1、Lesson 1 Who Are you and what are you doing hereWelcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. Youre to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.Its been said that raising a child effectively ta
2、kes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not in very good shape. Weve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians whoa little restraint herearent what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to
3、 win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.You now may think that youve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep
4、 doing what youve done before: Whttp:/ hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and youll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.Do not believe it. It is not true. If you want to get a real education in America youre going
5、to have to fightand I dont mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, youre probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself
6、inno matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more youll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America nowthere are astonishing opportunities at almost every collegebut the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get
7、it, youll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, and occahttp:/ even to piss off some admirable people.I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never
8、 been to collegein fact, hed barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. Iwas about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living m
9、emory. “I think I might want to be pre-law,” I told my father. I had no idea what being pre-law was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-like, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with poli
10、cemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “Im not really sure,” I told hhttp:/ “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had bette
11、r study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasnt I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had bett
12、er study literature, unless I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasnt just hype, and Id be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the re
13、incarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course catalog.http:/ “How about the science requirements?”“Take em later,” he said, “you never know.”My father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, Malden High School Class of 1948 (by a hair), knew the s
14、core. What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be. But apparently almost everyone elsestudents, teachers, and trustees and parentssees the matter much differently. They have it
15、 wrong.Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is educationuniversity education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want th
16、e certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them? http:/ values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most forthem is successmateri
17、al success. To be poor in America is to be a failureits to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those back-breaking student loanspeople leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Studen
18、ts come to college with the goal of a diploma in mindwhat happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that th
19、e courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future andhttp:/ not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be go
20、ne by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.The faculty, too, is often absent: Their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advanceget tenure, promotion, raises, outside offersis, broadly speaking, sch
21、olarly work. No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors scholarly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors work
22、as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that because professors dont pay full-bore attention to teaching they dont have to work very hardtheyve created http:/ massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.This is radically false. Ambitious profes
23、sors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal. These essays are honest:
24、Their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy workin which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from othersis quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard:
25、That the results have almost nopractical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.The students and the profeshttp:/ have made a deal: Neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happ
26、ens in the classroom. The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectualand often genuinely smart. For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, an
27、d often are. Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in themfor life is elsewhere. The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the f
28、irst job.No one in this picture is evil; no one is criminally irresponsible. Its just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.As for the adminhttp:/ their relation to the students often seems based not on lov
29、e but fear. Administrators fear bad publicity, scandal, and dissatisfaction on the part of their customers. More than anything else, though, they fear lawsuits. Throwing a student out of college, for this or that piece of bad behavior, is very difficult, almost impossible. The student will sue your
30、eyes out. One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class. (The class was a little boringI had a damned coldbut the punishment seemed a bit severe.) The dean of students laughed
31、lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation. I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cellphone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.Still, this was small potatoes. Cohttp:/ are even leery of disciplinin
32、g guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple. Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.Youll find that cheating is common as well. As far as I can discern
33、, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year,its okay to go ahead and take advantageyouve both got better things to do. The Internet is amok with services selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because peop
34、le purchase the paperslots of them. Fraternity files bulge with old tests from a variety of courses.Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news. But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.Onhttp:/ of the reasons professors so
35、metimes look the other way when they sense cheating is that it sends them into a world of sorrow. A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S. Black limousines pulled up in
36、 front of his office and disgorged decorously suited negotiators. Did my pal fold? Nope, hes not the type. But he did not enjoy the process.What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for
37、 an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university. Such students leave and become donors and so, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the universitys standin
38、g. Thttp:/ done a fine job skating on surfaces in high schoolthe best way to get an across-the-board outstanding recordand now theyre on campus to cut a few more figure eights.In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do? How else would you live if not by
39、getting all you can, succeeding all you can, making all you can?The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet abo
40、ut. Not so. This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gave to the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke. Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellingtons precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on
41、 the playing fields of Etohttp:/ Brodhead suggests that the content of the courses isnt really what matters. In five years (or five months,or minutes), the student is likely to have forgotten how to do the problem sets and will only hazily recollect what happens in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. T
42、he legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome. When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap their old resources of determination, and theyll win.All right, theres nothing wrong with this as far as it goesafter all, the student who writes a brilli
43、ant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources. Maybe it will give her needed confidence in the future. But doesnt the content of the courses matter at all?On the evidence of this talk, no. Trying to figure out whether the stuff youre reading is true or
44、 false and being open to having your lifhttp:/ changed is a fraught, controversial activity. Doing so requires energy from the professorwhich is better spent on other matters. This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: troub
45、le, arguments, bad press, etc. After the kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching. At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.So, if
46、 you want an education, the odds arent with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, whove doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services peopl
47、e are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and buhttp:/ another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, its recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.So why make
