Epigoni - Remarks on Teaching

For the null set of you -- let's say, for the sake of solipsistic verisimilitude, I -- who've been awaiting my further cogitations on the matter of logical abduction, I promise not to emulate Stephen King in the matter of The Dark Tower, but "l'explication juste" has been a bit slow in coming to my intermittent consciousness, so I thought, in the interim, I'd return to the subject of education, and the lack thereof to be had in the continental United States, which does relate, and not only tenuously, to the previous uncompleted opus. [Actually, I've just completed it, and backdated it a bit just to have the five parts of the post displayed in sequence, uninterrupted.]

So, as an erstwhile (tenured) academic (maybe more than I want to admit, but true), here's my take:

The quality of minds (like that of mercy) matters. I believe that we in academe are eating our seed corn, making new generations that are less good reproductions of our own, as though agonizingly diffracted, not through a glass darkly, but through a series of 17 mechanically defective Xerox machines with empty toner cartridges, set at the lowest possible resolution. (Has anyone not noticed that each generation is less articulate, less possessed of the breadth of erudition that used to be the hallmark of a liberally-educated human being?) And the reason has to do with the progressive, ineluctable devaluation of teaching and the stigmatisation of teachers. I think it does matter to make the next generation educated, and if the major universities have adopted the stance that only research is of value, and if this attitude migrates down (as it has) into what originally were teaching colleges, then truly, no venue is left from which a generation will come that has been taught effectively, and that has a model to emulate of what being a professor and a mentor ought to be about, other than writing a steady stream of grant applications.

It is possible to do research without having absorbed the fundamental principles of one's own discipline -- indeed, we're demanding it of our students, because what used to be required for tenure at major universities is now the minimum prerequisite for admission to their graduate programs. It is possible to do research without knowing anything beyond one's own discipline, without being able to lecture eloquently (or even intelligibly), without knowing Hamlet from omelets, without walking away from Omelas. It is possible, and it's become our consuming obsession; it's become the only currency in which it's possible to transact academic business.

When an activity goes unrewarded, or worse, is seen to be a manifestation of intellectual deficiency detrimental to the health and fame of the institution that supports that activity, you can be sure that people will stop spending time on it. Such is the status in the colleges and universities of this country of effective teaching. Woe betide the perpetrator, who has as much chance of continued employment as a starving person has of being fed at a Republican convention.