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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
About Brainstorm
Brainstorm is The Chronicle Review's team of bloggers on ideas, culture, and the arts.
Gina Barreca
Mark Bauerlein Marc Bousquet Laurie Fendrich Dan Greenberg John L. Jackson Jr. Stan Katz Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Bob Zemsky Recent PostsThe Bad Old Days | Comment [10] Remedies for the Ignorance | Comment [16] The Admissions Effect | Comment [12] Homework by Major | Comment [16] Poetry Out Loud | Comment [8] Featured Articles By the Author
May 13, 2008The Bad Old DaysIn an earlier post on undergraduate admissions, a few commenters raised the issue of workloads. Undergrads don’t work as hard, don’t put in as many homework hours, and still get decent grades, they said, which only makes it impossible for the rigorous teachers to hold the line on sliding standards. The remarks brought me back to graduate school, recalling the old “when I was in school refrain.” So, here’s the way it was at UCLA in the 1980s for an English Ph.D. The school was on the quarter system, with three terms of 10 weeks plus one finals week each year. It seemed that a quarter tried to pack a semester’s worth of work into 11 weeks, and undergraduates did, indeed, meet for four hours per week, not three (as in the semester system). Requirements for the doctorate included: 1, Course work in eight different areas. No. 4 is worth more description. The qualifying exams were called the Part Ones, and everyone lived in fear of them. Each candidate had to take four exams of four hours each taken over a two-week period. Each exam was in a specific historical period, plus a few special areas such as Critical Theory (you could only pick one of these as part of the four). Each exam had three parts. The first part involved a thematic question about the field as a whole, and might single out certain texts for commentary (and it required lots of illustration). The second part provided a passage or short text from the period and asked for an analysis of it. The third part asked a specific question about one of three texts that had been assigned in advance. Each field had a reading list of several pages. Anything on the lists was fair game for the first question. For an idea of how broad they could be, the Theory list began with Plato and Aristotle and moved through Longinus, Augustine, Dante, Sidney, Enlightenment rhetoricians, German Romantics, Marx and Engels and Trotsky, Arnold and Hulme and Eliot, the New Critics, some New York Intellectuals and structuralists, before getting to poststructuralism. The attrition rate, I was once told, was around 40 percent. It was a public university, and anybody could be flunked out without much loss to the program. If you failed, you had one more chance, and then goodbye. Do requirements of that magnitude still exist anywhere? Comment [10]May 9, 2008Remedies for the IgnoranceIn the Wall Street Journal today is a review of a book by Theodore Sorensen, chief writer for John F. Kennedy during his presidency. It opens with a startling fact about the American White House: “In the five years since it opened, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia has polled its visitors on who our greatest president was. To date, more than 1.8 million people have voted. Roughly half the visitors, not surprisingly, have chosen George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. But in third place is John F. Kennedy, having received more votes than Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt combined.” This is remarkable. How in the world could Kennedy beat out Jefferson and FDR together? For an obvious reason: Celebrity outdoes historical truth. Until Oliver Stone and Life magazine and the other mythmakers do the same thing for the latter two that they did for the former, the public will continue to honor the fantasy. The error underscores the duty of historians and teachers to correct the record. Historical ignorance and illiteracy persist, and with the forces of mass media backing them up, academia is sometimes the only bastion holding the line. This is why we need programs like: Program in Western Civilization & American Institutions The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy The Center for Western Civilization Comment [16]May 7, 2008The Admissions EffectIn my last post on homework comparisons by major, several commentators remarked upon the poor work ethic of the students and the declining demands of the syllabus. Kids don’t have to read, write, memorize, or inquire as much as they used to, and grades still linger in the B and higher range. I wonder if the admissions process at competitive schools plays a role. To win a place in the entering classes of those schools — which number, I would guess, around 250 — high-school seniors must undergo a long and complicated gauntlet that includes everything from campus tours to AP course enrollment to volunteering to after-school tutoring to PSAT tests to various competitions in the arts and sciences. Compare that to the old way. Here is how I applied to college back in 1977 at Torrey Pines High School in north San Diego County. I was new to the school, having moved there from Maryland that summer. Some time in the fall semester, I found my way to the high-school counselor’s office and muttered, “I have to apply for college.” “Where do you want to go?” she asked. “I don’t know — one of the UC campuses,” I replied. “Which one?” “Uh, Berkeley or UCLA,” I said, mainly because I’d heard of them. “Okay, well, you have to rank three of them,” she answered, reaching for a one-page form. “Let’s say UCLA, Berkeley, and, umm, Davis.” She filled in some blanks and I signed after recording g.p.a. (around 3.1) and SAT scores. A few months later I got an acceptance to UCLA and that was it. It makes the current system sound like a professional certification-induction procedure, mysterious and occasionally malicious. Perhaps once it’s complete and students land in college they assume education from then on is about precisely that: career training. Why work hard in classes that don’t contribute to the pertinent resume? Why understand higher education as the formation of intellect and taste and learning? The admissions process makes them think otherwise. So, for those classes in freshman comp and U.S. history, do as little as necessary in order to get the grade that won’t hurt too much when it comes time to go through it again, whether declaring a business major or applying to law school or hitting the job market. Comment [12]May 5, 2008Homework by MajorStephen’s post last week about reading complained that students don’t want any more homework, and their disposition certainly shows up in the surveys. In the 2006 National Survey of Student Engagement, almost one in five college seniors devoted five hours or less per week to “preparing for class,” and 26 percent stood at six to ten hours per week. College professors say that achievement requires around 25 hours per week of homework, but only 11 percent reached that mark. The 2007 NSSE numbers break responses down by major, and the homework levels for seniors are worth comparing. Here are numbers for 15 hours or less. Arts and humanities majors came in at 16 percent doing one to five hours of homework per week, 25 percent at six to 10 hours, and 20 percent at 11 to 15 hours. Biological sciences: 12 percent do one to five hours, 22 percent do six to 10, and 20 percent do 11 to 15 hours. Business: 23 percent at one to five, 30 percent at six to 10, and 19 percent at 11-15 hours. Education: 16 percent at one to five, 27 percent at six to 10, and 21 percent at 11 to 15 hours. Engineering: 10 percent at one to five, 19 percent at six to 10, and 17 percent at 11 to 15 hours. Physical Science: 12 percent at one to five hours, 21 percent at six to 10, and 18 percent at 11-15 hours. Social Science: 20 percent at one to five hours, 28 percent at six to 10, and 20 percent at 11-15 hours. NSSE includes the total number of respondents for each major, and it is generally true that the more popular the major, the less homework students do. Comment [16]May 2, 2008Poetry Out LoudThe Poetry Out Loud finals were held in Washington this week, and the winner was a student from the Virgin Islands who recited “Frederick Douglass” by Robert E. Hayden. You can hear him perform here. A story in USA Today on this year’s contest is here, and the Web site for the project is here. Go here for visuals and audio of previous contests. It’s a national competition like the National Spelling Bee, except that students recite poems instead of spell words. Contestants are scored on a range of performance measures, and they win scholarships for themselves and cash awards for their schools. The competitions are intense and dramatic, with the crowd shouting encouragement and judges swept away by the talent on stage. Last year, more than 100,000 students participated. The numbers are proof that poetry can become a popular activity for adolescents if educators and organizers cast it right. Most kids never think of opening a volume of verse, and they hate their poetry homework reading. But put them in the audience at a Poetry Out Loud event and they get into it right off. (I’ve seen it happen.) What are the keys? One, competition. Kids practice for weeks, battle each other, and shoot for Number One. No touchy-feely-everyone’s-a-winner outlooks. Two, recitation. Students pick from a list of poems and recite them from memory. They can’t pick their own work (a restriction that earned some criticism in the planning stages), and if they miss a word or forget a line, they lose. “Rote memorization” is a bad term in education circles (see here), but without it, none of the drama and emotion would follow. Three, drama. For most kids, poetry means a textbook on the desk and a class discussion about form and meaning. Poetry Out Loud, like poetry slams, puts verse into action and makes it a challenge. (See here, and click on “Da’ Poetry Lounge” for a model program.) Finally, money. When they know that cash depends on how well a student turns a phrase, changes her posture, and modulates her voice, tension rises. If more high school students get involved, maybe fewer of them will come to college regarding poetry as a stuffy, unnecessary distraction. Maybe they won’t say, as one student did recently when I announced a homework assignment of memorizing 20 lines of verse to recite to the class the next meeting, “Why?” Comment [8]April 28, 2008Good-Bye Italian, and French Lit, and Latin LitThe College Board has decided to drop AP Programs in four subjects, reports Education Week. No more Italian, Latin lit, French lit, and Computer Science AB. A distinguished French professor in the Ivies says that a group of French professors are drafting a letter of protest, but the College Board has a ready reply. The enrollments aren’t there, and costs are rising. The Italian class claims only 1,642 students served, with 352 of them taking it as their only AP class. French literature isn’t much higher at, respectively, 2,068 and 86. Trevor Packer, vice president at College Board, “said the decision was made principally because of demographic considerations.” The Italian program had only 97 underserved minority students served by it alone, and the French class gathered a microscopic 22. The AP program has made a point of reaching underserved minorities, and “for us, [the question is], are we able to achieve our mission of reaching a broader range of students?” Added to that, consider the cost equation. The Italian program has run 400 percent over budget. Only if outside funding arrives will the College Board reconsider. Additionally, beyond the immediate impact of the change, we should ask what it means for those fields at the college level, and for related subfields in Comparative Literature, History, and Art History. With overall AP course enrollments shooting up, any particular course that can’t at least hold its own stands out. Students aren’t interested, and if they’re not interested in 12th grade, they probably won’t get much more interested by college. Do we see parallel things happening with the size of French and Italian majors? Will those majors exist in 20 years? Comment [17]April 24, 2008Kids' Knowledge of HistoryWhen the NAEP History scores came out last month, and the rate of 12th-graders scoring “below basic” went from 57 percent in 1994 and 2001 to 53 percent in 2006, the rise gave optimists and pessimists grounds for judgment. “We got improvement,” some said, while others replied, “We’ve still got more than half of them with an ‘F.’” Another survey of historical knowledge appeared several weeks back entitled Still at Risk: What Students Don’t Know, Even Now. The survey received vast coverage, and its findings were just as negative as the NAEP scores (example: only 43 percent placed the Civil War in the period 1850-1900). This week, the author of the report Rick Hess has a summary statement on the findings, concluding: When it comes to familiarity with major historical events and significant literary accomplishments, America’s 17-year-olds fare rather poorly. When asked relatively simple multiple-choice questions and graded on a generous scale, teens on the cusp of adulthood earn a D overall. . . . When it comes to familiarity with the base of knowledge that enables us to engage in conversations about values and policy, our 17-year-olds are barely literate. His statement contrasts with another survey that came out recently, this conducted by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano. It was reported in advance here, and a post appeared here. Wineburg and Monte-Sano asked 11th- and 12th-graders to rank the ten “most famous Americans in history,” and the five most famous women, excluding presidents and presidents’ wives. They reported the findings in the latest issue of Journal of American History. Here is the first list: 1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Based on the USA Today story, I wrote that these “selections indicate just how far out of the way current social studies curricula go in emphasizing women and African-Americans.” I thought, though, that concessions should be made for the instrument asking for the “most famous,” not the most influential or important figures in American history. But in the Journal of American History article, we read that the researchers “experimented with different wording for the prompt, substituting the words ‘significant’ and ‘important’ for ‘famous.’ Those substitutions yielded little difference in students’ responses.” This is a serious finding of the study, but Wineburg/Monte-Sano have no interest in pursuing it. That fame and historical importance/influence mean the same thing to respondents might lead to sober reflections on celebrity and memory, but not here. Wineburg/Monte-Sano take the rankings at face value and highlight how they demonstrate how far America has come in recognizing women and African-Americans as historical players. They marvel at the top three on the list being black, though they wonder, with smooth superiority, “whether these four thousand Americans [the respondents] truly embrace diversity in their hearts.” Indeed, the diversity point is the only kind of judgment they wish to make of the kids. They regret that “other struggles get left behind” (women’s movement, Cesar Chavez, Native Americans, the labor movement), but overall the historical accuracy or propriety of the list they set aside. They do, however, have another judgment in mind, revealing several times a snide disdain of commentators and historians who criticize the young. They eschew the “worriers’ call” and “prediction of impending doom.” “Rather than convening a group of experts to rehearse the hoary ritual of ‘do you know what we know,’” they proclaim, “we instead allowed students to nominate the figures.” And: “It has become a national pastime to give kids a test and then wag our fingers at their ignorance.” And: “Such a convenient oversight [of not testing adults, too] permits each generation to marinate in the self-satisfaction that, back in their day, they knew their Andrew Johnson from their Lyndon Johnson.” When historians ranked John Marshall 3rd on a list of influential Americans and only two of Wineburg/Monte-Sano’s 4,000 respondents mentioned him, they only note the “gaping differences between academic historians and the ordinary Americans.” For them, it’s all relative. Things change. Values come and go. “As one set of myths goes backstage others jostle in the wings, waiting for their moment,” they explain. So, apart from the multiculturalist adjustments, let’s relax. Don’t fret at Marilyn coming out way ahead of Marshall. So much for historical method. So much for historical truth. Comment [32]April 21, 2008Bad Films Aren't Worth Scholars' TimeDid you know that most of the March 2007 volume of College English is devoted to the 2004 film Crash? The opening essay by David G. Holmes notes that the film was “critically acclaimed,” receiving not only Academy Awards, but also the NAACP Image Award and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Hubert Humphrey Civil Rights Award. Holmes also remarks upon “much to criticize as well, including plot contrivances and witty dialogue that quickly wanes to redundant one-liners.” That goes along with my impression of the film, and I found the characters to be loaded caricatures and the race presentations highly manipulative, enough to walk away after 45 minutes. Holmes asserts that “the movie engages what audiences of nearly every racial and ethnic hue feel, in part because the joke is on all of us, but largely because the movie dares to express the prejudicial sentiments we harbor in our hearts.” Yes, and therein is the problem: Not that the movie really succeeds in doing so, but that it takes such relentless and self-important aim at doing so. The film strives to reveal our inner racism, labors so ponderously to expose prejudice across colors that, for all its sobriety and directness, one can’t take it seriously. Officer Ryan’s molestation of Christine is excruciating, but does the film have to focus at length on his fingers climbing her thighs? Still, six more scholars in College English weigh in on the film. They form an example of intelligent academics spending time analyzing something that isn’t worth it. The appeal, of course, is the racial tension in the film, which can be taken as representing (or not representing) racial realities in our society. But when a work fails several aesthetic tests of plot, characters, etc., those drawbacks should outweigh the topicality. Film is a seductive medium, however, and several smart friends have been taken in. Here are a few more bad films that have evoked their critical respect: 1. American Beauty (only good scene: the boy’s monologue while filming the bag blowing in the alley) April 17, 2008Those Biased ProfsRecently the Chronicle reported on a survey showing that the less time people spend on college campuses, the more they think that professors get political in the classroom. A George Mason professor provided the obvious conclusion: “If you have never been in a college classroom, the fantasies and hyped-up expectations promulgated by David Horowitz and others may seem plausible descriptions of the typical American campus.” There you are. Attributions of bias stem from ignorance mixed with the actions of opportunists and fantasists such Horowitz. There may be, however, another explanation that doesn’t treat the public as so gullible and credulous. While distant folks do observe little of the nuts and bolts activities of the faculty, they do see and hear things about the university, often when professors talk about their work in their own words in op-eds and other writings. Often enough, the ideological bias in them is obvious. One of them passed by me in the gym the other day, an op-ed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Harvard professor Mahzarin R. Banaji, in collaboration with two Ohio State professors. (I can’t find it on-line, but it appeared in the Sunday, April 6, issue under the title “What Are the Costs of Being Black? And if they can be established, does that mean reparations are in order?”) The article argues the case for reparations for slavery, and it begins by citing how blacks lag well behind whites on crucial social indicators (infant mortality, homicides, incarceration, wealth …). “The inequities could not be clearer,” Banaji says. “Yet there is near universal opposition to slave-descendant reparations among whites.” Throughly objective and factual, but the next phrase gives it all away: “To understand this paradox. …” A paradox? How blithely Banaji utters the term, and how easily she converts the responses of whites, which are perfectly sensible to them, into an inscrutible attitude. What odd mixture of irrationality do these white people suffer? That’s the implication. The connection between inequity and reparations is a patent truth — that’s what makes resistance a paradox — and so we can move on to diagnosing the malady of the resisters. Banaji proceeds to describe survey research designed to open white people’s minds, asking them to put themselves in slave descendants’ shoes. She rejects the conclusion that “white Americans are prejudiced, mean-spirited bigots,” however. Rather, it is that “White Americans are sufficiently ignorant of their history and the effects of longstanding inequality that they simply don’t understand the need for reparations.” In short, whites just don’t get it. In truth, reparations is a complex issue — morally, historically, and practically. But this article places all the difficulty in the heads of ignorant white people. Reading such tendentious and arrogant statements, and hearing about the loaded and leading-question style research behind them, can off-campus people be wrong to question the ideological make-up of faculty? Comment [26]April 14, 2008The Remediation RiseBack in 2000, the U.S. Department of Education reported, 28 percent of entering freshmen showed up deficient in reading, writing, or math. Many observers found the numbers cause for dismay. How did the kids make it to college without learning paragraph structure or intermediate algebra? How many millions of dollars did those classes cost? A 2006 issue brief by the Alliance for Excellent Education (go here and scroll down to “Paying Double: Inadequate High Schools and Community College Remediation”) estimated the expense at $3.7-billion per year. Recent reports, however, make the old numbers look almost positive. In 2005, only 51 percent of kids who took the ACT test reached “college readiness benchmarks.” (See here). Also in 2005, according to this story, “Nearly one-third of Colorado high-school graduates who enrolled in public in-state colleges last year needed remedial classes in math, writing or reading.” In Fall 2007, according to this story, “37 percent of freshmen entered a California State University campus last fall needing remedial math, while 46 percent were unprepared for college-level English.” Finally, a report last month by the Massachusetts Department of Education found that “among public high-school graduates, 37 percent enrolled in at least one developmental (remedial) course in their first semester in college.” Professors in liberal-arts courses who spend no time with first-year students need to set new priorities. You can’t build advanced humanistic study on thin foundations of reading and writing. We need more full professors in freshman classes, more focus on general education in the humanities, and less tenured-prof flight into graduate seminars and special-topic senior courses. Comment [22] |