A More Excellent Way

Perhaps academic writing for today’s undergraduates seems akin to a Herculean labor, but why should the Academy let difficulty stand in the way of a co-educational good time? Andy Nash, of insideacademia.tv, interviews Robert Young, professor of English at North Carolina State University, who explains that the traditional composition course has gone the way of the rotary-dial telephone. No one wants to work that hard--neither students nor faculty. In the course of the interview, Young explains the differences between college composition courses, then and now.
[In times past] The regimen of extensively reading many classic works combined with literature professors laboriously critiquing and grading composition papers provided for and necessitated deeper and more quality thought by the student, allowing for better writing both in substance and in form. But with research faculty taking over and managing composition programs that are made compulsory for the masses of new college students – many of whom hail from grade and high schools that also experienced lowering standards - the demand has been to produce new theories on social science and education, not instill the rigors of the same old method and canon of education. Ironically, the “new theory” de jure on education has become just as fashionable as what is popular amidst the contemporary culture of the post-adolescent, pre-adult college underclassmen age group.

In Young’s related essay, a sample of today’s ‘innovative pedagogy’ includes a provocative textbook entitled Composition, Sexuality, Pedagogy. Young provides numerous examples of the author-professor's application of “sexual literacy” in practice, but concludes that any offensive content is far outweighed by the sheer banality and pedagogical vacuity of the project:

[T]he specific content of indoctrination displayed in Jonathan Alexander’s composition classes is probably their least pernicious aspect. The truly destructive element in his “compositionist pedagogy” is that it denies the students the knowledge and intellectual tools to resist the blandishments of the merely sensational and ephemeral, the means to raise “the mind above,” in [John Henry] Newman’s words, “the influences of chance and necessity, above anxiety, suspense, unsettlement, and superstition, which is the lot of the many.” Classic works of literature, history, philosophy, and the like have been disdained, deconstructed, and dismissed from the composition curriculum. Students have instead been immersed in a commercialized popular culture of unprecedented depravity and then invited to proffer any random notions that creep into their heads as “critical” insights, with no attention to the subtleties of style that provide writing with precision and profundity.

The gravitational pull of such nonsense seems stronger each day, as mass culture continues to devour the signs and symbols of the West's rich intellectual heritage. Our escape from such a black-hole of cultural decay must be found in the larger, brighter presences of the cultural heavens, whose eloquence will defend humane learning and draw us back into the orbit of Excellence, for which we were created.