Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2003/02/05/the_colleges_antiintellectualism_bourgeouis_administrators_run_amuck.php
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Since they were my age or a little younger, I could read their faces pretty well, and they appeared to be fine, well-motivated people who'd clearly worked hard to help their children get this far in life, and whose best wishes for them were achingly clear.
But then I saw an affable-looking, WASPy guy in his mid 30s, working the people in the room the way a bumblebee works the flowers in my back yard.Since I didn't know anyone there, I was standing around nursing a glass of wine, and the bumblebee, seeing this, soon enough worked his way around to me. I can't remember exactly how he started the conversation. It almost seemed like the fellow was systematically looking for a rich alumnus to be his patron in some way, and he started the conversation with some twist calculated to flatter, something along the line of, 'Well, you've gotten here—what affluent, successful part of town did you come here from?'
'Los Feliz,' I said. This threw him off, a racially, ethnically, economically, and architecturally diverse, somewhat arty area on the fringes of Hollywood.It wasn't Beverly Hills, but I might still be rich.
'I live in Westwood,' he said. I think he gave me the intersection, so if I knew real estate, I could gauge his monthly payment. But I didn't, and I didn't care.
'I like Los Feliz,' I said. 'Best southward facing slope outside of the French Riviera.'
He paused. He gave this a lot of thought. Finally, he spoke: 'Do you live north of Los Feliz Boulevard or south?' He wanted to keep the subject on real estate, not southward facing slopes. If I lived on the right side of the street, there might still be hope. We chatted a little longer, but he'd decided that, whether I was rich or not, there wasn't much more nectar to be gathered at this particular flower. 'Well,' he said, 'gotta talk to some more people.' The bumblebee flew on. I could see that I was back at Dartmouth.
President Wright's presentation was conciliatory. His perceived attempt to all but shut down the fraternities hadn't gone over well with the alumni, and it seemed like Wright was there to back-pedal a little bit. 'Dartmouth is a community,' he said. 'Fraternities are a valued part of that community. By the way, Dartmouth is your home. All alumni can feel as if they can come home to Dartmouth,' and so forth. Oddly enough, a few months earlier I was doing some work in Connecticut, had to stay over for a weekend, and drove up to Hanover to have a look around for the first time since I graduated. In a small way I was glad I'd done it before Wright gave me permission.
But I couldn't help noting with approval Wright's stress on what I believe he called the high and noble purpose and sense of obligation that should come with a Dartmouth education.Whatever my disgruntlements with the College, I was glad to find, in reflecting on Wright's words, some insight into why I'd shown up at the country club that night. But as I drove home, two images stuck with me: the optimistic, trusting faces of the freshman parents, and my bumblebee friend. It's taken me a year to figure out why both pictures have kept coming back over this time: one is a set of expectations, the other is a result.
To explain this further, one term that's kept coming into my mind as I read alumni communications is 'Babbittry'. As soon as I encountered my bumblebee friend, I knew he was a Babbitt. Assuming fewer and fewer readers read second-rank American novelists, I need to define this term. One internet glossary says it '. . . comes from the novel Babbitt (1922) in which the author, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), derides the behavior and character of George Follansbee Babbitt, a fictional middle class realtor.'
This is an excellent start, but what exactly is the behavior involved? Stephan Kanfer in 'The Newest American Credo' expands the definition to include H.L.Mencken, who may have invented the term 'Babbittry' (as opposed to inventing the character Babbitt). For Mencken, Babbittry was a characteristic of the Booboisie, a 'large, bland, self-satisfied group' that Mencken felt 'dominated the American South and Midwest.' It's important to note, though, that Kanfer's essay concerns the need to update Mencken's views to reflect the present day. Blandness and self-satisfaction no longer belong to Midwestern Protestants of the 1920s, but now, in Kanfer's view, 'Babbittry has changed its character and location'. The term should now apply to the groups whose views are articulated by network news anchors, the professional, academic, media, and literary elites.
Essayist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in Salon, says, Babbittry 'became a shorthand way of describing a kind of boosterish provincialism, a disdain for the arts, a smug self-congratulatory belief in prosperity and success above all other values.' He finds an outstanding example in the text of Lewis's novel: ''I'll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those,' George Babbitt says. 'It's because they're required for college entrance and that's all there is to it!' . . . . Shakespeare, . . . for Babbitt, is something useful only for Getting Ahead.'
I would add that, though I haven't seen it in these definitions, I've always thought an additional feature of Babbittry is vapid, self-important, cliché-ridden chatter. This, of course, is a staple of class newsletters, the Class Notes in the Alumni magazine, and so forth. You can certainly say, 'Come on, leave the class newsletters alone. They are what they are. Every class newsletter in the country is like that.' But that's exactly my point. Every once in a while I get a thickish envelope with a Hanover return address, and when I open it, it's my old classmates Peter Punt and Bob Baloney saying something like, 'Well, howdy, classmates, betcha never thought Bob and the Puntster would show up at the Cornell game!!!!! But here we are!!!! And here's a picture of the Puntster to prove it!!!!! That's the charming and beautiful Mrs. Puntster there, too!!!!!! After the game Puntster, the missus, and yours truly had dinner with Bill and Billie Bilious!!!!!!!'(I would add that a search of class newsletters available on the web shows that not all are like mine, and certainly the often-repeated refrain, 'not enough of your are sending in information!!!!!!!' suggests a level of intelligent detachment and good sense that probably exists among most Dartmouth alumni.)
I don't have anything against Puntster or Baloney, but where is the remotest high and noble purpose and sense of obligation here?I'm not looking for Lincoln's Second Inaugural, but is there anything here to tell me these guys ever came close to something called an education? I have a feeling that John Sloan Dickey, who was President during my years at Dartmouth, would have felt that if an alumnus were in any way smug, self-satisfied, or vapid, Dartmouth had somehow missed something.Babbittry, in this view, would be a quality assurance issue. Certainly if I were in a policy-making position at the College, I would think I ought to be losing some sleep every time I see nonsense like what comes from the Puntster and his like, with something like this running through my head, over and over: 'What did we do to get this, and how can we change it? Did we miss something? Is Admissions not screening for something here? What courses did these guys take? What was their GPA?' and so forth.
So I am going to conclude my definition and summarize it here. Babbittry is behavior that, through smugness, self-satisfaction with material advancement, or vapidity, subverts the high and noble purpose and sense of obligation that should invest a Dartmouth education. A Babbitt is a person who displays this behavior. But having raised this issue—and Dartmouth should be examining itself over every conventional Babbitt it turns out—we still should recognize that Punt and Baloney are only the easiest targets, more vapid than smug. A Dartmouth policymaker, for instance, in the event that one might read this, could reply that eliminating the likes of Punt and Baloney would be easily achieved, if only the Administration could proceed uninhibited with its project to close the fraternities and enhance student life, and that would be that. Enjoy yourself in California, Mr. Bruce.
My answer to this would be that Babbitts of the clearly vapid kind probably have their characters well formed by the time they apply to the College, and in any case, only about half the students at Dartmouth are ever affiliated with a Greek house. You would need to show that the Babbitts are all coming from the Row. My own experience as an undergraduate who wasn't affiliated was that vapidity was fairly evenly distributed among the population, and fraternities probably can't be blamed for it—a ding-a-ling would likely not be an attractive rush candidate in any case. I suspect that an only mildly careful perusal of personal essays submitted with applications could weed out more potentially vapid alumni-to-be than are currently rejected. The human condition is an inextricably mixed thing, and binge drinking—even without the presence of healthy, unsalted snacks—is not necessarily in conflict with high and noble purpose.
Instead, I see more resistant strains of Babbittry in places like the 'Faces to Watch' section of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. A photo sticks with me from a year or more back: an alumna, promoted to CFO of a major company, had her picture there. But it wasn't an ordinary corporate portrait—she was out in the woods in a brand new Banana Republic outfit, skipping down a forest path, blonde tresses trailing in the breeze. This was the kind of picture where something kept bothering me. Eventually I saw that it was the problem of the Hitchcock film Lifeboat: how did the camera get there? The lady is having her free-spirit moment, and somebody is taking her picture. For that matter, you don't get something publishable by taking just a snapshot in a leafy glade—lighting is a problem.And since this is a CFO, the picture is likely being taken by a photographer from the corporate PR department, and there are takes. She skips once, click, whirr, click, whirr—and she goes back and skips again. Hair not blowing as well this time, so she skips once again. Click, whirr. Try it with the back pack this time. And so forth.
This photo and blurb appeared in the Alumni Magazine not long before CFOs began to receive a bad odor in society due to corporate financial scandals. A few of them seem to have been crooks from the get-go, but many more, with their complaisant subordinates, appear simply to have been attractive drones, drawn into chicanery a little bit at a time as their companies' outlooks diminished. The alumna in question here appears to have been lucky enough not to work for a company like Quest or Adelphia, where her moral choices would have been stark. But if we follow the principle of faithful in small things, faithful in large, I'm not sure, from the admittedly limited picture she's presented of herself to alumni, if her undergraduate education would have equipped her to deal with those choices. Perhaps other resources might if Dartmouth failed her; let's hope we never need to know.
As well as in the Alumni Magazine, Dartmouth enables others who trivialize education. Every once in a whole I get a color brochure in the mail from Dartmouth Alumni Continuing Education, which seems to have some sort of a deal with a Chicago travel agencyThe travel agency pushes what appear to be for-profit group tours to places like the Greek islands, or in this case, Canterbury and Kent in England. Dartmouth adds its endorsement, complete with a signature from someone called the Director of Alumni Continuing Education, and a Dartmouth professor, active or retired, serves as tour guide.
Where I live, several supermarket chains have established specialized upscale operations designed to attract rich customers. One of the upscale stores has radio commercials featuring a snobby-voiced lady who gives pedantic-but-cute background on their various promotions — special holiday crumpets, say. These, she gushes, are no ordinary crumpets. These are the crumpets that are so special that Queen Victoria herself chose them before her wedding to Prince Albert. Hurry down for your own taste of these special holiday crumpets before our limited supply is exhausted. And so forth.
I open my latest invitation to join Alumni, Parents, and Friends of Dartmouth to find that 'Sir Winston Churchill's will stipulated that there should always be a marmalade cat named Jock in residence at Chartwell. Indeed, you may see the venerable—and portly—Jock III chasing mice in the gardens.'I hear the snobby-voiced lady of the supermarket commercials intoning these lines—I wonder if there's a writer out there who specializes in this stuff, it sounds so like.(Hurry down for our uniquely English marmalade cat food, so special that Sir Winston himself. . .)
I can see my contemporaries, the middle-aged wannabes on the tour, nudging and edging each other out of the way once the bus drives up to Chartwell, each one anxious to see Jock III the cat, visibly disappointed if they don't, and none noticing that in the meantime the brochure appears to elide St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430, author of the Confessions) with St. Augustine of Canterbury (d.604?), as it makes the remarkable statement, 'Saint Augustine founded England's first church here, in A.D. 597'. Note to snobby copy writer: one should identify St. Augustine of Canterbury as either 'of Canterbury' or 'the Lesser' to avoid such confusion, or to avoid the possible, and I would think entirely reasonable, imputation by readers that one doesn't know there were two St. Augustines.
Professor of History Carl Estabrook himself, whom the brochure identifies as 'a native New Englander', will escort the tour (heaven help us if we should have to put up with a professor from someplace like Ohio). I don't know if Professor Estabrook provided input to the brochure on 'St. Augustine,' or if he reviewed the text (he should have) — but the gaffe slipped by, and the Professor may also wish to reconsider whether Canterbury was England's first church; he will find this in any discussion of Augustine the Lesser. Isn't it peculiar that we learn the cat at Chartwell is Jock III (the kind of pedantic detail they love to put in the upscale supermarket spots), but we don't differentiate the Augustines?This all, of course, is Babbittry of the smuggest, most self-satisfied, most bourgeois kind, meat for the likes of Sinclair Lewis and H.L.Mencken, fully endorsed by the College, and enabled by a member of the faculty, which unanimously voted to disestablish fraternities at Dartmouth as being non-conducive to education.
According to the New York Times, '. . . Dartmouth faculty decided more than a decade ago that Greek houses' . . . sometimes downright anti-intellectual attitude outweighed their pluses, and voted to recommend they be abolished. 'They were the antithesis of what a liberal arts college should be,' said Prof. Hans Penner, a former dean of faculty, recalling antics like fraternity brothers competing to see how long they could go without leaving the house, including for classes.' Professor Estabrook's thumbnail mentions that he teaches European History surveys at Dartmouth, which suggests to me that some of the brothers, if they aren't lucky enough to be having their stay-inside-the-house contest, may in fact be taught that 'Saint Augustine' founded the English Church, an assertion doubly rebuttable.
Actually, having seen them from the student side as an undergraduate, I always thought such 'antics' carried with them an implicit, more or less considered, and entirely correct skepticism of the formal Dartmouth experience, by individuals who were neither unintelligent nor anti-intellectual. They won't be making the Valedictory, but that was never in the plan. For instance, 'antics' that involve staying away from class carry with them very concrete education in managing risk, with real consequences. Tenured faculty may, by nature, be unable to sympathize with risk-taking behavior. But the students who do this likely won't be the next generation of corporate yes-people, and in fact may be the real products of a liberal education who'll keep society from stagnating. I've had a high regard for Prof. Penner since I took his Religion courses as an undergraduate, and I know he is thoughtful and intelligent. He probably understands the challenge posed by the students more clearly than he lets on here—and 'antics' has crept into the summary of his thoughts as an interesting word choice. Is he not in fact put out by something like the anti-intellectualism of a Marx Brothers film, which of course is not anti-intellectualism at all?
Clearly the College itself endorses, with its name and over the signatures of its staff and other designated representatives, anti-intellectualism as bad as anything ascribed to fraternities. The difference is that the anti-intellectualism of the fraternities, which in any case is not as obtuse as it seems, is obvious, puerile, beer-soaked, and a passing part of growing up (which, of course, is what college is there for). The officially endorsed anti-intellectualism of the College is more deeply camouflaged in currently respectable bourgeois prejudice, and for that, far more insidious. Observers of the Administration's intent for the Student Life Initiative conclude that the College is embarrassed at a perceived reputation for lack of seriousness, and the College currently identifies the fraternities as the cause. But if I were a College policymaker, I would be tossing and turning just as sleeplessly if I ran across Alumni Continuing Education's silly Village Life in Canterbury brochure as I would at the memory of Animal House.
The criticism has rightly been made of the Student Life Initiative from all sides that, other than a more or less inchoate plan to change fraternities enough to make them unrecognizable, it has had little other focus. It was not, for instance, the sort of grand gesture Robert Hutchins made as President of the University of Chicago when he abolished its intercollegiate football program in 1939. Hutchins pursued a visionary agenda for high educational seriousness that had many components, all clearly expressed and forcefully presented. I thought, in writing this piece, that many others would have seen reason to compare President Wright's endorsement of the Student Life Initiative to Hutchins at Chicago, favorably or not. I've tried many combinations of 'James Wright', 'Robert Hutchins', 'Dartmouth', and 'Chicago' on Google searches on the web, and I come up consistently empty. Nobody compares Wright to Hutchins.
If I were a College policymaker interested in remaking Dartmouth in an image of high educational seriousness, I would be ransacking every aspect of the place. If a truly original thinker came in with that kind of mandate, imagine the experiments that might be proposed in faculty hiring, promotion, incentives, tenure, and the like. (Imagine the spirited national dialogue that would result!) Imagine how one might reexamine issues like academic freedom in the light of current problems. Imagine how one might reexamine curricula, bringing both new and neglected fields forward, putting now-faddish and unproductive ideas on the back burner. By all means re-think residential life, and for that matter everything else.
Instead, the most clearly articulated policy issues we've heard have centered on fraternities, of all things — not quite sure what we should do about them, either — and binge drinking. And every now and then a new community values flap. The current policy initiatives of the College always appear, when they're discussed, as part of a national trend that someone else started. Every discussion of the fraternity issue at Dartmouth refers to things Bowdoin, Amherst, Colby, Trinity, Williams, and others have already done.Dartmouth's policies on 'community values' use a phrase now common throughout higher education, and indeed those policies are listed among those of other institutions that are thought to be problematic for academic freedom.Dartmouth, in short, has been following instead of leading for some time.
And just from a perusal of Alumni communications, it seems like Dartmouth has been turning out Babbitts like General Motors used to turn out lemons, to the point that it seems like end-of-the-age decadence. Perhaps President Wright has had the past four years to get his bearings and will now aggressively clarify his vision of the College's future, bringing the Student Life Initiative into full perspective with the overall educational philosophy he'll begin to outline. Or perhaps another new Robert Hutchins, a new James Conant, a new Ernest Martin Hopkins will appear as a visionary leader in American education. For now, my money is not on James Wright.