A vigorous and sustained shoveling of sh*t against the tide

I LOVE TO READ advice given by notable academics to incoming freshmen (er, freshpeople). I like to compare their handy tips with the suggestions that I often dish out.

A couple of days ago, the New York Times assembled some pearls of wisdom from nine well-known academics (College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile). Check it out.

The inevitable Stanley Fish advises students to find out “who the good teachers are.” Good idea. I often tell students that, if they choose their instructors carefully, they can receive a better education here at IVC than at the fancy and expensive and  famous university up the road. It’s a lot easier for a student to get to know his or her instructor here in sleepy little Irvine Valley, where the motto “Publish or Perish” has been changed to “Publish? What for?”

Oddly, Stan the Post-Modern Man advises the fresh collegian to “consult the teacher-evaluation guides available at most colleges,” even as he acknowledges that these guides “are the vehicles of petty grievances.”

Stan confuses me. Too many high-school grads can’t manage a “clean English sentence,” he writes. The same can be said, of course, about many college grads. So he advises freshmen to take composition courses even if they don’t have to. On the other hand, he says that “too many [college] writing courses today teach everything but the craft of writing….”

Wadda nut.

English Professor Gerald Graff urges freshmen to emulate “key moves” made by successful profs, namely, some “common practices of argument and analysis.”

Graff wants students to “enter the conversation.” The best way to do that, he says, is to learn to summarize others’ arguments and to “Use these summaries to motivate what you say and to indicate why it needs saying.”

Summaries? Maybe this Graff fella has a touch of Asperger’s. (Like me.) He makes lots of lists, I bet.

Graff’s advice strikes me as a little odd—I think maybe he hung out too much with the college speech team—but he is surely right in urging students to engage in conversation and debate.

–But not with knuckleheads, and IVC ain't Ivy League. Students should stay away from colleagues who get their cues from talk radio or TV or SOCCCD board meetings. In Orange County, that pretty much leaves 'em lonely.

The venerable Harold Bloom clearly lives in the past. Entering college, he says, “should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions.”

That is, Bloom advises a vigorous and sustained shoveling of shit against the tide.

Meanwhile, historian Carol Berkin offers more practical advice. Make sure, she says, that you aren’t sitting in the wrong classroom. Embarrassing, that.

Also:

During class, do not: a) beat out a cadence on your desk while the teacher is lecturing; b) sigh audibly more than three or four times during a class period; c) check your watch more than twice during the hour. Do: a) practice a look of genuine interest in the lecture or discussion; b) nod in agreement frequently; c) laugh at all (or at least most) of the professor’s jokes.

We should pin these Six Commandments on all those empty bulletin boards in A200. --Except for that last one. I hate fake laughter.


Like Stanley Fish, historian Garry Wills advises students to “Learn to write well.” Aim for “clarity,” he says. Also, “Read, read, read.”

I often tell my students exactly the same things, but I suspect they think I'm just being quirky and they go back to writing enigmas.

Wills advises students to “Seek out the most intellectually adventurous of your fellow students.”

Exactly. The same advice will have students transfer to a good university ASAP. In fact, it'll drive 'em clean out of the OC. It is, after all, the home of the "birthers" and other Stupiders.

Wills recalls a story about Jimmy Carter, who was asked what he thought of his freshman daughter who had been arrested during an anti-apartheid protest. Said the pious Peanut Farmer: “I cannot tell you how proud I was. If you young people cannot express your conscience now, when will you?”

Yeah. When you try doing that when you’re old like me, your colleagues tell you to shut up and get positive.

Noted philosopher Martha Nussbaum also emphasizes the special opportunity that arises during college: “this may be the one time in your life when you have a chance to think about the whole of your life, not just your job.” Taking Humanities courses in particular provides one with “resources to prevent your mind from becoming narrower and more routinized in later life.”

Well, that’s the way it’s worked out for me, and for many of my yappy and peevish intellectual friends. We’re so broad and whimsical that some wanna send us to counseling or unemployment--or worse.

The grizzled James MacGregor Burns hasn't heard yet that newspapers are dead. His advice: “try to read a good newspaper every day.”

Well, first, try to find one! (Last week, the OC Reg filed for bankruptcy.)

Newspapers, he says, “will teach you how to write.” Again, “clarity” is the key virtue.

Yup, that’s what I tell my crew. Every day. But I steer 'em away from the Reg, 'cause its especially shitty when it's clear.

The old fossil Burns also advises students to “get to know your teachers outside of class.”

Well, he got that right. I'm always telling students to get to know their profs. I’m sure our detractors from on high will be horrified to hear this, but, owing to this tag-along-after-class phenomenon, the Reb and I know lots of students, and we hang out with ‘em.

Some of these kids who stick around, you can just see their eyes get wide, their world get bigger, more exciting, more fun! Wow, the world of big ideas, big possibilies!

The crazy posters on our office wall don’t hurt. Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, the Clash, the vegetarians, the 50,000 stupid voters.

We often send these kids on down to UCI (or Columbia or UCLA or Cal, etc.) and, for years, they return like boomerangs as they pursue ever-larger academic adventures out there, somewhere.

Biologist Nancy Hopkins advises students to “fall in love…with an intellectual vision of the future.” That’s what happened to her, decades ago, listening to geneticist James Watson. “By the end of that lecture I was a goner — in love with DNA,” she writes.

Hopkins focuses on “passion” and big dreams:

You may be the person who constructs a new biological species, or figures out how to stop global warming, or aging. Maybe you’ll discover life on another planet. My advice to you is this: Don’t settle for anything less.

I worry that the college experience, with all of its crazy and informal mind-expanding and world-opening mechanisms, is slowly disappearing, replaced by weird-assed online instructional “delivery” by for-profit companies whose cyber-walls are devoid of wacky posters, and whose “mission statements” refer to ever-improving, mind-numbing SLOs and plans for cheap but comprehensive “informational” brain implants.

Screw that.