“Academia is the Titanic”: Mark Bauerlein on teaching in the morally-bankrupt grind of the new American university
Controversial professor discusses NYTimes essay "What's the Point of a Professor?," the adjunct crisis and more
Topics: Academia, adjunct crisis, Emory University, Mark Bauerlein, professor, Media News, Life News
In the New York Times on Sunday, Emory English professor Mark Bauerlein asked “What’s the Point of a Professor?” and answered, in part, that what they should be is examples of “moral authority,” but that for a number of reasons they are increasingly becoming morally bankrupt “accreditors” instead. A number of professors took umbrage at both Bauerlein’s definition of what a professor should be and — as University of Rhode Island History professor Erik Loomis argued — whether Bauerlein should even be in the position to be deciding what other professors are supposed to be.
Salon reached out to Bauerlein to ask whether he would like to address the pushback against his piece, and he graciously agreed to do so.
Is it possible that your experience at Emory just doesn’t accord with the experience of teachers at other institutions? Or do you think that Emory is representative enough of academia at large to draw generalizations about students and teachers based on it?
I emphasized four-year colleges where students pursue BA and BS degrees, which is certainly a limitation on the commentary. The situation at two-year colleges and with vocational education is certainly different. And within that four-year population we have differences among liberal arts colleges, religious institutions, large state universities, etc. But I stand by the general drift, which is sustained by data from NSSE, the American Freshman Survey, the College Senior Survey, Academically Adrift, and longitudinal studies of grade and homework time.
Do you think you might be idealizing student-teacher interactions from the ’60s and ’70s? After all, the composition of the student body was far different then — far fewer women and minorities, for example. Also, is that difference maybe significant in economic terms? I know that when I taught at the University of California, Irvine, the majority of my students had jobs — often times more than one — and had to in order to afford college. That fact influenced my ability to interact with them in office hours, because try as I might, creating hours that were both 1) reasonable for a sane human being and 2) able to accommodate the majority my students was, frankly, well nigh impossible.
I’m not sure I get the inference about student-teacher interactions and identity changes. When I started at UCLA in 1977, I had several female teachers, a few Hispanic and Asians, and gays and lesbians, too — no black teachers that I can recall — and that didn’t affect the quality of interaction. If you are suggesting that non-white male students might have a harder time relating to white male teachers, well, I’ve found that identity-based factor unconvincing.
The economic point, however, I agree with entirely. I knew many students who worked part-time in college (I did from day one), but they didn’t have loans pressing down on them and high tuition fees. UCLA back then was around $500 a year. It is no wonder that students have become more mercenary in their approach.
That said, then, it is even more important that professors impress upon students the moral meaning of their studies. This is a unique time of life, and it passes quickly, and most of them will never again have the chance to discuss why Paolo and Francesca have to suffer so long [for the sin of lust in Canto V of Dante’s “Inferno”], what makes the opening measures of Wagner’s “Tristan” so great, who the Neocons were…here we impress upon students a higher eloquence, the significance of the past, the cultivation of taste, and all the other things that youth culture and mass culture disregard.
Finally, yes, it is impossible for teachers at large institutions to go one-on-one with all their students. You are right — and it’s deplorable.
Late in my teaching career, I shifted to teaching writing classes based on visual rhetoric, not because I didn’t value literature — but because I considered the main point of a composition class to be the writing and development of critical thinking. It seems to me you believe that the object of analysis — a literary text as opposed to a film or comic book — is as important as the analysis itself. Why is that?
No, Scott, I regard the object as more important than the analysis, not as important.
One reason comes from cognitive science, which says that background knowledge (bare familiarity) is essential for critical thinking. In one well-known experiment, reading researchers had two populations of children, one with significantly higher abstract reading skills than the other (verbal IQ such as size of vocabulary and ability to use words they already know) but the lesser group knew more about baseball than the better group. When they were tested on a passage that covered baseball, the reading scores equalized.
So, building familiarity with significant historical, cultural, political etc. phenomena is crucial to critical thinking. (This is the longstanding argument of E.D. Hirsch’s cultural literary project.) The question is what counts as significant. People who think that critical thinking can be cultivated as easily through the study of “Mad Men” as through the study of “Paradise Lost” are naive. We need great books and high culture, works of genius and events of historical import, political theory and religious doctrine, creations that have stood the test of time, that possess aesthetic excellence and introduce youth to the full range of human experience. Identity is no criterion of selection, nor is political correctness, nor ideology. (The slogan “everything is political” is a pernicious dogma.) Marx should be taught as well as Edmund Burke, D-Day more than Manzanar.
