A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
C O N T I N U E D
Dear Camille:
When are you going to write Camille Paglia's Guide to Colleges? I am sorely
in need of it. I am in the midst of the incredibly unpleasant job of finding
a college for my son. Despite my entreaties to "Join the Navy! Get a job!
Bum around Europe!" my little darling insists that he wants to matriculate
with his classmates. Sad to say, political conservatives seem to now be the
only ones with a commitment to good education: freedom of speech, freedom of
thought, a traditional liberal arts education with a rigorous curriculum that
stresses reading of great books and learning across a broad spectrum of
subject matter.
One of the only decent guidebooks available is one published
by the National Review; the authors define what should constitute a liberal
education and discuss 50 or so colleges that fill the bill to a large
extent. Their choices are not politically dogmatic (although, as one might
expect of a Buckley publication, there are quite a few Catholic colleges
listed); I was happy to see my own alma mater, Columbia, extolled for its
freshman seminars. There are also plenty of little-known schools, most of
them in the Midwest and South; they share your scorn for the well-known
Eastern colleges, which they describe in a hilarious final chapter called
"the Gulag."
One other helpful book is titled "Colleges that Change Lives."
The focus of this author is not so much on curriculum as on the feel of a
college and how well the college stresses the importance of teaching and
forges bonds to make a learning community of the faculty and students.
Again, precious few Eastern colleges, and none of the famous ones, make the
cut; mostly Midwest and Southern, with some Western. One of the interesting
things that this author did was to spend time on each campus talking to the
faculty and students, and he quotes many faculty who have fled from the
Eastern universities in order to find a place where they can really teach.
So do you have any suggestions about where my son should go? Please help!
A desperate mom
Dear Desperate:
Unfortunately, things change so fast from year to year on college campuses
that one would need a permanent field staff of 500 to collect and analyze
information. None of the available college guides are as reliable as they
look, since an entire book would need to be written about each individual
department, which usually has its own internal conflicts and must be
evaluated in terms of larger national trends.
You're quite right that it's still mostly conservatives who proclaim the need
for a curriculum based on learning and great books. Many liberal academics
secretly agree but are too cowardly to speak out on this vital issue: Dante
would classify the latter among the vapid "neutrals" who went with the wind
and never took a stand against the evils of their time.
The annual collegiate rankings by national magazines are hilariously
bad -- "prestige" meters constructed by self-interested, back-scratching
on-campus parties who are about as trustworthy as Hollywood PR agents. In
point of fact, parents who are forking out $30,000 a year for tuition are
paying not for education but for campus lifestyle perks and social
connections for their children. The latter may indeed be a wise investment
in our era of transnational corporate buyouts and downsizing. Alas, in
business or academe, appointments at the top are still made on the basis of
cronyism rather than merit. It's anybody's guess whether this is due to
moral corruption or to an innate human instinct for tribalism.
Given these melancholy facts, your son should pick his college on the basis
of geography and climate. The ideal situation is a pleasant, low-crime,
green campus just outside an urban cultural center. As long as there is a
well-maintained college library, your son's education is assured. He must be
told that self-education is a lifetime
imperative. There are good teachers and lousy teachers at every college.
Whenever possible, he should grill other students about the quality of an
instructor, but he has the ultimate responsibility
to investigate and master each subject. The reference section of the
library, with its wonderful encyclopedias on every subject, should be his
favorite teacher.
A word of advice: Your son must avoid professors who still spout
poststructuralism or postmodernism. These are shallow, unlearned
fad-followers who twist students' minds with passé jargon and rob them of
future creativity. A good question to ask when conversing with a teacher:
What do you think of Michel Foucault? An enthusiastic reply will
automatically expose that teacher's abysmal ignorance of how indebted the
mendacious, blundering Foucault was to basic sociologists from Emile Durkheim
to the American Erving Goffman. (Gullible Foucault-worship remains the
dominant belief system of ostensibly non-religious humanities professors in
the elite schools.)
I am delighted with the recent emergence of educational reform as a national
issue -- for which President Clinton, whom I still support, deserves much credit.
However, the focus has been on primary schools, when universities are in
equal need of scrutiny. I shouted "Hurrah!" when Chelsea Clinton gave a
slap in the face to the Northeastern schools (the alma maters of her parents
and their yuppie clique) by choosing Stanford -- although that institution is also notorious
for mushy political correctness.
The Northeastern media are in a conspiracy of silence about the educational
slide of the Ivy League in order to preserve the prestige value of their own
and their children's degrees. When will the regional media wake up to this?
For 20 years, talented humanities students have been fleeing the sterile
graduate schools and going into other careers -- seriously compromising the
quality of future education. Thanks to poststructuralism and postmodernism,
the humanities have committed cultural suicide and are steadily being
marginalized by cost-conscious university administrators.
But again, as long as libraries exist, a rich higher education is accessible
to everyone. My view is that lively football programs are also a significant
campus resource: See my op-ed piece, "Gridiron Feminism," in the Sept.
12 issue of the Wall Street Journal, where I argue that football beats
poststructuralism for "analytic complexity" and pragmatic preparation for
everyday life.
Clueless? Ask Camille.
Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html |
