An educator argues
that higher education should stop lamenting the blurring
line between academia and pop culture—and start taking
advantage of the synergies.
An old saying has it that academic disputes
are especially vicious because so little is at stake in
them. Behind the sentiment lies the belief that the intellectual
culture of academia is arid and self-absorbed, its head
in the sand or the clouds, concerned with rarefied stuff
that real people don’t give a damn about. And there
was more than a grain of truth to this view before World
War II, when higher education was the privilege of a tiny
social elite and the disciplines were dominated by a narrowly
antiquarian and positivistic view of inquiry, which was
seen as a business of piling up minutely specialized facts
regardless of their interest or relevance beyond the scholarly
world. In that period, to which many conservatives now look
back with misplaced nostalgia, research “scholars”
were the opposite of “intellectuals,” accumulators
of specialized information who left the big picture—the
application of the facts to contemporary life—to journalists,
the clergy, and other nonacademics.
The narrow pedantry to which scholarship
could descend had been a target of satire for centuries,
but it reached a kind of culmination with the rise of the
modern research university. The philosopher George Santayana,
who taught at Harvard from 1889 to 1912, complained that
his scholarly colleagues were too busy with their microscopic
projects to “form an intellectual society….
I never heard of any idea of movement spring up among them….
It was an anonymous concourse of coral insects, each secreting
one cell, and leaving that fossil legacy to enlarge the
earth.” William James, Santayana’s Harvard colleague,
and published similar criticisms of overspecialized scholarship
in a 1903 essay entitled “The Ph.D. Octopus.”
Such broadsides made little impact on the scholars, however,
who saw their commitment to solid learning undefiled by
controversial—that is, interesting—thought as
proof of their integrity as searchers for truth.
Large stretches of academia in which
not much has changed can still be found today. But for half
a century inward-looking specialization has come under challenge
by a counterimpulse toward outward-looking relevance. You
need only scan the bulletin boards outside any academic
department office or the advertisements for the latest academic
books to see that a silent battle for the soul of academia
is being waged between clashing conceptions of academic
work: between a view that sees such work as inherently esoteric
and specialized—and all the better for that—and
a view that aspires to “outreach” and have broad
influence on the wider society. But because our thinking
about academia is still shaped by older assumptions, we
tend to overlook the fact that since the end of World War
II the tide has actually favored academics who can generalize
their specialties and demonstrate their wider applications.
“Specialized” is one of the
most sloppily used words in the lexicon of education, often
functioning as code for “politically doctrinaire.”
But if the word means “restricted in interest to a
few experts,” then it is misleadingly applied to much
of current academia. In the wake of the postwar knowledge
explosion and the increased cultural diversity of students,
faculties, and curricula, the academic specialist and the
wide-ranging generalist increasingly merge in the same person,
while the writing habits of the so-called public intellectual,
once the exception to the rule, begin seeping into academic
writing generally. Academia itself has become part of the
mass culture industry, which disseminates and popularizes
academic theories and trends. Whereas academics were once
rewarded for burrowing into a narrow specialty and having
nothing to say about the big picture, such habits today
are more likely to get one rejected by editors, granting
agencies, and hiring committees. If today’s academic
disputes are still often vicious, it is because much more
is at stake in them, as controversies over bilingual education,
evolution, and creationism, the new general and race studies,
grade inflation, and the teaching of literature, mathematics,
and history extend far beyond the campus. As the New York
Times noted in a report on how “Campuses across America
Are Adding ‘Sept. 11 101’ to Curriculums,”
colleges are now much more prone “to tackle current
problems” than they were a generation ago and much
speedier in turning those problems into courses, whose existence
in turn becomes news in places like the Times.
Creeping intellectualism has become pervasive,
with the growth of a college-educated audience created by
the postwar democratization of higher education, an audience
that is fascinated by the culture of teaching and learning.
The fascination is reflected in the popularity of films
like Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, Educating
Rita, The Mirror Has Two Faces, Good Will Hunting, Legally
Blonde, and countless others, as well as TV series
from The White Shadow to The Education of Max
Bickford. Other signs range from cerebral cartoons
like Gary Larson’s The Far Side and The Simpsons to
ex-commentator Dennis Miller’s esoteric allusions
on Monday Night Football to the use of the word Theory as
a brand name for a line of women’s pants. Academic
ideas are increasingly popularized, not only by the media
but by academic writing itself, as university presses court
the wider audiences of trade houses while trade houses increasingly
publish academics. All this refutes the cliché that
academia is overspecialized. The University of Chicago Press
doesn’t boast in its advertisements that its latest
titles in the social sciences and Middle Eastern studies
are more specialized than those of Harvard University Press.
On the contrary, such presses claim their books are paradigm-smashing,
pathbreaking, and broad-gauged, and though such terms of
praise may have more to do with hype than with accuracy,
they show that a shift in priorities has taken place, a
pathbreaking shift, you could say.
It’s true that in the recent culture
wars academics and journalists have often been at each others’
throats. But this very antagonism is now a sign of proximity
rather than of distance. Whereas academics and journalists
once disdained one another from afar, they now compete for
preeminence in the common role of explaining the contemporary
world. Then, too, the journalistic bashing of academic stars
during the culture wars has been matched by the glorification
of many of the same stars in such venues as the New
York Times Magazine, National Public Radio’s
Fresh Air, or Nightline.
The new proximity of the academy and
the media has been well described by the academic journalist
Ellen Willis, who observes that many of the same theories,
terms, and debates now circulate between the university
and the media and back:
Ideas that matter, for better or worse,
have a way of spreading as they get picked up, translated,
recycled for different audiences up and down the media food
chain.
Cultural criticism written by academics influences writers
for journals of opinion, who in turn feed the heads of New
York Times writers and commentators for PBS; eventually
every aspect of the culture war finds its way into USA
Today, Roseanne, ER, and the Movies
of the Week.
Not everyone thinks what Willis describes
is a good thing, as critics charge universities with selling
out to trendiness, faddishness, and disciplinary orthodoxies.
Though these charges are often justified, I believe anyone
familiar with historical accounts of what academia was like
in the supposedly good old days will agree that the gains
have been greater than the losses.
Far from being narrow, soulless, and
impoverished, then, the content of academic intellectual
culture at its best is now rich and potentially compelling.
But academia represents and explains this content so badly
that one would think it is hiding it, as much from itself
perhaps as from it students. Indeed, one of the major facts
academia hushes up and hardly recognizes is the one I have
just noted, that today’s academic culture is less
narrowly “academic” than its prewar counterpart,
closer in spirit to the pulse of journalism and popular
culture, which in turn are increasingly fascinated by academics
and their ideas.
In a real sense, the university is itself
popular culture—what else should we call an institution
that serves millions if not an agent of mass popularization?
But the university still behaves as if it were unpopular
culture, and the anachronistic opposition of academia and
journalism continues to provide academics with an ironclad
excuse for communicative ineptitude. The damaging effects
of this ineptitude were limited as long as only a fraction
of the American population went to high school, much less
to college, as was the case for much of the last century,
and as long as vocational success did not yet depend on
a college degree. The consequences have become far more
serious, however, as higher education has become a mass
enterprise and college credentials are a prerequisite of
opportunity and mobility.
So what Willis calls the circulation
of “ideas that matter” has its limits, as the
opacity of university culture leaves the schools in limbo,
preventing them from preparing students for higher education.
The university’s increased interest in big-picture
ideas is not matched by any corresponding effort to clarify
those ideas for more than a circumscribed audience. What
“feeds the heads,” in Willis’s phrase,
of Times writers and PBS commentators (and perhaps
even the audiences of Roseanne and ER) doesn’t
necessarily enter the heads of college undergraduates or
of high-school teachers and students.
As a result, the more things change in
the intellectual culture of academia, the more they stay
the same with regard to what many students and the general
public make—or fail to make—of it. On the one
hand, the content of the academic disciplines has gone through
revolutionary changes, as paradigm-smashing, boundary-crossing,
high-wire interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching become
the order of the day and as the line blurs between academia
and journalism. On the other hand, the average level of
student cluelessness and apathy probably remains roughly
what it was, say, in 1910. High-achieving high-school and
college students become insiders to the most exciting academic
conversations, but the majority remain on the outside looking
in.
One of the most closely guarded secrets
that academia unwittingly keeps from students and everybody
else is that all academics, despite their many differences,
play a version of the same game of persuasive argument.
That this is so may seem obvious, but in my experience many
students have not been let in on the news and are surprised
when they hear it. The first step toward demystifying academia
is to start being more explicit about the academic centrality
of persuasive argument, as did a high-school teacher with
whom I work, Hillel Crandus, AM’98, and his students,
who coined a useful shorthand term for it: “Arguespeak.”
To be sure, the Arguespeak of literary
studies, philosophy, or history is very different from the
Arguespeak of the social sciences, economics, or computer
science. There exist underlying commonalities, however,
that are obscured by the divisions between the humanities
and sciences and the subdivisions of these fields. Indeed,
in obscuring the commonalities across the disciplines, these
divisions obscure disciplinary differences as well.
These common persuasive practices have
been inventoried by compositionists like Mike Rose, who
writes in Lives on the Boundary (1989) of “framing
an argument or taking someone else’s argument apart,
systematically inspecting a document, an issue or an event,
synthesizing different points of view, applying a theory
to disparate phenomena, and so on.” One could add
summarizing the claims of others, sticking with a summary
to unpack its key implications and premises, weighing evidence,
spotting and identifying contradictions and non sequiturs,
telling stories and devising examples that exemplify one’s
point, generalizing one’s conclusions, and many other
practices that come into play in every field. Though the
sciences communicate in specialized symbolic systems that
only other specialists comprehend, even the most brilliant
scientists do not advance in their fields unless they can
explain to relative nonspecialists—in a grant proposal,
for example—what their work does and why it is important.
Even when writing for fellow specialists,
scientists have to follow the same rhetorical principles
as everyone else if they hope to make an impact. Jerry Bona,
head of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s mathematics
department and a leader in the field of mathematical modeling,
says that mathematics journal editors are impressed by article
introductions that define an issue broadly and indicate
what is at stake in the writer’s argument, what difference
it would make to discussions in the field. As Bona puts
it, “You can be as technical as you like about integral
operators once you get into the body of your paper, but
if the editors can’t understand why you care about
your problem in the first few pages you’ve failed.”
According to Bona, not only undergraduates but also some
professors fail to grasp this fact: “Lots of articles
begin, ‘Let X be a blotch,’” Bona says.
“Their writers are under a mistaken conception about
how the game is played.”
A second secret is that persuasive argument
is not only the ur-discourse of academia, but an extension
of the more familiar forms of persuasion that drive the
public discourse of journalism and often the talk of students
themselves. As in academia, journalistic communication involves
listening to viewpoints different from one’s own,
summarizing them in ways others can recognize, comparing
and contrasting positions, spotting contradictions and non
sequiturs, and coming to conclusions that contribute to
a continuing conversation of ideas. These forms of argument
literacy connect the academic disciplines with each other—and
with the public world beyond academia and of student conversations.
It is by obscuring these continuities, or at best leaving
students to discover them on their own (as a minority do),
that schools and colleges make themselves seem opaque.
Here a great opportunity is missed, since
“argument” is a term students recognize and
connect with their experience (even if they dislike it),
whereas equivalent terms like “critical thinking,”
“rhetoric,” and “literate public discourse”
seem nebulous unless you are already familiar with them.
Children learn to make arguments as soon as they are old
enough to lobby their parents to stay up late, go out and
play, or not have to eat their vegetables, but schools fail
to take advantage of this youthful ability or even discourage
it as a form of troublemaking. To be sure, students (and
teachers) often confuse argument and debate with fighting,
hostility, and confrontation, but this very fact makes the
topic of arguing—Do you like it or hate it? Is it
a confrontational or cooperative activity?—a ripe
starting point for a class discussion and a first step toward
demystifying the academic argument culture.
When students do encounter a culture
of ideas and arguments in school (and too often they don’t),
that culture is often made to appear so remote and artificial
that students have trouble connecting it with their own
argumentative practices. To take just one example, students
are far from clueless about how to argue about the arts,
engaging as they do in lively critical discussions about
films, music, concerts, and TV shows that overlap at many
points with those of published reviewers and critics. Arts
education, however, instead of taking advantage of this
convergence in order to draw students into adult forms of
critical discourse, tends to keep critical discourse of
any kind out of sight in order to focus exclusively on primary
texts or on exercises that have no relation to the ways
critics talk about the arts. Bridging the gap between the
discourse of students and teachers starts with the recognition
that there is a continuum between the adolescent’s
declaration that a book or film “sucks” and
the published reviewer’s critique of it. Arts education
in the schools tends to be poor preparation for college
(though so does a lot of college arts education) since art
students are not asked to read criticism. In effect, students
are expected to produce a kind of critical discourse that
is withheld from them and then are graded down when they
hand in a poor version of it.
Learning Arguespeak means not simply
manipulating a set of mechanical skills but becoming socialized
into a way of life that changes who you are. As Julie Lindquist
observes in “Hoods in the Polis” (Pedagogy,
Spring 2001), “When people learn they don’t
take on new knowledge so much as a new identity.”
The educational implications in this personal makeover have
been well developed by writers like Mike Rose and the school
educator Deborah Meier, AM’55. Meier argues that,
at its deepest level, being well educated means “getting
in the habit of developing theories that can be articulated
clearly and checked out in a thoughtful way.” Meier
goes on to stress that such habits of mind entail a change
in the students’ social allegiances comparable to
joining a new club. As Meier puts it, “Somehow, somewhere,
young people need to join, if only part-time, the club we
belong to. That’s more important than the particulars
of what they learn.”
Like Rose and Meier, I see my goal as a teacher, and the
bottom-line goal of education, as that of demystifying the
“club we belong to” and breaking up its exclusivity.
I want to help students enter this club, which often involves
flushing out and engaging their resistance to entering,
addressing questions about why as well as how. Demystifying
the club, furthermore, means changing the club itself as
much as it means changing students. It means widening our
notion of who qualifies as “intellectual” and
building on the argumentative talents students already possess.
This article is excerpted from
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life
of the Mind, by Gerald Graff, AB’59, published
by Yale University Press. © 2003. Printed by permission.
The book is being published in April. Graff is dean of curriculum
and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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