A few minutes into Gerald Graff’s presidential address at last year’s Modern Language Convention (go here and scroll down to “Listen to the 2008 Presidential Address”), he recalls a conversation early in his teaching career.
“I had assigned an essay that asked my students to discuss the meanings of a certain novel. A young man came up after class and reported that the professor in one of his other courses had said it was a serious error to attribute meanings to a literary work, a practice that confused moral messages with propaganda. His professor had invoked the New Critical mantra that ‘A poem should not mean / But be” as well as its pop culture equivalent, the movie mogul Sam Goldwyn’s statement that ‘If it’s a message you want, call Western Union.’ I conceded that there were problems with the message-hunting approach to literature, as the New Critics called it, but I argued that there was a difference between looking for ‘meanings’ in a work, which might be complex and subtle, and ‘a message,’ which implied something simplistic.”
The episode, Graff says, illustrates an unfortunate condition in humanities education that has only gotten worse over time. He calls it “Courseocentrism,” a situation in which the curriculum breaks up into discrete classes that look more like a collection of disparate experiences than a cumulative sequence of study aimed at the formation of knowledgeable and skillful graduates. It follows from the libertarian outlook of the teachers, who think, “I do my thing in my classes — what others do is, well, what others do.”
Graff focuses on the end point, that is, how it comes off to students. They get “curricular mixed messages,” he says, “clashing stories . . . from the faculty.” In the episode above, the student received from Graff and the other teacher contrary assignments, and he was confused. One teacher seemed to “undercut” the other, forcing the student into what may have seemed senseless adjustments from morning to afternoon (“relativists at 10 o’clock and universalists after lunch”).
All too many literature students undergo the same fragmentation in silence, wondering what their progress from semester to semester is supposed to produce. Teachers don’t have to reconcile those differences, but students do, for it isn’t easy to write a paper that asks for one kind of interpretative posture on Thursday and another that asks for another, conflicting kind of posture Friday.
The sharpest students may have picked up the variety of approaches and disparities of readings and synthesized them, recognizing their teachers’ “conflicting or incommensurable views” as an intellectual condition that should be central to their learning. They recognized beneath the schools of thought and conflict of faculties a set of “common practices of reading, analysis, and argument,” those critical thinking skills that cut across different courses and semesters.
But those “high achievers” are a tiny minority. Such discontinuities strike “the struggling student majority” as a difficult and even bogus exercise. Some of them simply aren’t ready for the intellectual challenge, some haven’t the background of reading to proceed to more advanced interpretative questions, and some crave a more coherent moral vision from humanistic study.
Graff isolates two “disastrous consequences.” One, the curriculum loses its cumulative aspect, forcing students “in effect to start over from scratch in every new course.” And two, students end up exaggerating the differences between faculty members and overlooking the similarities, playing up the methodological/theoretical/political antagonisms and missing out on the “common practices of argument and analysis that lay beneath.”
In the second outcome, Graff maintains, sits one of the most damaging conditions of higher education, for in not recognizing the underlying practices, students don’t recognize and assimilate the basic character of academic life. “In other words,” Graff concludes, “the disconnect between courses ultimately reproduced itself in a disconnect between most students and academic culture itself.”
