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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 will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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Recent Posts
The Know-Nothing Party | Comment [1]
ACT Scores Are In | Comment [4]
Tom Wolfe on Larry Summers, Fiction, and Journalism | Comment [38]
The Race Gap | Comment [22]
The Kids Are All Right, but the World Isn't | Comment [2]
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Welcome to College
As the kids making up the Class of 2011, the largest in history, left high school and entered college this semester, here are some of the courses they took to fulfill general requirements:
•At Brown, English 110 turned students into “sensitive and agile readers” by having them do “critical readings of television shows (Big Brother, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City), films (The Godfather, The Hours, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and even architectural spaces (Starbucks and the shopping mall).” A Comp Lit course on “Che Guevara: The Man and the Myths” “compare[s] the development of Guevara’s theories to posthumous uses of his work and image.”
•A section of English 111 at Wake Forest, “My Friend Flicka: Companion Species in American Culture,” examined the “intimate connection” between Americans and their pets. Darwin serves as a starting point, but gives way to “adored animals such as Bambi, Lassie, Flicka and Barbaro.”
•The University of Washington offers a freshman seminar, “Queer 101: Exploring Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues,” which addresses them “from a broad, affirming and inclusive GLBT perspective.”
•At Ohio State, a freshman seminar, “Reading Superheroes,” surveys comic books from the 1930s to the present. Another asks, “Why Should I Care?: Rewards and Challenges of Community Service.” Two notions prevail there, Marxist educator Paolo Freire’s vision of community service for oppressed peoples and radical leftist bell hooks’s idea of “Service as a form of political resistance.”
Nothing surprising here. Cutting-edge critique of cultural fluff and tendentious counters to mainstream Americanisms have been standard practice for decades now. But instead of regarding them in the customary (and accurate) light of political bias, consider them in relation to something else: the intellectual condition of the students.
Last year’s results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in history and civics estimate well where high school seniors stand. In history, an abysmal 53 percent scored “Below basic.” Most of them, for instance, could not explain an old photo of a theater sign that announced, “COLORED ENTRANCE.” On the civics exam they did better, 66 percent reaching “Basic” or higher. But only 54 percent of them were able to read a sample ballot correctly, and only 16 percent provided “complete” or “acceptable” explanations of how the legislature and judiciary check a president’s power.
And yet, despite these and other reports documenting vast knowledge deficits among college students, departments continue to throw them into trivial and biased classes that won’t remedy the problem one bit. They cheapen the classroom tone and narrow the range of acceptable opinion, and they leave the kids just as ignorant as they were before, and more incurious.
Posted at 10:21:42 AM on December 13, 2007 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Cheap shots at cutting-edge critiques have been standard practice for decades now as well. Much of the fare you cite is intellectually light, it’s true, but many freshman writing seminars stoop to conquer, and have done so for at least a decade and a half. The crucial thing is the extent to which they feed into more consequential courses.
I took a course much like “Queer 101” at Cornell University in 1992. Not only was it tremendously helpful to me personally, it also introduced me to the literature on gender issues and was quite rigorous intellectually. Please refrain from the potshots until you know the whole story; and even then, you might have the courtesy to let us know what you think an acceptable course might look like.
— Laura Steele · Dec 13, 12:49 PM · #
“Cutting-edge” is the compliment these routine fixations pay to themselves. But the radical pretensions aren’t nearly as bad as the opportunity costs of these courses. Instead of devoting the precious and limited time of freshman year to The Aeneid and the Federalist Papers, they fill the hours with mass culture and tendentious social themes. What a waste.
— mark · Dec 13, 05:37 PM · #
While gay people may not have the civil rights protections afforded other minority groups, it is hardly acceptable to list a seminar in “Queer 101: Exploring Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues” as inconsequential or “fluff.” How can we expect that all groups of people will experience equal opportunities and respect if academia treats one group as inconsequential?
— Lydia · Dec 14, 08:47 AM · #
Well 3, it may not be “acceptable” to you, but it is “fluff”. In fact, almost all freshman “seminars” are fluff. In the Dumbed Down Ding Dong School that many colleges and universities seem to be trying to become, “seminar” has come to mean simply ‘small class’. This trivializes real seminars but it makes the freshmen feel good about them selves. Of course they arent ready for a real seminar.
— Joseph F Foster · Dec 14, 02:26 PM · #
Brown’s English 110 and Wake Forest’s English 111 are actually writing and composition courses. Both schools have a writing requirement, and students without AP English credit are required to pass these courses. I applaud the imaginative efforts of these English instructors to teach students how to write and think critically. This is so much better than standard composition courses!
Miriam Jacobson, AB Brown, Ph.D. Penn, Assistant Professor of English, Wake Forest University
— Miriam Jacobson · Dec 15, 01:23 PM · #
I’m curious as to why you, like so many other conservative commentators, focus only on the institutions that serve (or seek to serve) “elite” 18-21 year olds. Undergraduates who are working and have their own families (generally 24 years old and above) are an important part of the story of higher education, and I would bet that surveys of the faculty and students involved in this venture cannot be so easily dismissed as the liberal, effeminate “gown” against which the civic rectitude of the “town” are to be defended.
— Tim · Dec 17, 04:41 PM · #
Bauerlein has been milking the “fluff” angle for a while now, and the critique never gets much more nuanced than what he offers here. A few thoughts:
1. Bauerlein’s critique is strictly from a St. Johns “Book List” view of education. The idea that universities produce professionals who take up careers such as advertising, graphic design, and commercial architecture seems not to have crossed his mind. For students looking to such careers, a freshman seminar that studies the design of a Starbucks or the structure of a popular television show might be important.
2. Which is to say, we could have a decent argument about liberal arts vs. professionalizing education, but Bauerlein commits the logical error known by my high school students as “begging the question.” He assumes that it’s self-evident that college education should be about Great Texts, and then argues that schools are failing to meet that goal. He doesn’t stop to consider – or, better put, he doesn’t stop to inform his audience, for Bauerlein certainly knows better – that many universities are interested in professional training.
3. Bauerlein’s canon-centered vision of education also elides the fact that much of education is about passing on skills, not humping through a reading list. (We don’t read Euclid much these days to learn the skills of geometry.) When I teach my ninth graders the fundamentals of plot and narrative analysis, I begin with seemingly simple texts: folk tales, myths, comic strips, television shows, etc. I’m not telling my students that Dilbert is as good as Pope; instead, I’m using a text that, in its often subtle abstraction, highlights certain techniques that students can more easily learn to identify. Such scaffolding is a research-proven “best practice” in education. Thus, a freshman seminar on South Park that used the show to scaffold techniques for analyzing narrative, the relationship between word and image, satire and parody, etc., might actually attract college students to more important works of visual and literary art. Once students begin to master certain skills, they are more likely to move on to more challenging and more rewarding intellectual tasks. (Let’s remember that the idea behind freshman seminars is to introduce students to disciplines, ideas, and skills that they might not be attracted to. The pre-med student who gets hooked on literary analysis by examining comic books might never have known that he wanted to study literature before.) Some disciplines are as much about great skills as great texts.
4. Bauerlein also neglects to tell his audience that within the canon-based notion of education, there is much debate. Why The Federalist Papers before, say, the vast Jewish, Islamic, Vedic, Greek, or Latin literatures on politics? In terms of world importance and historical primacy, Bauerlein again begs the question. Likewise, it’s easy to agree that students should read Virgil, but then again, they should also read Leo Africanus, Li Po, the Hindu and Chinese epics, Epicurus, and the Pearl Poet. At that rate, American History and American Literature seem like “fluff” courses.
5. (But just because canons are debatable does not mean I’m against canons. Students should study great texts, and students should learn important skills.)
6. Bauerlein’s hysteria about American history, though, suggests that he’s not simply interested in The Best That Has Been Thought And Said. Instead, he assumes – begs the question again – that American education should make Americans. Why should students know American history rather than, say, Chinese history? Universities are not the place to make citizens. The professional ideal of education is about making good workers; the liberal arts ideal is about making good world citizens. But Bauerlein wants to make good American citizens. The fact that most Americans think that Islamic culture is an oxymoron is as worrying to me as the fact that Americans can’t name the first five US presidents. The Islamic preservation of Western culture is of far more historical import than, say, the War of 1812.
In the end, let common sense prevail. Universities should have rigorous distribution requirements. But these requirements must be balanced against (a) the students’ need for professional training; and (b) the students’ desire to pursue their interests. And distribution requirements should be text-based, culture-based, period-based, and skill-based.
— Lion O · Dec 22, 10:47 PM · #
Interesting to see here, Lion, that I suffer from “hysteria.”
— Mark Bauerlein · Dec 28, 08:33 PM · #
Bad word choice. Great Def Leppard album.
— Lion O · Dec 29, 03:06 PM · #