Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1998/11/17/race_writing_and_manhood_at_brown.php
Tuesday, November 17, 1998
'Does anyone know you?' That was the question a Brown University professor screamed across the room at me as I walked into his class, hoping to get a glimpse into Brown's academic life. 'Why did you pick this class?' was his next question. I stood in the classroom dumbfounded, not knowing what to say, as the entire class burst into haughty laughter around me.
This is how Brown University welcomed me. At Dartmouth, professors welcome visiting students into their classroom, or at least, they did so when I was a prospective. Conversely, Brown publicly humiliates prospective students. Interesting contrast.
Brown University has no core curriculum, and it has no requirements either. Students can take an unlimited amount of classes pass-fail. The theory is to allow students control over their own education; the effect is the propagation of a whole lot of ridiculous classes, with no educational or aesthetic merit but plenty of emphasis on political brainwashing.
I had decided to sit in on one of many such classes at Brown — 'English 118: Race, Writing, and Manhood.' This class meets once a week with the express purpose of 'exploring how discourses of gender and sexuality inform literary representations of racisms and racialization.'
The day's lecture topic of 'Whiteness and Masculinity' seemed to evoke little if any interest from anyone. Maybe, the class was still getting over Professor Daniel Kim's last lecture on 'Triangulated Desire, The Homosocial, The Race.' At one point, apropos of nothing, and perhaps to catch the attention of the narcoleptic class, Kim turned to face the class and announced, 'The black man is the penis of the white man.' After this comment I almost walked out, although no one in the class seemed the least bit phased.
Literary Analysis is far too strong a word for what went on in Race, Writing, and Manhood. The entire two-hour long class was a discussion (with Daniel Kim doing most of the talking) of whether or not a character in the assigned reading, named Emerson, was gay. Towards the end of the class I learned Emerson only appeared in three or four scenes in the novel.
When I got the syllabus I learned that this was the only class devoted to this novel. So the only thing that this class discussed about this book was whether one very minor character was gay. No mention of the main characters, no mention of thematic development, no mention even of what the book was about.
Please.
This is literature at Brown University.
I did, however, have some sympathy for Professor Kim. Discussing whether or not minor characters were gay was probably pretty close to the best Professor Kim could do — simply because its discussion did not require that the students had actually read the concerned text.
Over half of the students I asked said they were taking the class pass-fail, so they had no incentive to actually do the reading. It showed: on the one or two occasions that Professor Kim made even a dim allusion to the plot, all he got were bemused stares. Nobody had to read the book, so nobody did. The class was handicapped from the start.
The reading list for the class wasn't much of an improvement over the lectures: it included: Body Politics: Race, Gender and the Captive Body by George Cunningham, The Negro and Psychopathology by Frantz Fanon, and White by Richard Dyer.
There are certainly great novels about blacks in America and about being black in America — Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on The Mountain, Richard Wright's Native Son. These books are worthy, though, because they are novels, because they deal with important things like theme and plot and character development. Even if they are politically inflected, they are not political creeds. Reading tracts on 'Psychopathology' (or at least assigning tracts on Psychopathology; I seriously doubt any of these bored students read them) in an English Literature course seems to me to stretch the bounds of intellectual credibility beyond even what Brown is known for.
The structure of the class was fairly similar to a small Dartmouth literature class. The issues discussed, however, differed drastically from a traditional seminar and ranged far from the texts.
According to Professor Kim, the main issues of the class were 'how and why is it these writers deploy certain figures of 'femininity' and 'homosexuality' in their accounts of white racism' and 'why is literary identification tantamount to the attainment of racially distinct forms of masculine identity.'
Dissent is not exactly tolerated here.
Brown students are allowed to pick any classes they want to fulfill their graduation requirements. There are no required classes. I asked some students about this system; the responses varied slightly but senior David Yun best summed it up: 'I'm totally taking advantage of it.' The Brown program allows students from Brown to graduate without ever taking an introductory class in such core departments as English or Mathematics. Professor Kim said he liked the system because he 'knows the kids in his class are there because they want to be. They aren't fulfilling any requirements by being there.' Whether they are learning anything is also an open question.
I learned several things from my first trip to Brown. Not the least of which was that Brown students, for all their superficial sensitivity, were not particularly friendly. They seemed unhappy, angry (about what I'm not sure Ò maybe just being at Brown) and generally self-absorbed. Their core-less program allows students to choose classes in some of the most politically correct and intellectually irrelevant classes imaginable — Race, Writing and Manhood was just one of many similarly pitiful options.
Education can be productive and it can be silly. I'm sure no one at Brown set out to make their collective curriculum intellectually irrelevant, but the more I saw of the class the more I was convinced that the sort of politically-correct impulses that let classes like Race, Writing, and Manhood exist are best kept out of the Dartmouth classroom.