students and new ideas

In "Teachers as Students," Douglas Hesse argues that new students have trouble dealing with information that creates intellectual or moral dissonance. Rather than engage unfamiliar and potentially offensive writing, students usually dismiss the material as “stupid” or “poorly written.” This often has little or nothing to do with the actual quality of the work, but rather with the students’ lack of “prior knowledge” of the material presented. Hesse believes that in order for students to be able to enter into the academic "discourse community" to which they aspire, they must be able to process and respond intelligently to theories with which they might initially (or finally) disagree.

Hesse's article is fairly old (it was published in 1993), but his main point remains well accepted and is, indeed, commonsensical. College ought to be a place where students are asked to grapple with things unfamiliar or things that may contradict their assumptions. We are all aware of the human tendency to seek out and consume information that supports our own positions and to ignore or reject things that complicate or contradict them. College ought to help break that habit. But the issue is more complicated than simply that students reject ideas that are contrary from their own preconceived ones without engaging them.

As an example, Hesse quotes a Compostion teacher who laments that when she gave her students an article called "Gods, Goddesses, and Bibles," a "sophisticated argument explaining the transition from pre-Biblical matriarchal cultures to ones which promoted Paul's misogynistic epistles," the students rejected it as "blasphemous" without appearing to have read it. This example reminds me of an experience I had my first year as a university student. In my introduction to philosophy class, the professor discussed how to test a position or argument by reductio ad absurdum. He used the pro-life position as his example, saying, “If abortion is murder because it destroys a potential human life, then masturbation is murder because it kills sperm.” This professor probably thought of himself as challenging deeply rooted prejudices and forcing us to think critically. Indeed, he might have said that even if we remained pro-life after thinking critically about the subject, at least we had been forced to base our positions on more solid evidence than blind faith. What several of us in the class realized, however, was that this professor either didn’t understand the pro-life argument, or that he had deliberately misrepresented it in order to belittle those of us who were opposed to the legality of abortion. No thoughtful pro-lifer argues that abortion destroys a “potential human life.” [1]

The point of this story is that soon after they enter college, those students whose beliefs might be challenged by "Gods, Goddesses, and Bible" will probably begin to expect their professors to only give them one-sided information chosen specifically to rid students of their convictions and values. Whether or not those students are justified in their suspicions, the belief is often there and it certainly complicates Hesse’s argument. Getting students to think critically is certainly a worthwhile pursuit, but if students don’t trust their professors to be fair-minded, no amount of exhortation to critical thinking and engagement is going to have the desired effect.

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[1] In the case of the class which had to read “Gods, Godesses, and Bibles,” I would ask the teacher why, if she was prepared to offer students an article which questions the traditional reading of the Bible, was she not also prepared to offer them at least a summary explanation of counter-arguments put forth by Biblical scholars (I am too cynical to believe that she actually did). It is unlikely that any of her students were trained in textual criticism or Biblical scholarship, so she could reasonably expect one of two outcomes: either the students who were religious would reject the article as blasphemous, or they would accept it and reject their beliefs (or at least, reject traditional understandings of them). This is hardly conducive to “critical thinking.”

whose morality?

As an aspiring fiction writer, student of literature, and a teacher, I hear often enough that morality should have no part in what artists, students, and teachers do in their work. When they say "morality" in serious conversation, students and teachers alike deepen their voices into a mock-authoritative tone and use those ridiculous and reprehensible Quote Fingers lest someone take them to actually entertain the idea of universal moral principles. Critical articles and essays on literature examine their subjects from the standpoint of theory and if they treat of a work's morality at all, more often than not that morality is explained away as a quaint relic or an insidious attempt on the writer's part (either consciously or unconsciously) to control the distribution of power. One friend of mine summarized literary studies as finding out "who has power, who gets power, who loses power, and who surrenders power." Articles on writing pedagogy repudiate any notion of foundational truths lest they encroach on someone else's right to his or her beliefs.

But no one--not even those who say such things--believes a word of it.

Recently, some students and I read and discussed an article by Gerald Graff and Andrew Hoberek ("Hiding It From the Kids," College English, November 1999) in which the authors suggest that the only way literature programs can justify their existence to outsiders is theory (cultural, feminist, queer, postcolonial, etc.), since theory can use literary works to engage ongoing cultural discussions (such as those about race, gender, and sexuality). One of my fellow students forgot to read the article for class and so I explained briefly to her this central thesis. I also mentioned that I thought morality was a more important way of justifying literary studies, my fellow student looked surprised but interested.

"I know when I say 'morality' you think I mean, 'Men should wear pants and women should wear dresses,' right?" I said. My friend nodded.

I explained to her that for me, one of the most important functions of great literature (another word some people seem positively terrified to use without insulating it in Quote Fingers) is to give us a safe playing field in which to learn how to live. It is not so much that literature didactically shows us what to do and what not to do, but that it allows us a safe place in which to learn the physical and spiritual consequences of actions. Once I explained it that way, my friend warmed up to what I was saying.

"I would say that's something like . . . showing me how to exist and operate in the world," she said. "I'm not sure I would call it morality."

In other words, our understandings of what good literature can do for a thoughtful reader (show him how to live or how not to live) were roughly equivalent, mostly compatible, but we were using different words to express our ideas. I was happy to use "morality" to describe what I was talking about, but she preferred to avoid that loaded term.

But is the issue--the academic dread or loathing of that word "morality"--just about semantics? Is it really just a problem of terms? I think my fellow classmate would have said so had I articulated the question in that way, but I think it's more complicated than preferences about words.

Graff and Hoberek justify the existence of literature departments by pointing to the ability of literary theories to speak to the issues that concern society. So, for example, I can make Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew relevant to modern culture by interpreting it from the standpoint of feminist theory. I might use Petruccio's treatment of Kate and her eventual succumbing to his power over her to explain or elaborate on historical patriarchy, to discover something about male dominance over women. (That is not my reading of the play, of course, but I believe it could be the nutshell version of one feminist reading). The practical societal use of such a reading would be to inform the conversation over women's rights, marriage, and gender roles.

When I explain the use of my "feminist" reading of The Taming of the Shrew in this way, it sounds innocuous, safe from any didactic underpinnings of morality. But the underlying assumption of feminism is a moral imperative to respect the rights of all persons, regardless of gender. Indeed, to assert a "right" to anything is to say to everyone else, "You must not, should not, may not deny me this," which is the very language of morality.

I can imagine that a theorist who wanted to deny the moral dimension of feminist theory (or any other type of theory) saying that, "Yes, we use the language of 'should' and 'ought,' but what is really going on is that those whose autonomy and rights have been violated have stood and demanded equal treatment. It's not about what someone 'ought' or 'ought not' do. People are saying, 'I will no longer accept this treatment.' It's about the power to throw off oppression." But this is at best disingenuous. It denies the ubiquitous language of movements like the women's movement and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. If movements in which oppressed peoples rise against their oppressors are really about power, then we must dispense of all this talk about "rights." There is no such thing as a right if there is no "should" and "should not."

It seems to me that even those of us who are most eager to remove 'morality' from the vocabulary of literary studies realize that there is a moral dimension even to the theories which are so dear to them (even if they refuse to describe it as "morality"). The question is not, "Why are those in literary studies so afraid or intolerant of a morally-informed study of their subject?" The real question is, "Whose morality are we talking about?" Or to put an even finer point on it, "Who are we rejecting when we repudiate the word 'morality' from our vocabulary?"

At the end of the day, all of our talk about expelling didacticism and values from literary studies (and from society in general) is sheer hypocrisy. The real project of the theoretical model (either consciously or unconsciously) is the replacement of one morality with another. If nothing else changed than that academics admitted to each other and the world that this is what they have been doing, the academy would be far more respectable.