78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



University Marketing
2004-07-08   12:22 a.m.

Today, I am stuck somewhere between polarized positions in the murky haze of a complex situation. I have been thinking about this complex situation for - many? - years, especially since it has much to do with my current career. Things culminated for me today though as I had some time to read through some potential material to be included in my fall semester's course packet. While my current class was taking their three and a half hour final exam, I thought about next semester and the honors class I was considering this material for. Besides teaching these students basic core curriculum, I also want to make sure I beef up something else I felt was lacking in similar students in the last few courses I taught for the Honors College.

What is that something? I don't exactly know what to call it. Humility? Ethics? Serenity? In plainer, more primitive words, I want to beat the sense of entitlement they seem to have developed somewhere out of them. I want to show them that it's ok to fail at things if we learn from them. I want them to understand that one B+ (or even, gah, a D+!) does not a homeless man make. I want to show them that none of their professors are in a "service" industry, existing only to please and deliver the goods, and that I do not like it when they complain to me about how much work some other teacher has asked them to do. "How dare they, what's their problem, don't they know we have other classes too?", the complaints drone on and on.

At times, I wanted to ring their eighteen-to-twenty year old necks for saying things like "I have the right to pass this or that class!"

Do they? The right to pass? Why, because they paid for it? If that's the case, why do they even have to show up? In fact, why register for classes at all? Why not just write our esteemed University a check for $60K and just get a piece of paper in the mail?

It seems that some universities would be just fine with that. Some want and desperately need the money. But should students be fine with that? Why are they so comfortable with being comfortable, complacent, and having everything so easy? Why can't they accept failure as a challenge? Or why are they so afraid of a challenge?

Who scared them so shitless that they cry, slumping down in the chairs outside my office, begging me to change their grade from a C+ to an A, lest they never get anywhere in life? Who told them that it's ok to say to a professor, "Well fine, then if I don't get into med school, then it's on your head" (and this actually was said to my colleague, verbatim)?

It seems, the more I've been reading, that several horrifying practices that undermine the original "purpose" (though that's a hot issue as well) of a liberal arts education are being implemented by many a university. One is the consistent reduction of admissions standards. There's quite an urban legend a-brewing about a case where someone with ridiculously low verbal testing scores and a placement exam that resembled that of a fifth grade student's placed into our happy little University. I remember the telephone game and how that worked, so I'm still skeptical. However, the point of it all was well taken. While my pedagogy certainly allows for "multiple intelligences" and I myself am not the world's greatest test-taker, it's hard not to see when enough is enough. Dare I say such a person may not be considered qualified for University? Dare I say we turn down this person's money, and don't engage them in the big scam? Dare I say we present the harsh truth: that the person would be better off finding success elsewhere?

Another intolerable practice is grade inflation - giving "hooray! everyone is a winner!" grades - to keep students satisfied, appeased, and placated. And, to keep them coming. When said students get to that particularly rare, rigorous set of expectations, that particularly rare, challenging instructor, they're understandably confused, and irritatingly combative. Indeed, their average, complacent and unenthusiastic performances, their so-so work ethic, and their good attendance has been rewarded with A's consistently. This is the only explanation for the most recent argument a student levied at me in asking me why he got a C: "But I turned all my work in". So this automatically qualifies him for a grade of "Outstanding Excellence in Core Content Material" (The University's description of what an A is)? It must have, at one time or another, for him to have such expectations of this class, now.

Disgustingly, it's almost understandable that Universities are feeling pushed to resort to such tactics - faced with students who understand themselves to be consumers rather than students, colleges are aware that they must compete with each other as if they were mega-corporations. Education, and particularly higher education, has become quite an industry in our country and has been commodified since the baby boomers were coming by the thousands. Generic "Bob's colleges" sprang up everywhere, making it clear that college was not the privilege it was once.

But this also means something larger: a devaluation of the college degree. One of the problems many of my colleagues complain about is the lowering of University standards to enable higher enrollment. Indeed, I too feel there is something wrong if, in my Politics of Sexuality or Intro to Feminist Theory courses, both of which are 200 level and above, several students are writing and reading on a 10th grade level at best. What a disservice to them the University has done; how dare the University allow them to think they'll be able to understand Lacan and Freud and deBeauvoir if they're only functionally literate. What often happens goes something like this: most of the class can keep up - many become quite good at deconstructing or at least interpreting the convoluted, pedantic language of theory. But some, try as they might, can't - they lack the basic skills needed to get through a basic argumentative essay. Perhaps they're wonderful in class discussion, they might be good at conveying ideas during their presentations. But writing and reading - the staples of academe and the traditional academy - are near impossibilities.

So how do they get through University? More importantly, who lets them in? Who gives them the false impression that they'll prevail? That though they're lacking in these basic skills, they'll be able to complete the course-work that will earn them the degree (so long as their check doesn't bounce) they so desperately seek?

Guess who looks like the big asshole, by the way, when she tells these students "Um, yes, of course grammar "counts"...especially if I can't even understand what is written here", with a dazed, what-the-hell-kind-of-question-is-that? look on her face, or refuses to inflate their grades just because they have showed up everyday.

But we all wind up with the same degree, don't we?

I thought, "This must be a state-school problem". But then I read an article about similar things happening at Princeton. A friend who teaches at NYU said "Oh, I know! I hate that!" when I was explaining a situation that I was sure would be unique to the urban, State University where I teach.

So what is this? Some cultural defect, the product of our arrogance, greed, laziness and over-indulgence? Some distinctly American problem? (Because by the way, even the most liberal, socialist European countries have more restrictions and tracking systems in place for Universities.) Students hearing Clinton loud and clear when he said "everyone can go to college who wants to" during a State of the Union address? Universities duping students? Students literally viewing themselves as consumers who are entitled to the "product" they pay for?

And how many students at University actually want to be educated? How many want to take the fast, easy way out? How many don't want to be "bothered" with reading ANYTHING AT ALL? How many would complain if I did something crazy, like say "Ok, everyone gets an A and we'll just color in coloring books during class"? All of them should. I fear very few of them would.

My issue in being between two polarized positions is this: on one hand, I feel, truly, in defense of the elitism of University. I believe that college is not a right, but a privilege. I believe that one should not be able to sail through, sleep through, or cheat through college and wind up with the same degree I struggled for. I also believe that my graduating Magna Cum Laude, with a 3.95 GPA was a reflection of the hours and hours I'd spend at the library, the countless days I missed work to perfect an argument, and the friends I'd lost to being "too busy" to play at being 20 years old. I would be upset, then, if someone who read at about the 10th grade level, who was able to plagiarize most of their papers and who took courses they knew weren't very demanding could make the same claim. I do believe that the lowering of college standards negates the several degrees I hold.

However, we live in an extremely segregated society, no matter how nicey-nice the TV makes the world look. I fear that the above might be part of my enculturated, class and race privilege seeping out. It might be very easy for me to say these things, about standards and changes and expectations, because I grew up in a neighborhood and a community that had good schools. What if, for example, a 10th grade-level education is all an urban school, lacking in critical resources, is able to provide for a student? This student might be doing well, comparatively - the rest of the kids in her neighborhood might be caught up in drugs, pregnancy, abuse, violence; she becomes a shining star just because she can and does write, period. So should she be kept from University, just because she was born into an under-privileged community? Just because I wasn't doesn't mean I have more rights than she does.

So how do we rectify this situation? Colleges are lowering standards in the interest of making money - though politically and publicly, it's in the interest of "equal opportunity inclusion" or some other PC crap they recite to make donors smile. Lower standards mean students' sense of entitlement (and rewards for mediocrity) grows to ridiculous and impossible proportions, and they expect gold stars and my undying respect and utter devotion just for keeping themselves awake during class. They resent any criticism at all, as if learning could happen without it. They don't understand why I respond "how many of you read and write everyday?" when they ask "how can I get an A in this class?" during our first meeting together.

On the other hand, there is still such a disparity among privileged and underprivileged communities in this country - and one that falls along racial lines - that I'm afraid tighter restrictions and higher standards would exclude those students whom society won't allow to excel, and fast become an issue of racism, reducing already dwindling "minority" populations in post-secondary institutions.

I abhor Social Darwinism, and don't ever want to find its ideas appealing.

But I am almost afraid that the politics of Academia are frustrating me so much that I'm pliable and easily influenced. I also don't want to fall into the trap of naiveté, thinking this would all be better for our culture and wouldn't have a thing to do with student backgrounds just because I would never operate that way. As my friends always say, sometimes I give people way to much credit.

I will say this: I am glad to have gone through a graduate program with a faculty of ball busters and ass breakers who at points, made me cry. Yes, on a monthly basis, my instructors pushed me and made me question my choices; they asked me if I really knew what I was doing, knew what my purpose there was, knew anything at all. People who had written books that were made into HBO movies, people who were consulted regularly by huge media networks, and people who were the authority on certain aspects of literature all pushed me the way someone had pushed them, and never let me forget that work - actual work - felt good, challenges felt good, and that I should never remain complacent or content to just float and get comfortable. "If this hurts," one of them said to me, noticing I was in near tears after he completely slammed the first draft of a 75 page thesis I had worked on for six months, "then we're doing something right". I remember that he shoved it back into my unwilling hands. "Now go back and do it again".

I'll end with the words of Mark Edmunson, whose work I might just use in my fall classes:

"What happens if we keep trudging along this bleak course? What happens if our most intelligent students never learn to strive to overcome what they are? What if genius, and the imitation of genius, become silly, outmoded ideas? What you're likely to get are more and more one-dimensional men and women. These will be people who live for easy pleasures, for comfort and prosperity, who think of money first, then second, and third, who hug the status quo; people who believe in God as a sort of insurance policy; people who are never surprised. They will be people so pleased with themselves (when they're not in despair of the general pointlessness of their lives) that they cannot imagine humanity could do better. They'll think it their highest duty to clone themselves as frequently as possible. They'll claim to be happy, and they'll live a long time".

Uh-oh.

xo,