Freshman English in the Age of Revolution

The political biases of most universities are probably, by now, well-known to most readers of national review. A number of books, notably William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and John Coyne’s The Kumquat Statement, have dealt comprehensively with them. But as a member of the English faculty of a small state university, I have become aware of a relatively recent encroachment of the counterculture on the curriculum: the proliferation of politically oriented, self-consciously “hip,” and decidedly left-leaning anthologies designed for use as “readers” in English composition courses.

Though English requirements differ from school to school, freshmen in most universities have long been required to take a one-year course which is variously titled, but is usually known unofficially as Freshman Composition. The course has never been very popular with students, and chances are most graduates have painful memories of trying to figure out what a predicate nominative is, or remembering a dozen or so different ways of developing a paragraph; of wading through an essay by Edmund Burke, or trying to contrive interesting lies about how they spent their summer vacations. But if these alumni were to revisit their old classrooms in many schools, they would find that times have changed. The students who enter these days are less likely to be burdened with an oppressively heavy grammar than with a brightly colored paperback anthology bearing a title such as Crisis, The Subversive Voice, Encounter, Relevants (that’s really the way they spell it), Now, or (ready?) Grooving the Symbol. Most of the anthologies focus on a predictable list of current social topics: racism, Vietnam, the draft, the generation gap, drugs and so on. In the choice of authors Burke and Arnold Bennett have given way to Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Goodman, Mario Savio, Bobby Seale and other figures loosely associated with the New Left. If verse is included in the volume, the Beatles are more likely than Tennyson to be the editor’s choice. Whether the freshmen like the course any better than they ever did is doubtful, though they may be less likely to characterize the selections as “dull.” But the value of a textbook, whatever its alleged purpose, cannot be considered apart from the nature and quality of the ideas put forth in it—and here is cause for alarm.

JT

About the Author

John William Teel

Featured Tags

William F. Buckley Jr.

Whittaker Chambers

Russell Kirk

Edmund Burke

The political biases of most universities are probably, by now, well-known to most readers of national review. A number of books, notably William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and John Coyne’s The Kumquat Statement, have dealt comprehensively with them. But as a member of the English faculty of a small state university, I have become aware of a relatively recent encroachment of the counterculture on the curriculum: the proliferation of politically oriented, self-consciously “hip,” and decidedly left-leaning anthologies designed for use as “readers” in English composition courses.

Though English requirements differ from school to school, freshmen in most universities have long been required to take a one-year course which is variously titled, but is usually known unofficially as Freshman Composition. The course has never been very popular with students, and chances are most graduates have painful memories of trying to figure out what a predicate nominative is, or remembering a dozen or so different ways of developing a paragraph; of wading through an essay by Edmund Burke, or trying to contrive interesting lies about how they spent their summer vacations. But if these alumni were to revisit their old classrooms in many schools, they would find that times have changed. The students who enter these days are less likely to be burdened with an oppressively heavy grammar than with a brightly colored paperback anthology bearing a title such as Crisis, The Subversive Voice, Encounter, Relevants (that’s really the way they spell it), Now, or (ready?) Grooving the Symbol. Most of the anthologies focus on a predictable list of current social topics: racism, Vietnam, the draft, the generation gap, drugs and so on. In the choice of authors Burke and Arnold Bennett have given way to Eldridge Cleaver, Paul Goodman, Mario Savio, Bobby Seale and other figures loosely associated with the New Left. If verse is included in the volume, the Beatles are more likely than Tennyson to be the editor’s choice. Whether the freshmen like the course any better than they ever did is doubtful, though they may be less likely to characterize the selections as “dull.” But the value of a textbook, whatever its alleged purpose, cannot be considered apart from the nature and quality of the ideas put forth in it—and here is cause for alarm.