What is the Teaching College?

by Jeffrey Hart

The new president of Dartmouth College, historian James Wright, takes office amid a general sense of happy anticipation, but in his first extended statement after being chosen by the Trustees he made remarks that cause some to worry. He said, with some emphasis, that Dartmouth College, despite its name “is a research university.”

Of course, this is literally true. Dartmouth has an excellent medical school, a business school, an engineering school and awards PhDs in quite a few areas, especially the sciences and mathematics. But was Mr. Wright doing more than state the obvious, that Dartmouth does grant advanced degrees? Was he in fact signalling a projected greater emphasis on research and publication at the expense of undergraduate teaching?

Dartmouth has long prided itself on the fact that all of its professors, including senior ones, teach undergraduates and make themselves personally available to them. For example, all members of the English Department teach the required course in Freshman Composition. I know of no comparable institution of which this is true. This is good for the professors — it keeps them in touch with an important activity of the College — it is good for the students, and in general strengthens the institution. I would guess that there is zero possibility that President Wright would wish to change that.

Princeton University for as long as anyone can remember has had a seminar required of all Freshmen. Traditionally this was taught by a professor well-established at Princeton. The students were assigned some reading, but the real purpose of the seminar was to introduce the Freshmen to Princeton, about some of its history, its expectations for the students, the importance of academic integrity, and so forth.

A couple of years ago, Princeton suddenly recognized that the seminar had deteriorated, that few or even no senior faculty members were teaching it, and that it was now staffed by graduate students, new assistant professors, and even transitory adjuncts. Senior faculty, defining their “profession” too narrowly, were avoiding this introductory seminar, maybe to spend more time writing, or making nice consulting fees, and spending more time on advanced projects. Princeton is now trying, with considerable success, to lure established professors back into this Freshman course.

There has always been humor about the “publish or perish” aspect of academic life, jokes about a tenure committee wighing but not reading a candidate’s printed output, but the fact is that, in my judgement at least, publication is an important part of a professor’s activities. It can relate directly or in more complicated ways to what happens in the classroom, how he is viewed by the students, whether he is continuously alive within or even outside his academic field.

At Columbia College in 1950, for example, when I took Lionel Trilling’s junior-level course in nineteenth-century English literature, it was far from a neutral fact that he had just published a very important collection of his essays called “the Liberal Imagination.” This book had been widely reviewed and discussed, and, indeed, Trilling went on to publish other essays in the quarterlies, later collecting them into books. We students followed his publication avidly, and it was a felt presence every time he walked into his classroom.

Everything he said gained in weight because he had said it. If he said that Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” is not a great novel, if he said that Byron is a great poet, one might disagree with both of those judgements, but one wanted to know the basis of his judgement — that was the interesting thing, because we had the whole context of what he was writing. From what perspective were his judgements defensible?

The same was true of many other professors at Columbia at that time. F. W. Dupee was writing his biography of Henry James, of which it was later remarked that it was the only book about James the style of which was worthy of its subject. Egad! And Dupee read chapters of this work in progress to crowded audiences of faculty and students.

Mark Van Doren was teaching his course in such books as Dante, Cervantes, Homer, the Bible, Kafka. What he said gained weight from his magnificent book on Shakespeare and the fact that he was a frequently published Pulitzer Prize winning poet. I could go on with many other names, but you get the point. Publication can be an important fact about a professor. Of course, at any period much academic publication is notoriously sterile and of little interest to anyone, including the author, but this probably happens less often than many suppose.

Today, however, we have a peculiar situation.

The books and essays of such professors as Trillin, Van Doren, Dupee and many others happened to be directly related to what they were doing in the classroom. At one point, Trilling was teaching Wordsworth, but he was also writing a famous essay about him. The students read the essay when it came out, and it formed a part of the class discussion. The same sort of thing was true of other professors.

Today, in contrast, a great deal of “theory” is published in journals devoted to it, and this has no relationship with what is happening in the class. The students don’t read it. It tends to be written in an opaque and jargon-ridden style which is easy to parody, and numerous journals have been established to accomodate it.

These must have very few readers. Indeed, university libraries have begun to weary of subscribing to them. A couple of years ago a professor named Alan Sokal submitted to the theoretical magazine “Social Text” an article full of the usual jargon, but which was a hoax and absolutely meaningless. “Social Text” published it, and was embarrassed and outraged when the professor revealed his hoax.

And, as everyone knows, a great deal of ideology now goes around in the academic world, various kinds of Victim Studies, which is absolutely useless in the classroom. The students know that they are being conned when a professor explains that “Hamlet” is about the abuse of women or “The Tempest” about imperialism.

The student who is worth anything wants to come to grips with what Shakespeare wrote, not bother about the political obsessions of the professor. A lot of this resentment propoganda makes it into the journals, but it has nothing to do with the discussion of literature. As Sam Goldwin once famously said, “If you have a message, send a telegram.”

But, of course, we are going through a peculiar period in higher education. Many of the professors who are senior today entered the academy during the 1960s and 1970s, periods of great intellectual turmoil and confusion. There is no doubt that the wheel is turning slowly and inexorably against all that. Many professors publish things that are pertinent and readable, and this does not retract in their classroom. Ideally, this is the way things should be, and in fact often are.