When a few years ago the Power installed our very large and ambitious Writing Program, my attitude was the emphatic lukewarmth of a decisive trimmer, so to speak. After all, for years I had been among those faculty grousing about the "crisis" in undergraduate writing, and my good angel urged me to applaud the dean for doing something dramatic to address it. My bad angel whispered in my ear the unfriendly amendment of a "Yes, but . . ." that what she was doing would create an anomalous pedagogic bureaucracy larger in the size of its offerings than any existing Princeton department, yet staffed not with "real" faculty but with an army of de facto adjuncts nearly guaranteed the status of second-class citizenship.
Some reasons to applaud the advent of the program were noble, others less so. The skills of literacy are fundamental to all learning. If one cannot write well, one cannot write well not merely about "English" but about history, politics, or molecular biology, for that matter. Across the disciplines many faculty, who on the whole were neither particularly interested in nor particularly good at teaching propaedeutic skills, might assuage a certain amount of liberal arts guilt by turning the problem over to a group of accomplished braceros.
Now my own reservations about the Writing Program, having moved from theoretical anticipation to empirical observation, are maturing. In the first place I am a academic adviser in my college, and I get a lot of direct testimony from the freshman customer base. Many among the writing staff are inspiring teachers, and many of their topics imaginative and engaging. Still, between a third and a half of my advisees have had severe reservations about the quality of usefulness of their writing seminars, and those figures match what I hear from fellow advisers. And before you tell me that this evidence is merely "anecdotal," I'll tell you that "social science data" is merely anecdote made pompous with graph paper. There is a problem, a big one, with the quality and effectiveness of the writing seminars. I am not so naive as to think there will be no bad courses at Princeton, but they ought to be electives, not the single universal requirement.
My more philosophical anxiety comes with the gradual realization of unintended consequence: the further fragmentation of the intellectual universe of undergraduates. Here my thinking crystallized last week in the circumstances surrounding the birth in New York of my third granddaughter. The blessed event offered me my first opportunity to meet the other grandparents, who happen to be Iraqi-Israelis who do not speak English. We are Anglo-Americans who speak no Hebrew or Arabic. It is amazing how much communication can be achieved through shared happiness, large quantities of food and unrelieved smiling. What is less amazing is how little communication can be so achieved. Sharon is trying to pull out of Gaza. America is facing a divisive election. We had no common vocabulary to discuss such things, indeed to discuss anything.
The job of higher education is not simply to teach a lot of stuff to young people. A more fundamental task is to arm them with skills, to help them nourish intellectual habit and to create an arena of shared cultural aspiration. It is hard to approach what nobody knows without depending on a few things that everybody knows, such as the English language. We have never had an official common or core curriculum at Princeton, but there once was a fair imitation of one. In the old days the writing requirement was usually satisfied by taking one of a small number of large, very popular literature courses taught by superstar lecturers: such courses as Seltzer's Shakespeare, Sonnenfeld's European Writers or Nugent's Classical Mythology — to mention only some absent friends who had the misfortune to die, go to California or become college presidents. Like our compulsory writing seminars, these courses had mixed success in teaching students how to improve their writing. But they performed the invaluable if incidental service of giving substantial numbers of our students a shared intellectual experience and a common cultural vocabulary. In lecturing to students, or in talking informally with them in office hours, a professor could allude to Polonius, Gregor Samsa or Acteon without the guaranteed response of glassy-eyed blankness and the requirement of adding, "That's Shakespeare. Immortal Bard. Late 16th century."
But then,
Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got 'Til it's gone.
That's Joni Mitchell. Flower Child. Late 1960s. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.
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