Homunculus Academicus
The best teachers I had during my 20 years of formal education were not Ph.D.s. In high school there was Ronald Forsythe, my English teacher, who had been a professional baseball player. In college there was Elliott Coleman, who was a theologian before founding the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and Evangelos Afendras, who taught linguistics at Hopkins while he was still a grad student (and is still very much alive and kicking). Whatever it was I liked about them, it had nothing to do with their publications. So there goes the most important criterion for success in the publish-or-perish world of academia.
What was it, then, that I liked about the few teachers that I did actually like? Let me put it this way: A good teacher is like a good gardener. He loves his plants and gives them what they need to grow, and then gets the fuck out of the way.
Elliott Coleman's poetry seminar was like this. It was the best "class" I ever had. It was a graduate seminar but he let me take it as a freshman. What a beautiful place that was! It was not just a garden but what the Germans call a Wildgarten, which does not translate too well into English as "wildlife" or "natural" garden although I found a Wikipedia article that includes this photo:
A Wildgarten is "an environment created by a gardener that...will allow natural systems to interact and establish an equilibrium, ultimately minimizing the need for gardener maintenance and intervention." That's what Coleman's seminar was like. We crowded into his office in the basement of Gilman Hall ("The best thing about this place is the dust," Coleman said) and took turns reading our work aloud. Comments were welcome but not necessary. What Coleman had to say mostly had already been said, in the form of little pluses and minuses on the papers he returned to us. His "teaching" was minimalistic, like the man himself, with his white hair and black suits and the Mondrian prints on his office wall. There was no "subject matter." Or we were the subject matter. How exciting it was to be in that place once a week, where anything could grow, and there were no weeds.
When there was a subject matter, whether it was James Joyce's Ulysses (Forsythe) or Roman Jakobson's distinctive features (Afendras), what mattered most to me was the teacher's own enthusiasm for it. How else can it be transferred to students? I actually lost my enthusiasm for literature in college, the more I was exposed to literary criticism, and I lost my enthusiasm for linguistics in grad school, the more I was exposed to the various schools of linguistic theory. Why was this? The sense of discovery was gone. Everything became a chore. A drudge. When you have read through enough crap that other drudges have written about a subject and are ready to add your own to the pile, you are ready for your Ph.D.
Germany and a number of other non-English-speaking countries go even further. They require yet another degree, beyond the doctorate, in Germany called the Habilitation, to qualify for a professorship. It irked me to learn of this when I came here because I did not like the idea of becoming a grad student again. If I had it to do over again, though, I would. I was not unhappy being a "mere" language teacher, but I did not realize how much the intradepartmental class warfare would get to me. The class structure in German universities is quite rigid, with professors (all tenured) at the top, a middle class (Mittelbau) including grad students and language teachers (Lektoren), and a third class comprised mostly of secretaries.
As a professor I could have avoided a lot of conflict and probably accomplished more. As a mere Lektor I had no clout, and any attempt to rise above my station was soundly repulsed. After I won my suit for a permanent contract I was assigned to teach two classes of technical English at the engineering school. This was obviously intended as punishment, since the engineering school was located at a different campus and the students had a much lower level of English than the teacher trainees in the English department. I may have surprised my enemies, though, by rather enjoying the challenge. I wrote a couple of articles about it.
Most of the problems were quite petty, but as I got older and the profs got younger, they irritated me more. The profs liked to use our first names, for example, also in front of the students, while they expected to be addressed as “Professor” this or that, or at least "Herr" or "Frau" so and so. This bothered me from the beginning and I made a point of addressing them by their first names if they used mine, which did not contribute to my popularity.
I was not allowed to teach "content" courses, not even within my field of linguistics, but fortunately I could do pretty much whatever I liked in my language classes. I was supposed to be responsible for evaluating the language component of oral exams, and this sometimes led to conflict. Once when I mentioned a student’s mispronunciation of the word caste, one of the young profs corrected me energetically, in front of the examinee. “No,” he said, “‘caste’ is also correct,” pronouncing it to rhyme with paste. He insisted that he had heard it pronounced this way, and he had spent a full year (or was it two?) in the States. Later he stormed into my office with his finger on the entry in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary showing the pronunciation as /kast/.
"See!" he announced triumphantly, "it's ‘caste’!" again rhyming it with paste.
When I pointed to the pronunciation key at the bottom of the page explaining Webster's unorthodox (non-IPA) transcription system, he left in a huff, muttering again about "two pronunciations," having now understood Webster's /kast/ to represent the British pronunciation, which of course it did not. (Webster transcribes the British pronunciation as /käst/; the IPA version of the British pronunciation is /kɑːst/.)
At one point I proposed integrating language courses (Sprachpraxis) with "content" courses, on the model of what I had read was being done at my alma mater, Cornell (The John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines). I corresponded with the professor at Cornell responsible for the program, and he liked my idea of using the same principles with English as a foreign language. He invited me to attend a symposium on the subject at Cornell. The head of my department at the time (it rotated among the profs every two years) seemed enthusiastic too, at first, and he asked me to write up a proposal to fund the project.
I heard no more about it until some months later, when I learned from my contact at Cornell that my "colleague," the department head, without saying anything about it to me, had decided to attend the symposium himself and had indeed shown up at Cornell, but did not participate in any of the seminars or even speak to anyone about our (my) proposal. This was more than a little embarrassing for me, and nothing came of the project.
Another idea I had was to use the internet (Skype) to incorporate one-to-one exchanges with students in the US and Britain into the curriculum. This was long before corona, but the technology had long been available. I also proposed integrating standardized tests like TOEFL and the Cambridge Proficiency exam in the curriculum, which would have added an internationally recognized cachet to our language degrees.
None of my ideas got anywhere at all, which no doubt would have been different if I had been a professor. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. Unfortunately I didn't see the truth in this until it was too late, and eventually I just learned to keep my head down.
Maybe I wasn't cut out for academia. Maybe I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas, like Prufrock. I got my Ph.D. from Cornell without any problems, but one prof told me that I was "the most stubborn student" he had ever had. Another one rebuked me for asking too many questions in class. "It's supposed to be a lecture," she hissed. The man who became my thesis chairman accused me of "injecting an emotional tone into the discussion" in a sociolinguistics class. I have no idea what I said, so it couldn't have been all that emotional, though I guess it was for him. Later he stabbed me in the back by writing a letter of "recommendation" that I found out, accidentally, was anything but.
These letters were confidential in those days, but after graduation and months of unsuccessful job applications, I called the placement bureau at Cornell to make sure all my "recommendations" were being sent out promptly. Yes, the clerk told me, but he also -- very kindly, since he was not supposed to do so -- informed me that there was one letter in my dossier that was so bad that nobody who read it would offer me a job. It was from my thesis chairman. I wrote to him to ask why, if he thought so little of me, he had accepted my dissertation and passed me on the orals. He did not reply but must have felt some remorse because he rewrote the letter and sent me a copy. The new version was not the highest praise, but much better than the first.
Alright, already. I confess. I am "emotional." At least, no one has yet called me "unemotional." Seems to me that would be worse, but not so in the halls of academe.
I heard again about my "emotionality" many years later from the same "colleague" who, as department head, had stolen and then buried my proposal for "language" and "content" courses. He also refused to fix my office computer for six months, and maybe he didn't like it when I complained. In any case, one afternoon I found myself in an empty hallway with him -- and no witnesses. He told me that he was collecting a "dossier" of student complaints accusing me of "emotional outbursts" in class.
This was an empty threat because, first, the only "dossier" allowed to be kept on university employees was the personnel file, which was accessible to the employee, and when I checked, there was no such complaint -- in fact, no complaints at all. Secondly, I knew what incident he had been referring to -- and it was only one.
That happened on Monday, Dec. 11, 2000, two days after the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount that would have made Al Gore president instead of George Bush. I had written an article the day before titled “The Assassination of President Gore” which was published in an internet journal and later became the postscript to my book Looking for the Enemy. On Monday I proposed that subject (not my article) for discussion in one of my classes.
Usually the students were happy to discuss anything I proposed, but as luck would have it, in that particular class there was an older woman who had been a high school English teacher herself and was just auditing my class, and she objected, insisting that we talk about her experience as an au pair in the US. It was a large class (about 30) and it was not the first time she had tried to hog the conversation. I usually dealt with her by letting her talk until she ran out of gas or another student finally decided to speak up, but my patience was a little thin that day. I may even have had an emotion. (Sneaky little things!) In any case, I committed the unpardonable sin of interrupting her. This enraged her so much that she flounced out of the classroom and went directly to the university women's affairs officer. I was ordered to report to the department chairman’s office at 8 am sharp the next morning.
I knew the cards were stacked against me, so I didn't even try to defend myself. I apologized. I had no defense, since she could claim that it was not the fact that I had interrupted her but the way I had interrupted her. How could I argue against that? Try to find another student who would be willing to testify that I had been polite enough and was thus not guilty as charged? That would have dragged it out and blown it up even more out of proportion. The department head, who one might think would at least try to cut me some slack, smirked through every minute of it, adding his two cents at the end: "And don't let it happen again!" Would that Justice Scalia had received even that much of a reprimand.
The crudest incident I experienced in "academia" occurred in 1973, when I had my first job as an assistant professor of Spanish at a college in Louisiana. I probably got off on the wrong foot at a talk by George McGovern just before classes started. McGovern had lost the election, of course, so I don't know why he was on the lecture circuit, but there he was, the only presidential candidate I had ever voted for. Nor do I remember what he talked about, but I asked a question afterwards that may not have sat well with the rest of the audience. It was something about whether the Democrats would now drift more towards the likes of George Wallace. It was probably clear from the way I worded the question that I was not a George Wallace fan.
This may or may not have influenced the person, a student no doubt, who broke into my office a few weeks later, strewed toilet paper over my desk, and peed on it. The toilet paper was a thoughtful touch because urine alone would have been harder to clean. It could have been much worse.
I had a suspect in mind, a student in one of my classes I will call Sonny Boy because he was the son of a professor in another department. Shortly before the office break-in, Sonny Boy had burst into my office, thrown his books onto my desk, and shouted in a raging drawl, “If you ever do that again you and me are going to have it out!”
I said nothing because he seemed on the verge of mayhem. When I thought about it later, I realized that he had a point. I had asked him to move his seat during a test because two other students, one on each side of him, were obviously copying from his paper. Those two students, Sonny Boy told me with great vehemence, were Vietnam veterans! He was terrified that they would beat him up if I moved his seat again, so the logical response, in his mind, would then be to beat me up in return. Why they would beat him up in the first place was not clear. In any case I had not handled the situation well. I could have just let it go and found a more subtle way of changing the seating arrangements.
This is not what the dean I talked to about it advised. He said if it had been his student he would have "beaten the crap" out of him. This seemed unwise, not only because Sonny Boy was a strapping youth fully able to defend his crap. I was clearly missing some Louisiana logic here -- though in defense of Louisiana, I had received similar advice in Maryland.
When I was teaching junior high school French in Baltimore I was advised by the vice principal (vice principals are usually in charge of such things) to impress recalcitrant students by ripping a thick telephone book in half in front of them. This would demonstrate my superior strength and cow them into submission. I think there was a trick to this but I don't remember what it was.
That said, I do not deny the power of physical violence, or the threat of same, to influence the young. (Or the old.) I think of Mr. Moreno, my eighth-grade homeroom teacher at Isaac E. Young Junior High in New Rochelle, New York. Mr. Moreno was an ex-boxer with a fist the size of a basketball. More importantly, he was cool. Once when we were supposed to be quietly doing homework one of the "tough guys" decided to put on a show. He strutted flamboyantly over to the pencil sharpener and proceeded to sharpen a large number of pencils, or a smaller number of pencils a large number of times. We were all on tenterhooks, awaiting Mr. Moreno's reaction. Mr. Moreno waited patiently until the show was over, and then said with consummate aplomb, "I've always said that the sign of a good student is a well-sharpened pencil." The class erupted in joyful laughter, led by the showboater himself. I only had him for homeroom, but I'm sure Mr. Moreno was a good teacher, too.
In sum, if you like your teacher, almost anything will do; if you don't, almost nothing will. Same goes for the teacher. Otherwise you're stuck with the hammer and nail approach, which never worked for me, either as a nail or a hammer.