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Feature: October 22, 1997
A medievalist looks at life at today's Princeton by JOHN V. FLEMING *63 WE WERE READING PLATO'S REPUBLIC in Humanities 216 last week, and we managed pretty well to put the old fellow's book in its place. I am happy to say that the philosopher received general, though not uncritical, respect. He might have gotten off unscathed--except for the dreaded E-word, which alighted about halfway through our conversation, like a wasp on the picnic watermelon, and wouldn't go away. It turns out that Plato was an elitist, that his ideal republic was elitist to the core. Everyone knew elitism was bad and elitists worse. Soon someone remembered that Professor Martin had pointed out in lecture that the leisure for academic philosophizing in ancient democratic Greece was enabled by the institution of chattel slavery. Chattel slavery silently became the representative of "elitist" institutions, and gloom descended. Now I'm not one of your pointy-headed professors who believes that etymology is destiny; but the history of words, no less than the history of peoples, has its lessons. Elite is a French past participle of a verb meaning "to single out" or "to choose from among a group," meanings already well established in the Latin from which the French derived, and more obvious in the English version, "elected." Philology leads inexorably to the understanding that American democracy, dominated by elected officials, is a system of elite government. If few will admit to elitism in Washington, seat of the elect, even fewer will do so in Princeton, reservation of the self-appointed. My teaching career here extends back to the dark days of male hegemony, but there's never been a time when students and faculty were not excoriating elitism and ostentatiously eschewing it in thought and word. Eschewing it in deed has always been more difficult. Over the years, I have been struck by the large gap, about the size of Montana, between the way professors talk about "elitism" and the way we spend our time. Like other senior members of the faculty, I spend tense hours in painful department meetings selecting the tenurable unum from among the untenurable pluribus. The elect name is forwarded to Nassau Hall, to a ferocious tribunal of the specially elected, who, having solicited the written opinions of elites from Berkeley to Berlin, discuss the matter further. Generally this is a pretty thankless business for everyone involved. Louis XIV, upon elevating some lucky fellow in noble rank, said, "Now I have made a hundred men jealous and one man ungrateful." He didn't know the half of it.
WHEN I ARRIVED in the Department of English 30 years ago, the place was full of geezers whose eloquent but limited conversation stretched to at least two subjects: the good old days, and how the good old days were rapidly disappearing. I thought this was pretty pathetic, but I didn't say anything--in those days instructors and assistant professors at least pretended to defer to their elders--but gradually, by slow and nearly imperceptible increments, something unexpected happened: I too became a geezer, one well placed to appreciate what might be called the iron law of Golden Ages. It is this: the Golden Age of any educational institution was about 20 years before you arrived at the place. In those famous days of yore, professors actually slogged through the uncharted land of dormitories to munch chicken fingers in the awkward company of freshmen and sophomores. There are little pockets of that ancient ethos still here today. The nearly fabulous success of the Freshman Seminar Program, which reconstructs something of the old preceptorial system, demonstrates both the teaching talent of our faculty and the student appetite for what the faculty has to offer. But when evaluating pastry, it is still useful to be able to distinguish between cake and frosting. When I cast my geezer's glance on today's cake, I have my doubts. I even have my doubts that the $50 million the university hopes to raise during its current campaign for innovation in teaching will do very much in the absence of a real institutional commitment to teaching. What would be really innovative, in my opinion, would be for the president, the provost, the deans, and the leaders of the individual departments to express their already stated commitment to excellence in undergraduate teaching in a number of simple but concrete ways. Let me mention two unmentionables. • Abandon the comfortable bromide adopted by most of our public "experts" on higher education to the effect that there is no conflict or tension between teaching and research. I heard this most recently in a plenary address before the American Council of Learned Societies by the chairman of its board, but I have heard it for years at Princeton from a succession of deans. There are only so many hours in a day, and of course there is a tension between teaching and research. For younger professors, particularly, the tension may be very poignant. The question is not the otiose one of whether the tension exists, but the more substantial one of how to adjudicate it. The job of an institution that claims to value both is--to value both. There is abundant evidence that our administrators value scholarship. What is needed is some credible evidence that demonstrated excellence in teaching is a major--and in some instances even a decisive--factor in promoting assistant professors to tenure or in hiring famous professors from afar. • Express a commitment to the importance of undergraduate teaching by instituting equable teaching requirements among all faculty members throughout the university. In the by now substantial history of the residential college system, the roster of masters has included precisely one scientist and one engineer. There are doubtless many reasons for this curiosity, possibly including the superiority of the scientific mentality, but one reason is conspicuous. A serving master has his or her teaching load reduced by one half. But it is impossible to divide a one-course teaching load by two without messy fractional results. Q: Why do they call them the "hard sciences"? A: Because they hardly teach them. It is not really a healthy sign that some Princeton professors direct more senior theses in a year than others direct in a decade.
WHEN ONE HAS GIVEN as many lectures as I have, one has heard a variety of explanations from students, colleagues, family members, friends, and acquaintances as to why they were, or unfortunately will be, unable to attend. I have heard about the broken alarm clock, the canceled flight, the pet in parturition, and the sudden onset of pellagra. But never before has a college professor looked me in the eye and told me that he had to flee my wisdom in order to teach a class at 10 o'clock on a Friday morning, with or without adding the information that he had to teach another one at 11 on the same day. That, of course, is because I hang out mainly on the Princeton campus, which appears to have become a Friday-free zone a couple of decades ago. This truth had not entirely escaped my earlier notice. At 8:45 on a Tuesday morning, the dining hall of a residential college looks something like the Exodus scene from The Ten Commandments, only with the Egyptians knee-deep in skimmed milk and grapefruit rinds instead of Red Sea. On Friday mornings at the same hour, it's more like an abandoned bowling alley. Constricting the conventional working week by 20 percent has not been without some unfortunate side effects. One of them is that students have a hellish time scheduling lectures, seminars, labs, and precepts. I discovered this in the Chaucer course this year when something like a quarter of the class was unable to fit into any of several preceptorial times offered. The only practical solution was to open a new precept at 5 P.M., take it or leave it. (No problem, oddly enough.) Then there is the question of finding a room. Since the ruling convention seems to be that precepts can take place only between 11 in the morning and 3:30 in the afternoon, Tuesdays through Thursdays, one finds a lot of precepts meeting in broom closets and the second booth on the right at Burger King. So my suggestion to the Dean of the Faculty is that she instruct departmental chairs to arrange that approximately a fifth of all departmental teaching be done on Fridays. Why do I feel that this manifestly sensible suggestion will be greeted with the same enthusiasm reserved for leftover boiled cod? Because the current system has the unique advantage of ministering at once to the sloth of a fair proportion of the professoriate and to the incipient alcoholism of a fair proportion of undergraduates who start their partying on Thursday nights. The discovery of Friday did wonders for Robinson Crusoe.
LIKE MOST STUDENTS, I am frequently away from Princeton during the summer, but I have been here often enough to know what occurs on campus. Two or three days after graduation, sometimes before the bleachers from Commencement have even been removed, large work crews armed with mighty machines come in and begin devastating whole provinces. Soon the place looks like the aftermath of Woodstock or the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg. The symptoms vary. One year, it's a meandering trench, four feet wide, running from the Woodrow Wilson School to the U-Store. Another, it may be one or more stately buildings gutted to their stone shells. Even in this flux of change there are a few fixed points of reliability. For example, you can usually count on finding, dotted here and there among the beauty spots, a certain kind of specially rusted construction dumpster full of splintered wood, masonry debris, and the unappetizing residue of mysterious white plastic buckets. I have searched for a pattern here and may have found one. Each year, the president gives an informal financial report to the faculty, which is of course eager to divine, if possible, what might be expected in terms of departmental expansion, salary increment, and all that sordid sort of thing. This is an event demanding advanced hermeneutic skill to decipher the meaning of an analysis that is always somber but that does vary subtly between the poles of the cautiously guarded and the prudently reserved. I do notice, however, that the more astringent the financial forecast, the more ferocious the following summer's assault on the "physical plant," as it is called in administrationspeak. I am a person of settled habits, and the resulting disappearance, transmogrification, and relocation of classrooms and whole buildings is quite alarming. The whole campus has begun to act like the library--librarians, of course, being past masters of the art of the infuriating reshuffle. I began working in Firestone Library in 1961, and so far as I can tell, during the intervening 34 years the Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique has not remained on the same floor for a period exceeding seven months.
EACH SEPTEMBER, during what used to be called Freshman Week, the residential colleges host little receptions for parents in the process of delivering up their children to the uncertain mercies of Outdoor Action or Urban Action, or simply moving them into their dormitory rooms. The atmosphere must be something like that surrounding the soup kitchens set up under tents by the Red Cross in places that have just experienced hurricanes or floods. There are large numbers of traumatized people putting on a brave face. It is usually hot and humid. The parents are physically exhausted from carrying computers and refrigerators up and down stairs for hours and psychically stressed by the apparent ease with which their disappearing darlings blow them off: "Thanks a lot, folks. Now, you better get back on the road before the traffic builds up. See you at Christmas." This year, a certain amount of the stress was transferred to me when no fewer than three fathers approached me over the punch bowl and introduced themselves as my former undergraduate students--that's three in Wilson College alone, and God knows what's going on elsewhere. "You know, you're the third person to tell me that," I said to the third person to tell me that. Not to be outdone in repartee, he shot right back: "Probably makes you confront certain realities." Well, it did make me confront a reality: once again, a freshman class with lots of legacies.
THE RICHES OF THIS INSTITUTION--material, human, curricular, and cultural--are so enormous that no student can exhaust them in a fleeting four-year career. But there is a considerable distance between exhausting resources and barely sampling them. Advising at Princeton reveals the paradoxical privilege of the pathological. If you are struggling with sexual inadequacy, bulimia, or depression, you have trained counselors. It is far less clear what you do if you are troubled by the choice between economics and biology as majors, if you seek an explanation of the subtle but important differences between two levels of a math course, or if you might be interested in a weekend's offerings of chamber music. Although there has undoubtedly been a general decline in the care with which the supervision of junior and senior independent work is directed in many departments, it is principally the underclass years that are the object of my attention. Here, I think, the trajectory is upward. The advising of freshmen and sophomores is now done by a cadre of about 60 (mainly junior) faculty members, who are distributed in batches of a dozen each among the five residential colleges, where they work under the general supervision of the directors of study. This system is a considerable improvement compared with the walk-in clinic approach of old, but it still has its problems. Most advisers take their work seriously, but they also take it as an overload to already busy schedules. If you believe that the level of financial investment is an accurate signal of institutional priorities, you will hardly find in the modest stipends of the academic advisers much evidence that their work is highly valued. My informal researches in Wilson College suggest that a majority of underclassmen have actual contact with their advisers only on those mandatory occasions when they are planning a semester's work or making a routine course change. Most students think of these encounters not as enriching opportunities to exploit valuable advice, but as a bureaucratic ritual of "getting my course cards signed." For almost everything else, they depend upon those juniors and seniors who are resident advisers or minority-affairs advisers, old-fashioned scuttlebutt, and--above all--on the colleges' directors of study. The office of the director of studies is sensationally effective, and I believe in the next century it will come to be regarded in the nearly mythical terms that still surround the arrival of the first "preceptor guys" during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Hence my innovative suggestion of the week is that the university institute a universal system of directors of study (to be called "preceptor persons," natch), but with a director for every 20 students instead of every 500. Like current directors of studies, the new preceptor persons would be primarily trained for, and interested in, "student services," but they would be fully qualified to teach one course a semester in some academic department. They would be expected to be deeply knowledgeable and independent-minded about many curricular and extracurricular aspects of Princeton, and they would be paid decently. They would be expected to get to know their charges well, and to follow them through their careers.
IN RECENT YEARS the monthly meetings of the faculty have come to have much of the form, substance, drama, and eloquent debate of, say, Czechoslovakian democracy of the mid-1950s. It was, accordingly, positively exhilarating to attend last Monday's meeting, at which a large number of genuinely engaged members debated, with a contrived dynamism, a dignified and serious curricular proposal to reform the categories of the distribution requirements for the course of study for the baccalaureate degree. The proposal passed. In this instance, I voted with the majority, and my only lasting regret from that meeting was the success of the motion to stifle debate and "call the question," for I do not believe the discussion had become exhausted or repetitious. On the contrary, various physicists, biologists, and mathematicians were actually forcing me to look at an issue from a point of view quite different from the one I had rather easily assumed. This kind of conversation that matters, though prominent in our institutional self-advertisement, is actually rare in practice. Most of us spend several hours a week in meetings whose product is visible only through the most powerful optical instruments. It is no easy thing within the academy to distinguish subject and object, nor to hear and be heard across the multicultural divides of the university's disciplinary structures. Here and elsewhere, the humanistic challenge is to imagine the perspective of others very different from ourselves. I remember, as an Ozark farm boy shortly after World War II, gathering with a group of hog farmers in the Shady Grove General Store to hear the county extension agent make an oral presentation concerning a remarkable new regime for fattening cows. His audience, a tough one, remained skeptical in the face of proposed curricular innovation; but he carried on valiantly, reaching a memorable peroration: "The long and the short if it, boys, is this: Follow this plan and you get your hogs to market six weeks a-for you would following the regular plan." Well, that impressed me in my infantile innocence, but not my elderly neighbor, Edgar Lonon, who contemptuously dismissed the whole idea. "Hell," said Edgar, "what's time to a hog?"
IAM A MEDIEVALIST. For many years I studied dead monks, but recently, responding to methodological breakthroughs, I have added obscure dead nuns to my repertory. I got into this line of work more or less on purpose. When it became clear to me that I was destined to be a college professor, and therefore irrelevant anyway, I said to myself, "What the hell? Do it with as much pizzazz as possible." Aelred of Rievaulx and Angela of Foligno then followed naturally, as a manner of course, as night the day. For the most part, I am quite happy in my obscurantist vocation, except that I do have to take a certain amount of grief from famous colleagues who seek the meaning of life in the quintessence of the here and now. These people imply, and sometimes openly state, that to concern oneself with things that happened earlier than the day before yesterday is to exhibit a lack of intellectual hip. I mention no names, but you know who I mean--the Celebrity Professors. These people are constantly doing things like rushing off to the dacha of their dear friend Mikhail Gorbachev--before the dacha got repossessed--or dropping hints in Newsweek about the Fed and interest rates. Let no one think that, in saying these venomous things, I am motivated by vulgar jealousy. Honestly, I have no interest at all in being on Oprah Winfrey, though it is certainly true that if Oprah were ever to invite me, the world might learn what medievalism has to offer the masses.
L IKE MOST OTHER institutions of higher education, Princeton pursues "diversity" with a vengeance. The trouble is that I cannot find any two diverse people who agree on exactly what the word means. What the lexicographer thinks it means is "the condition of being diverse; difference, unlikeness." What it means to many sensible people on campus is the intentionally pursued condition of a student body, faculty, and administration composed--as our country and our world are composed--of people of different sexes, racial categories, and cultural backgrounds. In between such lexical understandings, and around the edges, one finds not so much a fineness of gradation as a chaos of--well, diversity. For example, students in Wilson College have occasionally expressed concerns about diversity representation within the college. In each instance, the expressed desire for augmented diversity was in fact a desire for "more people like me." In each instance, I should add, the students were undoubtedly right in the substance of their concerns. As a general rule--and I underscore the word general--where Princeton students are concerned, the category of "more people like me" is an entirely positive one. But don't confuse it with diversity. To do so is to embrace what The New York Times calls "irony." That irony is perhaps already sufficiently represented in the implicit belief of many that the principled pursuit of campus diversity demands a lockstep intellectual uniformity of opinion on the major social questions of the day.
THERE IS SOMEBODY out there trying to do nice things to me, and it's got me worried. It started late in the exam period, when I was walking up to McCosh Hall from Wilson College. As I came through the Prospect gates I could see a group of unusually well dressed and well combed young people standing next to some colored plastic tubs outside the big doors that open on the stairway to McCosh 10. I thought little of it, but rounding the building on the quadrangle side I found two more Nice Young Persons and another plastic tub just outside the Department of English. As I walked through the door I could not fail to notice that the tub was filled with cans of soda. Unfortunately, to see is usually the same thing as to lust after, as St. Augustine explains with reference to Jesus' strenuous advice "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out." As I sorted through my very dull mail in the departmental office, my thoughts were on how nice it would be to have a cold soda. Perhaps a Nice Young Person noticed, as I exited McCosh, that my glance drooped momentarily toward the soda tub, for he said to me, "We are giving away sodas." I tried to recover professorial aloofness, but his female fellow added an irresistible supplement: "They're free!" Shamelessly I reached down and plucked a can, then scurried off. Only when I went to drink the soda did I notice the little piece of paper, not too much larger than a Chinese cookie fortune, tucked under the flip-top. "Thirsty?" it asked. "We represent Campus Crusade for Christ and just wanted to take this opportunity to provide you with a personal and practical reminder of God's love. Good luck on the exam!" Now this was spooky. Not only did the little green slip of paper know I was thirsty, but it knew that, even then, I was avoiding a sizable stack of final exams. Naturally it made me think of the story of Jesus' meeting with the Samaritan woman (John, chapter 4), a story that involves a thirsty man, mysterious knowledge, and a final exam of sorts. I was looking for transient liquid satisfaction, but was presented instead with a nagging theological difficulty. If I actually consumed this soda, now opened and therefore threatened with being wasted, what was my ethical exposure? Foreign missionaries called converts who showed up at chapel around dinner time "rice Christians." If I consumed this beverage, would I be just another "rice Christian" (or, rather, a "Diet Coke Christian"); worse, would I be like Chaucer's Pardoner, exploiting spiritual things for carnal satisfaction? But I was thirsty. The woman gave to me to drink, and I did drink.
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