I commented yesterday on Professor's Berube's article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on how to deal with obnoxious conservative (or perhaps I should say "obnoxious/conservative" or "conservative, i.e. obnoxious"?) students. I emailed him to let him know, as one ought to especially in the case of hard-hitting criticism. He very impressively and politely emailed me back quickly, and at least paid me the compliment of saying, implicitly, that I was not " without qualification the most unscrupulous one I've seen", since he said that about somebody else. After a bit more thought, though, he did say he wanted to comment on one particular part of my entry, which I'll repeat here.

All three books mentioned are obscure (at least I, a well-read person, have never heard of them) modern leftwing novels that, it seems, disparage White Americans. What kind of course is this, anyway, and how did John get in it? Could it be that he is upset over finding himself required to take a course comprised of low-quality, stupid books seemingly assigned for no reason other than the political views of the professor? And might he not be frustrated that none of the other 16 students in the class (a) seems to realize this, or (b) is brave enough to tell the emperor that he has no clothes on?

Professor Berube's response was that Richard Powers is "an extraordinarily challenging, moving book by a writer who's widely acknowledged as one of the greatest living novelists in the country" and I ought not to criticize books I hadn't read. Those two statements are quite true, and so I ought to clarify.

The clarification is actually not complicated. I didn't say that any of the three books is bad. Rather, I suggested a hypothesis for why "John" in the story was upset: that it was because the three books were bad. My hypothesis can be shot down, as any interesting hypothesis can, by contrary evidence--- in this case, evidence that the books are of high quality. They may well be of high quality-- I really don't know, because I would have to know more about them than what I read in Professor Berube's article. That article made the books sound low-quality and stupid, but I bet there are a number of very good books that would sound bad if described in only three sentences.

The obscurity of the three books is a different issue. Even if a book is bad, it might still be worth discussing in an English course if it is widely considered important. And even if a book is good, it might be inappropriate for a course if it is obscure.

This depends quite a bit on the course, and in this case I am writing without knowing what course it was. If, for example, it was a course titled "Low-Quality, Anti-American Novels from 1980 to 2000", then student John shouldn't complain if that's what he gets. If it was a course on artsy American novels from 1985 to 2000, maybe he still shouldn't complain, because maybe most artsy American novels from 1985 to 2000 were anti-American and of low quality. But if it was a required freshman seminar on American literature, or any course that is billed as covering important books, then John has a right to be unhappy.

Now let us return to my ignorance of the three books. I just did a quick web search, and found bio information on Whitehead, Ishmael, and Powers. Whitehead's book actually sounds from the blurb like it might be good science fiction; Ishmael's apparently is a detective novel, a parody of a detective novel, or a detective novel posing as a parody so it can get both sales and critical acclaim; I feel kindly towards Powers because "In 1975, he enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois," something I came close to doing in 1976 (he switched to English to avoid specialization; I ended up going to Yale, starting in history and then finding economics a good compromise between history and physics). But the search confirms what one might think: these are three novelists of the kind that appeal to English professors and win literary prizes.

Does that mean, however, that they are good, or that a well-read person should have heard of them? No. Suppose we compile a list of the 100 best or most important novels written from 1800 to 2000-- the 100 novels we think a well-read person should have read. That comes to about two years per book. I would not be surprised if entire decades chosen from that interval failed to produce even one book for our list. The 1980's and 1990's might well be two such decades. There is, moreover, the greater difficulty of deciding whether such recent novels are good and important, especially if the novel is about topics that are of high interest currently but not for most of history, such as the status of minority racial groups in the United States. For a college course, I would want to think about what novels it is most important that a well-read person should read. I'd like the advice of experts, such as one imagines English professors to be, since I know that in just a few college courses I am not going to be able to read everything that's important. I must prioritize. So the possibility here-- only a possibility, remember, since John might have voluntarily enrolled in that course on Bad Anti-American Novels-- is that John thought he was getting expert advice on which author he should skip for lack of time, Leo Tolstoy or Jane Austen, and instead he was told to skip both and read Powers, Whitehead, and Ishmael.

Consider, reader, your own position. You have limited time. I would guess that the typical person in America who considers himself well-read has read one Jane Austen novel and either War and Peace or Anna Karenina but not both, and has read none of Tolstoy's stories. What will you read next, if I give you a choice between more Austen, more Tolstoy, or Powers, Whitehead, or Ishmael? (My own recommendation is Tolstoy.)

I'll end by addressing one other point: what if the aim of the course is just to use the novel a basis for discussion. Shouldn't we then pick novels to which the students can relate? Yes. But I think it is easier for a student to relate to novels of universal interest such as War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice, dealing as they do with themes such as pursuing the opposite sex and what's important in life rather than the history of American race relations, a topic remote to most students. In fact, our suburbanite students might well have more in common with the 19th century gentry than they do with the 20th century working class.

I ought to have linked this to my earlier entry on the Texas list of biased professors. That entry discusses some very similar issues--what does one do about a professor who chooses bad materials for his course? It is at http://mypage.iu.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.11.28b.htm [permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.12.05d.htm ]

To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.