​Try to picture a conformist in action. We will call him William. 

William is a follower, someone who is forever riding on the bandwagon and never driving. William adheres to standards because, well, they are standards, and he adores traditions. William is ever conventional because the unconventional is to him uncomfortable and even at times offensive. William is neither adrift nor passive. Despite appearances, conformity is a proactive mode and can be hard work. A conformist, such as William, does not float with the tide. He swims with it because it is stupid to resist. William buys the trendiest sneakers because the are trendy. He has no pronounced tastes of his own but he is convinced they look great since everyone is wearing them.  William chuckles and scoffs at people who wear other shoes.

If William were an animal, he would be an impala, a ubiquitous southern African antelope that is easily identified with a large figure M on its rump. Safari guides may tell you that the M stands for McDonalds because, like the restaurant chain, the impala is a reliable source of nourishment and can be found on every corner. When you see an impala in the wild (and you will), it will either be in a herd or dead. The impala runs with the herd for protection and companionship and eats a consistent diet of plant parts. The individual impala takes no risks, and the herd certainly does not. The impala plays it safe, relying on numbers and speed to escape enemies. That does not mean the impala has no fun. Herds of impala may frolic together and play and even fight, but one herd member is always cautiously on the lookout for danger. The impala are so consistent that they drink water and even give birth at the time of day least likely to attract predators. With any threat, the impala herd will bolt in an instant and scatter with tremendous leaps to disappear into the brush. William is an impala. And, William eats at McDonalds too, not because he likes it better than other places, but because it’s familiar, easy, and where everyone else eats.

Now think of a contrarian. Let’s call her Trudy, keeping in mind that there are many fewer Trudys than Williams. 

If Trudy sees a crowd on the march, she heads the other way. Trudy swims against the tide, often making a big show as she flails about. In fact, she does not like popular beach vacations and prefers staying home to work in her garden, which is "at least doing something useful." She must labor at her contrarianism, which she takes very seriously and is hence not much fun to be around. She is not a misanthrope, but she just hates going along with the throng. Strict adherence to traditions are for losers and followers. Trudy rarely goes to see the fireworks on Independence Day and has not put up a Christmas tree in years. Everyone else does that, so why should she? Trudy checks out the latest trendy footwear. She may even find the look appealing, but everyone is wearing them. She chuckles and scoffs before buying something else. 

If Trudy were an animal, she would be the infamous honey badger. Aggressive and solitary, the honey badger is a sharp contrast to the passive and social impala. I do not mean to suggest that Trudy or other conformists are aggressive, only to point up the contradistinction. Honey badgers work hard for their differences. Their only fun seems to be in reeking mayhem as, for instance, when they attack barnyard fowl and kill more than what they need or when they take over the borrows of other animals despite being superb diggers themselves. In addition, unlike the impala, there are no honey badger packs. The individual honey badger can and will fight even much larger predators, including lions, and has the added defensive ability to disperse a noxious odor from a gland if in danger. The honey badger is a risk taker. As for food, the honey badger enjoys honey, to be sure, but eats just about anything: insects, rodents, lizards, fruit, roots, etc. In short, the honey badger is just the opposite of the impala, and that is the point of contrarianism: to be contrary, to do the opposite as a matter of course. Trudy's diet, by the way, is probably less varied than the honey badger's. For instance, she would not eat McDonalds, but make no mistake. She enjoys the Big Mac just fine, but she prefers driving a bit further to eat at Bojangles', which has shorter lines. Finally, notwithstanding assurances from the viral video that "the honey badger don't give a shit," Trudy certainly does give a shit, perhaps even more so than the William.

So, what is the difference between the conformist and the contrarian, the impala and the honey badger? The impala and the honey badger contend with exactly the same things in their environment but in near-diametrically opposed ways. The impala moves in herds, the honey badger largely alone. The impala plays it safe, the honey badger not so much. The impala flees from danger, and the honey badger charges. The impala eats a limited diet, and the honey badger eats everything. Their reactions are different, but their drivers are the same. Still, what drives William and Trudy? Both respond to what is trending and what is popular and make their decisions according to their disposition, one in favor of the trend and one opposed. They are entirely reactive if not reactionary, and at times equally knee-jerk. As a practical matter, the only difference between the choices of the conformist and the contrarian is the outcome, which are equally predictable.

Contrarians often present themselves to and are perceived by the world as independent thinkers or even iconoclasts, and I have tried to demonstrate that they are anything but. Independent thinkers may take in all the same information—for instance, what is trending, what is not—but they go beyond simply binaries and fold in, well, whatever they want. They may go with the trend. They may reject it. They may find another option. There is no good animal analog for the independent thinker because there is no single model for the independent thinker. They can range from the less-than rigorous outlier on one extreme to the rigorous critical thinker to the true maverick or iconoclast on the other extreme. They can be leaders, loners, or the loyal opposition. To whatever degree, the independent thinker is marked by a lack of easily predictive reactivity.

While I admit to a bias toward the independent thinker, in our society the conformist and the contrarian certainly have their roles and their utility along with the independent thinker. My point is to demonstrate how the contrarian and the independent thinker are just two sides of the same coin. All too often, contrarians are held up to the world as bold thinkers. We hear this claim when some ignorant people deny well-established science, such as with the science of climate change. There are a few scientists who renounce the human causes and the consequences of climate change. Their supporters will point out that famous scientists like Einstein also bucked the establishment, but the comparison is weak. Einstein was a maverick and iconoclast, not a contrarian. He did not look at the establishment and pick the opposite stance. He applied rigorous thinking and self-awareness to forge new paths in areas of science that were not as easily verifiable or readily observable (and, in fact, not nearly as universally accepted) as climate science. In short, he was not simply reactive but was thoughtful and thorough in his analysis and left open the prospect that he could be wrong. His method was even more important than his conclusions and contributed to the accuracy of those conclusions. His methodology indicates that he was neither a conformist nor a contrarian but was an independent thinker.

The contrarian, though, is not driven by careful thought or the objective search for truth. The contrarian and the conformist are simply reactors to the same stimuli, no matter how the contrarian presents him or herself to the world. If the impala/honey badger analogy is a stretch for you, think of sheep and wolves. We have all heard the story of the wolf that infiltrates the sheep herd disguised as a sheep. But, imagine the sheep is a conformist, and the wolf is a contrarian. The sheep and the wolf would then lead their lives much as conformists and contrarians, reacting to the same drivers, albeit in antithetical fashions. Is the wolf so different then? If not, we must conclude that a contrarian is nothing more than than a conformist in disguise. The conformist is, indeed, a sheep in wolf's clothing.

​"Decent" is a slippery word, which does not exactly qualify it for stand-out status within the English lexicon. On the one hand "decent" just means mediocre, acceptable. A grade of 'C' is decent. If someone says that their team has a decent chance of winning, save your money. It is not a full-throated endorsement of a sure bet. A decent song is one that I will not complain about but do not care if I ever hear again. A decent television show is one to watch if there is nothing else on. No one will be pleased to drive a long distance or pay a lot of money just for a decent meal. Decent is good enough and nothing more.

On the other hand, "decent" as a mark of character is high praise. Saying that someone is decent indicates that they have a goodness of spirit, honesty, and integrity. I may not agree with a given politician, but if I deem her a decent woman, I am suggesting that I respect her rectitude if not her opinions or convictions. Saying an actor is only a decent performer but is also a decent person is neither redundant nor contradictory. It offers faint praise for the actor's thespian prowess even as it commends the actor's personal righteousness.

So, in one sense, as a broad descriptor, "decent" means "good enough" while on the other, as an assessment of human behavior and motivation, it means "better than good." (I told you, slippery.) Obviously, achieving decency in the first sense is the definition of unremarkable. Achieving decency in the second is a mark of distinction, particularly in our current environment of rampant indecency.

This latter sort of decency of character can be exemplified by a particular episode that took place in an organization when the longtime CEO was in her last year before retirement. This CEO was a woman of deep conviction and honesty. In short, she was a decent woman. In her last year, the organization committed to a multiyear contract with a vendor that promised to help put the organization on a whole new economic footing while maintaining its focus on its mission. The CEO and her staff probed this offer in every way, including contacting the vendor's current clients, and, while they learned that the road might be rough, they were assured that any struggles would be well rewarded. 

Instead, the vendor was unwilling or unable to deliver on its promises. In addition, and more troubling, the vendor pressured the organization's staff to commit to directions that were perilous to the organization and to its ability to deliver on its mission. Upon learning of this looming crisis, the CEO first sought to reset the agreement with the vendor, but the vendor failed to meet the terms of the revised contract as well. She then negotiated to rescind the contract altogether after that first year, thus sparing the organization unnecessary struggles and sparing her successor as CEO the burden of an untenable contract.

Think of the wherewithal her action required. The CEO first had to accept and admit that the arrangement with the vendor, however well intentioned, was in error and that she herself had been mistaken. She further had to convince herself that despite strategizing and budgeting around the tantalizing promise of financial rewards for the organization, the promise was empty. Now the organization had to make up for a budget shortfall. Had the contract been successful, it would have sealed her legacy as a CEO, so breaking the contract must have required an extraordinary act of self-discipline. Indeed, she scuttled the deal as almost the final act of her longtime career in leadership. It was the right thing to do and could not have been easy to present to her board. The correct decision required a leader with a core of fundamental decency who was more interested in the ongoing mission of the organization than she was in securing a legacy or protecting herself.

In a counter example, a CEO at another organization discovered, upon taking office, that the organization was in dire financial straights. To his credit, he worked with his team to devise techniques to keep the organization afloat. He did not, though, devise a strategy for moving past its precarious state, and those emergency actions quickly hardened into norms. Over years, they became sacrosanct practices, "the way we do things," and any effort to undo or even question the efficacy of those norms was met with extreme hostility and even viciousness. Anyone who proposed or sought to modify the practices was suppressed or purged, no matter their intention or approach. The organization's mission was subordinate to the practices that had been established. This CEO did not have the wherewithal to unwind the web of emergency actions he had undertaken because he did not possess a decent character. His method was to bluster, distract, and bully to get things done the same old way even though he was accomplishing little—all symptoms of his rampant indecency. The overall quality of the organization itself, inevitably, diminished with no hope of improvement due to the CEO and his team's fecklessness and malevolence.

The CEO in the first example was inherently decent and possessed the integrity to make difficult decisions even when they might reflect badly on her. The CEO in the second example was truly indecent. While he rose admirably to face the crisis early in his tenure, that effort exhausted his stock of mettle. Hence, one organization could continue to be excellent and deliver on its mission while the other inexorably sunk below the mark of mediocrity and could not fulfill its primary objective. It was less than decent.

So, human decency engenders excellence, which should not be surprising. A wise man said that "excellence is the result of habitual integrity" (often attributed to Lennie Bennett). Since decency and integrity are merely separate words to represent a person's inner strength and potency of character, it is not surprising that both describe the ingredient necessary to foster excellence in all we do.

These two concepts, Cocktail Party Instruction and Coverage vs. Uncovering, are related and therefore can be treated together. Both, when abused, have to do with content-intensive (and teacher-focused) pedagogy that privileges the what over the why and even the how. Sometimes they can be associated with particular academic disciplines, but they also correlate with the use of standard textbooks and anthologies and the employment of multiple choice and short answer tests as a primary means of student assessment. Neither does much to encourage students to enter into a dialogue with academic material and practitioners, much less produce new knowledge, now or ever.

Cocktail Party Instruction has much to do with what used to be called “cultural fluency,” the idea that to be a properly educated citizen one must have exposure to and knowledge of key facts and artifacts. There is a close association between this form of instruction and the so-called literary canon, which has purported to identify particular literary texts that are most valued by our culture and hence indispensable. Literature survey courses are an vestige of this assumption. Elsewhere in the humanities, this type of instruction might result in history's courses built around dates, important figures, and momentous events (useually financial upheavals and wars). In the sciences it might appear as a slavish adherence to rote memorization and preordained application, such as in a laboratory where student “experiments” consist of little more than multiple reenactments with canned results.

Similarly, Coverage has to do with an associated body of knowledge within a discipline but more focused on movement through a specific discipline than with meeting cultural norms. Simply put, Coverage focuses on completing the textbook and/or the syllabus on schedule rather than adjusting the pace of delivery and even not addressing material in order to facilitate student learning. Uncovering goes further by emphasizing the development of student skills and habits that will teach students to learn rather than to absorb (and regurgitate) material. For example, Coverage may dictate that because ten Shakespeare sonnets appear on the syllabus (or in the anthology!) for this week, students must slog through all ten in class even if they comprehend little. Uncovering, on the other hand, would allow the instructor to concentrate on fewer poems than assigned so that students may better understand how to read Shakespeare’s sonnets. If the students are good with ten, that is fine too. The teacher can make that assessment on behalf of student learning. The first approach all but guarantees most students will not be able to read on their own. The second helps assure that they could read on their own and, ideally, they may even want to. So, yes, they may not read as much at first, but they will read better.

While both Cocktail Party Instruction and Coverage emphasize a both of knowledge that students must have, even without comprehension, it is remarkable what always gets left out. Namely, historically oppressed or ignored people, peoples, and ideas. For instance, women, minorities, foreign norms, nonmainstream religions, languages, and controversies of all sorts. These items are invariably omitted from or abridged in the official body of knowledge to the detriment of all.

What is more, the political argument aside, no body of knowledge can ever be complete or truly representative. Therefore, to pretend that there is some universally agreed upon and finite set of facts and concepts is dishonest and irresponsible. It resists learning and encourages and rewards cramming and forgetting. Any mature student knows intuitively that the more one learns the more one finds more to learn. Learning is a never-ending process. It does not stop at the end of a term or upon graduation, or at least it should not. No learner is ever “complete.” The best teachers see their duty as teaching students to uncover knowledge, to learn.

Here is a cocktail party alternative. From time to time, literary scholars will play a little game in which they admit to some great or famous or canonical piece of literature they have not read. How is it possible that such erudite individuals could have overlooked The Great Gatsby or The Iliad? Were they avoiding difficult works, or was there a flaw in their otherwise impeccable educations. Frankly, the answer is that no one can get around to reading everything. Not a big surprise, I am sure, but someone always gasps as though I have a character flaw whenever I cop to the fact that I have never read nor seen Macbeth. I have not avoided the play, but I just have not read it or had the opportunity to attend a performance (and, yes, I know a version is in movie theaters now). The fact remains, though, that I could read and enjoy and understand the play at any time because I developed that skill many years ago by reading Shakespeare (and viewing his plays) and reading other authors in a variety of literature classrooms and on my own. I can uncover Macbeth and a host of other literary works at will. Why would I deny my students the same pleasure just to meet an arbitrary standard? I would rather they not read Macbeth in my class so that they may learn to read Macbeth better in the future. That is the distinction I draw and the choice I make for their benefit.

Now, I have to go to the movie theater.

Of course, this principle applies to all forms of communication, verbal and nonverbal, and gets to the crux of the human dilemma—that we are an inherently social species who need to convey all sorts of messages to one another for all sorts of reasons and yet cannot clearly and directly communicate our thoughts. Even the simplest messages are misconstrued, and our plethora of languages and cultures compound the problem. I do not have to dwell on this obvious fact.

Nonetheless, it remains imperative that humans focus on producing clear communication, however futile the effort. Clarity is futile.

Still, when teaching college writers, I drive this point home, that clarity trumps everything. Inexperienced writers often slog through their prose, stymied by their own insecurities and the weight of a thousand rules—real and fabricated—imposed by well-meaning teachers for whom a rule well-followed is more important than a thought well-communicated.

At the risk of appearing to erect a straw man, I want to address any objections that the rules of grammar are meant to help clarify the expression of our thoughts. First, the rules of grammar are not “meant” to do anything. They are simply the codification of convention, which is why they change as the conventions change. They are not immutable laws of the universe or abstract truths or religious doctrine. Also, as I suggested, perfectly grammatical constructions can still interfere with clarity. Here are a couple of glaring examples:

Or,

Is that clear?

These sentences are the sort that teachers might label "awkward" out of sheer exasperation. (The second one, by the way, is from Bob Dylan's song “Tell Me, Momma,” and I acknowledge that he is cleverly playing in these convoluted lines.)

Here is one that attempts to follow a “rule” (do not end a clause in a preposition—a manufactured rule, by the way) but ultimately serves up a pile of corned beef hash with a side of rank pedantry:

Or how about this masterpiece of embedded confusion:

The woman is a dentist. The man is dating her. My brother also sees that man. Awkward!

These examples offer extremes that have obvious fixes, and one could mine the annals of literary theory for some truly bizarre constructions. More to my point, though, and beyond the scope of my examples, sometimes bending or even violating the rules of grammar is advantageous to clear communication.

The fact remains that all aspects of the writing process and all elements of the written piece must serve to maximize clarity, including grammar. The planning, organizational logic, diction, syntax, style, etc., when correct, improve the audience’s understanding. And one of the most import benefits of emphasizing clarity to novice writers is that it helps them focus on the audience, which is paramount.

Even in poetry and other forms of literary writing, although they can be intentionally obscure, the goal is to be understood. Of course, sometimes the point of a literary piece is to defy meaning so as to evoke the futility of human interactions and understanding. Even so, although vexingly counterintuitive, such literary intention still devotes itself to the mission of clarity with the (obscure) form enacting the theme of imperfect knowability.

In Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), the narrator, a wit of the then-modern mode, presents a detailed Christian allegory that offers little illumination. He interrupts this tale frequently with lengthy digressions on various ostensibly unrelated topics, the final one being the famous “A Digression Concerning Madness” in which he altogether throws off reason. Then blissfully bereft of logic, he is free to continue his allegorical tale howsoever he pleases without any need to make meaning.

His final paragraph is most telling and worth quoting in full:

He follows this paragraph with a curt “Finis.”

Two paragraphs before, he had executed one of my favorite Swiftian metaphors:

This metaphor brings us closest, perhaps, to the meaning of the Tale: that it is a work that inherently resists meaning.

So, here, we have a great work of literature that eschews clarity to complain about the perceived lack of clarity in fashionable writing and the general futility of trying to communicate with accuracy or clarity. The reader, perhaps convinced by its opacity that there is much profundity in the Tale, falls victim to the allure of the “wondrous dark.” Here obscurity serves clarity, and the reader stumbles.

As is frequent with art, exceptions are the rule, and yet clarity still trumps everything.

Terry Dewsnap was my advisor at Bard College in the mid-eighties. I was an English major and a first-generation student, a term I never heard until I was anointed into the higher ed communion myself years later. Terry seemed just right to me, just what I should expect of the professoriate according to popular depictions of college. He sat in an arm chair in a stuffy, book-lined office, puffing on a pipe. His tonsure reflected just enough lamplight through the tobacco plume to effect a hazy halo. He wore a tweed jacket, a tweed jacket!, with leather sleeve patches! and later grew a full beard! Amidst the lumber of stereotypes stacked high in my seventeen-year-old mind, he embodied the quintessential professor. Bookish, smart, vaguely avuncular but never too familiar. I feel comfortable calling him Terry now, and other students did then, but to me, throughout my Bard years, he was Professor Dewsnap.

He sometimes confused me with my freshman roommate, Geoff, and would imagine he had seen one of us when only the other was present. He even cuttingly accused Geoff of never showing up to one of his classes, one in which I was enrolled (and attending) and not Geoff. Geoff and I, for the record looked nothing alike. Geoff was dark haired and I was blond--a pine and an ash. We are as bald as cypresses now, though.

Terry’s file cabinet was a wondrous contrivance. When Terry needed to hand me a text to illustrate a point, he would pull open the top drawer, always the top, and a flourishing copse of paper would instantly sprout. He'd thumb through and somehow pull just the right one, which would invariably be dogeared and slightly stained with a brownish substance. I imagined that he must once have knocked an open coffee into the drawer and ruined every sheet. He neither explained nor apologized for the condition of his offerings, and I was, nonetheless, content to receive his wisdom, howsoever ragged and soiled.

I took his class on satire and a tutorial reading Ulysses. In the classroom, Terry was somewhat unconventional. His notion of what constituted satiric literature was wide ranging, an expansiveness that influenced the satire courses I would teach years later. Terry tended to stand, swaying like a sapling, for most of the class, and, always in his tweed with patches, steadily smoked his pipe. Unlike other pipe-puffing professors, Terry had to light his pipe, it seemed, with every inhalation. This inconvenience was offset by the fact that he could immediately stow his pipe in his jacket pocket, which visibly alarmed uninitiated students, who expected him to ignite like dry timber.

While he lectured, he stood with his back to the class. This way he could doodle continually on the board. I do not recall if he ever wrote words there, but he did draw wiggly lines and looping curves while he spoke. The students were baffled and annoyed. Once, out of curiosity, I carefully copied his squiggles and found that studying them helped me recall his lecture. Or so nostalgia would have it. For an assignment in that class, I attempted to write an ill-conceived satiric parody of an epic in wooden prose. It was long, and when I showed the first part to Terry, he assumed it was complete. I told him it was only part one, and he asked, with perfect artlessness, “are you really going to continue with this?” Chopped down to size, I wisely never did.

As an advisor, Terry was most insightful. When I expressed interest in a particular professor’s course, he grumbled, “Take this other course of his instead. He at least knows something about that topic.” When I came to him to sign up for a music listening class he sighed with evident disappointment. “So, you've decided to go down the Bard path,” a statement that in a stroke sundered me from my pretense. The fact was that I just wanted to experience more varieties of music and begin to understand them. I thought I was plowing through the woods, not sticking to a route. In many ways, though, he was right--not about my motives but about the Bard path.

Terry oversaw my Senior Project, of course. It was the apotheosis of callow satiric novel writing, of course. Again, he struggled through the thicket of my prose, which was blissfully free from the fetters of talent or purpose. He really tried, was valiant in his effort, to chop through the slovenly wilderness of my mindless musings. When it was done, I gave it a title, Joe Christ. Terry hated it. I know because he told me so. Not subtle enough--a stark oak in a conifer forest. He suggested that I find a quote to use as my title, which is a grand old tradition and was a great way for him to dodge culpability. I turned to my old friend, Jonathan Swift, and found a pithy phrase in one of my favorite passages from A Tale of a Tub: “so ill to order affairs.” I had my title.

(I just realized that, to this day, despite writing a novel with that title and a dissertation on Swift, I still don't know what that phrase means.)

In spring of 1986, with buds on the branches, my graduating class was to select our baccalaureate speaker. I probably didn't even know what a baccalaureate was, but I nonetheless was present for the deliberations. Someone, it might have been me, nominated Terrence Dewsnap. I do remember giving an impassioned speech on why he should be our nominee, which I would have transcribed at the time had I known I would be asked to write this testimonial nearly three decades later. Terry handily won the laurels.

The next day I had an appointment with Terry. I was there early for whatever reason and was waiting outside his office when he showed up. I greeted him with a heartfelt “congratulations,” and he responded with wooden politeness. Inside, as we settled into our familiar seats, he looked up at me suddenly and glared darkly, cleaving me with his eyes. He barked, “what are you up to? Is this some sort of joke you are playing on me?”

Since I had no idea what he was talking about, I replied, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” I was stumped.

He told me that two other seniors had said congratulations to him that day and he did not know why. He determined that we were conspiring in some sort of prank designed to fell him.

I was cudgeled. He was pissed in a way I had never seen him before, and I braced for the next blow. I explained the vote and the honor we had conferred upon him. As I talked, his face softened, and he settled back into his chair. I congratulated him again, and he thanked me again, this time with genuine warmth

When it was time for Terry to give his speech, the graduates’ excitement buzzed like a saw. Here was the quintessential professor about to expound publicly, in the chapel no less. We grew as quiet as logs. He started off with banalities but then started weaving a subtle narrative throughout his more conventional remembrances. It was tale of an event that took place our sophomore year, one in which he, Terrence Dewsnap, with one stroke, transformed the entire campus. It was the tale of a tree and an axe, or maybe a chainsaw. I don't remember. Axe is more evocative, so let's go with axe.

Oh, and a brownout.

I remember the evening well If not fondly. It was a Sunday, and I had an art history paper due the next day. I was typing it on my Brother electric typewriter when the power went out. Well, most of the power. Some lights stayed lit, but dimly, and there was not enough electricity to run a typewriter. The dorms broke into panic. It seemed nearly everyone had a paper due and nearly everyone had an electric typewriter. Even the Luddites with manual machines would find the light too faint to work. We were doomed.

Dr. Terrence Dewsnap, it seems, decided that very evening to remove a tree from his property in the woods. The nearby powerline never stood a chance.

The speech, by the way, was a triumph. It was droll, it was self-deprecating, it was satirical. It was very Bard. We loved it!

After commencement, I took my parents to meet Professor Dewsnap. For the first time I introduced him as Terry. He was awkwardly gracious, and they were overawed to meet the quintessential professor.

Posted Monday January 26, 2015 by AACU In liberal education nation

On the last day of AAC&U's Centennial Meeting, one of my colleagues on the ACAD board (American Conference of Academic Deans) told me that someone was joking about creating an AAC&U Bingo game. You know how these things work. Every time someone says a certain phrase printed on your bingo card, you mark the card until you get to yell "bingo!" Our students could (and certainly do) organize similar games around professors’ pet phrases, only theirs are more likely to involve tequila shots. The evening plenary version for AAC&U would involve, perhaps, sips of wine.

Imagine that every time a speaker said “transformative” or “learning outcomes” or “student-centered” or “global citizens,” the players in the room marked their cards and nipped their wine. If you get bingo, you win a bottle.

While the innovative (bingo!) AAC&U Bingo proposal was no doubt a harmless joke, its lightheartedness veils a cynical yet accurate observation. I will admit that few things could be as much fun or as engaging (bingo!) as a room full of tipsy academic leaders (bingo!), but what does it say about our beloved organization that its rhetoric is so predictable, so repetitive? Does it suggest just the opposite of what AAC&U preaches about good teaching practices (bingo!) and avoiding lecturing and rote memorization? Repetition saps words of their impact (bingo!), even their very meaning. They become cant phrases and jargon, and their deployment suggests a failure of creativity (bingo!) and imagination, or worse, a mindless insincerity.

But let's step back a bit for a fuller and more generous assessment (bingo!). Frankly, the only reason we can all play the game is because we are such dedicated attendees of AAC&U meetings. We are voracious consumers of AAC&U publications. We are indefatigable participants in AAC&U workshops. In short, the words and phrases we hear at AAC&U are familiar because they are woven into the principles (bingo!) that guide AAC&U and that guide many, even most of us, to be more reflexive (bingo!) and intentional (bingo!) educators. The very fact that you are reading this blog suggests that you are a devotee of AAC&U or are, at the least, profoundly AAC&U-curious.

And, therein lies the positive outcome (bingo!) of AAC&U Bingo. The phrases that form the basis of the game also form our common language, a language we hope to induce the academic and wider world to respect, a language we hope will inform the practice (bingo!) of liberal learning (bingo!) well into the future.

At the closing plenary, Brian Murphy of De Anza College (one of the four excellent speakers tapped to fill in for the ailing Freeman Hrabowski) stated that the goal of his ad hoc panel was to have the very large audience leave the packed room and return to our campuses to convey and commend AAC&U’s agenda to our colleagues. While he earned a chuckle for his humorous delivery of the line, he was quite sincere. Many of us, maybe most, could easily fill our AAC&U Bingo cards again and again, and that is a good thing—maybe even a wonderful thing.

We know the principles (bingo!) and agenda of AAC&U, and we have pretty good ideas for implementing (bingo!) them. That is our imperative: to move words into action. Bingo!

Posted Wednesday January 22, 2015 by AACU In liberal education nation



The opening sessions of the AAC&U Centennial Symposium ranged across topics, but one theme that emerged Wednesday morning had to do with the impact and importance of mentoring to student learning. One of the most cogent comments was in the form of an audience question. During the second session, someone (and I apologize that I did not catch his name or his institution), pushing against some panel commentaries about making students career ready, asked whether higher education should be about subversion rather than about training students to conform to corporate structures. In a later session, Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan, had some choice comments in a similar vein. (To read some of those, check the #aacu15 hashtag on Twitter, where his remarks were liberally documented.)

One of the panelists in the second session, Mark Lindsay, suggested that the choice the questioner framed was not so mutually exclusive, that the well-educated employee would be the one who could push against the general “flow” when it is headed in the wrong direction.

All this discussion got me thinking about my own experience with mentoring. Let me start with a confession. Jim Citrin, on the first panel, made the point that mentoring relationships are “a two-way street.” He spoke of how students need to seek and cultivate mentoring relationships.

So, my confession? I am a lousy mentee. I have never successfully cultivated a long-term, meaningful, positive relationship with a mentor at any point in my life or career. Perhaps because of this personal shortcoming, I am probably a mediocre mentor--although I have prolifically mentored students and colleagues, I am not sure how valuable many of those efforts have been. One big exception, though, is a student I started mentoring nearly five years ago. At Stevenson University, my institution, both the student population and the full-time faculty are about one-third first generation. In light of this, we started a program tin which faculty who were themselves first-generation college students mentor first-generation freshmen whom we identified as “underprepared” and “at risk” of attrition.

The student assigned to me (I will call him “Steve”) was and is hungry to learn and grow. The fact that I have been mentoring him for five years while he earns his four-year degree may suggest failure, but time-to-completion is a poor measure of impact and value. Or so I tell myself. He started as a biology major with an eye toward medical school, but he is (another confession) the one and only student I have ever advised to become a business administration major--a subject for which he has a real passion and interest.

At first, Steve talked incessantly about how he would be a huge success on Wall Street. He used to joke about naming me to his first board of directors. I am not one to discourage a young man’s ambitions, but Steve’s required some careful, uh, subversion. Despite my alarm, I needed to guide him gently toward a more critical view of the “flow.” Sometimes, such as when I gave him a book on financial scammers who ended up in the slammer, I was not so subtle. I am happy and proud to report that now, in his last semester, he no longer talks about earning an MBA in order to facilitate his ruthless takeover of Wall Street. Instead--and I must add, with no prompting from me--he plans to pursue a degree in school counseling so that he can guide high school students in a way that he feels was lacking in his own experience. He wants to “give back” to a system that did not give much to him at all. That’s called altruism.

In other words, over five years, he and I collaborated on the subversion of his dreams in order to redirect his career trajectory. Who knows where he will find himself in the future? Careers are rarely, likely never, straight lines. What I do know is that, whatever he does, Steve will stand against and even try to redirect the “flow” when he perceives it moving the wrong way. Steve is becoming one of those well-rounded and responsible citizens we tout as the ideal outcome of liberal learning.

So I share the implied concern of the questioner from the audience. The goal of liberal learning needs to involve a healthy dose of subversion rather than conformity. But I also agree with Mark Lindsay that we can, through education, help graduates become successful in their careers while nurturing in them the wherewithal to stand agains the misdirected “flow.” Critical thinking, ethical reasoning, etc., constitute the stuff of liberal learning and are at the core of purposeful citizenship. Yes, my relationship with Steve involves more intensity than anyone can broadly apply, and Steve is an extraordinary young man by several measures. But his development is a good example of what we heard Wednesday morning: the importance of intentional mentoring in preparing students to be thoughtful and successful citizens.

Now, as everyone has been pondering, how do we scale that up?

One of the challenges of being me is my propensity to express complex interrelations as reductive binaries and catchy coinages. Over time, I have compiled a list of some my oh-so clever observations regarding higher education. In total, these comprise a pretty good summary of my views of and attitudes toward various aspects of higher ed--all of them highly subject to debate. This piece is a first in a series of blog posts in which I discuss these terms and conceptions.

Academic eschatology refers to the category of books and articles (academic and otherwise) marking the alleged "end times" of higher education and its institutions in their current configuration. Some works of academic eschatology (AE) welcome these radical shifts, but most view the future with wariness and even trepidation. In addition,some AE authors are reform minded--hoping to convert challenge into opportunity--while others offer mostly doom and gloom.

Such warnings about the systemic weakness of the American academy and its consequences have long been with us (The Education of Henry Adams, The Higher Learning in America, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Higher Education, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, The Closing of the American Mind, etc.), but the present-day hyper-proliferation of these publications and its sometimes hysterical response seems historically remarkable and more than suggests their popularity among their typical intended audience: academicians. Therefore, one cannot but conclude, that academics are peculiarly keen to read about threats to academia, perhaps out of fear or morbidity or, more positively, a desire to mitigate or adapt to the threat.

Which leaves an interesting question... Is the rise of AE the result of or a separate development from the prevalence of "end of times" narratives in the period after 9/11, through the Great Recession, and to the present day? Certainly, a correlation exists between these two trends, but is there causation? What could be the relationship between pronouncements on "the end of the world as we know it" (TEOTWAWKI) and "the end of academia as we know it (TEOAAWKI)?

I do not feel the need nor am I particularly qualified to rehearse the titles of end-times narratives in popular media--books, television programs, movies, blogs, and the like--but here is a small and rather arbitrary sample of some better or maybe just better known AE books from the last decade or so. The titles speak for themselves.

Clueless in Academe

Our Underachieving Colleges

Higher Education?

Academically Adrift

"Disrupting Class"

We're Losing Our Minds

College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be

The latest and potentially the current hottest? Aspiring Adults Adrift is a follow up to Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josip Roska. In both studies, our indefatigable social scientists seek to answer the obvious but rarely articulated question, "just what value does a college add." Sadly, the answer appears to be "not much"--and Aspiring Adults Adrift makes the case that even in early adulthood there is little evidence young people have gained much from attending college. And yes, there are those who take issue with Arum and Roska's methodology, particularly their reliance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment as a measure of student progress in the first book or their general disregard of the effect of the Great Recession in the second, but no one can ignore for long the data trend they document. Broadly, college does little to prepare students for the adult world of work they will enter (or, in too many cases, pine to enter) upon graduation.

While the fascination with end times is certainly pronounced in the zeitgeist, the view that higher ed is in serious trouble or is due for transformational disruption is a pervasive--and perhaps persuasive--sub-theme. This sub-theme resounds both inside and outside the academy and has become a favorite and gleeful refrain among a certain flavor of politician and journalist, resulting in wide diffusion. Academicians ignore such criticism at great risk. moreover, hostile politicians, cynical journalists, and rabid opportunists threatening from the outside offers enough peril and demands steady vigilance and frequent rebuttal, but any internal weakness is the responsibility of higher ed professionals. As with global climate change, many may deny the cogent concerns and the mounting evidence, but denial solves no problems. Nor does overreaction. We academics excel at deliberation, and now seems--with this topic--the optimal time to exploit that talent.