Where Blame is Due

Having decided to skip my mid-day economics class last Wednesday, I remained seated after my class of the previous period had let out, completing an anagram at which I’d been at work all class. Students filed into the room. Their conversations were loud, brash, and colorful, composed of the chitter-chatter gossip both enthralling and immediately forgotten.

Lost in others’ conversations, I nearly missed the sight of a short, tense man striding through the class-room’s doors, cutting through the gaggles of students, acknowledging each with a curt nod, before jaunting with a burst of energy onto the hardly-risen stage. What caused me to remember the professor of the class after mine was the ensuing loud music that drowned out all but the most-insistent students’ conversations and the odd points wrought meticulously, but so quickly, on the center black-board, these concerning rule-making, feelings, and happiness.

The music was REM’s "Shiny, Happy People." The professor was Randy-Michael Testa, mentioned too often in these pages.

I had inadvertently joined an education class. In that department, Randy-Michael Testa is a rock star.

Students were smiling, laughing, hugging, and holding hands. Others, having dropped their coats and backpacks, strode out en masse towards the email terminals in the hallway. No students perused notes, prepared notebooks, skimmed through readings, or groped deeply in their bags for a pen or pencil.

If only I had been able to muster the enthusiasm to weather the entire period, I could report to you, first-hand, the precise goings-on in Mr. Testa’s class, but, having heard so much about him second- and third-hand, I feared that an entire hour might be more than I could take.

Some mistake the Review’s criticism of Professor Testa as being solely ideologically based. In the strictest sense, it is not: the political leanings of a professor, in whatever direction, ought to be largely immaterial to the progression of his or her course. And when those ideologies do come into play, in class-room discussions, they ought to be catalysts for further discussion and debate, not dampers. Students are here to be educated, not dogmatized.

At least, that’s the assumption with which Dartmouth’s faculty has been working, but now has come the time to call it into question. Are Dartmouth students really here to learn?

In my economics class today, six students were called on to make two group presentations, each group arguing a side of the immigration policy debate. The terms are simple: more versus less immigration, with an economic justification either way. The economics are simple: nothing that, more or less, hasn’t been covered in Economics 1, which is a prerequisite. Finally, the rules are simple: fifteen minutes for each opening presentation, followed by five minutes each for rebuttals, followed by questions from the class. Ostensibly, no mean feat.

What hadn’t been counted on was the inadequacy of the students involved. But for one, all rambled at length, evading theory as possible, jumbling statistics, and lapsing into moral arguments and denunciations of Patrick Buchanan (even by those debating for tighter borders). The professor, though he had removed himself to a seat away from the front of the classroom, still took center stage as he corrected both groups’ arguments, worked through the graphs they were able to draw but unable to explain, and even answered the class’s few questions.

Has the day come when average students at an Ivy League college are unable to hold basic debates on pre-defined topics, even when the arguments for both sides had been assigned as a reading by the professor? It’s astounding to think that mere reading comprehension may be the missing ingredient.

Or is it mere disinterest? Presumably, Dartmouth’s student body has been vetted over and again by the College’s admissions department on factors of high school GPA, standardized testing scores, race, geographic distribution, prominence of family, and a whole host of other factors that we’re told is too complicated to explain in any simple fashion. Fine, I’m willing to buy that. But intellectual curiosity is one element that seems to have worked its way out of the admission’s department’s process. Or, is this approaching the problem from the wrong direction?

College-age students certainly have interests that lead them out of the class-room: athletics, fraternities and sororities, the Green on a spring afternoon, and so on. Such is as it ever has been.

What has changed, though, is the faculty’s attitudes towards these pursuits: they’ve become more accepting, more sympathetic, more understanding; and, in the process, less demanding.

No student should be able to graduate with a B-average after having spent the preceding four years face-down-drunk. Faculty err in blaming fraternities and sororities, as they do by vote every few years; it is they who sanction such behavior by making it feasible.

No student should be rewarded or congratulated for a job poorly done. Feelings aside, there’s no sense in replacing the carrot and stick with a dispenser. All six of the students who participated in the debate described above were treated to glowing words from the professor who did most of the work for them. I speculate, citing as evidence far too many similar cases, that none received an F for their efforts. At an Ivy League school, or any school, ought their to be spoils for mediocrity, or for work that hasn’t even risen to that level?

No student ought to be able to leave Dartmouth, but by withdrawal or expulsion, without the capacity to express him- or her-self, to make an argument given a side, to speak eloquently, to write with intricate knowledge of English grammar. Students leaving Dartmouth without these skills have not received an education worthy of that word and are, at most, the technicians of the future, not its leaders.

Since he professes not to read the Review, I entreat someone to let Randy-Michael Testa know, before he teaches again elsewhere, that we do not criticize him for his politics but for the high marks that I’m told are so easy to score in his classes by digesting his dogma dutifully and then regurgitating when prodded. We disdain him for his elevation of fuzzy empathy over actual education, of rock star over professor.

But students are more or less as they have ever been and Professor Testa’s campus cult would only have grown had he decided to stick it out another season.

Professor emeritus of English Jeffrey Hart writes in his column on page 8 that a specific student’s problem is "that no one takes her aside to tell her that her assertions are stupid, unworthy, and unacceptable." More likely, for these very qualities she has been praised and rewarded. This is the crux of the problem, and no amount of grand-standing over "student life" by the administration or faculty will address it. Students wouldn’t have time to engage in so much raucous behavior, after all, if they felt the need to study.

Looked at another way, if Dartmouth’s administration spent half as much time brooding over the College’s academic standards as its student life, well, then they would probably make a mess of those, too. The faculty, however, has no excuse for not holding students to the standards that it ought to.

— Andrew Grossman
Editor-in-Chief