I began my teaching career in 1968. In the course of those four decades I have worked in more schools than I care to remember. I am envious of the great Northrop Frye, who graduated from the University of Toronto and spent his entire subsequent and highly distinguished scholarly existence teaching in the same school. There’s a certain stability in that sort of sustained connection that I have never had.
Nevertheless, teaching in many schools has the advantage of giving you an overview of the academic profession, and also a basis for making comparisons and judgments. After a while you can tell which schools are the pits, and which are tolerable. Over the years I empirically developed two sure-fire litmus tests to determine the relative merit of any school.
The first is the mailbox test. Every school has a bank of individual mail slots or drawers for the faculty, where correspondence, notes, flyers, and other communications can be placed. Lately a lot of this stuff has been handled via e-mail instead, but the mailboxes are still there, and continue to serve a purpose.
Here’s the principle of the mailbox test: The intellectual quality and academic seriousness of a school are inversely proportional to the amount of paper stuffed into a teacher’s mailbox.
In a top-notch school like Princeton or New York University, the mailboxes are empty except for the occasional note, phone message, or late student paper. Once in a great while there’s an announcement about a public lecture. And apart from personal letters to you, that’s it.
In a crappy school like Asswipe Community College or Cornpone Bible and Agricultural Institute, the faculty mailboxes are jammed with paper—Glee Club notices, flyers from the Disability Office, pompous pronouncements from the dean, bureaucratic forms to fill out, fire-drill advisories, questionnaires, policy statements… on and on it goes, in a tsunami of wood pulp. One of the most disheartening things about teaching in such a school is the experience of showing up in the morning and seeing your mailbox overflowing, like a backed-up sewer, with all of this meaningless paper.
The second test is the faculty-office-door test. This is an even better criterion, since it tells you about your individual colleagues in the school. In a reputable school with serious scholars, every door has only three things on it: the room number and name of the faculty member, followed by his office hours. Nothing else. Every so often there may be a small personal note taped to the door, but that is only in emergencies.
In the low-level schools, faculty office doors are plastered with stupidities and irrelevancies. Typically these include New Yorker cartoons (in the past there also were Jules Feiffer strips), anti-nuclear power stickers, Free-Mumia posters, announcements of a Trans-Gender conference, Save-the-Whales flyers, exhortations to revolutionary solidarity, poems by Audre Lorde, and all sorts of other garbage. It’s not uncommon to see a door utterly enshrouded in this stuff, so that you can’t even read the room number or the occupant’s name. Walking down a faculty corridor in such a school is to run a gantlet of xeroxing, pushpins, and Scotch tape.
What do both tests tell us about academia? It’s easy: the less serious and reputable a school is, the more defensively and frenetically will it generate paper. Thirty years ago I wrote a prose satire on this subject, after having spent a few semesters working in a horrible pseudo-school. In it I said that forms and papers were a divinity that had to be honored by the school staff, and that entire days were set aside as sacred occasions for the worship of these papers. The satire appeared in Maledicta, and the editor later told me that Albert Shanker of the UFT placed a bulk order for offprints of that piece. As the head of a major teachers’ union, he probably saw the truth of what I wrote.
Let me give you some of the probable signs of a good school. I say “probable” because there are always exceptions and singular cases. But as a general rule of thumb, the following signs can be trusted:
1. A good school is quiet. This is an absolute sine qua non for intellectual activity. I have worked in schools where the constant din of movement and talking and sheer pointless noise made teaching and learning a torment, if not an impossibility. Schools should be as close to the atmosphere of a monastic cloister as can be managed. They should not sound like the floor of the Stock Exchange.
2. A good school has a minimal number of faculty meetings. When my good friend James W. Tuttleton became the Chair of English at New York University, he went to the Provost and asked him how many departmental meetings he was obliged to hold. The Provost laughed and said “Well, Jim, you have to hold at least one a year.” Tuttleton did exactly that—he held one departmental meeting per year, and he made sure the meeting didn’t last more than thirty minutes. It was utterly blissful to work in his English department. In other schools, endless meetings are a source of scores of stupid proposals and initiatives and arguments and rivalries and policy disagreements. Stop the meetings, and you kill this crap in the cradle.
3. A good school has a lectern or podium in every classroom. This may sound trivial, but I assure you that it isn’t. There is a subterranean movement among administrators and curriculum coordinators to get rid of the podium. They can’t do it openly, so they try to manage it surreptitiously. One fall you’ll return to school and find that all the podia are gone. Or perhaps they’ve been placed “in storage.” When you complain, one will grudgingly be brought back for you. A certain type of educrat loathes the podium and the lecture method of teaching, and will try to manipulate you into abandoning both. In one school, to foil these scum I had to construct my own makeshift lectern out of heavy-duty cardboard, keep it in my office, and then carry it to class. Do you see now why I hate Deweyites?
4. A good school has very few extracurricular events. Schools are for learning, not socializing. When students are not in class, they should be either studying or sleeping. Some schools have so many extracurricular activities and happenings that attending them is like being in a 1950s variety show. And the crummier the school, the splashier and more variegated are these distractions. Let’s be honest—when someone is eighteen years old, he can be trusted to come up with his own fun and amusements. The school doesn’t need to choreograph them for him.
5. A good school has only a skeleton crew of administrators. In the last twenty years, the number of administrators in colleges has metastasized in a manner beyond belief, and beyond any rational justification. Non-academics can’t conceive how many useless and redundant administrative positions there are today, sucking up a large chunk of the tuition dollar. According to the 2009 NEA Higher Education Almanac, non-teaching academic and support professionals now make up fifty-eight percent of the nation’s higher education workforce. Fifty-eight percent! And since no administrator will deign to work without a suite of offices and a full-time staff, huge sums of the school’s capital have to be sacrificed to building new office space for them and providing competitive salaries and benefits. Part of this is mandated by an intrusive federal government and its malevolent Department of Education. But a great deal of it is self-generated, in a kind of feeding-frenzy of administrative hubris. One of the most diseased things in American education today is this elephantiasis of administrative adipose tissue. Three quarters of these administrators could disappear, and there would be no effect whatsoever on what happens in the classroom.
What you have to understand, if you’re going to grasp the dimensions of our current educational debacle, is that a large and extremely powerful segment of academia specifically rejects the five signs of a good school outlined above. These people (there are many of them, and they are extremely vocal and influential) think that a school ought to be noisy, that it ought to have endless faculty meetings, that lecturing from a podium ought to be verboten, that a huge number of student activities ought to be encouraged, and that there ought to be deans and subdeans and administrative staff for every aspect of college life. Yes, there actually are people who believe a college should be a buzzing hive of noise and motion and contestation. They constitute a bacterial infection in the body politic of education. Just read an issue of Radical Teacher and you’ll see what I mean.
Those who defend the existing educational mess frequently indulge in what I call “post-criminal justification.” This means pretending that a palpable problem is really not a problem at all, but a sign of health. Schools are noisy? Well, they say, that’s just great—it means that there’s plenty of vitality and energy in the students. If there are lots of faculty meetings, this shows that teachers are interacting and cross-fertilizing each other with new ideas. Lecturing is discouraged? Wonderful—that will force faculty to abandon “teacher-talk,” and allow for a more collaborative atmosphere. And so forth and so forth, with every educational blunder reinterpreted as a triumph of progress and innovation. Post-criminal justification allows one to put a positive spin on whatever an unbiased outsider would perceive as a disastrous mistake. It’s now a cottage industry in most of our professional journals of pedagogy.
What our ancestors called a liberal education—that is, a cultivation of humanitas and paideia—is now as rare in the West as incunabula. It’s just no longer there. You can’t get it for your children, not for love or for money. Although an individual professor or two may survive here and there to pass on some scraps of the tradition, the machinery and control of education are today in the hands of our enemies. Making sure that those outside of academia are aware of this situation is the beginning of the counter-revolution.
