This Strangely Neglected Topic

Monday, May 14, 2007

Each of the Ivy League schools, quite apart from its overt personality, also exhibits a peculiar, hidden anxiety. Some Harvard kids mistake their own experience for everyone else’s and walk out of that place dazed with a sense that everything’s collapsing around them: higher education, the culture, the planet, the universe, everything. At Dartmouth, the neurosis is a craving for “intellectualism,” which hits like a pregnant woman’s desire for pickles. There is a sudden urge to sip overwrought coffee beverages, to feign enjoyment of the works of Theodor Adorno, to trudge around the library with an expression suggesting profound Weltschmerz, and to grow a weird beard. The neurotic sees himself barnstorming the fraternities in Jean-Paul Sartre’s biplane, which drops billions of leaflets covered continental philosophical gobbledygook.

This is in obvious reaction to the tenor of Dartmouth, which systematically discourages self-aggrandizers and pretenders to Deep Thought. Whereas your average Columbia student gets a golf clap from every passerby who spots the copy of Herzog sticking out of his messenger bag, at Dartmouth you’re more likely to get a beer thrown at you. (And, interestingly, the pitcher may adore the novel.)

The phrase “sentimental education” seems to have two meanings. First, it could mean what Gustave Flaubert meant when he wrote his novel l’Éducation sentimentale: an education of the sentiment, of feeling, of something more lived than mastering physics or “getting” abstract philosophy. It can also imply being sappy, saccharine, or self-serious about book learning. Perhaps I’ve unfairly rigged the comparison, but it seems obvious that very intelligent college students need more of the former and less of the latter.

The trouble is that sappily sentimental education is so much more available than education of the sentiment, which is visible only in retrospect, or, as Hegel put it, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” (How is that for unnecessarily pedantic piling on?) Formative experiences only form after the fact. What is tempting to say—that Dartmouth provides a better sentimental education than other top-tier schools—is rather tenuous, since it presupposes what can only be known much later. Given Dartmouth’s robust social life, however, the temptation lingers.

The American student’s conception of what an intellectual should be is strongly informed by both the Beats and the post-war French intellectuals. If they know one thing about these people, it’s nothing to do with the content of their theories but instead their style and manners—their accoutrements. One standby is cigarettes. Another is the late-night conversation. Whenever students romanticize intellectualism, they always evoke the late-night conversation; it must be what many had in mind when they pictured college life. I have participated in a few of these and have found them maddening and totally ineffectual. The yackers tend to talk past one another, and, if this is a stepping stone on their path to intellectualism, they do not establish propositions and defend them so much as strike a pose. Thus the urge to intellectualism can be deeply unintellectual, more concerned with the appearance of intellectualism than being truly thoughtful.

This is, by the way, very funny. Pretension is at the heart of much comedy. A whole genre—the campus novel—is dedicated to the proposition that eggheads mess up ordinary life because, not in spite, of their intelligence. In Kingsley Amis’s superb Lucky Jim, a young lecturer in history named Jim Dixon finds himself shackled to a senior professor in his department, an oppressive fool, and why?

How had he become a professor of history, even at a place like this? By published work? No. By extra good teaching? No in italics. Then how? As usual, Dixon shelved this question, telling himself that what mattered was that this man had decisive power over his future, at any rate until the next four or five weeks were up.

He is ostensibly at work on an article entitled “The economic influence of the developments in shipbuilding techniques, 1450-1485,” which he can’t bear, for obvious reasons.

“In considering this strangely neglected topic,” [the article] began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.

And as a final lap of his baptism into the scholarly faith, he must deliver a lecture on “Merrie England” to crowd of terrible bores. On the spur of the moment, he prepares too much with drink and delivers these closing lines:

What, finally, is the practical application of all this?... Listen and I’ll tell you. The point about Merrie England is that it was about the most un-Merrie period in our history. It’s only the homemade pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the record-playing crowd, the Esperanto…

Sadly, he then passes out. This is clearly great fun under tremendous presure to be dull; one can see how it might resonate with Dartmouth students. But the charge leveled against Dixon and Amis is that, underneath their snickering, they’re just philistines, who enjoy being contrary and misuse their talents. True: if we were all Dixons or Amises higher education might suffer in the aggregate. But the point, if literature can have a point, is that wisdom and a good life coincide with intelligence and intellectualism only fortuitously. What Jim learns by the end of the novel, no book could have taught him, except for, of course, Lucky Jim.

There’s no expediting sentimental education, then. You can’t ask the sun to send you more or less sunlight; you can’t learn from experience any quicker than you will. This is a daunting thought, though it shouldn’t dissuade us from giving phony intellectualism a fair trial and then shooting it.

This Strangely Neglected Topic

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