The State of the Academy in Indiana

 

How to speak good English...

One of my Korean students has just started classes at the University of Indiana. He is confused that all international students from countries in which English is not the official majority language must take an extra course in English as a Second Language. He accepts the need in his own case, but notes that some of these students speak impeccable English; some seem, to his ear, to have better English than the professor. And no entrance test was administered: all must take the course, depending only on their place of origin.

This seems to be discriminatory, and to make no sense.

But it makes more sense when we see the topic for his first homework assignment. It is to summarize and compare two short essays. One is by a Chinese-American lamenting that her father is foolishly proud to have lost his Chinese accent. She considers that he has thereby lost part of his ethnic identity, and it is due to cruel social pressure from the majority population. The cruel social pressure being, in part, his being complemented on speaking English well. The other is by a woman of Ojibwe ancestry, who laments that her ancestors had the language taken from them, by having learned English. None of her relatives speak to her in Ojibwe; it has been reserved for prayers. As a result, she must learn it as a second language, in order, in her mind, to reconnect with the thinking of her ancestors.

So the point of the course is apparently not to improve the students’ English. It is to discourage them from improving their English. English, although the course is given entirely in English, is the enemy.

Political indoctrination is plainly the point of this course. But this is actually secondary. The problem in the academy actually goes beyond political indoctrination. To justify their existence, many academic fields and many academics must spend their time in teaching nonsense. If they stuck to the sensible and true, there would be nothing to teach in many fields. Everyone knows, for example, that learning something new is a good thing, to the student’s benefit. If you spend a year simply teaching that it is useful to learn English, you have no course, and no job. 

So why not teach actual content? Why not teach how to write better?

To quote a certain plastic doll, “math is hard.” This requires that the field actually knows anything; and that the professor has learned it. The expansion of the academy into new fields has meant the creation of many new fields without substantial actual content. And in many other fields, the academy is not the proper venue.

In homeschooling my own kids in Canadian history, I read them a sequence of reports from the Kingston Standard of 1832, on the arrival of cholera from Europe. I thought it was especially interesting to compare it with our own recent experience of covid. But the comparison prompted a different response from them:

“How come the writing in newspapers then was so much better?”

This for what was a small-town newspaper, by modern standards.

It is because in those days, people were hired to write for newspapers because they could write well. In our day, people are hired to write for newspapers because they have graduated from journalism school.

Writing cannot be taught in the classroom. This is equally true of other fields: the arts in general, and even teaching itself.

At the same time, teaching correct English, at this level, it is only too likely that students will know more than the professor. That is a frightening prospect for a professor. Best to steer clear of that subject.

So you have to invent something to teach that nobody is likely to know. It therefore has to be something so absurd nobody would have thought it.

And so we get so many of our lunatic “woke” ideas, generated in the academy.

It is wrong to point to a problem without pointing to a solution. The solution is probably already spontaneously in progress. The conventional academy must die, and be replaced by open competition among online courses. The Harvards and McGills may survive by offering comprehensive testing to certify knowledge in a field.