English Professor Adopts Pro-Reading Stance
For unfortunate reality-based reasons, I have had to spend quite a bit of time recently thinking about the practice of teaching, which has ended up with me reading things like this interview with University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson.
He’s a big booster of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve never read Emerson, what little Thoreau I’ve seen has struck me as a bunch of hippie claptrap, and lines like
Thoreau is a tough, brutal critic of one central tenet — one central tendency in American life, and that is consumerism, all right? Simplify, simplify, simplify. There`s no writer who knows more about the perils of consumerism.
don’t exactly inspire me to pursue it further. (Thoreau’s noble embrace of asceticism led, if I recall correctly, to his dying of TB.) Regardless, Edmundson seems like an interesting fellow, and there’s some good stuff here on the seemingly deathless issue of politics in academia:
Also, I think a lot of the kind of angry conservative movement that rubs me the wrong me, the Rush Limbaugh kind of stuff, came about because people going to college felt, All my professors are liberal, I could never give them my reservations about the liberal line, so that those things festered and got darker and nastier. And then, you know, welcome to talk radio. There they are, expanded to 90 times their size. If they`d been listened to in a tolerant way and disagreed with in an affectionate way, we might have a little bit better civil discourse in the country… one of the things that English departments, in particular, need to do is become receptive to hiring more people who have conservative political views. You can`t have a real dialogue if all you have are liberals, leftists and leftists to the left of leftists.
I particularly like the phrase “disagreed with in an affectionate way”.
Read all the way to the end and, in lieu of a cookie, you get an amusing Hayek-related moment.
Paul Dresman taught one of my literature classes over the summer. I wasn’t very fond of him, myself. But I did end up with an “A”, so I guess I can’t really complain. Among my greatest statements in that class: “Edna Pontillier was a coward, a poor example of a woman, and deserved her end,” and “stay-at-home days with tea, crumpets and servants don’t sound too bad to me! How repressed can you be, painting and writing in your free time and being nice to people who come to visit you? Funny how women today strive to do just that, but want a college degree before they snag their rich hubby…”
Needless to say, he didn’t like me much, either.
The compromise second draft!
Edmundson writes: “These professors, whatever they may say, are fundamentally afraid of living in a democracy, where people think for themselves rather than letting experts do their thinking for them. This fear is a scandal at the center of the current-day academy. Though many professors claim to be on the left, the fact is that they do not trust, or sometimes, even much like, everyday, relatively unschooled people. In fact, they tend to despise the people on whose behalf they claim to be working.”
He goes on to say that professors need to “turn outward toward the direction society,” even though they may be laughed at or not get the response their looking for.
I certainly agree with his sentiments, and I wish I saw more of that at the U of O, possibly seeing it once in Professor Paul Dresman of the English department (who Bret once told me was the only left-leaning professor he liked).
Also, say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, but I like the interview’s unintentional connection to The Big Lebowski with the inclusion of nihilists and the Port Huron Statement.
Erg. Thoreau’s tough, brutal criticism of consumerism ends at his participation in the family business: manufacturing and selling pencils to consumers.
The free time necessary to write his hippy claptrap, then, was paid for by consumerism, to the extent that he wasn’t mooching off of Emerson.
And how did Emerson earn his money? By selling his ideas, in lectures and books, to consumers.
Just sayin’.
I’ve always been a fan of Edmundson. He wrote an essay called “On the uses of Liberal Education as Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” (I hope I have the title right) that gets taught in a lot of WR 121 classes. Even if one doesn’t endorse his argument without reserve, he has a keen knack for describing certain behaviors observable on campus. (He makes much use of words like “shuffling,” for example.)