Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2002/03/01/a_report_from_the_time_before_course_guides.php
Friday, March 1, 2002
When I was a freshman at Dartmouth, student guides to classes and professors were yet to be invented. We chose courses blindly or by word of mouth. The first student class evaluation came, as best I can recall, in my senior year, too late for it to be of much use to me, and it hardly mattered, because my career goals were still firmly undecided, and with that objective ahead of me, my grade point average made little difference.
I came to Dartmouth after attending high schools in two different suburban school districts, both well-regarded. In hindsight, between attentive parents and assiduous administrators they must have worked hard to weed out incompetent teachers, because I had none, though I remember one math class where the principal kept slipping into the room to take a seat in the back, and soon afterward it was announced that the teacher had decided on a new career and was leaving in mid-year. So I had no inkling of how things could be, and since (at least in 1965, I don't know how it's done now) incoming freshmen had to elect their courses before they even arrived on campus, I was as na've to the possibilities as a house cat meeting a coyote.
But if I'd had a class evaluation available, I probably would have avoided the freshman seminar I took, and overall that would have been a bad thing for my education. And actually there was no need for me to take that course, since I'd scored high on the Advanced Placement exam. I must nevertheless have lacked some level of confidence in my writing ability. The result was that Prof. Arthur Dewing's seminar on Frost and Conrad was the single worst course I had at Dartmouth, though there were others in the running. But consider that of all the courses I took, I can remember the names of very few of their professors, and the first and last names of even fewer.
Arthur Dewing, by the time I reached Dartmouth, was a wizened, sour-faced man, likely well past normal retirement age. The last time I saw him is the time that most sticks in my memory, maybe a year after I'd finished his class. It was a very cold, gray winter morning, and he was stomping the snow off his galoshes at the door to Sanborn House, his back to me. Maybe he sensed that I saw him, because he suddenly glanced around almost furtively to either side, eyes just a little bit wild. I wasn't feeling ill of him or staring daggers, only watching him as something of a curiosity, and he didn't quite see me anyhow. But it probably wasn't me that gave him a start; it was something else. The only look I can compare to his is the dark, creepy darting of the eyes Humphrey Bogart did in his portrayal of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
His fingers were stained with tobacco, and during class he frequently paused to suck noisily on a pipestem with no bowl attached, the whole thing caked white with dried saliva. This was so visible, and so bizarre, that you couldn't help wondering what had caused it. He wasn't abstaining through any sense of delicacy. In those days you could smoke anywhere but next to a gas pump, and both students and professors routinely lit up in class. It was a mark of his fussiness that when I tried it once, he became very agitated and shouted 'No! No smoking in class!' Whatever the actual regulations were, they were mostly ignored, and this was very unusual.
I don't believe his colleagues allowed Prof. Dewing to teach anything but freshman seminars. While I never made a detailed search, I never noticed his name next to any other courses. In the academic economy, a department with a required course is like a business with a monopoly. An English Department can put its deadwood in the old reliable freshman classes with no fear of losing enrollment. If they couldn't get rid of Dewing at Sanborn House, this is where they put him, and that's where I got him.
The seminar was on Frost and Conrad. When I chose the class, I assumed there was some hidden connection between the two, and Dewing would make it clear. (For a while, until I outgrew it, I kept expecting grand Hegelian syntheses from all my classes.) No such thing. It appeared that Frost and Conrad were the two authors that Dewing felt able to teach. Dewing must have taught at Dartmouth when Frost taught there, but if Dewing had any personal experience of Frost, no mention was made of it in class. He may also have had a vague sense that Conrad, who wrote often of youth and character, might be of interest to young Dartmouth students. But Conrad's young men are not easily understood by people who are simply young, and Dewing didn't have the subtlety to recognize this. Instead, he plodded.
His method was to take the day's assigned texts and read key passages to the class in a windy, declamatory style. I still have the Viking Portable Conrad I used in the class, with each passage Dewing read in class marked. I marked the passages, because I would go back to them as I tried to puzzle over what he wanted in our assigned papers, or I should say I marked the passages until I began to cut many of his classes and stopped learning which places I should mark. The most profusely marked story in the book is Youth.
The action of Youth centers on the properties of coal and the conditions that lead to spontaneous combustion on board a ship. Conrad's narrator looks back on his first voyage to the Far East aboard a collier clearly past due for the scrapyard. Here, marked, is the subject of one of Prof. Dewing's flights:
'Her name was the Judea . . . below her name in big letters, a lot of scrollwork, with the gilt off, and some sort of a coat of arms, with the motto 'Do or Die' underneath. I remember it took my fancy immensely. There was a touch of romance in it, something that made me love the old thing — something that appealed to my youth!' I kept puzzling over passages like this, because after each reading Dewing would expand on how our papers should be written. He seemed to feel the best papers should capture something ineffable about youth, as he seemed to feel Conrad was capturing in passages like these. (His Conrad, I fear, was a sunny-day writer of young people's adventures. We read Lord Jim, not Heart of Darkness.) And he would read from what he felt were the best papers by my classmates, few of them fools. They had, let's face it, reached Dartmouth in large part through a talent for divining what teachers like Dewing wanted and serving it up, laid on thick.
So after the windy, wheezing reading of Conrad himself would come a brief pause for the pipestem, followed by a windy, wheezing reading from Mr. Slickwell's latest 'A' paper, 250 well-organized, well-chosen words on the bracing air of a fall day, with appropriate reflections on the fleeting nature of life. I would go back to the River Cluster after class on dreary winter days trying vainly to compose something like it, though on reflection I had the good sense not to try too hard. I don't think I ever got more than a C-plus on a paper in Dewing's class. I couldn't make head or tail of Youth.
There is a certain amount of wild-eyed idealism in Youth, but the story is being told by an older man who, we are reminded, is drinking heavily while telling it. The plot line is simple: the Judea puts out for the Far East with a load of coal, but once under way runs into a storm that makes the ship leak, and it must put into port for repairs. The details of what was then done to the ship are easy to skim past, but Conrad has them all in place: in order to repair what becomes a succession of leaks, the coal is unloaded, reloaded, and moved around the ship's hold several times. In the meantime, Conrad regales his listeners with stories of the cheerful incompetence of his captain and fellow officers. With the ship finally repaired and the coal reloaded for the last time, the Judea — 'Do or Die' — sets out for the Far East for sure.
Conrad, a career as a seasoned ship's officer behind him, clearly knew the implications of moving coal in and out and around a wooden ship, but what may have been clear to readers for whom coal and wooden ships were commonplace is less clear now. 'The primary cause of spontaneous combustion in soft coal, ' reads a treatise contemporary with Conrad, 'is oxidation. . . . The oxidation process is more rapid with fine or powdered coal. . . . coal piled against wooden beams is apparently more susceptible to oxidation . . . .wet coal must not be placed in storage.' The whole effort in repairing the Judea involves moving wet coal back and forth making it finer and finer, and then placing it next to wooden beams, and this misguided process is a background for the narrator's nostalgic reflections on the wonders of youth..
So I note another windy passage marked as a reading from Prof. Dewing: 'There was all the East before me, and all life, and the thought that I had been tried in that ship and had come out pretty well. And I thought of men of old who, centuries ago, went that road in ships that sailed no better.' But this na've self-congratulation comes less than a page before another passage, not marked, that ends, 'It was no use choking myself. The cargo was on fire.'
I re-read Conrad frequently. I probably wouldn't have gotten to know Conrad well if it weren't for Arthur Dewing's seminar. But clearly Arthur Dewing missed the whole point of Youth. It's not a good story for young people in the first place, because it's less a story about being young as it is a story about being old with few illusions, and young people are not going to take well to it. The Judea — Do or Die — is a ship full of feckless incompetents on a voyage of futility, and clearly it has taken Conrad's narrator years to understand in hindsight each excruciating folly of that voyage. The youth he celebrates is the 'romance of illusions', and those are the concluding words of the story.
I can tell from the frequency of marked passages in my Portable Conrad that I was cutting more and more of Dewing's classes after Youth. I didn't have the life experience or argumentative ability to take exception to what he was teaching, and in hindsight I suppose I took what would be considered the rational course, and what was certainly the path of least resistance. All I had at the time was the inchoate feeling that in characters like Conrad's skipper in Youth or Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon I was looking at someone closer to Arthur Dewing than Arthur Dewing would allow.
But I kept turning in my papers for him. I was never going to get an A or even a B out of the course, but there was some salutary effect in the angry red scrawls I got back on every paper. 'Vague.' 'Tautology.' And so forth. At some point that term, feeling lousy anyhow, I picked up the Daily D and began to notice the writers on the front page and the editorials were writing vaguely and tautologically, and I realized they were probably getting As for it. Things were not going well for me that day. I was breaking up with a girlfriend. Dewing's class was not the only one that was frustrating me. I toyed with the idea of feeling sorry for myself, but something told me I couldn't do that. If the professor was a jerk and someone else was getting As for tautologies, it simply meant I had to hold myself to a different standard from the others, and that was one thing integrity was about.
I was, in fact, justified in the lack of confidence I had in my writing ability, and someone — it may as well have been Arthur Dewing — needed to take me to the woodshed over it. But there are tens of thousands of graduate teaching assistants in any number of universities who could have done the same job. I was getting no particular benefit from having it done at Dartmouth from a professor who should have been weeded out long before. In this area there was no justification for Dartmouth's claim to be an elite institution that valued (or continues to value) teaching, though possibly for other, offsetting reasons, the market continues to hold Dartmouth in high regard despite the continuing presence of egregious cases, such as those The Dartmouth Review cites year after year.
It's puzzling that, at least in the 1950s and early 1960s, some secondary school systems were doing an apparently effective job in ensuring a minimum level of teacher competence, while Dartmouth, at least in certain cases, wasn't — and the rise of published class and professor evaluations by students is plain testimony to that, though as an attempt to remedy to the problem it appears to be valiant but largely ineffectual, maybe a part of the romance of illusions of youth. The annually repeating offenders are testimony as well. Dartmouth—Vox Clamantis in Deserto.