Class Action
By Mark Edmundson

Washington Post
Class Action

Sunday, June 1, 2003; Page BW12
CLUELESS IN ACADEME
By Gerald Graff
Yale Univ. 309 pp. $29.95

My favorite fish joke, which comes courtesy of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, goes like this: A hoary old fish, hooks and leaders trailing like battle ribbons from his jaw, approaches a collection of loitering youngsters taking their ease by a coral reef. "Hey," says the grandpa, "how's the water?" The young fish smile, bob and sway their fins deferentially. "Fine, fine, fine," they all say. When the relic has swum off and away, they turn to each other and, almost simultaneously, say, "What's that all about? What's water?"

One way to describe Gerald Graff's new book is to say that it's an attempt to explain to the denizens of academia something about the element in which they dwell. Like the poor fish in the joke, the residents of the academy, students and teachers alike, take their surroundings for granted. They don't really have very good answers to the question "What's water?" -- if they've ever thought to ask the question at all. They are, in Graff's phrase, "clueless in academe."

Why does academe seem so weird? Why, for instance, do the students, the new swimmers in its strange ocean, persist in seeing professors as so far out of touch with the common life of American culture? Graff's answers here aren't altogether new, but they're delivered with a singular verve. Professors tend to write abhorrently and often to be rather proud of it. They employ strings of portentous magic words -- called critical idioms -- when clearer terms would do just as well. They construct courses of study for students that seem to have no coherent organizing plan to them. As a result, the public at large has become highly mistrustful of professors -- and so students come to school with a bagful of unpleasant preconceptions about the women and men who will be their teachers.

What does Graff offer as an alternative? The major point that I take him to be making is actually implicit rather than explicit in his text. He appears to believe, oddly, given current academic preconceptions, that the place to begin thinking about academic life is the point where students and teacher come together. At the center of his polemic, in other words, is the simple perception that being a professor should not be primarily about scholarship or the quest for professorial distinction, though these things surely can matter. College teachers should not think of themselves first as Earth-shaking scholars but as people whose primary responsibility is to help young people unfold themselves in the best possible ways.

The idea that being a professor is about doing something for students, first and foremost, and perhaps too for others in the general public -- this idea, in the current climate, is rather revolutionary. As to precisely what professors at their best have to teach students, Graff has some very clear ideas. He is a public-minded writer and what he wants, centrally, is to contribute to creating good citizens.

A couple of things make one qualify as a good citizen from his perspective: the power to think critically, to be skeptical and to apply the rules of evidence; and the capacity to argue. For a democracy to succeed, its people must be able to weigh evidence, to form their opinions, to listen to others who disagree, and from time to time to be influenced by them. The ability to change the minds of others, and to have your mind changed in turn, judiciously, is at the core of Graff's vision of an educated person. This is an ideal that he not only endorses but also exemplifies.

All through the book, he brings forward the views of those who don't agree with him on one subject or another. He gives them a fair hearing; he gives his readers a chance to change their minds. Is the culture of argumentation that Graff endorses an aggressive, hyper-masculine culture? He thinks not, but the argument he offers against his own position is full enough and fair enough to allow readers to disagree with him. Out to create good citizens, Graff often shows himself a remarkably responsible citizen in his own right. He's very candid about the collaborative nature of some of the work he has done to get into a position to write this book. He credits not just big names in the professoriat but also assiduously cites lots of lesser-known teachers and scholars. There's an appealingly democratic quality to the entire endeavor. Graff is reopening the door on a major debate.

In the wake of theory, in the wake of feminism, post-colonial criticism and all the rest, what is a liberal arts education supposed to be about? How should teachers teach? What should students learn? Intelligently, humanely, Gerald Graff is bringing all of these questions back home to the classroom, which, at least for now, seems exactly where they belong. *

Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of "Teacher."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company