Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

by Gerald Graff

Overview

Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify.

In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300132014
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Gerald Graff, Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of many books and articles, including Beyond the Culture Wars, and he was winner of the American Book Award in 1992. He is currently working with his wife, Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, on a writing textbook, A Short Guide to Argument, that will be a how-to companion to Clueless in Academe.

Read an Excerpt

Clueless IN Academe

HOW SCHOOLING OBSCURES THE LIFE OF THE MIND

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By GERALD GRAFF

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Gerald Graff
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-09558-9

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Chapter One

The University Is Popular Culture, But It Doesn't Know It Yet

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 or 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, had 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 to broader 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.

CREEPING INTELLECTUALISM

"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 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 is at stake in them, as controversies over bilingual education, evolution, and creationism, the new gender and race studies, grade inflation, and the teaching of literature, mathematics, and history extend far beyond the campus. And 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 cliche 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 Night Line.

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 Movie 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 its 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 Roseannne 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.

PARLEZ-VOUS ARGUESPEAK?

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, 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 mathematics or chemistry, which is different in turn 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.

The common persuasive practices to which I refer have been inventoried by compositionists like Mike Rose, who writes in Lives on the Boundary 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 (UIC) 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 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 some professors fail to grasp this fact: "Lots of articles begin, 'Let X be a blotch,'" Bona says. "Their writers are under a misconception 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 not only with each other, but with the public world beyond academia and with 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.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Clueless IN Academe by GERALD GRAFF Copyright © 2003 by Gerald Graff. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	vii
	Introduction: In the Dark All Eggheads Are Gray	1
Part I	Confusing the Issue
1	The University Is Popular Culture, But It Doesn't Know It Yet	17
2	The Problem Problem and Other Oddities of Academic Discourse	43
3	The Mixed-Message Curriculum	62
Part II	Intellectualism and Its Discontents
4	Two Cheers for the Argument Culture	83
5	Paralysis by Analysis?	96
Part III	Communicative Disorders
6	Unlearning to Write	115
7	Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty	134
8	Why Johnny Can't Argue	155
9	Outing Criticism	173
10	The Application Guessing Game with Andrew Hoberek	190
Part IV	Teaching the Club
11	Hidden Intellectualism	211
12	A Word for Words and a Vote for Quotes	232
13	Wrestling with the Devil	246
14	Deborah Meier's Progressive Traditionalism	261
	Epilogue: How to Write an Argument--What Students and Teachers Really Need to Know	275
	Notes	279
	Index	299

Editorial Reviews

All through the book, he brings forward the views of those who don't agree with him on one subject or another. He gives them a fair hearing; he gives his readers a chance to change their minds. Is the culture of argumentation that Graff endorses an aggressive, hyper-masculine culture? He thinks not, but the argument he offers against his own position is full enough and fair enough to allow readers to disagree with him. Out to create good citizens, Graff often shows himself a remarkably responsible citizen in his own right. He's very candid about the collaborative nature of some of the work he has done to get into a position to write this book. He credits not just big names in the professoriat but also assiduously cites lots of lesser-known teachers and scholars. There's an appealingly democratic quality to the entire endeavor. Graff is reopening the door on a major debate. — Mark Edmundson

The Washington Post

"Graff is reopening the door on a major debate. In the wake of theory, in the wake of feminism, post-colonial criticism and all the rest, what is a liberal arts education supposed to be about? How should teachers teach? What should students learn? Intelligently, humanely, Gerald Graff is bringing all of these questions back home to the classroom, which, at least for now, seems exactly where they belong."—Mark Edmundson, Washington Post Book World

"[Graff] writes with lucidity and charm. . . . A worthwhile work trapped in an enigma."—Steven Lagerfeld, Wall Street Journal

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