Why Read? (3 page)

These thoughts of mine didn't come with any anger at my students. For who was to blame them? They didn't create the consumer
biosphere whose air was now their purest oxygen. They weren't the ones who should have pulled the plug on the TV or disabled
the game port when they were kids. They hadn't invited the ad flaks and money changers into their public schools. What I felt
was an ongoing sense of sorrow about their foreclosed possibilities. They seemed to lack chances that I, born far poorer than
most of them, but into a different world, had abundantly enjoyed.

As I read those evaluation forms and thought them over, I recalled a story. In Vienna, there was once a superb teacher of
music, very old. He accepted few students. There came to him once a young man whom all of Berlin was celebrating. Only fourteen,
yet he played exquisitely. The young man arrived in Austria hoping to study with the master. At the audition, he played to
perfection; everyone surrounding the old teacher attested to the fact. When it came time to make his decision, the old man
didn't hesitate. "I don't want him," he said. "But, master, why not?" asked a protege. "He's the most gifted young violinist
we've ever heard." "Maybe," said the old man. "But he lacks something, and without this thing real development is not possible.
What that young man lacks is inexperience." It's a precious possession, inexperience; my students have had it stolen from
them.

Cool School

BUT WHAT ABOUT the universities themselves? Do they do all they can to fight the reign of consumer cool?

From the start, the university's approach to students now has a solicitous, maybe even a servile tone. As soon as they enter
their junior year in high school, and especially if they live in a prosperous zip code, the information materials, which is
to say the advertising, come rolling in. Pictures, testimonials, videocassettes and CD-ROMs (some bidden, some not) arrive
at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the students and their tuition dollars.

The freshman-to-be sees photographs of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate phys-ed facilities; of expertly maintained
sports fields; of orchestras and drama troupes; of students working joyously, off by themselves. It's a retirement spread
for the young. "Colleges don't have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments," a school financial officer
said to me once. Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come
to college thinking that the Shakespeare and Freud courses were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part, the answer is a matter of demographics and also of money. Aided by the GI Bill, the
college-going population increased dramatically after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate
them colleges continued to grow. Universities expand readily enough, but with tenure locking in faculty for lifetime jobs,
and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it's not easy for a university to contract.
So after the baby boomers had passed through—like a tasty lump sliding the length of a boa constrictor—the colleges turned
to promotional strategies—to advertising—to fill the empty chairs. Suddenly college, except for the few highly selective establishments,
became a buyers' market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken potently into account. That often meant creating
more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone
was nice.

Just as universities must compete with one another for students, so must individual departments. At a time of rank economic
anxiety (and what time is not in America?), the English department and the history department have to contend for students
against the more success-ensuring branches, such as the science departments and the commerce school. In 1968, more than 21
percent of all the bachelor's degrees conferred in America were humanities degrees; by 1993 that total had fallen to about
13 percent, and it continues to sink. The humanities now must struggle to attract students, many of whose parents devoutly
wish that they would go elsewhere.

One of the ways we've tried to be attractive is by loosening up. We grade much more genially than our colleagues in the sciences.
In English and history, we don't give many D's, or C's, either. (The rigors of Chem 101 may create almost as many humanities
majors per year as the splendors of Shakespeare.) A professor at Stanford explained that grades were getting better because
the students were getting smarter every year. Anything, I suppose, is possible.

Along with easing up on grades, many humanities departments have relaxed major requirements. There are some good reasons for
introducing more choice into the curricula and requiring fewer standard courses. But the move jibes with a tendency to serve
the students instead of challenging them. Students can float in and out of classes during the first two weeks of the term
without making any commitment. The common name for this span—shopping period—attests to the mentality that's in play.

One result of the university's widening elective leeway is to give students more power over teachers. Those who don't like
you can simply avoid you. If the students dislike you en masse, you can be left with an empty classroom. I've seen other professors,
especially older ones, often those with the most to teach, suffer real grief at not having enough students sign up for their
courses: their grading was too tough; they demanded too much; their beliefs were too far out of line with the existing dispensation.
It takes only a few such incidents to draw other professors into line.

Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland.
When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and prepro-fessional training are theirs, if that's what they want. The
world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that's fully continuous with the American entertainment
and consumer culture they've been living in. They hardly know they've left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation
of students—steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before
they arrive, then pandered to from day one—are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed
without effort or languidly cast aside?

So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities
were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works
of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they'd had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time,
and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer
Complex itself came from—that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time,
a treatise in itself.)

But what about me? Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations
made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman
and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that's what I was offering. But
what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.

I'd like to say that I arrived at something like a breakthrough simply by delving into my own past. In my life I've had a
string of marvelous teachers, and thinking back on them was surely a help. But some minds—mine, at times, I confess—tend to
function best in opposition. So it was looking not just to the great and good whom I've known, but to something like an arch-antagonist,
that got me thinking in fresh ways about how to teach and why.

The World According to Falwell

I TEACH AT the University of Virginia, and not far from me, down Route 29 in Lynchburg—whence the practice of lynching, some
claim, gets its name—is the church of Jerry Falwell. Falwell teaches "the word of God," the literal, unarguable truth as it's
revealed to him in the Bible and as it must be understood by all heaven-bound Christians.

For some time, I thought that we at the University of Virginia had nothing consequential to do with the Reverend Falwell.
Occasionally, I'd get a book through interlibrary loan from Falwell's Liberty University; sometimes the inside cover contained
a warning to the pious suggesting that though this volume might be the property of the Liberty University library, its contents,
insofar as they contradict the Bible (which means the Bible according to Falwell) were of no particular value.

It's said that when a certain caliph was on the verge of burning the great library at Alexandria, scholars fell on their knees
in front of him and begged him to relent. "There are two kinds of books here," the caliph purportedly said. "There are those
that contradict the Koran—they are blasphemous. There are those that corroborate the Koran—they are superfluous." So: "Burn
the library." Given the possibilities for fundamentalist literary criticism that the caliph opened up, it's a good thing that
Liberty has a library at all.

Thomas Jefferson, the University of Virginia's founder, was a deist, maybe something more scandalous than that, the orthodox
of Virginia used to whisper. The architecture of my university's central grounds, all designed by Jefferson, is emphatically
secular, based on Greek and Roman models. In fact, the Rotunda, once the university's library, is designed in homage to the
Roman Pantheon, a temple to the twelve chief pagan gods. Where the statues of those gods stand in the Pantheon, there, in
the Rotunda library, were books. Books were Jefferson's deities, invested with powers of transport and transformation equal
to anything the ancient gods possessed. As soon as they saw the new university, local divines went apoplectic. Where was the
church? Unlike Princeton and Harvard, the state university didn't have a Christian house of worship at its center. From pulpits
all over Virginia, ministers threatened the pagan enclave with ruin from above. In 1829, the Episcopal bishop William Meade
predicted the university's ruin, because, as he put it, the "Almighty is angry" about the Rotunda. (It's probably only fair
to report that in 1895 the Rotunda did burn down.)

Jefferson—deist (maybe worse), scientist, cosmopolitan—seems to have believed that the best way to deal with religion was
to banish it, formally, from the university, and instead to teach the useful arts of medicine, commerce, law, and the rest.
The design of my university declares victory over what the radicals of the Enlightenment would have called superstition, and
what most Americans currently call faith or spirituality. And we honor Jefferson now by, in effect, rendering unto Falwell
that which is Falwell's.

In fact, we—and I don't mean only at the University of Virginia; I mean humanists in general—have entered into an implied
bargain with Falwell and other American promulgators of faith, most of whom have much more to recommend them than the Prophet
of Lynchburg. They do the soul-crafting. They administer the spiritual education. They address the hearts of our students,
and in some measure of the nation at large. We preside over the minds. We shape intelligences; we train the faculties (and
throw in more than a little entertainment on the side).

In other words, we teachers strike an unspoken agreement with religion and its dispensers. They do their work, we do ours.

But isn't that the way it should be? Isn't religion private? Spirituality, after all, is everyone's personal affair; it shouldn't
be the substance of college education; it should be passed over in silence. What professor would have the bad taste to puncture
the walls of his students' privacy, to invade their inner lives, by asking them uncomfortable questions about ultimate values?

Well, it turned out, me. I decided that I was, in a certain sense, going to take my cue from religion. After all, I got into
teaching for the same reason, I suspect, that many people did: because I thought it was a high-stakes affair, a pursuit in
which souls are won and lost.

"How do you imagine God?" If you are going to indulge in embarrassing behavior, if you're going to make your students "uncomfortable,"
why not go all the way? This question has moved to the center of many of my classes—not classes in religion, but classes in
Shakespeare, in Romantic poetry, in major nineteenth-century novels. That is, the embarrassing question begins courses with
which, according to Jefferson, according to Falwell and other, more tempered advocates of faith, and according to the great
majority of my colleagues in the humanities, it has absolutely nothing to do.

What kind of answers do I get? Often marvelous ones. After the students who are disposed to walk out have, sometimes leaving
an editorial sigh hanging in the air, and after there's been a weekend for reflection, answers come forth.

Some of the accounts are on the fluffy side. I've learned that God is love and only love; I've heard that God is Nature; that
God is light; that God is all the goodness in the universe. I hear tales about God's interventions into the lives of my students,
interventions that save them from accidents, deliver them from sickness while others fall by the wayside. There's a whole
set of accounts that are on the all-benevolent side—smiling, kindly, but also underramified, insufficiently thought-out. If
God is all things, or abides in all things, then what is the source of evil? (By now, it's clear to the students that bad
taste is my game; already I'm getting a little by way of indulgence.) A pause, then an answer, sometimes not a bad one. The
most memorable exponent of smiling faith was a woman named Catherine, who called her blend of creamy benevolence—what else?—Catherin-ism.