What is our problem with your academics, Pomona? You offer us no vantage point, not even a low one, no hope for reconciliation between disciplines, or even between classes in the same discipline. You give us bits and pieces of information, here and there, according to different methodologies and incompatible points-of-view, and we are never really told what these methodologies and points-of-view are, we have to figure it out on our own, sift through the information heaped upon us without help, because the teachers are specialists, with eyes trained for microscopes, and all they want is for us to lower our heads to a microscope as well and explore with them their particular petri dish, where they are familiar and comfortable with the peculiarities of each bacterial colony that we might detect and comment on. We have learned not to ask teachers to look up, because they quickly become disoriented by the enormity and multiplicity of things surrounding them when they do: the world is much scarier away from a microscope! We have learned to point down and say, “Wow! What is that under my microscope? Fascinating!” and to other students (but with one eye on the teacher), “I’m not sure you’ve described that colony correctly. Think about how it would look to someone from a different culture.” This excites our teachers: “Fantastic point. It is wrong to assume that your kinds of eyes are naturally the best at discovering things about bacteria.”
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You train us to excel, Pomona. By the end of four years, we have learned the art of academic excellence. We know what to say and how to say it to you, what to write and how to write it for you, which would be fantastic if academic excellence was an end in itself. It is not, of course; to sound trite, academic excellence is of course the means to the end of an education, which is the means to the end of ends – a good life. There are people who have figured out what their version of the good life is at age eighteen. There are people who have figured out that they want to be doctors, or lawyers, or businessmen. Good for them, and all the best to them in their classes. We are different from them; our relationship with you is different than theirs is. They are more likely to base their judgments of you on your career-advancing characteristics: it will be grades, connections, and career placement that define their lasting assessment. We are harder to please, though we have the potential for a closer bond. We are liberal arts students, the quintessential ones. (Our numbers are depleted each year, though this is no excuse for you not to cater to us, for you are still a liberal arts college. You have not yet sold your soul, like Claremont McKenna.) We are looking to understand things like the self, how our society works, this country’s place in the world, and what the examined life holds. Most of all we are hoping for an understanding of what is possible for us; you are useful to us insofar as you help us to achieve this understanding. We have found you utterly useless, worse than useless – you have been an impediment to our studies.
You have asked us to hand over our individuality and insight-producing equipment at the door – to use your preferred methods of argumentation whether we have a self-devised approach or not, to use your conventions whether they confine us or not, to follow you around suburbia when we have knowledge of unexplored expanses of wilderness. You have distracted us from learning and prevented us from attaining a critical perspective from which to view our reality. You have made academic life here about grades, and then you have gone ahead and made receiving good grades, not the reflection of a superior intelligence or thorough work or even intellectual labor, but about resigning yourself to formalized procedures. You have made receiving good grades about endurance. Who is willing to conform to your well-delineated procedures? Who is willing to bring his first draft in to office hours? Who is willing to write an introduction-quotation-analysis-quotation-analyis-quotation-analysis-quotation-analysis-quotation-analysis-conclusion essay? Who is willing to be conservative – to renounce ambition, to renounce his own ideas, to renounce his freedom, and to paraphrase the words of others, with just the right amount of originality, the unoriginal amount of originality: who is willing to respect the five ideas of experts to one of your own ratio? Well, who wants an A? We came to you for fresh surroundings, Pomona. We came to you for a place where we would be encouraged to reflect critically upon “the system”. Why are you a part of it? Why are you it? In whose arms have we sought refuge?
Don’t be taken aback by our hostility. It is justified. We are hostile because you have lied to us about yourself, and your lies have held us back. You see, here you have told us that you are this wonderful Liberal Arts paradise, when in all reality the Liberal Arts education is in a state of crisis and the Liberal Arts promise is empty. For the longest time, we have been shocked by the lack of vitality in your Humanities departments, as dead as Claremont air in the summertime; we have waited patiently for improvement, and we were genuinely puzzled as to how things could be this way when we did not see it. For the longest time, we searched for the reasons why you would want us to learn how we learn here, why you would not bat an eye at the apathy and grade mongering and mindlessness and overall lack of progress in us: what could you be thinking? Don’t you notice? It was a revelation when we faced the fact that we had the wrong focus all along. We are under a new directive. We are assuming that you do not care. We have hardened ourselves. We now coach ourselves not to wonder: how does the system benefit us? and to instead ask: how does the system perpetuate itself? It is the sort of cynical question that we wish we didn’t have to ask; we had always thought it applied to less prestigious institutions in less privileged places. It is, however, the sole question that has yielded insight. We must pursue it.
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A Summary of some of our Findings:
In general, the Humanities departments are split between concentrating on the subjects they take their names from and focusing upon the academic business their professors conduct; so we can view a sizeable portion of History as the Study of the Work Contemporary Professional Historians do, English as the Study of the Work English Professors do, Philosophy as the same. This explains why the only required course in the English major is Literary Interpretation, which teaches you how to do literary criticism the way professors who submit literary criticism to academic journals do it. When professors write literary criticism, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on them, unless they are brilliant, to focus on minutiae, because their employers and colleagues demand that they produce something new for academic journals, and most of the good topics have been played out already. (What, after all, is the 400th critic to write about Pride and Prejudice going to add?) This is why, when we glance at the journals scattered around Crookshank, we spot articles like Sighing for a Soldier: Jane Austen and Military Pride in Pride and Prejudice; Chance and the Hierarchy of Marriages in Pride and Prejudice; and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Hegel’s “Truth in Art”: Concept, Reference, and History. This is why professors’ comments on student papers are something like: “I’m not sure that your thesis was as controversial as it could have been. Look into the secondary literature to see if you can craft a more unique argument next time.” How should students interpret this advice? Only as a guide to getting your paper accepted by an academic journal. Frustrating, when you want to learn – infuriating when you know the reason… We can explain why certain History classes will throw you Neo-Foucauldian, Post-Colonial academic articles to decipher, without telling you why the method is valid; you are to understand that the approach to history just is, presumably because the approach is popular in academia at present. You should learn how. You can, easily if you know how to write to begin with, and once you nail it down, once you have mastered academic journal writing light, which indicates the completion of your apprenticeship, you are primed and ready for future study, a pre-professional like most of your peers, but of the pre-professorial variety. These departments should not fear of their ranks being replenished: the replacements for the dying and retiring begin their training at a young age.
There are several departments that are, intellectually speaking, stuck. If you went to the mental illness talk held recently at Pomona, you heard the worn-out doctor on the task force charged with defining and diagnosing mental illnesses say, essentially, “Well, our criteria for mental illnesses are a patchwork job. But there is nothing better to be done. We are in need of fresh ideas.” One can infer that psychology, which if it is concerned with anything is concerned with mental illness, is in need of fresh ideas as well. (Doesn’t experience in a psychology classroom bear this out?) A psychology professor will never tell you this, it won’t be in any psychology readings either, because you might be dissuaded from further study upon discovering that the field to which you are dedicating yourself is out of ideas – that the ideas you will be learning are generally considered to not be very useful. This information, the state of your field, which you deserve to know, will be concealed from you if it will harm the field’s position in your eyes or in the academy’s. You will be frustrated in these fields, and ask why concepts are unclear or unimportant or simply commonsensical. The answer is that concepts have to be that way, for the sake of the disciplines’ preservation. The worst departments are those with the most to hide. More on the philosophy department later.
Part of the reason why departments are stuck is because their boundaries are artificial. Their separateness is a historical artifact, not the carving of knowledge at its joints. Take a question that psychology claims, for instance: “What are the stages of child development?” and watch where it leads you. You will need to explore language development, which requires that you know certain things about syntax and speech production, and so you will study linguistics. You will of course be acquainted with Noam Chomsky, the heavy-hitter in the field, whose universal grammar hypothesis views language acquisition as an innate process, and his Nativist thought will lead you to Neuroscience. There is also the matter that child development varies across societies, according to different childrearing practices. Sociology comes into the picture, and anthropology too, since psychology is interested in which elements of a child’s development are immutable, and cross-cultural comparison helps to identify these…We will stop here, and say that it is taken as a matter of course by intellectuals today that no subject can be studied without reference to the others; interdisciplinarity is a must for the serious student. The disciplines need each other to function properly.
Pomona is not very interdisciplinary. It is hard to imagine that many colleges are dynamic enough to be very interdisciplinary. The truth of the matter is that embracing interdisciplinarity would not merely mean increased communication between disciplines; it would also mean that disciplines would be stripped naked, forced to open up about what they do, and some would be exposed as less useful than others, some as expendable. What actually happens when the interdisciplinary question pops up is that departments, when it is apparent that they may be merged or mitigated, erect higher walls in the places where they could come under siege. When necessary, they will shift emphases to avoid volleys from threatening enemies. Philosophy, for instance, in danger of being absorbed by history and by psychology, has fled to the opposite corner of its kingdom: toward pure mathematics.
The departments become territorial about their defining questions and areas of expertise. Departments turn into boys from the same social group who realize they have both been talking to the same pretty blonde girl. Their first act is to stop confiding in one another. If sophisticated, they make efforts to positively separate themselves from one another, until their personalities have become distinct enough that they could no longer maintain a friendship, even if they wanted to. Academic departments at Pomona are incapable of maintaining friendships with each other. Academic departments at Pomona are isolated. Crossover between courses in different departments is minimal, and when it exists it is typically incidental. It is rare to hear a professor recommend a course in another department because professors in different departments do not speak to each other about academic matters. They can’t. They have no basis for conversation.
The end product is an inassimilable mix of ideas and orthodoxies. It is a Herculean task to get your bearings. We suspect no student has. The reality is that there is no thought-out academic program at Pomona College: it is do as you wish in each department, and we’ll put all the departments together in one place and call ourselves one college. Why is there not an outcry against the broken system? Few people care. Few see themselves as affected. It is not professors, who remain unchallenged in their vocations, nor is it administrators, who are more caught up in the U.S. News measurables than they are in difficult-to-quantifies, not the parents, who are fed propaganda and digest with ease, not most students, for whom college is just a way station, but it is the students in search of an honest and comprehensive education who are the losers. Minority groups typically have a tough time of things.
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Back to addressing you directly, Pomona. Your practices leave us lost and confused. Thirty-two classes accumulated and we are just beginning to pull ourselves up onto higher ground. Thirty-two classes accumulated and – “Goodbye! Congratulations on all of the A’s you have received here!” On our way out, you present us with a few clear-cut options: We can go out into the world, which has become harder for us to see, and enter into a profession in which it is maybe best to have blurred vision anyway; we can delay facing the world by attending pre-professional graduate school; or we can grab a petri dish of our own (though not of our own choosing) and place it under a microscope for six years of intensive study, until we too are masters of the small and removed.
Who, if anyone, has a chance at taking the world on? Of questioning it? Of changing it? Who has the desire? One would guess the dropouts.
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It appears, Pomona, as if you do not believe there is anything we absolutely must learn while here, or else why do you not have required courses? You have your area requirements, but with one of 100-odd choices for area one, and more for area two, and the numbers remaining high down the list, you are basically telling us, “Go! Take what you want.” You are basically telling us that there are no requirements. Some might find this liberating; we consider it undermining. You should be telling us that there is knowledge that we must have; it is your responsibility as knowledge’s representative and advocate. If you subscribe to a hands-off philosophy, fine, but not even a guide to the attractions? You are appointed to design a school field trip at a good museum: how should you handle it? Three basic plans come to mind: you could lead a structured tour, select an expert to take the kids around in one big group start to finish, a strategy there are arguments for, but which you might fear will bore the children and not respect their individuality. If this is your conclusion, you could opt for a shorter tour, hitting the high spots, followed by a free choice for each child of how to spend his remaining time. Sounds good – if you trust that they are curious. You certainly would not choose the last option: inexperienced as kids are in museums, you certainly would not simply set them free. You know what would happen: one or two would look at paintings and benefit from the trip (of course you would not expect them to understand deeply what they saw, or expect that they would locate the gallery that interests them most), and the rest you would collect horsing around in the gift shop.
Have you noticed that there is not an intellectual community here? Does it give you pause? Does it make you doubt that you are accomplishing anything? It should. Does it bother you that if you put all student conversations about books together, throughout the whole year, and compared their number to conversations about Taylor Swift over a two-day span, there would be no comparison? It should. It should make you want to pick up a new model, or at least poke around the engine.
Or maybe you have well-founded reasons for an open curriculum, and you will just take the hit with the lack of community. What could they be? Are you just very conscientious regarding the pitfalls of prescribing? Are you just very conscious of the state of knowledge in the modern epoch? If you are skeptical about the possibility of knowledge, or the necessity of any particular piece of it, if you feel as if you have nothing definite to impart, at least achieve second best – at least help us find joy in learning. How to determine if we are liking learning? Read our publications, listen to our conversations, snoop on our Facebook profiles, crouch behind bushes outside of a converted parking garage on a Saturday night – the evidence is everywhere. The evidence is nowhere, rather. Pay attention! Please, just pay attention!
Leave the classroom behind every once in awhile. Drop the idealized story: “Pomona students are the kind to work hard during the week, and it’s understandable that they need to blow off some steam on the weekends. They are smart, and fun; that’s what is so great about Pomona students!” What a pathetic story! It is your job to find the real one, the story with particulars rather than your brochure material, and to respond to what you find. Change us once you think we need to be changed, but not before then! Seduce us! Be aggressive if you need to be. To truly seduce you must first understand, and you do not understand us automatically; you do not understand us at the moment, even if you think you do: We will tell what you want to hear if it gets us what we want, and it is always astonishing how capable the cleverest of us are at describing paintings we have not seen. (A tip for dealing with future crops: it is not helping your cause to gift them a pamphlet entitled, How to talk about paintings you haven’t seen.)
Pay attention! Note that we feel worn down by academics (it hasn’t changed much throughout our lives), and try to reinvigorate us. Note our intellectual defensiveness and competitiveness, how we pretend as freshmen that we know everything anyone would ever want to know about the world, and tell us how silly we are to act like that. Notice that as seniors we have come to accept tediousness as an inescapable condition of life, and show us our freedom. It starts with asking us questions. Find out about us: our friendships, our “hook-ups,” our tastes, our prejudices, our anxieties, our opinions and interests, and modify your lessons accordingly; adjust them so that you are speaking to us. If we disappoint you, it is better than if you had never inquired. You will finally know how to teach. When you do, be honest. You might just capture our hearts.
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