Emory is a highly selective university that enrolls students with excellent grades and high SAT scores.
. . . the ignorance, laziness, sense of entitlement and lack of basic rhetorical skills are stunning. One student thinks that "books" and "novels" are the same. Another identifies the Granite State as "New Hamster." Few are familiar with the rules of language, many spell poorly and all are confused by tenses and apostrophes and complain bitterly when Prof. Allitt marks them down for grammatical errors.
Don't Know Much About Much
If you think college professors are bad, take a look at the students.
BY Philip Terzian - WSJ.com
Thursday, August 26, 2004 12:01 a.m.
An Englishman who teaches American history at Emory, Patrick Allitt has written a charming, and compelling, account of one course in one semester, to record (as he told his editor) "what actually happens in class."
Having said "charming," I must declare my bias. I graduated from college more than 30 years ago, and while I generally savored my undergraduate career, I can still recall the pleasure of walking out of what I knew to be my last student examination (in French, as it happens). While I have nothing but reverence for the life of the mind, I would just as soon stay out of classrooms and, as a journalist, have deliberately ignored the wars of education. Yet returning to the lecture hall, guided by Prof. Allitt, was not nearly as uncomfortable as I might have expected.
First, the good news. We all know the modern American campus, or think we do: concentration camps of the mind where students are tortured by baby-boom professors whose speech codes, leftist politics and unseemly obsession with race, sex and gender have distorted the ideal of higher education. Whether or not this is true of Emory--it is, after all, home to the Carter Center--it is not the case in Prof. Allitt's classroom.
Despite his best efforts, Prof. Allitt's political biases are often evident; but he is aware that such things as bias exist, strives to be fair and refrains from judging the past by present standards. As an Englishman, he furnishes novel perspectives (George Washington as traitor to Britain). Indeed, his judgments are sometimes startling: He seems, for example, to regard the tendentious Hollywood vision of the Scopes trial, "Inherit the Wind," as a dramatized version of truth.
Yet critics of higher education, particularly conservative critics, have little reason to complain about Prof. Allitt. As a scholar, he is scrupulous, pleasantly eclectic and wears his erudition easily. As a teacher, he adheres to traditional standards of regular attendance, correct deportment, classroom courtesy and hierarchy. (The title of the book--"I'm the Teacher, You're the Student"--is not ironic.) He expects his students to read widely, write carefully, memorize dates and answer random questions in class. He appears to be a popular and successful teacher, but not because he is easy or indulgent.
The bad news is not Prof. Allitt, or his course on post-Reconstruction America, but his students. As with any selection of human beings, they vary in temperament and character, and some appear to be exceedingly admirable people. Many, however, come across as parodies of the cheerfully uninformed American undergraduate. Since this is Emory, there are no re-enactments of "The Blackboard Jungle," and most in the class strive for an A, in their fashion. But the ignorance, laziness, sense of entitlement and lack of basic rhetorical skills are stunning. One student thinks that "books" and "novels" are the same. Another identifies the Granite State as "New Hamster." Few are familiar with the rules of language, many spell poorly and all are confused by tenses and apostrophes and complain bitterly when Prof. Allitt marks them down for grammatical errors.
Prof. Allitt recognizes, as the reader must, that most students are not especially keen on history, and his survey course is required for graduation. He does all that a gifted instructor can do to make the material palatable and generate interest. But the obstacles are formidable, and the long-term benefits--to teacher and student alike--are open to debate.
This is not to look backward to some golden age of education. People who went to college in, say, the 1930s or '40s can be remarkably obtuse and, as any newspaper editor knows, may be just as awkward at expressing themselves as Prof. Allitt's charges. All the same, Emory is an elite, highly selective institution, and its students must be reckoned among the finest in the country.
What's the matter? The problem, as Prof. Allitt sees it, is that the skills required to ace the SAT and post a high grade-point average are not the best preparation for a rigorous liberal-arts curriculum. Our secondary schools, public and private, have not only substituted Maya Angelou for Robert Browning but guided their charges in perfecting the art of passing multiple-choice exams, not drafting essays. No wonder they cannot write, or organize their thoughts, or marshal an argument, or identify the decade in which the Civil War took place. No wonder they confuse Theodore Roosevelt with his cousin Franklin D.
Like any good teacher, Prof. Allitt has something of a missionary's impulse and thinks he is broadening minds. I hope he is right. I came away from "I'm the Teacher, You're the Student" with a lingering sense of absurdity about college. For the career-minded, or for young scholars who know exactly where they're going, the training that a school like Emory provides is probably worth the cost. But what is the point of requiring future poets to master calculus or dragging engineers to Restoration comedies? To sharpen the intellect or stimulate the appetite? Maybe. But I am tempted to guess that, on the whole, it's in one ear and out the other.
By contrast, while Prof. Allitt is exhorting his Emory students, he moonlights at a history lecture series for retirees in a wealthy Atlanta community. Decades from the classroom, they pant for knowledge, ask eager questions, argue passionately among themselves--and beg their teacher to come back soon. Perhaps, to paraphrase Shaw, undergraduate education is wasted on the young.
Mr. Terzian is the Washington columnist for the Providence Journal.
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