E S SAY

ON THE USES OFA LIBERALEDUCATION

I. AS LITE ENTERTAINMENTFOR BORED COLLEGE STUDENTS

By Mark Edmundson at the University of Virginia

Today is evaluation day in my Freud class,and everything has changed. The classmeets twice a week, late in the after-

noon, and the clientele, about fifty undergradu-ates, tends to drag in and slump, looking discon-solate and a little lost, waiting for a jump start.To get the discussion moving, they usually re-quire a joke, an anecdote, an off-the-wall ques-tion-When you were a kid, were your Hal-loween getups ego costumes, id costumes, orsuperego costumes! That sort of thing. But to-day, as soon as I flourish the forms, a buzzrises inthe room. Today they write their assessments ofthe course, their assessments of me, and they arewithout a doubt wide-awake. "What is yourevaluation of the instructor?" asks questionnumber eight, entreating them to circle a num-ber between five (excellent) and one (poor,poor). Whatever interpretive subtlety they'veacquired during the term is now out the win-dow. Edmundson: one to five, stand and shoot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESSAY 39

UNIVERSITY CULTURE, LIKE AMERICAN CULTURE WRIT LARGE,

IS EVER MORE DEVOTED TO CONSUMPTION AND ENTERTAINMENT,

TO THE USING AND USING UP OF GOODS AND IMAGES

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

Thanks but no thanks. I don't teach toamuse, to divert, or even, for that matter, tobe merely interesting. When someone saysshe "enjoyed" the course-and that wordcrops up again and again in my evaluations-somewhere at the edge of my immediate com-placency I feel encroaching self-dislike. Thatis not at all what I had in mind. The off-the-wall questions and the sidebar jokes aremeant as lead-ins to stronger stuff-in thecase of the Freud course, to a complexly trag-ic view of life. But the affability and the one-liners often seem to be all that land with thestudents; their journals and evaluations leaveme little doubt.

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

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

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

40 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! SEPTEMBER 1997

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

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

classrooms and campuses, where a

E new kind of weather is gathering.

rom time to time I bump into a colleaguein the corridor and we have what I've come tothink of as a Joan Lee fest. Joan Lee is one ofthe best students I've taught. He's endlessly cu-rious, has read a small library's worth, seenevery movie, and knows all about showbiz andentertainment. For a class of mine he wrote anessay using Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus toanalyze the pop group The Supremes. A trite,cultural-studies bonbon? Not at all. He saidstriking things about conceptions of race inAmerica and about how they shape our ideas ofbeauty. When I talk with one of his otherteachers, we run on about the general splen-dors of his work and presence. But what in-evitably follows a JL fest is a mournful repriseabout the divide that separates him and a fewother remarkable students from their contem-poraries. It's not that some aren't nearly asbright-in terms of intellectual ability, my stu-dents are all that I could ask for. Instead, it'sthat Joan Lee has decided to follow his inter-

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

It's his capacity for enthusiasm that sets[oon apart from what I've come to think of asthe reigning generational style. Whether thestudents are sorority/fraternity types, grungeaficionados, piercer/tattooers, black or white,rich or middle class {alas, Iteach almost no studentsfrom truly poor back-grounds}, they are, nearlyacross the board, very, veryself-contained. On gooddays they display a light, ap-pealing glow; on bad days,shuffling disgruntlement. Butthere's little fire, little pas-sion to be found.

This point came home tome a few weeks ago when Iwas wandering across theuniversity grounds. There,beneath a classically castportico, were two students,male and female, having arip-roaring argument. Theywere incensed, bellowing ateach other, headstrong, con-fident, and wild. It struck mehow rarely I see this kind offull-out feeling in studentsanymore. Strong emotionaldisplay is forbidden. Whenconflicts arise, it's generallyunderstood that one of theparties will say somethingsarcastically propitiating("whatever" often does it)and slouch away.

How did my studentsreach this peculiar state inwhich all passion seems tobe spent? I think that manyof them have imbibed theirsense of self from consumerculture in general and fromthe tube in particular.They're the progeny of 100cable channels and omni-present Blockbuster outlets. TV, MarshallMcLuhan famously said, is a cool medium.Those who play best on it are low-key andnonassertive; they blend in. Enthusiasm, a la[oon Lee, quickly looks absurd. The form ofcharacter that's most appealing on TV is calmlyself-interested though never greedy, attuned tothe conventions, and ironic. Judicious timing ispreferred to sudden self-assertion. The TVmedium is inhospitable to inspiration, improvi-

Illustrations by Jeremy Wolff

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

bonanza for producers of the right products, whodo all they can to enlarge that culture and keepit grinding. The Internet, TV, and magazinesnow teem with what I call persona ads, ads forNikes and Reeboks and Jeeps and Blazers thatdon't so much endorse the capacities of the

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

ESSAY 41

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

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

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

sumes, sure. But they alsowant other people to havea fair shot. And in theircommitment to fairnessthey are discerning; thereyou see them at their in-tellectual best. If I were ontrial and innocent, I'dwant them on the jury.

What they will not gen-erally do, though, is indictthe current system. Theywon't talk about how theexigencies of capitalismlead to a reserve army ofthe unemployed and near-ly inevitable misery. Thatwould be getting too loud,too brash. For the pervad-ing view is the cool con-sumer perspective, wherepassion and strong admira-tion are forbidden. "Tostand in awe of nothing,Numicus, is perhaps theone and only thing thatcan make a man happyand keep him so," saysHorace in the Epistles, andI fear that his lines oughtto hang as a motto overthe university in this era ofhigh consumer capitalism.

It's easy to mount one'shigh horse and blame thestudents for this state of

affairs. But they didn't create the present cul-ture of consumption. (It was largely my owngeneration, that of the Sixties, that let thecounterculture search for pleasure devolve intoa quest for commodities.) And they weren't theones responsible, when they were six and sevenand eight years old, for unplugging the TV setfrom time to time or for hauling off and kickinga hole through it. It's my generation of parentswho sheltered these students, kept them awayfrom the hard knocks of everyday life, makingthem cautious and overfragile, who demandedthat their teachers, from grade school on, flat-ter them endlessly so that the kids are shocked

hibited, except on ordained occasions, fromshowing emotion, stifled from trying to achieveanything original. You're made to feel thateven the slightest departure from the reigningcode will get you genially ostracized. This is aculture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

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

42 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1997

STUDENTS WILL NOT INDICT THE EXIGENCIES OF CAPITALISM.

FOR THE PERVADING VIEW IS THE COOL CONSUMER PERSPECTIVE,

WHERE PASSION AND STRONG ADMIRATION ARE FORBIDDEN

if their college profs don't reflexively suck up tothem.

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

But wait. I teach at the famously conservativeUniversity of Virginia. Can I extend my viewfrom Charlottesville to encompass the wholecountry, a whole generation of college students?I can only say that I hear comparable storiesabout classroom life from colleagues everywherein America. When I visit other schools to lec-ture, I see a similar scene unfolding. There are,of course, terrific students everywhere. Andthey're all the better for the way they've had tostrive against the existing conformity. At someof the small liberal-arts colleges, the tradition ofstrong engagement persists. But overall, the stu-dents strike me as being sweet and sad, hoveringin a nearly suspended animation.

Too often now the pedagogical challenge isto make a lot from a little. TeachingWordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," you ask forcomments. No one responds. So you call onStephen. Stephen: "The sound, this poem real-ly flows." You: "Stephen seems interested inthe music of the poem. We might extend hiscomment to ask if the poem's music cohereswith its argument. Are they consistent? Or isthere an emotional pain submerged here that'scontrary to the poem's appealing melody?" Allright, it's not usually that bad. But close. Onefriend describes it as rebound teaching: theyproffer a weightless comment, you hit it backfor all you're worth, then it comes dribbling outagain. Occasionally a professor will try to ex-plain away this intellectual timidity by describ-ing the students as perpetrators of postmodernirony, a highly sophisticated mode. Every-thing's a slick counterfeit, a simulacrum, so by

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

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

be. But let us look at what is actually

O coming to pass.

ver the past few years, the physical lay-out of my university has been changing. To putit a little indecorously, the place is lookingmore and more like a retirement spread for theyoung. Our funds go to construction, into newdorms, into renovating the student union. Wehave a new aquatics center and ever-improvinggyms, stocked with StairMasters and Nautilusmachines. Engraved on the wall in the gleam-ing aquatics building is a line by our founder,Thomas Jefferson, declaring that everyoneought to get about two hours' exercise a day.Clearly even the author of the Declaration ofIndependence endorses the turning of his uni-versity into a sports-and-fitness emporium.

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

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

ESSAY 43

THE SOCRATIC METHOD SEEMS TOO JAGGED FOR CURRENT

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

EMBARRASSED IN FRONT OF THE GROUP FILLS THEM WITH DREAD

he's living in a prosperous zip code, the infor-mational material-the advertising-comesflooding in. Pictures, testimonials, videocas-settes, and CD ROMs (some bidden, some not)arrive at the door from colleges across thecountry, all trying to capture the student andhis tuition cash. The freshman-to-be sees pho-tos of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaboratephys-ed facilities; of fine dining rooms; of ex-pertly kept sports fields; of orchestras and dra-ma troupes; of students working alone (nooverbearing grown-ups in range), peering withhigh seriousness into computers and micro-scopes; or of students arrayed outdoors in at-tractive conversational garlands.

Occasionally-but only occasionally, for weusually photograph rather badly; in appearancewe tend at best to be styleless-there's a profes-sor teaching a class. (The college catalogues Ireceived, by my request only, in the late Sixtieswere austere affairs full of professors' creden-tials and course descriptions; it was clear onwhose terms the enterprise was going to un-fold.) A college financial officer recently putmatters to me in concise, if slightly melodra-matic, terms: "Colleges don't have admissionsoffices anymore, they have marketing depart-ments." Is it surprising that someone who hasbeen approached with photos and tapes, bellsand whistles, might come in thinking that theFreud and Shakespeare she had signed up tostudy were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part the an-swer is a matter of demographics and (surprise)of money. Aided by the G.I. bill, the college-going population in America dramatically in-creased after the Second World Wat. Thencame the baby boomers, and to accommodatethem, schools continued to grow. Universitiesexpand easily enough, but with tenure lockingfaculty in for lifetime jobs, and with the gener-al reluctance of administrators to eliminatetheir own slots, it's not easy for a university tocontract. So after the baby boomers had passedthrough-like a fat meal digested by a boa con-strictor-the colleges turned to energetic pro-motional strategies to fill the empty chairs.And suddenly college became a buyer's market.What students and their parents wanted had tobe taken more and more into account. Thatusually meant creating more comfortable, lesschallenging environments, places where almost

44 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 1997

-no one failed, everything was enjoyable, andeveryone was nice.

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

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

.Along with softening the grades, manyhu-manities departments have relaxed major re-quirements. There are some good reasons for in-troducing more choice into curr icula andrequiring fewer standard courses. But the move,like many others in the university now, jibeswith a tendency to serve-and not challenge-the students. Students can also float in and outof classesduring the first two weeks of each termwithout making any commitment. The commonname for this time span-shopping period-speaks volumes about the consumer mentalitythat's now in play. Usually, too, the kids candrop courses up until the last month with onlyan innocuous "w" on their transcripts. Does acourse look too challenging? No problem. Takeit pass-fail. A happy consumer is, by definition,one with multiple options, one who can alwayshave what he wants. And since a course is some-thing the students and their parents have

bought and paid for, why can't they.l do with it pretty much as they please?

....L~ sure result of the university's wideningelective leeway is to give students more power

over their teachers. Those who don't like youcan simply avoid you. If the clientele dislikesyou en masse, you can be left without students,period. My first term teaching I walked into myintroduction to poetry course and found it in-habited by one student, the gloriously namedBambi Lynn Dean. Bambi and I chatted ami-ably awhile, but for all that she and the plea-sure of her name could offer, I was fast on theway to meltdown. It was all a mistake, luckily,a problem with the scheduling book. Everyonewas waiting for me next door. But in a dozenyears of teaching I haven't forgotten that feel-ing of being ignominiously marooned. For ithappens to others, and not always because ofscheduling glitches. I've seen older colleaguesgo through hot embarrassment at not havingenough students sign up for their courses: theygraded too hard, demanded too much, had be-liefs too far out of keeping with the existingdisposition. It takes only a few such instancesto draw other members of the professoriat fur-ther into line.

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

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

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

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

Disturbing? Sure. But I wonder, are we reallygetting students ready for Socratic exchangewith professors when we push them off intovast lecture rooms, two and three hundred to aclass, sometimes face them with only grad stu-dents until their third year, and signal in ourmyriad professorial ways that we often havemuch better things to do than sit in our officesand talk with them? How bad will the student-faculty ratios have to become, how teeming thelecture courses, before we hear students right-

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

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

ESSAY 45

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

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

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

Naturally, there are exceptions, kids I chatanimatedly with, who offer a joke, or go onabout this or that new CD (almost never abook, no). But most of the traffic is geniallysleepwalking. I have to admit that I'm atouch wary, too. I tend to hold back. An un-

guarded remark, a jokethat's taken to be off-col-or, or simply an uncom-prehended comment canlead to difficulties. I keepit literal. They scare me alittle, these kind andmelancholy students,who themselves seemrather frightened of theirown lives.

Before they arrive, we plythe students with lusciousads, guaranteeing them across between summercamp and lotusland. Whenthey get here, flattery andnonstop entertainment areavailable, if that's what theywant. And when theyleave? How do we send ourstudents out into the world?More and more, our ad-ministrators call the book-ing agents and line up oneor another celebrity to ush-er the graduates into themillennium. This pastspring,Kermit the Frogwonhimself an honorary degreeat Southampton College onLong Island; Bruce Willisand Yogi Berra took cre-dentials away at Montclair

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

Is it a surprise, then, that this generation ofstudents-steeped in consumer culture beforegoing off to school, treated as potent customers

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

46 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1997

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

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

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

by the university well before their date of ar-rival, then pandered to from day one until themorning of the final kiss-off from Kermit or oneof his kin-are inclined to see the books theyread as a string of entertainments to be placidlyenjoyed or languidly cast down? Given the wayuniversities are now administered (which ismore and more to say, given the way that theyare currently marketed), is it a shock that thekids don't come to school hot to learn, unable tobear their own ignorance? For some measure ofself-dislike, or self-discontent-which is muchdifferent than simple depression-seems to meto be a prerequisite for getting an education thatmatters. My students, alas, usually lack the con-fidence to acknowledge what would be

their most precious asset for learn-

N ing: their ignorance.

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

My students' answers didn't exhibit anyphilosophical resistance to the idea of great-ness. It's not that they had been primed bytheir professors with complex arguments tocombat genius. For the truth is that these stu-dents don't need debunking theories. Long be-fore college, skepticism became their habitualmode. They are the progeny of Bart Simpsonand David Letterman, and the hyper-coolethos of the box. It's inane to say that theoriz-ing professors have created them, as many con-servative critics like to do. Rather, they havesubstantially created a university environmentin which facile skepticism can thrive withoutbeing substantially contested.

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

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

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

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

What about the phenomenon called politi-cal correctness? Raising the standard of civilityand tolerance in the university has been-whocan deny it?-a very good thing. Yet this ad-mirable impulse has expanded to the pointwhere one is enjoined to speak well-and onlywell-of women, blacks, gays, the disabled, infact of virtually everyone. And we can owe thisexpansion in many ways to the student culture.Students now do not wish to be criticized, notin any form. (The culture of consumption nev-er criticizes them, at least not overtly .) In thecurrent university, the movement for urbanetolerance has devolved into an imperativeagainst critical reaction, turning much of the

ESSAY 47

A WORLD UNINTERESTED IN GENIUS IS A DESPONDENT PLACE, WHOSE

SAD DENIZENS DRIFT FROM COFFEE BAR TO PROZAC DISPENSARY, UNFIRED BY

IDEALS AND THE GLOWING IMAGE OF WHAT ONE MIGHT BECOME

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

. To some professors, the solution lies in themovement called cultural studies. What stu-dents need, they believe, is to form a criticalperspective on pop culture. It's a fine idea, nodoubt. Students should be able to run a criticalcommentary against the stream of consumerstimulations in which they're immersed. Butcultural-studies programs rarely work, becauseno matter what you propose by way of analysis,things tend to bolt downhill toward an uncriti-cal discussion of students' tastes, into whatthey like and don't like. If you want to do aFrankfurt School-style analysis of Braveheart,you can be pretty sure that by mid-classAdorno and Horkheimer will be consigned tothe junk heap of history and you'll be collec-tively weighing the charms of Mel Gibson.One sometimes wonders if cultural studieshasn't prospered because, under the guise of se-rious intellectual analysis, it gives the cus-tomers what they most want-easy pleasure,more TV. Cultural studies becomes nothingbetter than what its detractors claim it is-Madonna studies-when students kick loosefrom the critical perspective and groove to theproduct, and that, in my experience teachingfilm and pop culture, happens plenty.

On the issue of genius, as on multiculturalismand political correctness, we professors of thehumanities have, I think, also failed to pressback against our students' consumer tastes.Here we tend to nurse a pair of-to put it chari-tably--disparate views. In one mode, we're in-clined to a programmatic debunking criticism.We call the concept of genius into question.But in our professional lives per se, we aren'tusually disposed against the idea of distin-guished achievement. We argue animatedlyabout the caliber of potential colleagues. Wesupport a star system, in which some professorsare far better paid, teach less, and under betterconditions than the rest. In our own profession,we are creating a system that is the mirror im-age of the one we're dismantling in the curricu-lum. Ask a professor what she thinks of thework of Stephen Greenblatt, a leading critic ofShakespeare, and you'll hear it for an hour. Ask

48 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 1997

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

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

consumerism. The consumer ethos isrJ" winning.

.1hen how do those who at least occasion-ally promote genius and high literary idealslook to current students? How do we appear,those of us who take teaching to be somethingof a performance art and who imagine that ifyou give yourself over completely to your sub-ject you'll be rewarded with insight beyondwhat you individually command?

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

It's too bad that the idea of genius has beendenigrated so far, because it actually offers alive alternative to the demoralizing culture ofhip in which most of my students are mired. Byembracing the works and lives of extraordinarypeople, you can adapt new ideals to revisethose that came courtesy of your parents, yourneighborhood, your clan-or the tube. Theaim of a good liberal-arts education was once,to adapt an observation by the scholar WalterJackson Bate, to see that "we need not be thepassive victims of what we deterministicallycall 'circumstances' (social, cultural, or reduc-

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it would be a good idea to try firingthe counselors and sending half the deans backinto their classrooms, dismantling the footballteam and making the stadium into a play-ground for local kids, emptying the fraternities,and boarding up the student-activities office..Such measures would convey the message thatAmerican colleges are not northern outposts ofClub Med. A willingness on the part of the fac-ulty to defy student conviction and affrontthem occasionally-to be usefully offensive-also might not be a bad thing. We professorstalk a lot about subversion, which generallymeans subverting the views of people who nev-er hear us talk or read our work. But to subvertthe views of our students, our customers, thatwould be something else again.

Ultimately, though, it is up to individuals-and individual students in particular-to maketheir own way against the current sludgy tide.There's still the library, still the museum,there's still the occasional teacher who lives tofind things greater than herself to admire.There are still fellow students who have notbeen cowed. Universities are inefficient, clut-tered, archaic places, with many unguardedcomers where one can open a book or gaze outonto the larger world and construe it freely.Those who do as much, trusting themselvesagainst the weight of current opinion, willhave contributed something to bringing thissad dispensation to an end. As for myself, I'mcanning my low-key one-liners; when the kids'TV-based tastes come to the fore, I'll aim andshoot. And when it's time to praise genius, I'lltry to do it in the right style, full-out, withfaith that finer artistic spirits (maybe notHomer and Isaiah quite, but close, close), stillalive somewhere in the ether, will help me outwhen my invention flags, the students doze, orthe dean mutters into the phone. I'm gettingback to a more exuberant style; I'll be expostu-lating and arm waving straight into the millen-nium, yes I will. •

ESSAY 49