by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic
Back when I was young and green at the teaching game, when I first assigned this story to my students, I had some concerns about its old-fashioned quality. These concerns evaporated when, before the next class, I asked a pair of students who happened to be black what they thought of it. They smiled and nodded with enthusiasm; their eyes lit up with pleasure and relief. “Oh, it was really good,” one said, and then the other added: “It didn’t have the n-word or anything.”
Oh yes. We had been using the word “nigger” a lot in the class.
In the minds of textbook editors, the tortured history of race relations in America is a subject ripe for replaying, again and again. Its presence in the texts is unrelenting. Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite writers, and I have come to appreciate her more since becoming a college instructor because she is incredibly teachable—full of large ideas, packed with potent imagery, violent and twisted enough to keep everyone awake. But she loves nothing more than having characters talk, in the most offhand way, about “niggers.” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” endlessly anthologized, is indeed a great story, but what is the literature teacher to do with that discomfiting business in the middle concerning the grandmother’s old beau, Edgar Atkins Teagarden, who once left a watermelon with his initials carved in it on her front porch? She never received the watermelon “because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials E.A.T.!” I know the grandmother is supposed to be an embodiment of evil, and we can consequently file away her racism, but O’Connor herself, as her letters and the big new biography reveal, was far from fully enlightened about racial matters. This comes through in the story. My black students can sense it; when I teach the story, I feel that I am betraying them. They look up at me, earnestly taking notes, and I feel terrible. Here we are having a pleasant enough time in a literature class; why must they have their noses rubbed in the old racial attitudes? And, come to think of it, why must I have my nose rubbed in them? “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “Revelation,” “The Artificial Nigger”—sometimes I don’t have the steam to teach these things, and so I fall back on photocopies of “Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in which O’Connor’s mockery is of religion and sensuality and class, or “Good Country People,” in which she turns her scalpel, at least in part, on herself.
Flannery O’Connor is only part of the difficulty. The textbooks with which I am presented to teach college literature are chockablock with tales of racism and oppression. “Battle Royal” seems to be in every anthology. Can’t be avoided. It was written by a black man, of course, Ralph Ellison, but that does nothing to lessen the discomfort level of the piece, in which a black valedictorian, invited to give his speech at a smoker, a gathering of his town’s “leading white citizens,” discovers that for the crowd’s entertainment he and nine other black men will first have to take part in a battle royal, a group boxing match during which all participants are blindfolded. “Bring up the little shines, gentlemen! Bring up the little shines!” says the school superintendent when they are ready to begin. The narrator, with killing understatement, comments that he “suspected that fighting a battle royal might detract from the dignity of my speech.” “Battle Royal,” essentially the first chapter of Invisible Man, is nothing short of a racial nightmare. All attempts to concentrate on the mechanics of the story, the way the thing operates, are doomed by the events of the narrative, which is so dark, so twisted, which posits a world in which cruelty is so pervasive and wounds so deep, whites so sadistic and blacks so humiliated, that race relations can never be anything approaching normal. Maybe it’s all true, but is this what the class and I have signed up for? We read “Battle Royal” and the old pot of enmity is stirred up. Soon everyone is a little angry, or a little humiliated, or a little ashamed. The glories of foreshadowing and symbolism and subtext seem rather beside the point.
The catalogue of charged material in the textbooks goes on. “Barn Burning” by Faulkner is full of minstrel show dialect and casual talk of “niggers.” Excerpts from Richard Wright’s Native Son are just as painful. “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren’t)” by Patricia Smith may be a perfectly estimable bit of verse, but its insistence on keeping me, the instructor, on the poem’s outside (for I can tell you this much about myself: I am not a black girl) makes it difficult for me to teach. Natasha Trethewey may have won a Pulitzer Prize, but I feel too much the oppressor teaching her “Domestic Work, 1937.” (“All week she’s cleaned / someone else’s house, …”)
In Wole Soyinka’s “Telephone Conversation,” the speaker tries to convey the exact hue of his skin to the skeptical potential landlady on the other end of the line. Okay, so it’s not the United States. It’s probably Nigeria. I still don’t want to teach the poem; I want to apologize.
What of “The Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall, in which a little girl who wants to participate in a “Freedom March”—she must think it’s some sort of patriotic pageant—is instead sent off to the safety of singing in the children’s choir at church, which is reduced to rubble by a bomb? The poem is chilling, as is Toi Derricotte’s “A Note on My Son’s Face,” in which a black mother wishes for her child to be born white; when she peeks in the infant’s bassinet, however, all she sees is “the face of a black man.” How can I teach such a poem? How can I stand in my little classroom, under the buzzing fluorescent lights, in the quiet and airless blue-white gloom, and present, with academic nonchalance, the vision of a sick nightmare? As Sekou Sundiata says in “Blink Your Eyes”:
All depends, all depends on the skin,
All depends on the skin you’re living in.
Wordsworth was right: The world is too much with us.
Some of the nonfiction we study in College Writing is just as loaded. In Maya Angelou’s “Champion of the World,” Primo Carnera knocks down Joe Louis in their heavyweight bout, which prompts the narrator to observe, “It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree.” Then there is Gloria Naylor’s “The Meaning of a Word” (that word is “nigger,” by the way). I try to avoid “The Fourth of July” by Audre Lord, in which a northern black family, unused to Jim Crow laws, can’t get served at a soda fountain in Washington, D.C.; what a “travesty,” the author says, is the Independence Day celebration for black people.
I can’t fault black people for writing about race in America. As Margaret Atwood says, “Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.” Race is America’s biggest and saddest story. The life of the black writer stands—a loaded gun. The black faces, young and old, look up at me from their desks and I find it difficult to teach those stories, poems, and essays. They make me too sad and worried about humanity. I try retreating to a neutral ground, where it is high and safe and postracial, where no mortar shells will scar our meadow of learning.
Perhaps I am too timid. Perhaps I am too old-fashioned, like a member of the family in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Manners,” sitting in the early years of the century on my horse and wagon, speaking politely to everyone while the newfangled automobiles zoom by, covering me with dust. I don’t want to talk about race and I don’t want to talk about social class, either.
The compilers of our nonfiction anthologies include, in addition to the professionally written essays of people like E. B. White and William F. Buckley, examples of what is called “student writing.” I don’t know if these things are real or made up. If they are real they seem heavily edited; there’s a homogeneity to them, like a page of letters to the editor. These student essays, in an effort to appeal or have relevance to students such as my own, tend to have about them an unmistakable tinge of the struggling lower orders. A supposedly lighthearted essay concerning the writer’s difficult encounters with corporate computer systems features collection agencies, funds in bank accounts that desperately need to clear, car insurance about to be canceled, and perilously empty food cupboards. One essay, particularly poignant, explores the reasons behind the writer’s lengthy history of academic failure;
in the end, he winds up in a community college, and though things appear to be looking up a little, he’s having trouble with some of his courses, and trying to figure out why he even has to take such courses as College Literature.
In one essay, a clerk in a convenience store deals with poverty-stricken customers who come in to steal or ask for food. Another deals with the hazards of working as a telephone solicitor. Another piece talks about someone who records too many programs on his DVR, programs he never gets around to watching; I can’t help but notice that the writer is not addicted to reading books. A love of books, or indeed any mention of the written word, never comes up in these essays.
Some of my students come from poverty, and the last thing I want to do is remind them that they are poor. I’m pretty sure they already know. I take a different approach from somebody like Ira Shor, a rhetoric and composition big shot who teaches at the College of Staten Island in New York. Shor seems to feel it is his duty to bludgeon his students with fresh insights about their lack of advantage. He thinks a lot about class and its implications: his biography on the College of Staten Island Web site says that he was born in the Bronx, attended “weak public schools for New York City’s white working class,” and “grew up in a rent-controlled apartment among all-white families… .” At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, he offers seminars in “literacy and conquest” as well as “whiteness studies, domination and oppositional discourses … and the rhetorics of space, place, and resistance.”1
Shor writes about the importance of teaching about “evolving knowledges of social class”2 to his community college students. “Why is the theme of social class urgent for classroom study, particularly at two year colleges, but also more generally in higher education?” he asks rhetorically.
I do agree, speaking from a spot squarely in the recession, with his point that “the current economic and political climates threaten the fragile work-family-school nexus in which college students live … ,” but I’m just not sure why English classes are the place to enlighten the downtrodden. We are in a “new class war,” he says; community colleges are underfunded; education for the working class is suffering.
One damning piece of evidence he presents is that basic writing and first-year composition courses at the College of Staten Island are taught by the English department’s “new army of seventy-two adjuncts.” The gauntlet has been thrown; I take that as an insult, sir! “All in all, then, we teach about social class to empower students to know themselves in their times,” writes Shor, “to dream large and act wisely as alert citizens, to evolve into capable workers who build lives that nurture life, in a democratic society at peace with itself and the world.” Me, I think my role is to teach tense agreement and topic sentences, and to instill in my students a writer’s sensitivity to language, so that words like “rhetorics” and “knowledges” will start to sound funny to them.
The fact is that anyone in America can attend college if he or she so desires. That battle is won. The time has come to start worrying about paragraph unity and dangling modifiers.
13
An Introduction to the Research Paper
THE CULMINATION of my college writing class is the assignment of a research paper. Students are expected to assemble books, journal articles, and Web sites and, using the words of experts, studies, and statistics, assemble a coherent argument about something. The research paper illustrates the difficult time my students have with college. I spend no fewer than five out of fifteen classes teaching various aspects of the thing, and still, many of the students make a complete hash of it.
The English department teaches the research paper so that the students will be able to write papers for all their other classes. The idea is for students to take English 101 early in their academic careers so that we can give them the tools to do research in whatever their disciplines turn out to be. Both English departments I work for take this responsibility seriously, and feel that they are performing a service to the rest of the school. I have heard teachers in the other disciplines remark that the English department shouldn’t be so puffed up, as they are doing a really shitty job of it.
The research paper assignment is meant to teach the fundamental mechanics: how to find sources, paraphrase or quote them, and make a list of cited sources, all the while not plagiarizing. Students must develop a strong thesis for their papers, and not just write what is called a “passive report,” the sort of thing one knocks out in fifth grade on Thomas Edison.
I always do an introductory class on research. We all trudge down to the library and sit at the computer terminals. I ask my students about their computer skills, and some of the older ones say they have none, ’fessing up to being computer illiterate and saying, timorously, how hopeless they are at that sort of thing. It often turns out, though, that they have sent and received e-mail and Googled their neighbors, and it doesn’t take me long to demonstrate how to search for newspaper and journal articles on Lexis-Nexis, EbscoHost, and Academic Search Elite. For my younger students, computers are second nature, and I remember one young man, particularly on the ball, who held his index fingers together in the shape of a cross as though warding off a vampire when asking me what my take was on Wikipedia. Even my younger students, though, fall short of the sort of cybercompetence one associates with collegians. Many have spent lots of time goofing off in front of computer screens but have fallen short of developing any actual expertise.
I explain to the students that their job is to imagine they are hosting a party. They are to take my arm and introduce me as a stranger to scholars A, B, C, and D, who fall on one side of an issue, and scholars E and F, who stand firmly on the other.
“That’s some dull party,” snorted my Wikipedia fellow.
The first problem I encounter in teaching the research paper is explaining to my students, as they pull up peer-reviewed articles, just what these things are. They have no familiarity with academic journals. Now, neither did I when I first strolled into college, but I did see that there were whole bunkerlike depositories of the things in the library, and small armies of pale clerks darting about, assigned to the storage and retrieval of the bound volumes. Once I got into the swing of my major, I always had my nose in an old issue of Shakespeare Quarterly or the Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. The things had heft, and weight. You could hold them in your hand; you could imagine a postman popping them into a mailbox. Some of the older ones gave off a particular smell, a faint tang of dust and mildew and oil from a thousand fingertips. Certain of the hotter articles would on occasion be ripped out, and this sort of vandalism reinforced the worth and import of the writings.
My college had a whole floor devoted to periodicals. I loved it up there. I loved reading the old English journals; I loved distracting myself from work with the few consumer publications the library had, the shelves and shelves of bound Life and the New Yorker and Commonweal. But today, at least in the school libraries I frequent, all is virtual. Journal articles are nothing more than a particular arrangement of pixels, no different from a Facebook page. My students never see a whole issue of a journal. They see a smorgasbord of different articles, like unrelated songs on an iTunes playlist, served up by the search function of WilsonWeb or ProQuest or whatever database they are using.
With the advent of remote access from home computers, research has become a lot more private. Students don’t see their professors doing research anymore. I used to see my own professors spread out on tables in the library, jotting notes on index cards and looking thoroughly miserable. This helped me in my own work.
A few of the more seasoned nursing students have heard of the Journal of the American Medical Association. But they are in the minority. I still have to explain to the class not just about the use of scholarly journals but about where the things come from in the first place. I try to give them some idea of how the professoriate works. “All those books in the library—they’ve got to come from somewhere, r
ight?” I say, and the class smiles indulgently, as though I am a dotty old uncle making a joke they do not quite understand, for they have no truck at all with books or any sort of intellectual commerce. They don’t go anywhere where there are books, not even the college library. I once had a student who handed in a paper late, and this was his explanation: he got a late start because he couldn’t find the college library.
I try to devise good, paper-ready topics for the students to help them out, but it’s not easy. I wind up assigning things from history or sociology or current events because these are areas in which every student should be able to conduct discourse. Maybe the topics are a little spongy, but they have to be. What are we going to write, a paper on chemistry? Mathematics? Social or cultural anthropology? Too technical. English itself, meaning literary analysis, is far too technical for nonmajors to attempt. It wouldn’t be fair to many students to assign a paper about The Plague; however, I see nothing unreasonable in expecting any college student, after conducting the research, to be able to compare the Tehran and Yalta conferences, or analyze whether or not municipalities should fund sports stadiums, or figure out whether school vouchers would be a cheap alternative in the long run, or present evidence as to whether boxing should or should not be banned.