Into the Heart of Darkness

by Barrett Thornhill

It has been three years since I was in English 5.Though my memory of it has become slightly hazy, I still feel the need to comment a bit on my experience. 

And it was an experience, not simply another course; the word “course” would indicate that the nine weeks of polemics through which I grumbled had some kind of academic merit.

The bully pulpit was the oak-paneled 234 Baker; the topic of the sermons teetered between environmental ga-ga and feminist slop; the self-appointed preacher was Professor Shelby Grantham.

English 5 is a mandatory freshmen course “aim[ed] to develop the student’s capacity for understanding and using language.” So says the Organization, Regulations, and Courses handbook. It’s kind of a gut, and I managed to do pretty well—though only after I learned that the more I spoke up the lower my grades dove. The irony is that in an intro course in which I expected to read some of the classics, Shakespeare, Joyce, Milton, Hemingway and the like, the syllabus read like a list from a counter-culture “Book of the Month” club.

I fumbled through the Greenpeace Bible, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and a pastiche of far worse polemics that no one this side of Stalingrad takes seriously. 

What stirred my bile was the appalling lack of teaching professionalism. Example: I had a great professor in the spring for my freshmen seminar, the course into which the kids who get a 5 on the English A.P. get to jump. The first day of class he said, “If I do my job properly, by the end of these nine weeks, you’ll have no idea where I stand in the political scheme of things.”

Professor Grantham decided to not keep us in suspense, and on the first day of her class she made it abundantly clear that she stood somewhere to the left of Che Guevara.

Coming to Dartmouth I accepted the fact that I may be subject to left-leaning classrooms, but I thought that I could weed out some of the more sketchy courses.

But my hands were tied with English 5. I didn’t know what I was getting into, and I didn’t have much of a choice.

On my first paper I wrote, “I was standing in the kitchen with about twenty other guys and girls.” She seized upon the sentence—red ink: “Girl=female unable to reproduce. Woman=female able to reproduce.” Umm, no.

On another occasion, I came across a passage in one of the assigned readings that inferred that the overproduction of wheat in Nebraska was the driving force behind India’s population growth.

I did a bit of research, digging up the wheat export and import numbers of the U.S. and India from the past fifty years, and also looked into India’s social system, and presented my findings to the class the following day.

When I told the class that the average woman in India gave birth to 3.4 children because of social factors and not wheatfields, Professor Grantham told me that men also give birth.

Yes, she actually said that: “Men also give birth.” Apparently I had used “woman” improperly yet again—another in a long series of unexpected faux pas.

Perplexed, I asked her to explain her random rebuke. She seemed baffled that someone could be confused, ignored my objections, and continued to lay the blame on poor ole Nebraska. I decided to drop my point. I could see my grade plummeting before my eyes.

Fine: men also give birth.

It’s not that she was blathering on in obtuse mumbo-jumbo that only a tree-hugging, pinko radical would believe nor that she was openly propagandizing for NOW. It was the subtle but constant barrage of anti-male slurs and assaults on those people who have better things to do than throw otter blood on the fur-wearing public.

She was a sneaky old bird. She slowly but steadily indoctrinated the class over the nine weeks of the term to the point where some of us began to agree with her despite ourselves.

Towards the end I found myself going around my dorm turning off all the bathroom lights to conserve electricity. It was like I had suddenly acquired eco-OCD. It reached the point when some of my friends were considering hiring a deprogrammer.

I was hooked on eco-babble and she was my pusher. She was pimping me out. 

The rest of my classmates thought she was just as bad a teacher as I did.

One confided to me that he “did not doubt that she had an ulterior motive other than just teaching us how to write. I believe that another goal of hers was to spread her ideals.” Another agreed saying, “She NEVER hesitated to stick some feminine pride comment in, even when it was irrelevant to the topic of discussion.”

Even those of my classmates who accepted part of what she said couldn’t miss the ideological bent. “I think she stimulates good discussion, but she does come across as trying to convert us, whether it be through facts or just plain guilt.” 

Said another, “Although I feel [Grantham’s] ideas about the environment, organic food, and equality are good, I don’t think she taught us. She tried to convert us.”

My qualm is not that a professor felt strongly enough about her beliefs to share them with a class. It is that a professor manipulated her position of power and force-fed her class radical opinions on very controversial matters.

The podium was hers, she authored her own commandments, and she drowned all of us in a Red Sea of malarkey.