Still Crazy After All These Years

By Alston B. Ramsay | Friday, March 5, 2004

"It's not that very good teaching is not going on in English 5," English Chair Peter Travis recently told the Daily Dartmouth, "but we've not had the sense of mission and vision that we think writing instruction should have at an institution as prestigious as Dartmouth."

On the second point, I'll happily concur. But Professor Travis would be wise to sit in on one of Shelby Grantham's English 5 classes before making his first pronouncement. Grantham is more than just a bad teacher. She's horrific.

Prof. Grantham is the subject of a lengthy retrospective on page six of this issue. Two freshmen, who wish to remain anonymous, describe their experience with the nutty professor as she led them through a term of rants and essays on subjects like slave reparations and radical environmentalism—not William Shakespeare, not James Joyce, and not even Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Grantham does not even pretend she will teach students to write. Her biography on the web includes a list of things she'd like to "figure out with students," which include "what to do about racism," "how to make non-violence a national priority," "whether it's possible to share the planet with other species," and finally, "where to seek words to make these questions ring and their answers sing."

That's all fine and dandy, but she misses a crucial point: English 5 is supposed to be about writing—not proselytizing on whatever whimsical idea is on Grantham's mind, be it the War in Iraq or lobsters suffering at the Co-op. (Seriously, she's "not sleeping at night" because of the latter. See page seven.)

According to the course description, however, English 5 is supposed to "hone [students'] skills in expository argument." Professors have a relatively easy task: "Instruction focuses on strategies for reading and analysis and on all stages of the writing process."

Nowhere is Grantham's disdain for this mandate more obvious than the final "Long Paper" she assigns to each of her English 5 classes. Rather than a critical essay, as one might expect, Grantham has students author a ten-page "account of [their] experience trying to change the world." But the assignment is not quite as open-ended as you might imagine:

The subject of the paper is the experience of trying to change your world to make it more racially inclusive. What the thesis will be is anybody's guess. Don't try to outline this paper before you have executed the plan, because you can't know where that will take you. Execute the plan without thinking about how it is going to appear in a paper. (Otherwise, you'll limit the experience and the paper.)

Somehow, this task is supposed to introduce students to the rigors of college writing. Luckily for Grantham's class, however, "it is not necessary to achieve conventional 'success.'" Students don't actually have to change the world in order to fetch an A. They just have to try—and then write about the "experience." I may be missing something, but I'm unclear what this assignment has to do with refining an "expository argument." Of course, I could be out of my element: I did not change the world in my English 5 class. No, our final assignment was just a comparative essay on mimetic desires in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the Gospel of Mark, but I digress.

Grantham is obviously free to do whatever she wants on her own time—no matter how bizarre. The problem is that her outrageous views underpin every lecture, writing assignment, and reading in the class. Students last term had to study "Agree About Abortion," "White Anti-Racists," and "Colorblindness Personified" from Lifting the White Veil, to name just a few. Her syllabus fittingly urged the class to "save trees" and to "save more trees."

Finally, there's the utter lack of tolerance in her classes. Despite her exhortations to the contrary, students who speak out or disagree with Grantham are shut up. Just read the e-mail on page six sent to her class after a student suggested the lack of brown band-aids might not be the result of societal racism. This stance, apparently, originates from a "white supremacist set of assumptions." Indeed, as she noted in class, "White culture is racism. It's based on hate." She's also accepting of men: "I can't read male authors anymore." And she even has words of wisdom on the arcane: "Animals don't know the rules of economics."

I could continue, but I'd be beating a dead horse. With her four English 5 classes this year, Grantham exposed almost almost eighty freshmen to her drivel. Worse, these eighty kids were deprived of their first opportunity to think critically and to write persuasively in a college atmosphere.

There is reason to be optimistic, though. After thirteen years on the job, Grantham does not have tenure—which brings me to my final point. If Dartmouth is truly interested in sprucing up its English 5 curriculum, I have an obvious suggestion: Fire Shelby Grantham. Immediately.

Still Crazy After All These Years

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