Making Intellectualism Intelligible

Robin J. Sowards Making Intellectualisai Intelligible (on Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind [Yale University Press, 2003]) Here is a diode, learn what to do with it. Here is Du Guesclin, constable of France 1370-80—learn what to do with him. A divan is either a long cushioned seat or a council of state—figure out at which times it is what. Certainly you can have your dangerous drugs, but only for dessert—first you must chew your cauliflower, finish your fronds. "Do you think intelligent life exists outside this bed?" one student asked another, confused as to whether she was attending the performance, or part of it. Donald Barthelme, "The Educational Experience" At one memorable moment in Road Trip, Tom Green, leading a group of prospective students on a campus tour, observes: "This is the English Department. I see most of you already speak English, so we can skip that." This joke may well be funny both to college undergraduates and to their professors, but for the latter it will be tinged with bitter irony, too. The difference between the two reactions exemplifies the deeper gulf between academics and students, which, according to Gerald Graff's most recent book, usually goes unexamined and unaddressed, and hence continues to widen, to all of our peril. Graff's observation that the most basic premises of academic discourse seem counter-intuitive or downright opaque to those outside academe, and his daim that academics contribute to this opadtyjust as mudi as a complacent public, will not likely take anyone by surprise, and readers of his previous work, particularly Beyond the Culture Wars (1992), will find many familiar arguments here. But what makes this book illuminating is Graff's consdous attempt to enter the mindset of his students to find out just what makes intellectual discourse so alien to the uninitiated, while maintaining his faith in the discourse's potential intelligibility. Graff's basic move is always toward reflection: any particular pedagogical difficulty one encounters can be effectively handled by explidtly addressing it in dass (his widely-known 'teadi the conflicts' approach). If the book has any defect, it is that Graff fails to state baldly enough what is at stake in this gesture. Graff pays far more attention to the particular details of classroom teaching in this book than he has hitherto, although the discussion of such minutiae is carefully situated in the context ofbroader questions about curricular structure, the place of the university in the larger educational system, and the ways in which academe represents itself (or utterly fails to represent itself intelligibly) to the total culture. His emphasis on the big picture in the 280 the minnesota review past was in part a result of his reservations about the idea that all educational problems are solvable at the level of the classroom (e.g., Clueless 30). But he has many extremely keen things to say about intellectual habits that students find alienating in the dassroom: for example, the "preoccupation with what often appear to be bogus 'problems,'" what he calls 'the problem problem' (45). University teachers regularly demand that students, in writing and discussion, seek out problems to address, but students often reasonably wonder whether "there [are] not already enough problems in the world without our straining to invent new ones" (46). One instance of this is the resistance students frequently offer to finding 'hidden meanings ' in literary texts on the grounds that if a meaning is 'hidden' it must not obviously be 'there' in the text, suggesting that much of literary critical discourse amounts to quibbling over highly speculative critical impositions (48ff.). In part this conclusion results from a misunderstanding of how literature works, such that the success or value of a literary work can be measured by its lack of contradictions, its success as an act of communication. This problem is made even more difficult to address by the seemingly counter -intuitive idea academics have about what makes a problem interesting. As Graff points out, "paradoxically, claims that are arguable and solidt disagreement are a sign of an argumenfs viability, not its failure" (54). If the objective of argumentation is to...