthe weekly was designed to supplement.There was criticism of various flap-doodle, food for fools, offered in theguise of public lectures, as well as asports column which was expert socialcommentary. One issue printed onlypoetry, including work from two LamontPoetry Selection authors. But whatmakes the now dated copies worth keep-ing are the epigrams which appeared,several in each issue. Any example wouldrequire several clippings from the uni-versity daily to show that they had par-ticularity as well as force. This one wasaimed at a Big Ten coach:

Exemplar molds the characters ofmen;

His mind is shrewd, his ethic ab-solute:

Fake! Fake! The world's a standingstadium

To cheer the fool, the lecher, andthe brute.

But we made the mistake of editingsome good writing for priggish reasons.I was getting further behind in my grad-uate work and further ahead in the sizeof my family. My co-worker on thepaper exploded and disappeared fromthe face of the earth one day duringan effort to explain, to someone who hadasked, why we were always criticizing


things. Our failure, however, camechiefly because we could not get writingfrom the students for whom the weeklywas intended. I had supposed that ev-eryone in the English department wouldhave a few pieces of ripe prose in theirdesk drawer; I had underestimated theamount of their devotion to Studies inthe Quarterly of English and GermanicPhilology.

The Newspaper of Ideas and Opinionscontinued, but in the more capablehands of its first and continuing sup-porter. He was a librarian and livedamong his books in better honesty thanI. I had to finish a thesis on the con-ventions of the pastoral elegy.

At the same timethis was in 1960I watched an excellent and bold quarter-ly, The Graduate Student of English,fold for about the same reasons. Thissmall journal had run for three yearsattacking the main difficulties of grad-uate life with a good deal of intelligence.It printed critical bibliographies, sum-mary articles on trends, on modern criti-cism, and on various Ph.D. requirements,as well as specialized articles and re-views. I had just begun teaching Fresh-man Compositionthere were sixty-fiveof us "practice" teaching with the assist-ance of one professional down the halland the articles in the GSE on teachingcomposition were helpful, neither ob-vious nor promotional, but helpful.

Perhaps the value of the journal wasmost in evidence when its editors wereattacking some hallowed totem or taboo.The New Criticism received some well-deserved Orwellian comment. The frailbody of Old English was frowned' upon.The Modern Language Association slavemarket was discussed. The editors didnot attack the common professional mad-ness of relegating broad questions tosome part of a two or, three hour exam-ination while, lest an exclusively literaryexperience be gained, encouraging themost narrow topics for the eight or so

weeks of term-paper investigation ( e.g.,the water imagery in Lycidas). Theypointed to notable instances of self serv-ice special pleading by the tribal fathers;and they repeatedly asked why onecould never discover by reading Englishstudies that man was a political animal.

The journal failed. It never receivedfinancial support from a university, pro-fessional organization, or foundation.The editors were excessively self-con-scious. But I gather from the concludingeditorial that the great reason it failedwas the continued evidence of indiffer-ence to such a journal by graduate stu-dents of English. It was multilith printedand, of course, not the big game we arebeing trained to hunt.

But these two instances of what Ihave called rebellionand I may includethe quacking of ducks on a bridge whichcan always be heard in English depart-mentswould be nothing but predict-able mishap or empty complaint were itnot that there is an Establishment, a Sys-tem, which should be overthrown. Everypony graduate school in the countryshould not be imitating every other.Most schools should adopt some of thechanges often recommended with re-spect to the shamefully perfunctory buttraditional late language requirements,the "contribution to knowledge," theexclusive diet of English literary history,and the complete absence of underlyingunity in the typical program.

However, unlike other professions, ourtraining is in the form of our practice.What we cannot realize in one placecan be realized in another; so for the lastyears of my rite of passage I have de-cided to teach again full-time. Thismay prolong the years; but teaching asI will be doing seems better than sacri-ficial, full-time pursuit of the doctorate.At least it is much closer to that dreamof learning which is the only claim Ihave to being, as they say, highly mo-tivated.


I accept the eventual necessity of thedoctorate. Without the Ph.D., what theModern Language Association calls myvita, is incomplete. The parting of theways, between .my vita and me, camewhen I accepted the necessity of thePh.D., not in order to become bettereducated, but in order not to be har-

+ case-history io

Dear Ken,I wrote the first draft of this letter

to tell you why I couldn't write aboutmy graduate experience. My reasonswere good, cautious graduate-studentreasons: I said I hadn't achieved enoughdistance to write well about the sub-ject; I wondered what I could add tothe proliferating discussion (see, for ex-ample, the Winter 1964 Carleton Mis-cellany); and I explained that my en-rolling in graduate school seems to havebeen occasioned by a failure of nerve,since I scuttled into it after two sum-mers' disappointing work on my novel.This seemed to me to cast doubt on thevalidity of the anger I often feelper-haps I am angry only with myself.

I think those were sound reasons fornot writing an essayif the essay wereto be a reasoned and balanced argu-ment, that is. But of course you didn'task me to measure the dimensions ofgraduate training, to make proposalsthat could be asked upon by a facultycommittee; you asked me for an ac-count of my experience. I would cer-tainly be a poor man to consider thequestion of Whither Textual Editing inThe Graduate School? or other momen-tous matters, but I can, perhaps, say

rassed and penalized throughout myacademic career for lack of that pro-fessional totem.

I could be content with this attitudewere it not that my professors, thosewho taught and often studied as if artwere short and life were very long, musthave accepted just such a necessity.

"a nagging sense of dislocation . . :A

something about what has happened tome. So I have thrown away the firstletter and written this one, keeping tothe form of the letter because what Ihave to say doesn't seem to fit a neaterform. In what follows I haven't at-tempted to emulate Henry Adams, whocarried objectivity to the ironic pointof erasing himself from his autobiog-raphy. Instead I have taken my cuefrom the frog in Aesop's Fable who fellinto the milk bowl. Unable to scale theslick sides of the bowl, the frog thrashedabout until he had churned an islandof butter, from which he was able tohop to freedom. This letter, this com-munique from my milk bowl, is a recordof thrashings, and if my little island istoo slippery or too small or too privatefor others to stand upon, I can only ad-vise them to find a raft of statistics.

It may seem wilful' to begin this rec-ord in the wheatfields of eastern Colo-rado, but my relatives have a good dealto do with what I want to say, and theylive in eastern Colorado. Each summerI go home to help harvest the familywheat. For one or two weeks I workunder a heavy-hot sun, doing all thethings that once were the daily stuff ofmy life. I deal with wheat, not with

"A NAGGING SENSE OF DISLOCATION" 249

ideas: Wallace Stevens forgotten, I crackthe fat red berries between my teethto see if they are ready to thresh, andthe setting of the straw-walker on thecombine is more important than allegoryin the Faerie Queene. I drive the com-bine through the delicate shafts of strawwatching warily the thunderheads in thewest that might hold hail, and I scoopgrain in the galvanized heat of a bin. Allof this gives me a pleasantly deceptivefeeling of really being home, a sensethat is strengthened by certain constantparts of the homecoming ritual. I canlook for a sour-cream raisin pie at noonmeal of the second day of my visit, Iknow that my father will recall theyear the wheat made 58 bushels to theacre, and sometime during harvest oneof my cousins will offer me a chew oftobacco and a faintly taunting remarkabout the habits of professors, both ofwhich I will accept.

But this convivial chinking togetherof the homecoming ritual doesn't ob-scure the fact that, to most of the mem-bers of our large family, I am a failure.The more positive of my uncles andcousins think of me as an "educatedfool," belonging roughly in the sameclass as the county agent who labor-iously identified bindweed by looking itup in a book, while others take thesofter view that I am a student merelybecause I am too lazy to be a wheatfarmer. This judgment is an old fact ofmy life, and I don't think I'm overstatingit. That I was a lazy, muddled, skewedchild, one who would probably be walk-ing down by the river if he were neededto take a broken combine part to theblacksmith for welding, was decided bythe bright suns of my juvenile sky, themen who broke horses and drove com-bines. They knew what they were do-ingthat showed in every movement oftheir thick bodiesand so they had tobe right about me. I knew I wasn'tlazy, but I accepted their estimate; when

I fell asleep while driving a tractor anddragged a one-way plow through abarbed wire fence, for example, I didn'ttell my uncles that I had stayed awakeall night reading The Grapes of Wrath.To account for my drowsiness that waywould have been useless, even impertin-ent, so I simply said that I couldn't stayawake, thereby furnishing the wholecommunity with a cherished joke.

I don't tell you this in order to ex-hibit myself as a sensitive young planttrapped in a wheat field. It does havesome bearing on my life as a graduatestudent, as I hope to show. But for nowthe point I want to make is that I hadearly practice in accepting two contra-dictory ideas about myself: I knew thatwhat my relatives saw as slothfulnessin me wasn't that at all, but I acceptedtheir judgment of me.

This wouldn't have been so clear tome three weeks ago. On my last harvesttrip this summer I garnered more thanwheat; I saw how deeply the arrogantvalues of my relatives had penetrated.And even though what happened athome this summer s, ems to me improb-able, something more fitting for a Steigcartoon about Dreams of Glory than foran important event of my life, it is truethat a silly, childish quarrel did allowme to glimpse something of myself, andthis needs to be churned up with therest.

The way it began was not unusual.Uncle John, the wit in our family,needles me every year about my effetestudent's life. Last year it was the shortsand sandals I was wearing when I ar-rived: "Is that what schoolmarms arewearing?" This year he mined the veinthat I had gotten too soft to stay aboardanything more dangerous than a swivelchair. At the huge harvest table, beforean appreciative audience, or out in thefield, while we greased and gassed themachines, he talked of a two-year oldfilly he owned. She was still unbroken,

I250 COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

having thrown John twice, and he keptchallenging me to break her. (Once thiswouldn't have been a joke; it is part ofthe family mythology that anyone somuddle-headed as I was as a child hadto be good with animals, so if this hadhappened while I was a teen-ager, Iwould have been asked seriously to dothe job, even though John has alwaysbeen a better rider than I.) Althoughit's been ten years since I tried to actlike Jim Shoulders, John and the familyleft me no out, and when my youngrelatives began to snicker at the baremention of the horse, I thought I hadto say I'd ride her. My wife was angry.She said it was adolescent of me"May-be you should brawl with the footballplayer who sneers in class; it would bethe same thing."and refused to go outto Uncle John's place with me.

So I found myself, late one Sundayafternoon after the wheat was cut,standing in a corral with my hand onthe wet, quivering hide of a sorrel horse,waiting for John to chinch up the sad-dle. The horse was scared and so wasI; once I had known more about horsesthan about Henry James, but that hadbeen a long time ago. About twentycousins, uncles and other relatives satalong the fences, waiting for what prom-ised to be a very short rodeo. I wishedinsanely for the audience to be blind-folded as the horse was. I was sure I'dbe thrown.

But I wasn't. I rode her, rode herdown until her legs were flaccid andher coat lathered and I don't think al-together in my life I have felt a sweetermoment than when I whipped the reinsacross her flank and she shambled intoa tired trot. My jaw was numb from myleaning too far forward in the saddlewhen she tossed her hand, and the in-sides of my legs were rubbed raw be-cause I hadn't worn chaps, but a brokenleg wouldn't have been too much to pay.

Later, sitting in the yellow, noisy

kitchen that had been built by mygreat-grandfather in 1885, we drank andtalked. The occasion was festive. I'mnot sure why my relatives were pleasedand I suspect most of them had beenJohn's victims too, and perhaps thatwas part of itbut for myself, I washappy to be completely comfortable forthe first time in my life with my family.As I sucked whiskey through teeth thatbarely opened it struck me that ridingthe horse should have brought me closerto the familyas it had, but in a strangeway. I was comfortable not because Ifelt I was really one of them, not be-cause I had proved myself accordingto theierules; rather, it was because Icould accept the differences in myself.

Now, all of this sounds, even to me,suspiciously like one of these hokeyReader's Digest stories: I Rode A Broncand Found Security. When I went home,a little drunk, and told my wife aboutit, she said as much. Banal or not, thething happened, and my attitude towardmyself changed.

And even though it is a long and cir-cuitous route from a wheatfield to corralto seminar room, the incident helpedme to understand my feelings about be-ing a graduate student. Throughout thepast year, I have felt a disquieting senseof having been here before; somethingin the atmosphere reminds me of a pastvisit, a visit that was blandly unpleasant.There is nothing really ominous or fear-ful, just a nagging sense of dislocation,of being a displaced person. It is, ofcourse, the atmosphere of my childhood,in evidence again here at graduateschool. For just as the values of myfamily marked me off as an odd duckand made me at least apologetic for mystrangeness, the values of my graduateschool (not the stated values, the onesyou feel and breathe) are also not mine.My uncles thought me hopelesslywrong-headed for preferring to collectwild-flowers over installing new piston

"A NAGGING SENSE OF DISLOCATION" 251

rings in a truck motor; my faculty, morerefined and polite, merely suggests thatthe main business of my life is to bea critic. Another book about the allegoryof The Faerie Queene, even another arti-cle for graduate students to mull over,would do more for me professionallythan would a novel.

There. It's out. I've taken a long timeto get around to repeating a clichénamely, that graduate schools are lessinterested in creative effort than in criti-cal ability. Everyone except me appar-ently knew this; I assumed that anyonewho adopted literature as a professionwould naturally be concerned with theproduction of a modern literature. Butthis is a naive assumption for me tomake, showing that I am heir to myuncle's mistake; they assumed that any-one who lived on a wheat farm in east-ern Colorado could ask for nothingmore. At any rate, it is too easy to callnames and too hard to prove charges,so I must identify my point as an en-tirely personal conviction that is unsup-ported by any statistics or polls: I amregarded as less of a student at my uni-versity for being a writer.

Not that I came to this university tolearn to write. I wouldn't have goneanywhere, except to my books and mytypewriter, to learn to do that. But Iexpected a certain community of inter-est, a certain encouragement or at leasttolerance, so that a published short storywould be roughly equivalent in valueto a speech given at MLA on "Whitherthe Subjunctive?"

So my sense of aid vu during thisfirst year of doctoral study stems fromthe resemblance of my situation as agraduate student to my childhood. Inboth I have been subject to an avuncu-lar patronizing; in both I have pursuedmy own course more or less in secret.I realize that the production of wheatis the main business of wheat-farming,

just as the production of scholars isthe main business of graduate schools,and I am ready to go along with thesepropositions so far as it pleases me. Ican do and have done a good job ofoverhauling a truck motor, and I canand will write a competent dissertation,but I will be damned to Huck Finn'sHell before I grant that I should feelfurtively ashamed of myself for beingless than a dedicated mechanic or schol-ar. One needs money and one doeswhat is needed to get itbut one needn'tbelieve with Coolidge that the mainbusiness of America is business.

Of course I would like to drop outof this doctoral program, but I want toteach. I can't make my living by writ-ing, at least not yet, and I don't wantto return to driving a tractor or workingas a carpenter or selling vacuum clean-ers, nor do I want to continue teachingfour sections of freshman composition,with 120 themes a week, as I've beendoing for the past three years. I hope mytone here isn't truculentI certainlydon't feel aggrieved at having to earna living. Not all of my reasons forwanting to teach are negative or eco-nomic, of course, but the more respect-able reasons do sound pretentious andempty when spoken. The most I cansay with any degree of truthfulness isthat I am engaged with and committedto literature and ideals. I should like todo better. I should like to say I hopeto inspire my students by showing themthe great liberal tradition of thoughtand feeling, but that has an uncomfort-ably ashy taste in the mouth. Inspirethem to what? One of the best studentsI taught last year is now in jail, con-victed of rape; another, a boy whobarely passed, is in Mississippi this sum-mer, risking his life and whatever faithin humanity he possessed by workingin the voter registration drive. I spokeof Milton to both of them. It's anotherof those questions I can't answer; I


have to leave it dangling here as itdangles in my mind.

So there it is, my little island of but-ter. Somehow, riding that horse allow-ed me to take my family and my schoolon my own terms. I am, admittedly, akind of fugitive, but I no longer view

*

myself as one of those "fugitives fromthe worlds of business and the exactsciences, who come to graduate schoolto raskolnikov," as one of the contribu-tors to The Carleton Miscellany put it.The smugness of such a remark nolonger convinces me that I am wrong.

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