Margaret Wente Still Knows Nothing About Canadian Universities

It worries me that I agree with so much Margaret Wente writes. It worries me because sometimes her writings deal with things about which I know little, but she is so convincing. When she writes about universities, however, something about which I know a lot, I discover just how faulty is her thinking. Can she be as wrong in her thinking about all that other stuff?

"Want To Know Why Professors Don't Teach," her latest screed, is a familiar lament for the "golden age" of late-1960s post-secondary education. Ms Wente had beers with profs dedicated to teaching small classes. They did not go in for any of that research stuff. Today, she claims, students are all taught by grad students in large lecture theaters while the professors travel the globe to give papers no one attends. Not content with our six-figure salaries and six month vacations, we have bargained our employers down to nine to twelve hours of work a week. In the meantime, students drift away because they have been neglected, and still those of us in the humanities and social sciences are rewarded for researching topics that contribute nothing to society.

If any of this was true, I would expect to see citizens storming campuses throughout the country. But Ms Wente's argument is so faulty that anyone of university age could see through it.

First of all, Ms Wente makes no distinction between different types of universities. After reading the Globe and Mail, you could be forgiven for believing that every Canadian university teaches every introductory class in an auditorium, and that every university has and uses as lecturers an army of graduate students. There is a responsible way to employ students, just as there is a responsible way to employ medical residents, but only someone who never considers the world outside Toronto would imagine that this practice is as common as she describes it. At my university, for example, our introductory composition course is taught to classes of twenty-five students. It would be indiscreet of me to guess at the average age of our instructors, but needless to say they are all experienced teachers. Students in this country can choose from a variety of different approaches to post-secondary education. They can attend King's in Halifax, or they can attend the UofT. Ideally, they can attend one after the other. There is no one way to structure a university: different models have different strengths and weaknesses, but Ms Wente loses any such nuance with her generalizations.

Furthermore, Ms Wente makes no distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences/humanities. Or, when she does, it is only to make a distinction convenient to her argument. She accepts that research in the natural sciences is valuable to society, and she claims that research in the social sciences and humanities is not. But the problem of distracted researchers seems to be on the social sciences/humanities side where, apparently, we have no right to focus on anything outside the classroom. Research programs in the natural sciences are, often, and by necessity, quite large, and one could argue for example that supervising a first-year lab section is something a graduate student could do very well, while the supervisor is freed up to run a research team of dozens of graduate students. One could also make the argument that we should be seeking to give major scientists better opportunities to inspire first-year students. In fact, I would say, the balance between research and teaching is a thornier problem in the natural sciences, for precisely the reasons I set out above. But this reality is not convenient to Ms Wente, whose whole argument hinges on what she judges to be useless research. So, she singles out work done in the social sciences and humanities, where the commitment to research could never be the distraction it might be in the natural sciences, if there was any real distraction at all.

Ms Wente, as we know, finds absolutely no value for research in the social sciences and humanities, and she thinks again of her sainted professors, sometimes without doctoral degrees, who seemed, from her explanation, more interested in socializing with her than teaching her the curriculum. One can only imagine the lessons she received! Imagining for the moment that these people were as good academics as she remembers, and not just good friends, how did they get that way? Were they not influenced by research in the social sciences and humanities? Or are we to believe, instead, that they were all gifted geniuses of some kind? Perhaps they were teaching "appreciation," some version of an Oprah's book club reading? At any rate, I wonder if the advances in English over these subsequent years -- the interesting conclusions we can now draw by looking at alternate versions of books, all that we have learned about how readers respond to texts, all the efforts to include in the discussion hitherto marginalized writers, including women -- would leave addled and discouraged those saints of the 1960s who trained Ms Wente? I suspect that they would not possess the skills possessed by every graduate student today.

The mistake she makes here is assuming that research never finds its way back into the classroom. All, apparently, I should do is teach composition. And so, if I have have discovered material that helps clarify the prejudices and shortcomings of modernist authors, Ms Wente does not believe that I can explain this to my students in any way that benefits them. If I have uncovered forgotten texts that demonstrate more effectively than the canonical works of my period the values of that age, Ms Wente does not believe that I should introduce them to my students. If I have helped explain how the writings of modernist authors themselves shaped the reception of their texts and made their reputations, Ms Wente does not believe that I can train my students to be savvy enough to know when they are being manipulated.

I note in Ms Wente's writing a strange reverse snobbery. Beer is fine and sherry is not. Research that cures cancer is fine, but research that is meant primarily to make the general public more perceptive is not. Ms Wente shares with intellectuals of the late nineteenth century an alarming fear of the masses, it seems, reflected in a very narrow understanding of what education should do. And to make her argument she must create a straw man of the professoriate in the social sciences and humanities. Take, for example, her suggestion of the nine- or twelve-hour work week and the six-month vacation. Well, first of all, I know only of universities with four-month summer sessions. And, in that time, in addition to legitimate vacations (what are those?) and conference and research work, there is preparation to do. If one wishes to introduce new texts in subsequent semesters, when does Ms Wente imagine that preparatory work gets done? Certainly not during a term when I work a whole nine hours a week. In fact, I would estimate that for every hour in the classroom, there are three or four worked out of it. Those papers take a long time to mark, Ms Wente, and those lectures do not write themselves. And, yes, they must be constantly updated. Students call and visit, and now they email, at all hours of the day and night. So, if I want to do any research, I do it on my own time.

I do not disparage your hobby, Ms Wente. Do not disparage mine, especially as it feeds back directly into my professional life.

Comments

[Rohan Maitzen]

Yes, all of the above. Also, as an aside, one of the things I resent most about ignorant diatribes like Wente's is that they make it so difficult for us to have self-critical conversations because (as has been pointed out to me about some of my own blog posts) they play into the hands of people like her who don't want to reform or diversify our work but to dismiss and, ultimately, end it.