[Cross posted on the Academe Blog]
Best known as an essayist and short-story writer, and former editor of The American Scholar, Joseph Epstein retired in 2002 after 30 years in the English Department at Northwestern University. As an emeritus lecturer, however, he still receives university announcements, which recently led him to complain about a decline in teaching standards. Writing in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled; sorry), Epstein unhappily observed that Northwestern has bestowed seven teaching awards on faculty members who are celebrated as “welcoming” and “supportive,” and ready “to foster inclusive and anti-racist learning spaces.”
“Reading about these award-winning teachers,” Epstein complained, “makes one wonder if teaching has become the pedagogical equivalent of psychotherapy.” After all, one of the recipients explained her efforts to integrate “methodological rigor, impactful engagement, and human sensitivity” into her teaching. And a department chair described another recipient’s classroom as “a rare phenomenon: a safe and nurturing forum for learning and debate.”
Far from nurturing, according to Epstein, good teaching should make students “mildly ashamed of their ignorance and slightly fearful of exposing it.” He allows that “shame and fear (also of failure) may not be central to classroom learning, but are indubitably part of it.”
Epstein is almost exactly twelve years older than I am, but I began teaching at a younger age. Our formative years at the lectern therefore overlapped. Law schools, as everyone knows, have a venerable tradition of shaming and frightening students. It is an approach that I have never practiced, and I know of few if any colleagues who engage in it now. To the extent that the method ever had any merit (which I doubt), it completely lost its value once admissions were democratized and classrooms diversified. Instead, it became just one more way to silence students who did not fit the conventional mold.
It never occurred to me that English professors would use a similar technique. Law professors at least have the plausible (though mistaken) rationale that they are effectively preparing students to appear before imperious judges. Literature professors have no such excuse.
Epstein, however, invokes one of his own revered teachers, whom he remembers as an exemplary adherent of the “tough-guy tradition.” The University of Chicago professor in question was Norman Maclean, author of the novella A River Runs through It and coauthor (whether or not coincidentally) of the Manual of Instruction in Military Maps and Aerial Photographs. “When he asked you a question," said Epstein, "he made you feel as if you were being interviewed by the bad cop. (The good cop had ducked out for a smoke and wasn’t likely to return soon.)”
Recall that the bad cop is the one who threatens violence, and sometimes delivers it. The good cop is the one who is supposed to persuade you to begin talking. If the good cop is never coming back, the most natural response is to clam up (for all but the bold or foolish), which is unlikely to result in a very lively or enlightening classroom (for any but the bold or foolish). Perhaps today’s nurturing teachers represent an overdue renaissance of good cops.
Upon his retirement, Norman MacLean wrote a remembrance of one of his revered professors, upon whom he modeled his own teaching style. As related by Epstein, “On the first day of class this man assigned a 3,000-word paper due on the second day of class. ‘That’s just to show them grandma has teeth,’ he used to say.”
No typical college student could possibly write a respectable 3000 word paper between the first and second class meetings – most likely within a day or two, but perhaps a week for a seminar. Even a highly accomplished essayist, such as Epstein, would have a difficult time coming up with a decent paper under those circumstances. If the students learned anything from the 3000 word assignment, it would be some combination of padding, meandering, overbreadth, and repetitious appeasement. None of those attributes will be useful in either English or law (with the possible exception of appeasement).
Need it be said? I would far rather get 500 well-thought out words than ten pages of make-work, stress-induced verbosity. And if that requires encouraging the students to do their best, given sufficient time and instruction, rather than frightening them into compliance (note: it does), I can easily live with that.
Joe Epstein and I are both Evanstonians. We have never met, to my knowledge, but we have friends in common. Epstein has been described to me as “Just a Good Guy” (capitalization original), who enjoys juggling for children and regaling his friends with stories of his dissolute, card-playing youth. I have no trouble believing that, as I have enjoyed Epstein’s incisive essays and personable short stories about growing up in a Chicago neighborhood. He once wrote that his father used “Canadians” as a coded euphemism for Jews. As a half-Canadian Jew myself, I will always appreciate that.
It is unsurprising that the editors at the Wall Street Journal do not miss an opportunity to take a dig at today’s university professors, but one would hope Epstein’s educational paradigm might have evolved since his student days. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958; MacLean from Dartmouth in 1924; MacLean's unnamed mentor, who identified himself with the Grimm Brothers' grandmother-cum-wolf, may well have been in school before 1900. Everything else has changed mightily in even the past sixty years, let alone over more than a century. On most campuses, lupine teaching has gone the way of manual typewriters and rotary phones.
Yet, of his preferred instructional chops, Epstein says,
I never felt the need to assure students that in me they had a friend. I never worried about making them feel safe. I never thought to build up their self-esteem, which in any case cannot be conferred but must be earned. I’m not sure this would be acceptable today.
Just so.
Many years ago, far too long to remember the date, Mr. Epstein reported that he gave an address to the freshman class at, maybe Grinnell. Or maybe Kenyon or Dennison. Memory of the place fades. He mentioned how uneducated this neophytes were, indeed the were ignorant of two people mentioned in his talk, The Goncourt Brothers. I was appalled. Imagine how, sometime in the 1980s a class of first years at a fine liberal arts college should be unaware of these ever so important French literary giants. It is not clear to me whether Joe really believes half the stuff he says, or which half. Those of us who know Joe or many of us anyhow, have a tendency to like the person and dislike the ideas. Or to put it in pedagogical terms, make the student feel personally comfortable and intellectually challenged. Even if it means having to learn things about which they are unaware or find distasteful.