Getting a Clue: Gerald Graff and the Life of the Mind

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. By Gerald Graff. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Gerald Graff believes that his students, yours, and mine are clueless about the life of the mind and higher education. Graff defines cluelessness, the central topic of Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (2003), as "the bafflement, usually accompanied by shame and resentment, felt by students, the general public, and even many academics in the face of the impenetrability of the academic world" (1). He has therefore written a book that examines "some overlooked ways in which schools and colleges themselves reinforce cluelessness and . . . perpetuate the misconception that the life of the mind is a secret society for which only an elite few qualify" (1). Graff is slightly less precise in his definition of his title's other key term, the life of the mind. Ultimately, the closest he comes is in his discussion of Michael Warner's "Tongues Untied," where he quotes Warner's phrase, the "saturation of life by argument" (Graff 2003: 212). This, it appears, is how Graff would define his own life of the mind, and this is the life of the mind into which he would like to welcome more students. Although Graff acknowledges, very briefly, that there are "qualities that can't be reduced to pure rationality" (3), he maintains that what students most need to know about the life of the mind is that "summarizing and making arguments is the name of the game in academia" (3). With these concepts in place, Graff then sketches a pedagogical response to what he sees as the problem of cluelessness in the state of education.

The power of Graff's argument depends entirely on the reader's willingness to accept the premise of cluelessness and, following that, to accept Graff's view of the life of the mind. I have some difficulty with both of these requirements. In my career, I have taught English on the tenure track at Raritan Valley Community College, I have worked as an administrator in the Writing Program at Rutgers, a large state university, and now I am the associate director of the Princeton Writing Program. I have seen a cross-section of college students in the Middle Atlantic, and, despite having taught this wide range of students, I cannot accept the label "clueless" to describe my students, past or present. It may be true that a good number of them were unaware of and uninterested in academic culture. To some, the expectations of college were mysterious. To others, the expectations were merely rules to be complied with on the way to the degree. Very few found in academia a club they would like to join. It is fair to say that many of these students were not inclined, for a variety of reasons, to embrace the academy's version of the life of the mind. But it is not fair to conclude, therefore, that they were clueless.

Although I want to develop that position, for the moment, let's move forward with Graff's argument, to see what kind of academic world he wants to build for students. His goal is to help students find a place for themselves in academic culture. His reason for fighting cluelessness is to make sense of academia for those who pay the tuition and taxes that support the club but are not full members themselves. The way to bring outsiders in, according to Graff, is to bridge the academic and the vernacular, and this can be best accomplished, he thinks, by two activities central to academic culture: good teaching and good writing—both of which clearly communicate academic ideas to a general audience. Graff's text also articulates a number of compelling claims that make his vision attractive: college students should learn to read and write argument because these skills are fundamental...