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When I started at Duke 40 years ago, classes seemed important. Students were here to learn new things, and professors were here to help them do that. The new things included old things — history, classics, literature, philosophy, religion — along with the sciences and social sciences.
We have a new curriculum!
How do you guys spend the time you’re not in my class?
Some people I love have spent their lives doing heavy labor: carpentry, warehouse work, truck driving. In my younger years, I spent a lot of time doing what they used to call “waitressing” — a profession that entails its share of heavy lifting and running back and forth, unpredictable hours, no benefits, and a miserable, insulting salary. A lot of what I do these days can be done lying on the sofa, but it is demanding in its own right. The insides of my brain ache at the end of a long day spent following complicated plot lines; remembering scores of names; deciphering impenetrable literary theories; explaining to students why perfect work can only earn them a 95; breaking into maddening, heavily barricaded websites; and grappling with — but never answering — the great accursed questions.
In some places, when you speak your truth, nobody listens. You may write it down, but it remains readerless in your tear-blotched notebook. Say whatever you want, who cares? It’s just words.
I was at a high-stakes meeting at a top research institution the other day. Mousy, elderly female humanities Professors of the Practice are not usually included in high-level gatherings, so I folded my hands in my lap and switched into listening mode. At the meeting, a terrifying, extremely eminent social-sciences professional pointed out with some fervor that a university Slavic program in the 21st century has no business “throwing Tolstoy at students.” What frivolity to read made-up stories at a time like this! It’s a tough world out there and time is money (время – деньги). Give students a toolkit of basic words and concepts; train them in how to gather facts and summarize arguments in crisp, convincing memos.
“I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that...I think, if you wrote a book, you f—ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” — Sam Bankman-Fried (skeptical of books).
The 50th anniversary of Earth Day is this Wednesday. You don’t realize this yet, but fifty is a big deal. And so is the environment. So why am I not reading about this in my news feed?
This past summer, at the Dostoevsky State University in Omsk, Siberia, one of my most cherished dreams came true. A dean escorted me into an auditorium, and seventy students leapt to their feet. The dean waved her hand in the air and said something, and they all sat down. There was no food, crinkling cellophane, open laptops, or whispering in the room. An hour passed, then the students leapt to their feet once more and applauded. Later, after it was over, I learned that that’s basically the way class is in Russia—though of course it was cooler not to know that. It’s the leaping I recall, and the noise of clapping, but I know that the main thing is what we talked about.
Sure is lonely around here.
The other day this student was telling me about her brilliant friend: he is double-majoring in Statistics and Computer Science and getting a 4.0 in his majors, and on top of that is doing a Certificate in HTSTYMWN (How to Sell Things You Make with Numbers) and getting all A’s in that too. Plus, if he crams some stuff in and overloads, he’s even on track for a pre-med! And he’s co-authoring an article his lab group is working on. Cool (terrifying) Duke stuff.
There’s your dream world, and then there’s the world that you live in.
Some of what follows is factual, and some of it is made up, but it is all true.
Long before anyone reading this column was born, I asked my grandmother one day what she had majored in in college. My grandmother said, “Home Economics.”
Over the past few months my boss (Duke University) has been sending around a veritable frenzy of messages urging me to put my courses online. The messages are kind, helpful, nurturing; they recognize my eagerness to get up to date on technology and to learn the many exciting ways I can bring my classes into the 21st century. The premise is that I’m still hauling my old handwritten (or typewritten) notes into class, standing regally at a big podium and reading lists of facts out loud to an auditorium packed with reverent, note-taking students. There is good news, says my boss: No longer need I be confined in the prison of the Languages Building, with its chalky blackboards and snoozing students—the world is my classroom! The only obstacles are my insecurity, my fear of the unknown and my discomfort with technology.
Over the past few months my boss (Duke University) has been sending around a veritable frenzy of messages urging me to put my courses online. The messages are kind, helpful, nurturing; they recognize my eagerness to get up to date on technology and to learn the many exciting ways I can bring my classes into the 21st century. The premise is that I’m still hauling my old handwritten (or typewritten) notes into class, standing regally at a big podium and reading lists of facts out loud to an auditorium packed with reverent, note-taking students. There is good news, says my boss: No longer need I be confined in the prison of the Languages Building, with its chalky blackboards and snoozing students—the world is my classroom! The only obstacles are my insecurity, my fear of the unknown and my discomfort with technology.
Sometimes my job requires me to receive documents via email, in PDF format. The last time this happened, instead of a nice 70-page PDF, I received an extremely long email made up of a mass of English letters all crammed together in no coherent order. A very competent human being in IT fixed it in a matter of minutes. To my question as to what had caused the problem—was it something I did?—she answered: “No, sometimes they just do that.”
Recently, ads have been cropping up around campus offering thousands of dollars in prizes for students to think things up. What those things are, I have no idea; maybe because they have not been thought up yet. Clearly, based on the themes listed in the ads, they will have something to do with innovation, interdisciplinarity, sustainability, the greater social good, teamwork, ideas, innovative solutions to real-world issues and #$%&@-loads and #$%&@-loads and #$%&@-loads of money. Apparently, what you will do to win the competition will be exciting, fun, socially constructive and financially lucrative. You’ll make friends, solve social problems, build a resume and become incredibly, unspeakably rich. There’s no down side: no drudge work, no stupid boss making your life miserable on your pathway to receiving that big check.
In the fall of 1834, a 25-year-old high-school graduate, lapsed civil servant and novice writer, Nikolai Gogol, managed to work his way—with the help of active patronage—into a position as an adjunct professor of world history at St. Petersburg University.
Any child will tell you that it’s a lot more fun to play than to clean up. Many of the great misunderstandings in the world can be traced to this elemental truth. You know this already if you have a roommate. Engineering a beautiful system can be fun. Sometimes, though, like a building-block tower, things come crashing down. And even if you don’t want to clean them up, you might have to, or all hell will break loose.
