Whether Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift criticizes colleges accurately, or undergraduates have always performed poorly, I can imagine the director of the freshmen-composition program at Elite National University, where I taught as a graduate student, gazing down from behind a celestial podium now and saying, "I told you so."
In earlier columns I've written about the late "Dr. Dreedle" with something less than admiration. He routinely sent untrained teaching assistants into the classroom and was difficult in general. But from time to time he uttered cynical maxims about academic work and life that have turned out to be accurate. I would like to share my favorite Dreedlisms.
There's no such thing as an isolated incident. When I was a new T.A. and Dr. Dreedle announced that maxim, I didn't want it to be true. It sounds like something Joe Mantegna would say while tracking down a serial killer on Criminal Minds. Despite his harsh tone, however, Dr. Dreedle intended to comfort T.A.'s with his version of the old saying, "The way you do one thing is the way you do everything." In other words, if a student texts his significant other in freshman comp, I should stop him, but I shouldn't regard it as a personal insult because he does the same thing in every other class.
In addition to providing comfort, Dreedle's maxim can be useful when handling student complaints. For example, I once had a less-than-energetic student, "Fred Shameless," come to my office and declare, "You grade way too hard. I've gotten A's in all the other classes I've taken at Locally Known College."
Knowing that students see themselves as customers, I offered to do a quality-control check. I made a quick call to Fred's adviser and said, "One of your advisees, Fred Shameless, claims my grading is out of line with that of his other professors. Is Fred right? Is my grading unreasonable?"
Once she stopped laughing, Fred's adviser replied, "No other professor has detected greatness in Mr. Shameless."
So Fred's report card wasn't filled with A's. Once confronted about that, Fred Shameless showed no more embarrassment or remorse than if I'd called his bluff while playing poker.
Students don't realize that actions have consequences. I thought Dr. Dreedle was wrong the first time he shared that maxim. Toddlers know that actions have consequences, don't they? Yes, but even when toddlers learn not to touch a hot stove after burning their fingers, sometime between diaperdom and the first day of freshman year, many misplace the skill to make the link between actions and consequences.
A number of times I've had students ask, "How come you didn't give me an A in freshman comp?" I reply with a question: "If the syllabus states how many points each assignment is worth, and how many points you must earn to attain an A, why did you turn in only half the homework?"
Invariably the student replies, "I didn't think it would matter that much."
For such students, life must be like Google gone mad, randomly listing site after site, none with any link to another.
Occasionally I encounter more extreme cases of that phenomenon. One student, "Joey Narcissus," griped, nagged, and challenged me in class, and afterward complained that I gave him a lower grade than he deserved because I just didn't like him. I reminded him how my points system worked and declined to change his grade. Even though I stood up to Joey, he signed up for another of my courses, in which he behaved the same way. When that semester ended, he asked me to recommend him for an off-campus internship. To help Joey connect actions and consequences, I declined politely, saying, "You need to find a recommender better acquainted with your accomplishments."
Thanks to Mr. Narcissus, I remind students in freshman comp that they constantly make impressions on faculty members, and if they expect professors to recommend them for scholarships and jobs, they ought to conduct themselves as if their actions will have serious consequences.
Students respect courses that include homework. Many instructors fear that asking students to write anything will result in lower evaluations at the end of the semester and an unpleasant visit from the Retention KGB. I've discovered, however, that my ratings actually rise if I require students to bring a typed page or two of homework for each class session. My students write better long papers and earn higher scores on general exams than their counterparts in composition classes with little or no homework.
I'm proud of my daily homework system because it gets students to perform the dedicated practice that Geoff Colvin advocates in Talent Is Overrated, but my approach also has critics. One day in class a student I'll call "Irving Idleness" declared, "You assign homework just to trick us into doing the reading."
"I give you daily tasks to help you develop your interpretive skills," I replied in my best professorese, and then added, "But in classes that don't have homework, do you read all the assigned material?"
"No," Irving replied in the same tone he would have used to say, "Duh!"
Freshman comp may be the most important class you teach. I must have rolled my eyes when Dr. Dreedle announced that one. If freshman comp was crucial, why would Elite National University entrust it to beginners with no teaching experience? Furthermore, I came to graduate school because I wanted to pass on the wonders of literature to eager English majors like me, not because I longed to walk 19-year-olds through the difference between "to" and "too."
Teaching freshman comp brought me around to Dr. Dreedle's point of view. In a nation in which people actually take Donald Trump seriously as a candidate for president, how desperately do my students need to know the finer points of William Blake's poetry? I wish the previous sentence represented a false dichotomy—freshman comp versus literature course—but that dichotomy isn't so false. Many students are required to take only one English course in college, and many assure me that they will take only one. In that single course, if students don't learn how to analyze and dissect an argument, or how to distinguish an argument from a rant, I suspect they won't acquire those skills on their own via Twitter.
Let's go further. Many students see themselves as customers buying four years of frolicking that will magically morph into a job, so here's my suggestion for weaving career training into la dolce vita: Instead of having only one first-year course devoted to composition, every general-education curriculum should require students to take a writing class every semester to earn a bachelor's degree.
Every semester.
Those courses shouldn't be writing-to-discover-yourself experiences. They should be writing-to-demonstrate-the-other-person-is-wrong courses.
Students will balk, but for their sake, let's apply the business model to higher education. Let's tell students that if they learn how to think, analyze, and express, they will outperform all other employees in their workplace. While we're at it, let's tell them an inconvenient truth: They won't go far in their careers unless they apply themselves, but this sequence of courses can prepare them to do that.
We might also consider using course evaluations that ask students how much they learned, rather than whether they thought the class was fun.
The ideal undergraduate experience could produce skilled employees, informed voters, and superior students, but, of course, for that very reason it must remain a daydream. Better employees would mean wiser consumers, which would force businesses to improve their goods and services, rather than simply sending their PR campaigns into warp drive. If citizens actually learned to think critically, political campaigns would have to become more than empty promises and false accusations. Superior undergraduates would force graduate programs to tell applicants the truth about the job market and display their placement records boldly. With its reliance on bait-and-switch tactics, American culture couldn't withstand having a large block of citizens trained to think and write.
As the leader of a writing program, Dr. Dreedle had some serious shortcomings, but he also had insights, and I'd like to close with one more. Once during a meeting with T.A.'s, he announced, "Don't become the scholar who says, 'The schwa is everything.'" Dr. Dreedle got quite a laugh by saying the last four words in a maniacal voice, but in advising us not to build a career on a tiny vowel sound while the world faces colossal problems, I think he created his best maxim. Whether undergraduates are brilliant and energetic, or unprepared and lackadaisical, they don't need monomaniacs convinced that nothing in the universe matters except their research. They need professors to teach writing and thinking.
(Editor's Note: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 of this series are online.)
