Fort Worth, Texas Conference, October, 2003: Keynote Address
Dr. P. F. Kluge, Kenyon College

The Unthinkable Thoughts of Summer

Is there anything like email for inculcating a false sense of productivity? Not the sending of it but the deleting of it, as fast as possible. How much nonsense can I vaporize in a seminar break or better yet, in the length of time that I hold my breath? Job candidates auditioning in chemistry; fitness classes cancelled, stray dogs and wallets, rides to the airport, stern warnings from a college bookstore that needs to know, right now, what texts I'll be requiring in 2005; student colloquies, endless and inflamed. Then, in the midst of all this, like a rock in the river, there's a message that makes you stop and think. Early last fall, about the time my American Novel Since 1950 class was segueing from Portnoy's Complaint to American Pastoral, I got something like this: I'm sorry I missed your class which I take seriously, and I'm not copping a plea but my horse came down with colitis and had to have emergency surgery in Columbus. It looks like she'll make it but I might have to miss the next class too, and I'll take whatever penalty you give me, I just wanted you to know etc. etc. Well, the horse recovered and the student: she wrote a decent final paper comparing the sex life of Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom to the sex life of rabbits, actual rabbits, and it's not often that I can get a female student to react thoughtfully to Updike. Happy endings all around but oh, the hours I spent wondering whether the email I'd gotten was a very new or possibly very old excuse: my horse broke down, right up there with my puppy ate the homework. What should I do? What if the horse died? Or worse yet, relapsed and died while I forced the student to attend that second class? Would the absence be more excusable if the nearly fatal colitis had kicked in while the student was riding Seabiscuit to class?

You've got to love it, at least mostly love it; this daily blend of the sublime and the ridiculous: one moment you think you've heard it all ... especially when it comes to student excuses... and then you're ambushed by a surprise. One day you're walking around in a world that goes back forever and will surely go on indefinitely and, a little later, you sense bad things headed your way, fast. For nine months, when I can spare a moment to brood about how old I am and how famous I wanted to be, I grant nonetheless that I am in a good, sometimes magical place and that lots of people would trade places with me, like the parents who accompany my students to class on visit days, the adults bursting with energy, bright-eyed, raising their hands, lingering after class, while their spiky-haired, heavy-lidded offspring pray not to get called on. This makes me wonder if the relationship between the people who profess and the people who pay couldn't be simplified: cut out the kids and meet, payer to payee, adult to adult.

Our life could be better. But it is good. Nine months of incredible clutter that discourages ... mercifully discourages... prolonged reflection. Splash around in the shallows of a beach that's crowded and noisy, you don't worry about the drift of continents, the melting of ice caps, the slow grinding of tectonic plates. You worry about sunburn. But then, it's summer, when my thoughts go long and deep. Summer, that succulent season, that unwritten page that begins with graduation and ends when the football players come lurching into town. Summer on an empty campus is my time for serious wondering. Clearly the absence of students and faculty has something to do with thoughts of summer. But there's more, I believe. In the vision of empty paths and playing fields, locked-down classrooms, vacant commons, most of all the dormitories - that sound in fall like jukeboxes on which all buttons have been pushed, all songs playing simultaneously - dormitories, dark and mute and lifeless, in all this I get a picture of the nightmare which haunts me ... us ... all of us in the liberal arts, more especially those who do the liberal arts at small, residential places. The nightmare is this: those parents who sit in back of class find themselves unwilling to finance an education that isn't vocational, that not only lacks an immediate job market reward but worse yet, all but guarantees that such a reward may never arrive, an education that insists, quaintly, that virtue is its own reward when the fact is that virtue may be its only reward. All those poets and writers, artists and musicians, philosophers and classicists we send into the world, enriched and impoverished from knowing us, our proxies, our products, our prides and joys. Can this go on? Should it go on? We give birth to them, litter by swarming litter every year; why not send them straight to the animal shelter? Here's my dark vision, simply put: what if we gave a party and nobody came? Thinking about things like this is how I spend my summer vacation.

It's hard to contemplate change and loss in a place you love, especially when that very change and loss come packaged as something called progress. Last autumn, in an appearance before the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences in San Francisco, I tried setting out my sense of things, that is, what came to mind the previous summer. That speech, that kamikaze flight, was excerpted in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Our Coddled Students: Kamp Kenyon's Legacy: Death By Tinkering - those were the headlines and this is what led to your invitation to me, that reposed in my inbox for quite a while before I said I would come. I hesitated ... and with good reasons. In San Francisco, I began with a list of small things - the devil is in the details: professors invited to help incoming freshmen move into dorms at the start of the school year "the parking lot aloha" - and then, the Mulligan rule: students permitted to drop a class at no cost within a week of the course's conclusion. After that, "comfort zones:" during exam times, baked goods, popsicles, in-chair massages, college-provided. There were more serious concerns, mainly about a beloved, often admirable college moving whether by design or drift, beyond its most important function: the college going into the travel business with study-abroad programs, a.k.a. junior year vacations; the college going into the judicial business adjudicating rape and sexual assault cases; the role of the professor narrowing, of student affairs types increasing, all signaling the piecemeal mutation of an important college into a user-friendly therapeutic kibbutz. In our attempts to attract students to the college and keep them there, would the college itself become less worth attending? That's what I was wondering.

I was in Prague, thanks to my wife's Fulbright Fellowship, when my speech excerpt showed up in the Chronicle. In describing the college's reaction to the piece I have to specify that I can only discuss the reaction that I'm aware of, surely a fraction of the whole. And, I must add that the reaction is something I'm still discovering, in nods of approval, in sudden handshakes ... and silence, avoidance. By all accounts, the campus erupted in a firestorm of emails and phone calls, many of them angry. Angry at me, about me. Some people I didn't know ... and I was pretty sure didn't know me ... hated me. To be sure, the administration kept its distance; a dozen faculty and administrators sent sympathy, sometimes condolence. All the alumni I heard from approved, as did numerous people at other places, where the piece was reprinted. But among current students, the reaction was mixed, shading from qualified agreement to bitter denunciation. I had suggested that some things about life at our college were not first-rate and that shattered the self-re-enforcing detente between college and customer: I am here because I'm good, you are good because you're here, we are good because we are here together. And let the circle be unbroken, let the attitude, the assumptions, the booster pride and loyalty go un-interrogated. I was a fink, a whore, a mopey out-of-touch reactionary. Too often, way too often, the attention was directed not at what I said but where I said it, in the outside world, in a well-regarded publication. This raises an interesting question. Where does one take concerns about a college? To the trustees, scattered as they are, subdivided into committees, happy to be respected in a respected place? To the administration's senior staff? To the last five minutes of a faculty meeting, everybody numb and cranky, hoping that no one will raise his hand in the so-called open forum? To the Campus Senate, a faculty-student-administration body, which spends hours discussing how to count beer kegs and what to do about bog us fire alarms? No way. To make your case locally is to be regarded as a local character in a company town, marginalized and condescended to. So I did what people said I shouldn't have done. I went public. That's public as in public relations, as in public relations problem. Forget the thrust and substance of my argument. Everyone was worried about its impact on the college, on the vision we have of ourselves. Everyone was a spinmeister, an image-doctor, media-wise.

In the months that have passed, months leading to another summer's reflections, nothing really has changed as a result of my speech. An added dash of irony, a little perspective, a heightened but still inadequate sense of the ridiculous are the most I can hope for. But the facts on the ground haven't altered. Just recently a college which has employed lawyers to contend with litigation from fraternities defending their ancient claim on college housing has recently designated part of a dormitory as the "gay, lesbian, trans-gendered, bisexual, queer and questioning" living area. Well, put me down as questioning, as in questioning whether a housing policy that frowns on one group and accommodates others is a coherent policy, whether it doesn't Balkanize the student body in the same way that the faculty is Balkanized. As for the name, one can only pray that Gary Trudeau doesn't hear about it. I'd hate to see my current employer, my alma mater, turning up ... or into ... a Doonesbury cartoon.

There's more. When Christmas rolled around last December, faculty were invited to help serve appetizers and punch at a student holiday dinner. "The students would enjoy seeing you in this informal setting," we were told, "and you are welcome to stay for dinner following." The hits just keep on coming, life imitating bad art. One more, I can't resist. Years ago, a wealthy trustee endowed a February event called - after the first name of Kenyon's founder, an Episcopal bishop, Philander Chase - Philander's Phling. Casino night was part of this year's theme and professors were invited to be blackjack dealers, tattoo appliers, coat check attendants, van drivers. Or we could just wander around "to help keep things running smoothly (i.e. searching out and squashing delinquent acts)."

What, I might ask, paraphrasing my students... what's up with that? What's up is that someone employed by the same college I work for, someone just as hardworking and well-intentioned, has come up with an idea that infantilizes and marginalizes the faculty, exalts student affairs honchos, and spoils students. "What's up with you?" I hear the retort coming back. I have no problems with parties and am willing to forgive a fair share of undergraduate grotesquerie. Midnight howling at the fraternity lodge behind my home, the occasional beer can in my driveway: I can hack it. But underlying all the changes I've mentioned... and many more that I haven't -- trust me on this, they abound, they compound --- is a change in the character of college life, exceptions become entitlements individually plausible changes become collectively subversive, faculty treated as bad-cops one moment, addressed as party clowns the next. Well, if you teach what we teach, the humanities and the arts, you know that the character of the professor is crucial. In the sciences, hard and soft, this is sometimes the case. In the humanities, it is almost always so. What we are is as important as what we do and whatever lessons we teach - about traditions and innovation, style and substance --nothing comes before the urgent need to make what matters to us matter to them: our students, their parents. We don't only convey information, we live it, we incarnate it. And if you happen to profess at a small college, your role as an exemplar, an avatar is magnified, for what small colleges sell is contact with the professor, contact that is not confined to the classroom, not limited to office hours. See your professor at the post office, the bank, the bookstore, catch your professor browsing for bargains at Dollar General and Big Odd Lot, raking leaves, driving loser cars, there's no end to it. Students walking by professor's houses on recycling day can learn whether their kid is on chewable Prozac, who springs for Dom Perignon, who thinks Monsieur Andre will do just fine. These things are knowable and a certain amount of knowing is inevitable, part of the tight weave of life on a campus. Know your professor is a good thing only provided, as one stern Kenyon provost remarked, that the professor is worth knowing. Most of this is good, it's what brought me to a place like Kenyon as a student and brought me back as a professor, the flow of life through a beloved place, part Mount Olympus, part Grovers Corners. The chance for magic is constant and endless. And, so is the risk of nonsense. The possible magic is that students will encounter a professor who will change their lives.

Not every student with every professor, god forbid, but at least one or two professors for every student. If that doesn't happen over the course of four years, someone has been cheated or cheated themselves. So much for the magic. Now for the nonsense. The nonsense that demeans and dilutes, nonsense that, however well meaning is misconceived and misplaced and threatens to turn us into something soft, amorphous and not worth knowing. The first is what I referred to in my comments about Kamp Kenyon: that the proximity of professor and student is corrupted, turning the professor into a glad handling, eager-to-please camp-counselor, a colorful curmudgeonly character who turns out .... surprise, surprise ... to be your new best friend. I belong... and so do many of you, I can see... to the last generation to arrive in college fearing that they might not make it, they might return home as failures. Now things have shifted so utterly that those fears seem quaint: the institution, not the incoming student is on trial, the college, the department, the individual professor all dread failure. Mediators, counselors, residential life experts, disorder experts of all sorts proliferate and the professor, meanwhile... well, consider the last day of class which once was stirring or poignant or a little bit sad because, let's face it, none of these kids will be in the same room with you again, not ever --- and now the last day of class builds toward that moment, that spectacularly cruddy moment when the professor is obliged to pass out student evaluation forms and then, in the interests of jury confidentiality, shuffles off while these forms are being marked and collected. Can there be any better evidence of how things have changed, how power has shifted? Of course an administration has the right ... make that the duty to keep tabs on professors and to solicit the opinion of students in this regard. But could they have found a more demeaning way to accomplish this goal? It's not enough to turn us into teamsters and tattooists. We must be waiters and waitresses as well, placing paper questionnaires folded like paper tents on restaurant tables. Was your order cheerfully taken, was the daily special clearly described, was the coffee hot, the restroom clean? It comes to this: professors are being coaxed into doing things they should not do. And what they should do ... the most important thing they should do ... is being surrounded by buffers, padded walls and safety nets, the perquisites of summer camp, rehab clinic, country club. And the saddest thing of all --- what I did not mention in my speech last year --- is that professors have acquiesced in much of this, collaborated in their undoing, whether in the interests of sloth, scholarship or privacy it's hard to say.

No one comes to a school because of its simpatico dormitory managers, its cool dean of students, its cutting edge alcohol and drug abuse counselors. The professor comes first, work comes first and everything else--- play, humor, sociability, life-long friendship, even --- follows afterward. It accompanies work. It does not precede work; it does not substitute for it. Residentiality is not a synonym for meltdown; small college proximity shouldn't propel a blurring of lines and roles; it should enforce them. Otherwise you get what Ring Lardner called "friendship ripening into apathy." In this grade-inflated, price-inflated era, and especially in the humanities, where we're always suspected of trading in airs and attitudes, a patty-cake reputation is no way to live. Or die. Unforgivable.

I'm almost done. In a rare act of administrative whim I was invited last year to join a committee, a "college marketing committee," chaired by the father of an incoming student, a fellow who was well known for assessing corporate identities, images, brand names. Our purpose, at least when we began, was to differentiate our college from others, what made us special, what made us -- using the world loosely, unique. Bottom line: what did we have that might ratchet us a few inches up the greasy pole of success symbolized by the U.S. News and World Report's annual college rankings? Here again, we see how colleges have gone from master to mendicant. "Will you be admitted to the college of your choice? Will you be admitted to any college at all? ... Are you... or are you not... college material? Those haunting 1960's tunes, oldies but goodies have pivoted 180 degrees. The college is now the one concerned. Will the college be chosen, will it have a good yield, how low will it have to go - how deep into that problematic wait list, before it "makes" its entering class?

Now a confession: I like joining committees at my college, perhaps because I'm invited to join so few of them. Faculty meetings, department meetings --- I'd rather have root canal work. But a fresh committee, chaired by an out-of-towner, a fresh cast of characters, meeting in summer, it might be fun. And there was, after all, an interesting question on the table: What makes us special, as special as we believe we are? That was the big question, well worth asking.

We never answered it. What we ended up doing --- I strain to recall --- was tweaking the website, considering whether we should recruit drama majors to lead campus tours to pump our spiel up a little. There was a survey, which wondered about getting more "big name bands" to campus and creating fine-dining opportunities. Tweaks and massages in the comfort zone, like "we'll leave the light on for you" at Motel Six. The liveliest conversation was about increasing early admissions, which would lead to more acceptances which would hoist our yield and maybe our ranking, etc. etc. as if everyone else in the liberal arts gulag weren't already contemplating, or already doing, the same thing, the same dubious thing. It was like the debates about poison gas in World War I, weighing a transient advantage over a lasting debasement. Whatever you could say about this idea, you couldn't say it was unique. Neither were the offerings around the table, our sports teams, our study abroad program, even our esteemed literary magazine. Nor our new science facilities. Nor our daunting $70 million super gym, a.k.a. "Fitness, Recreation and Athletic Center." Nothing special about any of that. Maybe nice, maybe necessary, maybe not ... but not unique. Then I glanced around at the literature that covered the table, the brochures and self-advertisements of dozens of other colleges. Who were we kidding? They all featured the same handsome pictures, wise feeling and autumnal, multi-cultural kids walking down leafy paths, small groups huddled around caring teachers in coffee shops, laboratories, on the grass in spring time. Close friendships, careful teaching, small classes we were all bragging about the same thing, famous graduates, charming old facilities, cutting-edge new ones.

It's all good, as they say. Well, mostly good. It's the kind of institution, the kind of life I value and defend. But please, spare me the talk of uniqueness. It doesn't hold up except in one way. When I looked around the room at all of us on this college marketing committee and asked myself why is this college special, the answer came to this only this: I am here... at this college. That's unique. That's special. Total solipsism I admit and, in terms of the committee's high-flown mandate, a mighty long run and a mighty short slide. But there you have it. I am here. This is my place, not some other place. And I grant that there are thousands of people at other places who might be thinking the same thing at the same time though not, I hope, on a similar committee. That's all I could come up with and I saw no evidence that anyone else sitting around the table came up with anything more. Still, maybe it's enough. There is something in a liberal arts college that attracts and holds me, something worth having and worth defending, the importance of what we teach, the integrity and focus of the institution we serve. There are pressures all around, cultural and economic, that cannot be denied: the costs of college, the demands of parents, the needs of students, proliferating and escalating. And special pressure on the humanities, to show that what we teach is more than just nice to know: once again the need to make what matters to us matter to them. A constant problem, which we all contend with. I have no answer to this downward drift that besets us. Only three smallish suggestions: I would take a cue from the enthusiasm of parents on visiting day. Reach out to them, as students. And break the unbroken rite-of-passage between high school and college and encourage students to knock around the world before sitting at our feet. Chances are they'd have a deeper appreciation and a greater need for what we do. The third suggestion: consider whether turning out majors these days may be irresponsible, either because they are default majors, avoiding math, lab, foreign language or, conversely, they are clones who head towards graduate school, a costly cul-de-sac for many of them, an outcome which obliges us to write increasingly guilt-stricken letters of recommendation for many years to come. Let's hear it for minors, those chemistry and biology kids who light up our classrooms, who are hungry for the chance to read and write, whose contributions to class discussion leave jaded, ring-wise English majors in the dust. Let's hear it for the business person who wonders what Updike is up to or whether Morrison is sizzle or steak. Let's hear it for the dentist who keeps The New Yorker or the Kenyon Review on his waiting room table.

But nothing will help more than being true to our purpose and keeping our employers true to theirs. What I offer, I realize is no strategy. Sorry. It's a credo. But adherence to that credo... defining our roles, defending our work, defending our institutions... is our best hope. Delete those emails, turn down those invitations, postpone life-long friendships with students until at least a month into the semester, grade honestly, cast a sharp eye on the student whose sick horse kept her out of class. That's my way. It's not special. It is not unique. I hope.