I will add a follow-up question to the one of "how much ground to give to students?"
How much ground can collegiate institutions as a whole give before they bankrupt the point of collegiate education? I have studies going back to 2010 that this already occurred at community colleges. This links into another concern, which is the disjunct between what academics think of academia and what the general populace does, and how that rift may be fueled by the typical academic practices of low-tier colleges, which teach the vast majority of American collegiate students. That is, professors may be far more complicit in what Josh called the "foreign invasion of academia" than we think. this line of thinking takes the initial question into divergent directions, e.g., professor teaching preparedness, public perception of the purpose of college, how the aforesaid drives the contemporary teacher-student dynamic, etc.
There are several questions/threads to address here. You're certainly right that professors contribute to the problem, either out of perceived necessity or because they feel they must make strategic choices. I have mixed feelings about Moby Dick, for instance, but even if I were to regard it as a work of genius, I would have a hard time justifying the time required to meaningfully engage with it. So I've typically preferred to assign "Bartleby." I suppose it depends on how much one feels that the integrity of a college education requires exposure to the "classics." We had many debates about this in our department while revising our mission and our requirements over the years. Should Shakespeare be a stand-alone graduation requirement? If so, why not make it an entry-level course rather than one of our advanced requirements? And so on. Perhaps you have other examples to illustrate your point/question?
You're overshooting by miles when it comes to what I'm talking about. Let me explain.
I was trained in the Great Books tradition, so I'm used to either using or mixing in the classics, and carefully guiding students through them. But I gave up the attempt over 5 years ago, because it was clear that maybe 1 in 10 were actually attempting to read them, as it just seemed impossible to them. One of my colleagues, a pharmacologist, took the class and said it was the hardest class he ever took, despite it already being toned way down from what was normal in my undergrad experiend or my graduate teaching to undergrads. If one isn't used to reading anything above grade 8, and that for entertainment, then reading Machiavelli's The Prince over two weeks on a guided experience is going to be a bit much.
But now, it's become apparent that even gentle, accessible secondary textbooks are proving to be a bit much for the majority of the open access students I see. In contrast, my carefully selected highschool students are more "normal," as they are not open access to my classes. For about a year now I've been running carefully calibrated reading comprehension tests, multiple choice with long time limits that they take on their own with the text, and even with open book they struggle to get to 70% correct. My colleagues and institutional data confirm that this is not anecdotal, and national data suggests that I'm within the range of normal.
Let's step back. I mention the details to express the general idea that I'm coming at this from a data and analytic perspective as well.
So, I am saying that "downgrading" from Moby Dick to Bartleby would be a massive upgrade around here. And my concern is that the professorate working at my kind of institution, my tier, are all downgrading.
But, and here's a divergent point, I also think that this phenomenon is stratified. That it's different depending upon the tier and location of institution. Hence, when I talk to colleagues at some institutions, they express utter disbelief. Others, just groan and nod knowingly. Some, even at those same institutions, don't recognize this as a problem.
Ah -- I see your point. Things are/were not nearly that bad at Central College. I hear people like Mark Bauerlein bemoaning something similar even at a place like Emory University, so I think you're right: it's a stratified problem and a question of degree, depending on the institution.
At the risk of yet again veering from the point, I'll say that I did not dig as deeply into the material as an undergraduate as I did later on. I recall reading Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and many more in my Political Science classes, but I never had a pure philosophy course, was never trained in logic, and have enormous gaps in my knowledge of literary history. This comes partly of having had little direction in high school -- my tastes were eclectic and I'm not sure that I really challenged myself that much -- and being lazy enough as an undergraduate to leverage my above average literacy for easy As. My courses in Shakespeare and Milton pushed me more than anything else.
This made me understanding of students who are less prepared or who haven't built the stamina necessary for lengthy readings or who haven't yet learned how to read more efficiently. When I did include challenging texts, I often tried to make a game of it, building some close reading exercises into our discussions and hoping to build some competency as we went along.
I do not think we are a dying breed in terms of our larger goals for teaching, even if the current trends run counter to those goals. We seem to be stating the problems rather plainly here -- do you think we are in denial?
I have a complete manuscript. I've taken it as far as I can without an editor's eye. It's presently out for external review at a university press (has been since July).
That's awesome. I was hoping you were going to say you're just starting out and I'd suggest a writing group. I've been struggling with making time to write or creating a schedule/habit. For years.
Yes, it's difficult. Even when there is more time for writing, it can be difficult to devote that time to a longform project that requires many months to finish. I'm presently finding Substack time to be pulling from the longform work, mainly because progress on Substack is tangible and immediate.
I remain hopeful about finding a writing group here. I'd really like to do something in person, like I once did with some friends in Iowa. It really does help to have that smaller audience to write for, and to have some deadlines to urge you along.
"How much ground should writers give in order to reach the average reader?"
Well, I am probably going to miss the mark as far as you and Jason are concerned, but in my book the answer to this should be "none". I'm not suggesting that writing should be made deliberately or ridiculously too difficult to read, but I do think that there comes a point where readers should rise to the level of the work, not have the work dumbed down to meet the reader.
I did a course last year (as a student) and I found it incredibly difficult -- a good way of demolishing one's self-esteem is to discover that despite being pretty literate you're way out of your depth. But when, as a result of reading, discussing, repeat for months on end, and endless drafts of the final essay, I came out with a really good evaluation and an even better sense of self-worth.
The only case for dumbing down, if I can put it that way, would be in the hope that it entices the reader to read the real thing or read an authors other works. An example of each of these would be:
1. I became interested in great works of literature by reading Classics Illustrated.
2. I became interested in Melville y being introduced to him through Bartleby, like your students. (I haven't acted upon that interest yet, but I will).
Other than similar scenarios, I can't see that lowering standards helps anyone, least of all students or readers.
Yes, there are cases where it is the reader’s job to rise to the material. But there are developmental considerations, too. What one assigns in a second-year survey is often less challenging than what a senior seminar might include.
Of course. I was really thinking about reworking texts to remove the hard bits, or assigning something less challenging than a particular level would suggest is 'doable'. Perhaps it's not the same in literature, but when I was teaching A Level (advanced level) Economics I didn't start with the lower level syllabus. I did give them simplified versions of theories though, and as they became more attuned to the way economists think, I added more detail/nuance/concepts etc to those simplified models. I don't know if these are still fashionable, because I keep meeting trainee teachers who have never heard of them, but I was a great advocate of Bruner's spiral curriculum approach and Ausubel's advance organiser , and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development approach. All of those I found to be good ways of making the material more accessible but without dumbing down as such. Sorry if this comment is completely irrelevant to the field of literature teaching
Jason can speak for himself, but I think this is what he meant by secondary texts. There are versions of this for literary theory, which overlaps with philosophy. I’m torn on this. It can be useful to assign a reference like M.H. Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms, which includes some pocketbook definitions of literary movements and theoretical approaches. But I think the reason for introducing undergraduates to critical theory is often to prepare them for graduate school. The colonization of literary studies by critical theory is one of the aspects of academe that I am recovering from!
However I was reading a review yesterday (it doesn't seem to be online yet) in which the writer starts by saying that he has spent a very pleasant evening NOT reading this book! He seemed to be saying the same thing as you in that comment.
Guillory's book looks interesting. I have not attempted a bird's eye view of literary criticism, but I am aware that many nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers (Poe and Cather, say) also wrote what might be called criticism. Some of Cather's essays on style might fall under the crass genre now known as the "craft essay," although her historical sensibilities tend to far surpass anything I see written under the craft heading today.
There is often a difference between people who are professional academics and people who are professional journalists. For instance, Joan Acocella's book of scholarship on Cather reads very differently from the average scholarly monograph. My friend Sam, who writes Castalia, is often doing something more like Acocella's style of literary criticism, which is not overtly theoretical. I think of that kind of writing as simply an intelligent mind thinking out loud about style or theme.
While I enjoyed writing from a more theoretical perspective at times, I can't say that it was terribly useful to anyone. The main reason for "interdisciplinary scholarship" and for much of the theory-driven research is professional development: one builds a body of work that earns one tenure and then promotion, and then (presumably) some authority in the field. This creates real problems for teaching, because it either means that one's research is not germane to teaching, or it means that one's teaching is skewed toward cloning oneself. This has some value for students who want to get a PhD, but most of us in the humanities have been advising our students *not* to do this, if they can possibly help it, given the scarcity of jobs and the dismal future many of us foresee for the humanities in academe.
I don't really know that I have a coherent vision of what a *better* kind of scholarship might look like, except to point to what one sees in The New Yorker or in reviews like the one you shared. Substack more often seems like a space that parallels the university, rather than one that might enrich teaching and learning within academe, but perhaps what we are trying to do here as public intellectuals will circle back into the profession.
I will add a follow-up question to the one of "how much ground to give to students?"
How much ground can collegiate institutions as a whole give before they bankrupt the point of collegiate education? I have studies going back to 2010 that this already occurred at community colleges. This links into another concern, which is the disjunct between what academics think of academia and what the general populace does, and how that rift may be fueled by the typical academic practices of low-tier colleges, which teach the vast majority of American collegiate students. That is, professors may be far more complicit in what Josh called the "foreign invasion of academia" than we think. this line of thinking takes the initial question into divergent directions, e.g., professor teaching preparedness, public perception of the purpose of college, how the aforesaid drives the contemporary teacher-student dynamic, etc.
There are several questions/threads to address here. You're certainly right that professors contribute to the problem, either out of perceived necessity or because they feel they must make strategic choices. I have mixed feelings about Moby Dick, for instance, but even if I were to regard it as a work of genius, I would have a hard time justifying the time required to meaningfully engage with it. So I've typically preferred to assign "Bartleby." I suppose it depends on how much one feels that the integrity of a college education requires exposure to the "classics." We had many debates about this in our department while revising our mission and our requirements over the years. Should Shakespeare be a stand-alone graduation requirement? If so, why not make it an entry-level course rather than one of our advanced requirements? And so on. Perhaps you have other examples to illustrate your point/question?
Josh,
You're overshooting by miles when it comes to what I'm talking about. Let me explain.
I was trained in the Great Books tradition, so I'm used to either using or mixing in the classics, and carefully guiding students through them. But I gave up the attempt over 5 years ago, because it was clear that maybe 1 in 10 were actually attempting to read them, as it just seemed impossible to them. One of my colleagues, a pharmacologist, took the class and said it was the hardest class he ever took, despite it already being toned way down from what was normal in my undergrad experiend or my graduate teaching to undergrads. If one isn't used to reading anything above grade 8, and that for entertainment, then reading Machiavelli's The Prince over two weeks on a guided experience is going to be a bit much.
But now, it's become apparent that even gentle, accessible secondary textbooks are proving to be a bit much for the majority of the open access students I see. In contrast, my carefully selected highschool students are more "normal," as they are not open access to my classes. For about a year now I've been running carefully calibrated reading comprehension tests, multiple choice with long time limits that they take on their own with the text, and even with open book they struggle to get to 70% correct. My colleagues and institutional data confirm that this is not anecdotal, and national data suggests that I'm within the range of normal.
Let's step back. I mention the details to express the general idea that I'm coming at this from a data and analytic perspective as well.
So, I am saying that "downgrading" from Moby Dick to Bartleby would be a massive upgrade around here. And my concern is that the professorate working at my kind of institution, my tier, are all downgrading.
But, and here's a divergent point, I also think that this phenomenon is stratified. That it's different depending upon the tier and location of institution. Hence, when I talk to colleagues at some institutions, they express utter disbelief. Others, just groan and nod knowingly. Some, even at those same institutions, don't recognize this as a problem.
So, Josh, are we a slowly dying breed? In denial?
Ah -- I see your point. Things are/were not nearly that bad at Central College. I hear people like Mark Bauerlein bemoaning something similar even at a place like Emory University, so I think you're right: it's a stratified problem and a question of degree, depending on the institution.
At the risk of yet again veering from the point, I'll say that I did not dig as deeply into the material as an undergraduate as I did later on. I recall reading Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and many more in my Political Science classes, but I never had a pure philosophy course, was never trained in logic, and have enormous gaps in my knowledge of literary history. This comes partly of having had little direction in high school -- my tastes were eclectic and I'm not sure that I really challenged myself that much -- and being lazy enough as an undergraduate to leverage my above average literacy for easy As. My courses in Shakespeare and Milton pushed me more than anything else.
This made me understanding of students who are less prepared or who haven't built the stamina necessary for lengthy readings or who haven't yet learned how to read more efficiently. When I did include challenging texts, I often tried to make a game of it, building some close reading exercises into our discussions and hoping to build some competency as we went along.
I do not think we are a dying breed in terms of our larger goals for teaching, even if the current trends run counter to those goals. We seem to be stating the problems rather plainly here -- do you think we are in denial?
Can't wait! Thanks, Josh!
Appreciate your willingness to share your story!
Where are you in your novel writing process?
I have a complete manuscript. I've taken it as far as I can without an editor's eye. It's presently out for external review at a university press (has been since July).
That's awesome. I was hoping you were going to say you're just starting out and I'd suggest a writing group. I've been struggling with making time to write or creating a schedule/habit. For years.
Yes, it's difficult. Even when there is more time for writing, it can be difficult to devote that time to a longform project that requires many months to finish. I'm presently finding Substack time to be pulling from the longform work, mainly because progress on Substack is tangible and immediate.
I remain hopeful about finding a writing group here. I'd really like to do something in person, like I once did with some friends in Iowa. It really does help to have that smaller audience to write for, and to have some deadlines to urge you along.
👏👏
"How much ground should writers give in order to reach the average reader?"
Well, I am probably going to miss the mark as far as you and Jason are concerned, but in my book the answer to this should be "none". I'm not suggesting that writing should be made deliberately or ridiculously too difficult to read, but I do think that there comes a point where readers should rise to the level of the work, not have the work dumbed down to meet the reader.
I did a course last year (as a student) and I found it incredibly difficult -- a good way of demolishing one's self-esteem is to discover that despite being pretty literate you're way out of your depth. But when, as a result of reading, discussing, repeat for months on end, and endless drafts of the final essay, I came out with a really good evaluation and an even better sense of self-worth.
The only case for dumbing down, if I can put it that way, would be in the hope that it entices the reader to read the real thing or read an authors other works. An example of each of these would be:
1. I became interested in great works of literature by reading Classics Illustrated.
2. I became interested in Melville y being introduced to him through Bartleby, like your students. (I haven't acted upon that interest yet, but I will).
Other than similar scenarios, I can't see that lowering standards helps anyone, least of all students or readers.
Yes, there are cases where it is the reader’s job to rise to the material. But there are developmental considerations, too. What one assigns in a second-year survey is often less challenging than what a senior seminar might include.
Of course. I was really thinking about reworking texts to remove the hard bits, or assigning something less challenging than a particular level would suggest is 'doable'. Perhaps it's not the same in literature, but when I was teaching A Level (advanced level) Economics I didn't start with the lower level syllabus. I did give them simplified versions of theories though, and as they became more attuned to the way economists think, I added more detail/nuance/concepts etc to those simplified models. I don't know if these are still fashionable, because I keep meeting trainee teachers who have never heard of them, but I was a great advocate of Bruner's spiral curriculum approach and Ausubel's advance organiser , and Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development approach. All of those I found to be good ways of making the material more accessible but without dumbing down as such. Sorry if this comment is completely irrelevant to the field of literature teaching
Jason can speak for himself, but I think this is what he meant by secondary texts. There are versions of this for literary theory, which overlaps with philosophy. I’m torn on this. It can be useful to assign a reference like M.H. Abrams’ Glossary of Literary Terms, which includes some pocketbook definitions of literary movements and theoretical approaches. But I think the reason for introducing undergraduates to critical theory is often to prepare them for graduate school. The colonization of literary studies by critical theory is one of the aspects of academe that I am recovering from!
I haven't read this review yet: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/03/09/departments-on-the-defensive-professing-criticism-john-guillory/
However I was reading a review yesterday (it doesn't seem to be online yet) in which the writer starts by saying that he has spent a very pleasant evening NOT reading this book! He seemed to be saying the same thing as you in that comment.
Guillory's book looks interesting. I have not attempted a bird's eye view of literary criticism, but I am aware that many nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers (Poe and Cather, say) also wrote what might be called criticism. Some of Cather's essays on style might fall under the crass genre now known as the "craft essay," although her historical sensibilities tend to far surpass anything I see written under the craft heading today.
There is often a difference between people who are professional academics and people who are professional journalists. For instance, Joan Acocella's book of scholarship on Cather reads very differently from the average scholarly monograph. My friend Sam, who writes Castalia, is often doing something more like Acocella's style of literary criticism, which is not overtly theoretical. I think of that kind of writing as simply an intelligent mind thinking out loud about style or theme.
While I enjoyed writing from a more theoretical perspective at times, I can't say that it was terribly useful to anyone. The main reason for "interdisciplinary scholarship" and for much of the theory-driven research is professional development: one builds a body of work that earns one tenure and then promotion, and then (presumably) some authority in the field. This creates real problems for teaching, because it either means that one's research is not germane to teaching, or it means that one's teaching is skewed toward cloning oneself. This has some value for students who want to get a PhD, but most of us in the humanities have been advising our students *not* to do this, if they can possibly help it, given the scarcity of jobs and the dismal future many of us foresee for the humanities in academe.
I don't really know that I have a coherent vision of what a *better* kind of scholarship might look like, except to point to what one sees in The New Yorker or in reviews like the one you shared. Substack more often seems like a space that parallels the university, rather than one that might enrich teaching and learning within academe, but perhaps what we are trying to do here as public intellectuals will circle back into the profession.
I love the chicken approach -- I hadn't come across that before.
Who doesn’t love a chicken joke?