The argument of this talk is developed in my recent book, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. In the book I discuss a number of different ways by which colleges ‘”withhold the academic disciplines from undergraduates” by failing to clarify the culture of ideas and arguments that, I claim, underlies these disciplines. At first sight, though, this version of my argument may seem self-evidently false. Whatever shortcomings undergraduate programs may have, failing at least to introduce students to the academic disciplines does not seem to be one of them. General education courses provide a rudimentary introduction to the disciplines, and then the various majors give a more intensive acculturation into them. And if the major in English, anthropology, chemistry, history, mathematics, or what you will does anything, it certainly exposes students to the practices and modes of thought of these disciplines, does it not?

In fact, I would answer no. The truth in my view is that what undergraduates are typically exposed to is the subject matter of the disciplines, not the disciplines themselves. Before you reply that this is a distinction without a difference, consider that in the humanities, for example, undergraduates study works of art and philosophy, but, except for a minority of graduate-school bound honors students, they are rarely expected to become familiar with critical and scholarly discussions of these works. As for the social and natural sciences, I defer to those closer to those fields than I am, but my impression is that the situation is similar to that in the humanities. That is, science and mathematics majors study problems in these fields, but are not generally expected to be familiar with the conversations of scientists and mathematicians, much less able to enter those conversations.

Now I would argue that it these critical and scholarly discussions that characterize the disciplines at any moment rather than the discipline’s primary materials. If you study, say, Heart of Darkness, Plato’s Phaedrus, an El Greco painting, or the American Civil War without some familiarity with the state of scholarly and critical discussions of these things, you may come away with an exciting and rewarding experience, but you will not have any sense of these works and events as objects of a discipline, something that means having a sense of the current state of discussion of them. For all you know, you may be viewing Plato or the Civil War the way they were seen in the nineteenth century, and that would no longer be the way disciplines now see them.

Indeed, exclusion from disciplinary conversations has virtually defined what undergraduate study means in the liberal arts tradition. That tradition has assumed the existence of a sphere of “liberal learning” that is independent of and separate from what professionals and specialists in the disciplines are concerned with and argue about. This sphere of liberal knowledge has been assumed to be what we want students to know as human beings and good citizens, not as technical specialists or vocational apprentices. And it has been thought that this sphere of liberal learning can only be compromised and denatured, if not corrupted, by the intrusion of disciplinary conversations. In the humanities, this thinking leads to the view that criticism and scholarship on works of art can only come between students and works of art themselves.

The problem is that that the sphere of liberal learning does not really exist apart from the way disciplines and other professions define it. That is, the conversations of literary critics and scholars about Heart of Darkness are themselves an important part of any serious contemporary understanding of the novel. Such an understanding of the novel would include, for example, the fact that, until recently, nobody saw anything very significant in the fact that Conrad uses Africa and black Africans as his image for the savage impulse that underlies the veneer of civilization and Enlightenment that Europe confidently takes for granted, but that in recent times this representation has become controversial, with some arguing that it smacks of ethnocentrism and racial bias. This understanding of the current state of the conversation about the novel, moreover, would today be expected of journalists as well as academics. Yet if I am right, this and other contemporary critical debates about the novel is only occasionally included in high school college courses.

But one reason why undergraduate research is so potentially transformative is precisely the challenge it makes to this long-standing way of defining liberal education as a sphere that stands apart from scholarly discussion and debate. The premise of undergraduate research, by definition, is that undergraduates can and should be part of the conversation of research scholars, and not merely as spectators but as participants with an active role in research themselves. In one way, this represents a stiff challenge to the traditional liberal arts tradition, but in another way it promises to reshape that tradition by redefining research as part of liberal education. Research in its turn figures to gain by being liberalized, which is to say that scholars may have to define their research less narrowly in order to teach it to undergraduates.

For undergraduate research to advance and grow, however, becoming something more than an option for a small number of honors students, entrenched practices rooted in traditional liberal arts thinking will need to be challenged. These practices are especially strongly entrenched in the humanities, in a way I want now to illustrate by referring to a course handout I recently came on that exemplifies a certain very standard approach to teaching the humanities. The handout was produced and circulated by the instructor of an introductory poetry course.

Since what I have to say about this handout will not be complimentary, I want to say at the outset that as a pedagogical strategy I think it is admirable in the frank, no-nonsense way it cuts through the clouds of mystery that generally surrounds the humanities and lets students in on the sort of thing they are supposed to say about a literary work. This question—what is one supposed to say about literature—is intensely mystifying and thus frightening to many students, yet typically we leave those students to figure it out on their own and punish them at grading time when they struggle to do so. In fact, it is the admirably explicit quality of these prescriptions that will make them vulnerable to my criticism. The problem is not in the fact that they are prescriptive, but in what they prescribe.

Take the comment that “Your goal is to make a convincing argument.” This in itself is admirable and a great improvement over the kind of instruction which asks students merely to gather information and not only fails to ask them to make an argument of their own, but leaves them unaware that making arguments is one of the most important and distinctive things educated people do. The problem, however, is there is no suggestion that when students make an argument, they have to make that argument with anything or anyone. In fact, the model presented of what a thesis statement for an essay about a poem should look like makes it clear that the kind of argument you make in an academic essay is not an argument with, against, or for anybody else, but an argument in a vacuum, as if lost in space.

Here is the model statement:

In “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins uses words with double meanings to express the apparent paradox that submission is more glorious than mastery.

What is immediately striking to me about this sentence is how far it is from anything any critic or any literate person would actually say. Not that one would never speak or write such a sentence, but it could never be an adequate thesis statement. It is not an adequate thesis statement because, as presented, it fails to give any indication of why it needs to be said in the first place. That is why such a statement leaves us wondering, does someone say otherwise? Could someone dispute the claim that Hopkins’ double meanings express the paradox? Since no answers are suggested, the statement fails to answer the “so what” question: okay, Hopkins uses double meanings to express the paradox. So what? Why are you telling me this?

In other words, as presented the statement is pointless, by which I mean nobody would ever think of saying it except in an academic assignment, where unfortunately we do not consider it unusual for statements to be made for no reason and without any point. Of course there is a kind of point--to let the students prove they have read the poem and can make an accurate and coherent statement about its qualities—but the underlying assumption here is that such artificial, make-work discourse is all we can expect from college undergraduates, that they are not capable of entering the kinds of discussions that go on about literature in the real world.

In the real world, where we expect communication to have a point, we would not think of making such a statement about Hopkins double meanings unless we were provoked and motivated by something someone else had said or might say. That is why in the real world in order to give statements a point, writers and speakers present them as conversational responses to others. Which is why in the real world of research and criticism, statements about Hopkins’s double meanings generally take the following forms:

People who have discussed this poem seem not to have noticed that, in “The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins uses words with double meanings to express the apparent paradox that submission is more glorious than mastery.

Or

Most readers will probably think that, in ”The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins uses words with double meanings to express the apparent paradox that submission is more glorious than mastery. Though such a paradox is what Hopkins does indeed seem to be doing, I want to suggest that the paradox is even more complicated than that.

Or

Critics have argued that, in ”The Windhover,” Gerard Manley Hopkins uses words with double meanings to express the apparent paradox that submission is more glorious than mastery. I agree, and would like to show how that paradox appears in other poems by Hopkins as well.

But notice that in order to write in this way you have to have some knowledge of the conversation about the poem and perhaps about poetry in general, or at least be able to imagine hypothetically how that conversation might go. If I am correct, however, it is this kind of conversation that undergraduates tend to be systematically screened from, and screened from it, moreover, in what is assumed to be the carrying out of the mission of liberal education, which is to focus on the great work (or historical event, or sociological or mathematical problem) and not on the scholarly or cultural conversation about the work.

We can now see that this type of assignment arises to meet a pressing need: it provides a way for students to make statements about literature and the arts when they are not part of the culture’s conversation about those subjects. If you can talk about how certain double meanings express a paradoxical theme, then you can write an A paper in a humanities course without knowing anything about or being able to enter the conversation of scholars, critics, and general readers. To put the point another way, by talking about words and themes in a vacuum you can find things to say about literary and art works without resorting to Cliffs Notes. And it is no accident that the boilerplate statement about Hopkins’ “Windhover” in the handout resembles very closely the kind and level of literary commentary that Cliffs Notes provides for students who do not master the art of making pointless statements in a vacuum.

To return to my opening remarks, then, I adduce the “Windhover” handout as a small but I hope not trivial example of how teaching and learning have been constricted and disfigured by a conception of liberal education that leads students to be exposed to the subject matter of the disciplines—in this case a poem by G. M. Hopkins—but not to the conversations about the poem that constitute the discipline and extend out into the wider cultural discourse about the arts. Students are asked to behave in ways nobody practices in the real world, making pointless statements in a void, in exercises that should properly offend anyone who expects his or her education to have meaning. Indeed, I am tempted to believe that many students would actually find the humanities less mystifying, and would accordingly take more humanities courses and actually fare better in them, if such exercises were replaced by ones that asked students to enter some part of the scholarly conversation. Such a shift would have the salutary effect of forcing us as educators to identify those conversations that are most worthy of being presented to students and to make them clearer and more accessible than they have been.