Those of us who teach in large, urban universities with open admissions policies are sometimes on a cycle of frustration. We will teach attentively for months and years with patience and generosity, but when the cycle peaks, we collapse into rage and despair, a carnival of blame, hatred, and resentment focused on our students and, indirectly, on our own miserable lot. Corresponding to these cycles, it seems, is a publication schedule for angry screeds that try to express--often in generational terms, and I'll say more about this later--just why it is our rage is justified.
We usually assume that there is a consensus that these diagnostic diatribes are right on the money. "Did you read that?" "Yeah! I read it." No real discussion ensues. And we're not even sure we have a common frame of reference in which to begin a discussion. Is the retired biologist showing me the article that critiques postmodernism and the rejection of the canon because he thinks, as I do, that postmodernism constituted an interesting moment in our recent intellectual history, or does he expect me to curl my lip and curse Derrida and all things french for ruining the very fabric of literacy in North America? I'd love to engage the debate, but most of the time, debate is not exactly on the menu. You either agree or you don't, and nobody ever really says what you're supposed to agree with.
A recent case in point: an article called "Boastful Dunces" is flying around the faculty email servers faster than a Viagra ad. I've received two copies of it today from colleagues at opposite ends of the university, and for all I know, at opposite ends of the political spectrum. These articles about how stupid our students are appeal to conservatives and liberals alike, so you never know exactly why it is the anthropologist is showing it to you saying "See?!." In any event, I think the article is sheer drivel from start to finish. Let's begin with the title:
"Boastful Dunces."
I suppose it is a genre to itself with one of the leading and more articulate practitioners being Mark Bauerlein. The genre is characterized by its unabashed hatred of most (never "all") students who are in our classes. They are "dunces," "undisciplined," "confused," inured to cause and effect, immune to logic, "impervious to correction," "self-entitled," incapable of honest soul-searching, self-absorbed, "blurry." With students like these, who needs...well, more students, I guess?
The genre is also characterized by a total faith in an epochal notion of history, but where epochs last for a few years or so, marked on one end by "the students I used to have" and on the other by "the students I have now." More subtle historians might reach as far back as "my friends in college," but always with the same results: students today are "gen-X," "gen-Y," "gen-N," "post-literate," and never ever just people.
"Boastful Dunces" by these epochal standards is an instant classic of the genre. It's subtitle, "Post-literate college students reveal a "resentful incapacity"" is to this article what "Sing in me Muse" is to the Homeric poem: it calls us faculty around the campfire to hear tales of woe about the students we have learned to recognize so well. We will hear our own frustrations given voice. The article begins with an account--another marker of the genre--of a woefully inaccurate and badly written sentence on a student's final essay in a class taught by Thomas Bertonneau, a literature professor at SUNY-Oswego. The article is based on Bertonneau's observations in another masterpiece of the student-hating genre, "What, Me Read?", published on the Pope Center web site. Yes, that Pope Center web site, the one that recently calledfaculty research a "sacred cow."
The problem is, I'm more sympathetic to the student who has had her sentence lifted out of a final exam and exposed to ridicule than I am or will ever be to Bertonneau. First, look at the error: she writes "from" instead of "to." That's called a "mistake." But from this error (and we all have seen our share of whoppers, haven't we? Like the Penn State student who lamented on an exam I read that Hitler put his victims in the "creamery"), Bertonneau's expositor (Janie B. Cheaney!) concludes that students are dunces. Yes, it's badly written. But notice that we never learn what grade it got (give it a D and shut up already), and we never learn whether the student was a new student, an old student, really busy that semester, or what). It's just emblematic of something much larger.
Bertonneau teaches "Western Heritage"--not "Western Literature," "Great Books," or anything normal like thatm but the creepy "Western Heritage"-- and the damned students can't seem to remember that the Horse went TO Troy and not FROM Troy, even though he gave out LOTS OF NOTES and showed them a powerpoint and gave them cheatsheets and said it over and over again in class. You see where the argument is going, right? The rules of this genre say that we have to come up with evidence (usually drawn from the keen observations from people exactly like Cheaney and Bertonneau) that when amassed leads us to the ineluctable conclusion that students are stupid, Higher Ed is failing, and, as one colleague put it today, "there is nothing we can do about it."
Before I proceed with Cheaney's gloss on Bertonneau, a word on the man himself. Actually, on his work for the execrable "Pope Center": at the risk of being unfair, I think one only needs to look at this paragraph, scrawled by the teacher of Western Heritage, to get a sense of his POV:
Adults know what propels the descent [in the ability of students to use "competent language"]: proliferating electronic media, video games, an ideologically inspired de-emphasis of rigorous learning at all levels of education, and a pervasive attitude of entitlement that students now absorb into their deficient souls the way babies drink nourishment from a mother’s breast. Flashing lights and three-minute "rap" songs stultify cognitive development. MTV, that bastion of the youth audience, nowadays specializes less in the music video than in the "reality show," with its endless, formless palaver among "twenty-somethings" confined in a house.
Yes, you read that correctly: Students absorb a sense of entitlement into their deficient souls the way babies drink nourishment from a mother's breast. Romulus and Remus, anyone?
I think Bertonneau deserves a good bloggy thrashing, and maybe I'll take that up later, but the object of this post is his expositor's more recent article on Generation Dunce.
To return, then: