I've been traveling for 10 days -- to Philadelphia and Lancaster, PA, visiting a friend who's a professor at
Franklin & Marshall. Ah, the life of a small, liberal arts college in the Amish hills of eastern Pennsylvania.
This idyllic setting seems to be the assumption many people have about where a college education should happen: brick buildings, ivy, intellectual conversations under tree-leaf canopies (remember Plato's plane tree in the
Phaedrus? F&M does indeed have sycamores, our name for the plane).
When I returned from my travels, my son asked if I'd read an article called "
In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" in this month's
The Atlantic magazine, an article that bemoans the state of higher education. Of course, I realize that this bemoaning is nothing new: every professor remembers the past rosily; every new generation of students is dumber than the last; every social force conspires to erode the idyllic intellectual investigation that's supposed to happen in college.
Coincidentally, this article is being discussed in one of my online lists, where many folks take issue with this Professor X's attitude and approach to his/her students. Others decry the institutional pressures that make such attitudes/approaches necessary. Still others recognize the hazy-memory assumptions behind what's supposed to happen at an institution of higher education.
What interests me most is something not many folks are talking about on my list: the
centrality of writing to the educational project. Professor X notices that his/her students "cannot write a coherent sentence." These students fail as a result -- and this failure happens in their composition course, the one Professor X is supposed to be teaching, the one upon which most other courses rest. Other departments/disciplines depend upon our composition courses to "teach students how to write" so that said students can communicate their learning in a complex way, a more complex way than memorizing facts and filling in bubble-sheets.
So I would posit that writing coherent English prose (what we used to call Standard American English or
English for Academic Purposes) is a *
necessary condition* for the educational enterprise, not simply a *
sufficient condition*.
Yet, sadly, while many educational practitioners are aware of this necessity, they're woefully out of touch with how those writing skills/habits/practices develop or can be developed. They're out of touch with their own working conditions in their own classrooms and institutions. They're out of touch with how they, themselves, developed these skills/habits/practices. They're out of touch with the hard work we rhetoric/composition instructor/scholars do to help remedy the situation.
*P.S.* I've ended on a pretty depressing note, which is NOT where I want to end. I don't want to be the same kind of doom-and-gloom emoter as Professor X or as
Alan Charles Kors, who's written "
On the Sadness of Higher Education" in
The New Criterion.
What's up with the world that we higher education professionals, people with some of the best, most important work on the planet, are getting depressed?
Most days, I think my work is profound, useful, a gift. My students are curious, ready, willing (this to me is the most important emotion) and able. My classrooms are dynamic, friendly, inquiry-based sites for real learning, real knowledge-making, real community. Most days I "love my job" so much that it's not a job: it's my way of life.
