LETTER: Distribution revision should be supported
I would like to respond to the apocalyptically shrill forebodings of Professors Morrison and Grandy about the recommendations of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee for distribution in the humanities . First and foremost, the faculty is not being asked to buy "a pig in a poke" but simply to expand to all students what has been required of two-thirds of our entering freshmen for the past six years, an interdisciplinary freshman course taught in small sections in which students read, discuss and write about important texts and issues in the humanities.
In part, we recommend this because the original exemption of humanities and social science majors from this requirement was based upon the transparent fiction (driven by the desire to make the coherent minor work) that students majoring in English, political science and managerial studies would somehow study Homer, Beauvoir, Plato, Michelangelo and Kafka -- or writers and artists like them -- though we knew full well that in reality this was not likely to be the case. But more important, we recommend this change, making Humanities 101 and 102, or some similar interdisciplinary course, a general requirement, because all of the several studies of student and faculty opinion undertaken by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee have shown Humanities 101 and 102 to have achieved considerable success and to have answered a strongly felt desire by students and faculty alike for some significant general education component in the Rice undergraduate curriculum. (Even Grandy and Morrison grudgingly admit that "the humanities courses have not been disastrous.")
But the shrillest and most disingenuous part of their letter is their dire warnings against the adjunct peril, that we are to be swamped by an "army of adjuncts" if we pass this proposal. Why we should require 60 sections is unfathomable to me since we now teach two-thirds of the freshman class in 32 sections, and would presumably require approximately half this number to meet the larger requirement, with the teachers of most of these, I would hope, drawn from the regular faculty.
Their argument verges on sophistry in their demand that we specify that the courses be taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty, which they would have us believe is the soul of Rice's philosophy of education. If that is so, then in the teaching of freshmen Rice has lost its soul, for as that philosophy is implemented in the freshmen courses given in the departments in the humanities it is a shambles and a sham. Most freshmen courses in the foreign languages are taught by graduate students and adjuncts; all eleven sections of English 101 and 102 are taught by graduate students and adjuncts; the basic course in religion is taught by an adjunct. And more often than not, when a freshman course is taught by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member, it is taught in a large class, with no discussion, little writing and exams graded by a grader rather than by a faculty member.
Nor do we have any currricular philosophy for freshman, any sense of what finally must be offered for them in any given year. The freshman American history course that generations of Rice freshmen took disappeared without explanation when the faculty who taught it moved on to other things. And even in the philosophy department where they talk the talk, they don't always walk the walk. This year's entering freshman found Philosophy 100, "Problems of Philosophy," cancelled -- a course which sounds educationally fundamental to me and could surely be taught by any tenured or tenure-track member of the philosophy department. And in the philosophy department, too, in recent years, the Mr. Staff whose name appears in the course schedule so often next to the basic courses frequently turned out to be not a regular faculty member but a one-year or sometimes one-course visitor, i.e., an adjunct.
The reason for all of this is not difficult to understand. Freshmen, by and large, are residual claimants on faculty time. When the individual faculty member satisfies all his or her other interests and inclinations, he may -- or most often may not -- turn to the needs of our freshmen. That is the way it is in our departments. The faculty ignores the freshmen; the administration tacitly condones the practice; and since Grandy and Morrison in their e-mail letter express concern about what applicants might think, I would add that the admissions staff either does not mention or at times misrepresents what our real educational practice in the departments is.
I do not recoil in horror from the use of adjuncts in the humanities courses as Grandy and Morrison do. Some of them are among our very finest teachers. Still, 20 tenured and tenure-track faculty now regularly teach in the basic humanities course, a better record than that of many of their departments. Nonetheless, I would like to see greater involvement by the tenured and tenure-track faculty in teaching Humanities 101 or 102 or even teaching freshmen in their own departments, both because it is a good thing for the freshmen and the right thing for the faculty to do, an obligation that supersedes our inclinations and interests (a distinction I learned from teaching Kant).
As to the strictures of Grandy and Morrison against interdisciplinary teaching, I am surprised. This is an age of interdisciplinarity, "the blurring of the genres" as the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes it, and most of the current developments in the humanities division reflect these burgeoning interdisciplinary interests, the growth of faculty interest groups, the Center for the Study of Cultures and the normal scholarly practices of many of our faculty. Moreover, the most successful of basic undergraduate programs, Chicago and Columbia, have been for many years predicated on the ability of faculty to teach to freshmen texts from a variety of disciplines. And I would add, that the success of our own course only serves to reinforce the fact that this can be and is being done. We believe that the texts we choose are accessible to any intelligent reader willing to work at them, that is, to read them carefully and, if necessary, consult the commentary.
But still the guilds insist upon their ancient prerogatives and, though little interested in freshman education themselves, even there they will either rule or ruin. Though two-thirds of the freshmen now at Rice have read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche, Grandy and Morrison tell us that if the freshmen have not been taught these authors by trained philosophers they would be better off never having read them at all. I will certainly concede that our freshmen would be better served if Grandy teaches them Descartes than if I do (though I won't concede that they don't learn worthwhile things from me), but then again the point is academic since Grandy does not teach freshmen and I do.
I hope the faculty will pass the proposal recommended by the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, for it is based on an educational experiment that has succeeded and rectifies at least some of the flaws in a dishearteningly flawed program of freshman education at Rice. Educationally the Humanities program seems to me the finest program I have been involved in in 33 years of teaching at Rice and I hope that the faculty will support its continuance.
Alan Grob
Professor of English
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the March 18, 1994 issue.
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