Why College Writing Matters

“Why College Writing Matters”

Ryan Skinnell

UNT Writing Program Orientation

August 20, 2014

Those of you who know me, and especially those of you who have taken my classes, know that I am pretty cynical about composition. My invitation to talk today about “Why College Writing Matters” may therefore seem like the height of irony. But obviously I don’t think it is, otherwise I would’ve had to politely decline Dr. Yeatts’s gracious invitation. In fact, although I am cynical about composition, I am also rather idealistic about why college writing matters, and especially why teaching college writing matters.

For me, the crucial distinction to be made at this point is between composition and writing. The former, to my mind, is a uniquely institutional creature, caught up as it is in discussions about FTEs, assessment reportage, and degree plans. Probably synergies and deliverables, too. Composition in this sense is 150 years old, give or take. Writing, on the other hand, is a couple millennia older and it is neither organically nor necessarily linked to institutions of higher education.

Here’s the other thing about writing—it’s really hard to define in a satisfactory way. I can say, for instance, that my 3-year-old daughter is learning to write just as truthfully as I can say that I am still learning to write. The common thread that ties these two usages, and many others, together is that writing is a form of cultural participation. My daughter is in the early stages of learning to participate in a broadly literate culture; I like to think I’m a little further along in learning to participate in a series of much more focused professional, public, and personal cultures.

Both composition and writing matter, in their own ways. Both, in fact, are absolutely necessary for our existence as college writing teachers. But unlike composition, writing matters in a way that we—as writing teachers—can actually affect on a regular, individual, personal basis. My idealism about writing, then, is grounded in a deep-seated optimism about the possibility of participating meaningfully in culture and about the possibility of helping students to do so, as well.

The remainder of what I have to say today is essentially an amplification of this theme. I’ve broken it down roughly into three sections to tease out what I think are some useful distinctions as we approach the beginning of a new semester. First, I plan talk more specifically about teaching, second about culture, third more properly about today’s theme, why writing matters.

           

First, teaching. I hope you will forgive what is sure to be a classic case of preaching to the choir. I am quite certain that we all believe teaching is important—some of us maybe even think teaching is virtuous. No doubt this belief is reinforced by how challenging good teaching is. In a recent essay for Slate magazine, former Yale professor William Deresiewicz writes that [QUOTE] “College teaching, like any other kind, is a slow, painstaking, difficult process.” [UNQUOTE]. It is complex, uncertain, and often ambiguous. [I warned you that I would be preaching to the choir.] 

The thing is, teaching is also fundamentally a hopeful process. We believe that students can learn, and in so doing, can be better, smarter, happier, and more successful people. And we believe that we can help. 

To be sure, the slowness and difficulty and painstakingness that Deresiewicz talks about can make the hopefulness hard to maintain. As you’re all undoubtedly aware, when you spend days and weeks and months with students who seem not to get what you’re trying to teaching them, it is hard not to come away feeling a little frustrated—maybe even occasionally dejected. And even when teaching works well, the evidence of success may be invisible for weeks or months or years—which can mean “invisible forever” to teachers whose students move on after a semester or two. Yet, despite the all reasons to be frustrated or dejected—and there are plenty—teaching remains at its core an optimistic endeavor.

             

Recently, I had to go see my doctor to update some vaccinations. This was the first time I’d been to see this doctor and he asked me what I do for a living. I bet you can guess what his response was when I told him I teach writing. Right on cue, as if reading from a script: 

“Oh, that’s fantastic. I don’t have to tell you” [BUT OF COURSE HE DID], “Kids today can’t write. It’s all text speak and tweeting.” Etc. etc. etc. 

I have a standard response to these kinds of conventional complaints about “kids these days.” I always respond, “It’s a good thing they can’t write—otherwise I’d be out of a job.” Depending on how snarky I’m feeling, I might also add, “After all, if they could already write, they wouldn’t need college, would they?” 

I relate this anecdote for two reasons. The first, of course, is that it’s a common experience for writing teachers. You could replace doctor with “stranger on an airplane” or “grocery bagger” or “President of the United States” and predict much the same response. Heck, you could replace doctor with “President of the university” and the script would probably stay the same. I find this routine intensely aggravating, and many of the teachers I know do as well. 

But the second reason I tell this story is the reason teachers tell it to each other all the time—it reminds us how hopeful we are about teaching and about students. It illustrates what I think is the hopeful difficulty of teaching—and especially of teaching writing. I am aggravated by the conventional “Kids these days” script because I believe that what I do is worthwhile. And I believe it is worthwhile because I am really, truly, deeply optimistic about students. 

I hope that those of you who have taken classes with me (or will be soon) know this to be true. For all my theatrical blustering, I know that students are enriched by education and by good teachers (a designation to which I fervently aspire). I am hopeful FOR students and I am hopeful BECAUSE of them. I’ll wrap this section here with a quick summation lest I start gushing—teaching is intrinsically an optimistic undertaking, even when it is otherwise burdened by frustrations and delayed gratification.

             

Which brings me to section two: This section will be both shorter and less optimistic than section one. My academic background is in rhetoric, and it is my unequivocal belief that the study of rhetoric is also fundamentally optimistic. Rhetoricians are relentless in their pursuit of positive change through the power of language. We’re practically a bunch of Pollyannas. 

Except, of course, the insistence on bringing about positive change also incessantly directs rhetoricians’ attention to all the negative things that need changing. As it happens, culture—broadly-defined—is a roiling mess of negative things that need changing. Cultures—more narrowly-defined—are also ripe with things that demand positive change. And, as we see in any number of spots around the university, the community, the nation, and the world, the need for positive change is intense. It is also interminable and controversial. 

I suppose this, like the previous section, is preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, it returns me to my definition of writing as cultural participation. What we are enlisted to do as writing teachers is to help our students make sense of and thoughtfully participate in cultures that are roiling messes in need of positive change. So here’s where we are so far: teaching is an optimistic pursuit, and culture is intensely fraught. Based on my definitions, then, teaching writing is a grand paradox.

           

You have no doubt noticed a theme in my talk by now. To wit: the abundant rewards of Teaching…Writing…and Teaching Writing are always complicated by serious obstacles. But, of course, another way to say this is that the slow, painstaking, difficult process of teaching writing is always accompanied by serious rewards. This, to my mind, is precisely why college writing matters. College writing matters because, done well, it is an invitation for students to encounter the complex challenges of the worlds they live in—to participate in them—by holding out the possibility of actually making positive cultural change. 

Granted, this is not a one-to-one transaction. College writing does not necessarily make positive cultural change. In Writing at the End of the World, Richard Miller confronts this uncomfortable truth directly. He writes, [QUOTE] “The dark night of the soul for literacy workers comes with the realization that training students to read, write, and talk in more critical and self-reflective ways cannot protect them from the violent changes our culture is undergoing” [END QUOTE]. His examples are of 9/11, Columbine, and pervasive sexual assault on college campuses, among others. We might update them to include Afghanistan, Ferguson, and countless more. 

Not cheering stuff, and not likely to be solved by 15 weeks’ worth of exposure to Ancient Rhetorics or The Shallows or a half dozen progymnasmata exercises. But Miller is a committed teacher, and as such he cannot help but betray his hopefulness. Miller is non-plussed by claims that reading or writing will empower students, or make them good academic arguers, or will save them from the blight of modern life. He’s not a romantic. Nevertheless, he sees real value in teaching students to [QUOTE] “use writing as a technology to think with.” 

At the risk of oversimplifying Miller’s subtle arguments, I read him to say that writing is a way to explore, confront, and engage in the concerns that shape our lives—not just students’ lives, but our lives as well. College writing may not solve the world’s greatest problems, and in fact it may be one of the world’s problems, depending on who you talk to. But college writing nevertheless matters because it can help students make sense of and thoughtfully participate in cultures that that need positive change. And college writing matters because it does not abandon those processes for students to figure out alone. As I said earlier, whatever the frustrations, teaching writing matters because writing teachers can contribute meaningfully to students’ participation in their worlds through regular, individual, personal interactions.

           

Perhaps it would be worthwhile here to reframe this point about why college writing matters. My doctor thinks college writing solves problems—this is the crux of his complaint about “kids these days,” with their twitterizing, and their text messaging, and their fashionable ankle monitors. But of course he is exactly wrong. Or more precisely, solving problems is the purview of composition—which is assessable and achieves outcomes. 

As I said in the beginning, composition matters, but composition is not writing. College writing in the way Miller invites us to see it doesn’t solve problems as well as it reveals them. Teaching in the way Deresiewicz invites us to see it, likewise reveals problems. In this sense, the paradox of college writing is its greatest strength. The paradox of college writing exemplifies the hope and difficulty of teaching writing more generally.  

And, of course, it’s a beginning, not an end. After 15 weeks of strict drilling, my students would probably not impress my general practitioner with their erudition, nor even probably their punctuation.  

And what I am asking them to do is much harder in the long run than excising dangles from their modifiers.  

And they may choose not to accept the invitation, and they may defer the invitation until long after we’ve parted ways.  

And in the end, of course, the composition creature must be fed. Miller again: [QUOTE] “Students must attend; teachers must be present; papers must be solicited, assessed, returned. And, regardless of what actually happens during this process, instruction must be said to have occurred” [END QUOTE].  

And all of these things conspire to undercut the hopefulness of teaching.  

And yet they are exactly why college writing matters. Because while the college writing classroom is certainly not the only place that students are invited to discover the problems of the world around them, it remains, against all odds, a hopeful place for discovering ways to participate in the process of solving them.

The Academic Job Market--One Thing I Wish I'd Been Better Prepared For

(originally written 10/11/11)

I'm watching several friends take on this year's academic job market, and having just come off the market myself, I have one bit of advice I wish had been shared with me earlier in the application process.

The job market is likely to be one of the most emotional years of your career to this point. One reason is that being on the market is so drawn out. You spend the summer waiting for ads to be posted, you spend September-December writing and sending applications, you spend the same period waiting for requests for more information or invitations to interview, you spend winter break waiting for MLA, you spend the few weeks after MLA waiting for invitations to interview on campus, you spend time after that waiting for additional information and/or an offer. If you get a job, you have to wait 3-4 months for it to start; if you don’t, you start the process again. In short, you spend a year of your life in limbo, just waiting for some resolution.

At every step, you will likely experience incredible highs (“Hinterlands University emailed to ask for my teaching philosophy!”) and incredible lows (“Hinterlands University emailed to say they received 400 applications and do not intend to interview me at MLA.”) In fact, it’s quite possible that on any given day you could experience both peak and valley, maybe even several times over.

The emotional rollercoaster is compounded by any number of other factors: noticing a typo in a job letter that’s been replicated dozens of times, seeing a job posting that seems to describe your exact qualifications, not hearing anything from anyone for long stretches of time, being invited to interview, reading job wikis (avoid this if you can—they can be poisonous), getting unexpected encouragement, learning that a position (or positions) was cancelled, getting helpful or enthusiastic feedback on any of your job documents. The list could easily extend for many more pages, and while the factors may change from candidate to candidate, it’s unlikely that anyone, regardless of qualifications and preparation, will avoid the job market ups and downs.

There are as many ways to meet the emotional challenges of the job market as there are causes of potential emotional swings. I relied heavily on chocolate, meals with close friends, and regular contact with people who could put my “plight” in less emotional contexts; other people pour themselves into work or monster movie marathons. Whatever your preferred method, knowing that your emotions are likely to be running high, and preparing ways to meet those emotional challenges, is nearly as important as any other action that you take during your time as a job candidate, especially if you’ve done a good job of preparing to be a candidate during your time as a student.

On Debates and Disappointments

Every season on American Idol, one of the heavy favorites goes home way too early. Chris Daughtry, for example, was sent packing even though he was apparently far more popular than the three contestants who survived him (including the winner, and subsequent flop, Taylor Hicks). So shocking have the departures been that the show instituted a “judges save” to allow the judges to overrule the numb idiots in the electorate (nobody says outright that they’re numb idiots, but the message is palpable). Additionally, the Idol judges regularly repeat the obvious message that “you have to get out and vote for your favorites if you don’t want them to go home.” The Idol example, silly though it may seem, is instructive for thinking about last night’s presidential debate.

For anyone listening to the debate analysis, Romney wiped the floor with President Obama. I’ve heard commentators announce that Romney “destroyed,” “obliterated,” and “dominated” Obama. On the Diane Rehm Show, the three guests, ostensibly representing the entire spectrum of American political belief, agree that “this format isn’t really Obama’s strong suit.” On MSNBC, Obama’s liberal supporters are like howler monkeys, shrieking about the President’s failure to “show up” and “get the job done.” As on the teevee, there is widespread disbelief and dismay across the liberal social media landscape. And as if that all wasn’t enough, Obama and his team are apparently so demoralized that his handlers barely showed up to spin the debate last night (one Twitter commenter noted 17 Romney surrogates to only 5 Obamanites talking to the press after the debate), and the Obama campaign has been all but silent this morning. Surely, it seems, last night’s debate was a catastrophic blow to the Obama campaign. But, I think we forget too quickly the American Idol lesson.

For the past several weeks, Obama has looked insurmountable following a series of devastating gaffes on Romney’s part. The most prominent one, of course, is the secretly recorded video of Romney calling 47% of the country leeches and victims that has been making the rounds for the past few weeks. The election forecasters InTrade and FiveThirtyEight blog have had Obama at a huge advantage to win both the electoral and popular votes (not much has changed since last night as that’s concerned, by the way—FiveThirtyEight still gives Obama better than an 80% chance of winning the election.). While this seems like a good thing for the President’s chance at a second term, Chris Daughtry can tell you that there’s nothing worse for turning out voters than a sure thing. In fact, the more certain the President’s chances are, the more he has to worry that voters will lose their motivation to turn out on November 6th.

This put(s) the President in a tough position as a debater. Does he, as Chris Matthews and Ed Shultz suggested, crush his opponent on stage to show that he’s the big man on campus? Or does he soft-pedal into the debate, hoping to convince his supporters that the race is still a tight one and he needs their energy, their fervor, or at least their begrudging support come election day? I think we got a pretty good idea of which path Obama decided was the smarter one. It was no surprise, then, when Senior Advisor to the Obama campaign, David Plouffe, said in an interview on MSNBC that Obama thinks that “in the long run” voters will recognize who the best leader is. Anyone who watched Al Gore’s dominating performance against George W. Bush in 2000, and then watched the electorate revolt against the incumbent because mean old Mr. Gore hurt poor Bushie Wushie’s feelings might recognize the genius of this strategy. I assume it was strategic, for what it’s worth, because, while debates might not be Obama’s greatest platform, there is no evidence that I can see that he or his advisors have ever been anything but masterful at campaigning (whether or not you agree that he’s been great at actually governing). The absence of “messaging” or “spin” following the debates reinforced my sense that Obama’s team made a strategic choice that was far removed from winning last night’s debacle.

As I’ve watched the debate analysis over the past 12 hours or so, it appears the strategy is working. Liberals and Democrats (which are not, by the way, always the same thing) have spent lots of hours and energy rehashing and reasserting Obama’s accomplishments as Commander-in-Chief. Obama’s weakness last night has provided an impetus for renewed energy and commitment on the part of his voting base, in no small part because they’re being reminded (ad nauseum) of his accomplishments over the past four years. On the other hand, conservatives and Republicans (again, not necessarily coterminous) have spent much of the same time lauding Romney’s debate bona fides. For Romney, I can’t help but wonder about whether his push to the middle on things like tax cuts, Medicare, and even Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act (“I’ll get rid of Obamacare and replace it with Romney Care on a state-by-state basis?) will re-energize his voting base or de-energize them. I doubt they’ll be rushing to change teams, but there wasn’t a lot of what the pundits call “red meat” for his supporters to get them excited about casting a ballot in his favor. For people whose minds were made up prior to the debates, nothing that happened last night is likely to change their minds, but much happened that might have changed their motivation. For those who have yet to make up their minds, I imagine this event (and all the energy surrounding it) will inform their eventual decision, but only mildly given the inevitable intensity of the next 5 weeks of campaigning.

Which brings me to my final thought, only tangentially related to what I’ve already said. As I surfed Fizzborg, the Twitter, and other haunts of the political commentariat last night and this morning, a theme kept surfacing: these debates were nothing but political theater, and therefore a waste of time. I find this assertion somewhat distressing for a number of reasons, but I will restrain my observation to just two of them here. First, a large number of people claiming the irrelevance of last night’s debates are also, in other circumstances, wont to claim that they’re troubled by Americans’ widespread disconnection from politics and aversion to democratic civic engagement. This is especially the case among academics, and yet, the sort of abdication I saw repeatedly in regards to the debate made me wonder: If we, the people who are supposed to be professionally critically engaged in this type of civic event, can’t get invested, how can be surprised when our fellow Americans don’t engage either? In tuning out, it seems to me, we risk performing the failure of our own beliefs.

 Which leads to my second point. The fact is, a lot happened last night, and the baying of the pundit class was as much a part of what happened as were the lunge-and-parry onstage. The debaters said little and meant even less, but to dismiss it as meaningless theater is a tremendous mistake. This is the political environment in which we live—strategy, messaging, and manipulation are (and have always been) fundamental parts of the process. We act surprised and dismayed, but that’s because we’re playing at being willfully naïve, not because there’s anything so surprising. In fact, there was nothing, and I mean nothing that was truly surprising last night. In the absence of some astonishing revelation, it is easy to dismiss the debates as meaningless. But it is exactly the absence of revelation that invites us, and every potential voter along with us, to consider more deeply the “meaning” of a series of debates that seem absent of any meaning. A tremendous amount of time, energy, and emotion was invested in last night’s event, and to pretend that it was wasted because (1) the debaters weren’t honest or forthcoming enough or (2) the exchange didn’t provide enough revelatory fireworks, is to become the numb, mindless sheep that each party is fond of accusing the other party of catering to.

Conservatives: Hanging Tough?

In the last few years, at least in the 8 years between 2000 and 2008, Americans got a good look at many forms of conservatism. One fundamental tenet of modern conservatism, especially if you recognize the views of people like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Joe the Plumber as representative of modern conservatism, is that conservatives are tough. They're tough on crime, tough on terrorism, tough on foreign policy. They support rugged individualism, hard work, and making tough choices. They supported the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, and the war on terror. They support a strong military, tough border policies, and guns for everyone. Conservatives  would have you believe that they are the only people standing between Americans and those that would massacre them.

In contrast, liberals are supposedly soft, weak-willed naifs. If Republicans are the party of strong national security, Democrats are the party of cut-and-run and surrender. According to conservatives, liberals only care about making everyone feel good with politically correct language, affirmative action policies, and massive government spending. As Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and Beck are all too happy to announce, liberalism (also called "socialism," "fascism," and "communism" by voices of the conservative movement) is going to result in America's fall from grace.

If all you listened to was the way the two sides talked about themselves, it would be easy to fall into the trap of believing that conservatives are hardened, realistic defenders of American values and liberals are gentle, vulnerable, sentimental weenies.

And yet, conservatism is, at least in its current incarnation, nothing less than the fear of nearly everything. American conservatives' entire platform is based on the fear of something: terrorist attacks, government bankruptcy, higher taxes, divine retribution, the weakening of traditional marriages, feminists, the siege of illegal immigrants, Muslim infiltration, watering down of the 2nd Amendment, and on and on and on. I'm not saying they're wrong to be worried about some of these things, but for tough guys, they spend a lot of time cowering in fear of every shadow on the wall and breath of wind in the trees. On the other hand, those sad-sack, weakling libruls are getting pepper sprayed for protesting Wall Street abuse and getting their asses kicked in support of free speech.

Just as I'm not saying all conservative fears are misguided, I'm not saying all liberal demonstrations are justified. I'm simply pointing out that from where I'm standing, the "tough guys" look like a bunch of fraidy cats, and the supposed fraidy cats are standing tough for what they believe.

So I'm left wondering, how did conservatives get the reputation for toughness, again?

What Really Scares Me About Evil, Deranged Lunatics

In the last 36 hours or so, Americans have been collectively weighing the shooting of 71 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There are already volumes of commentary on the pertinent issues, a healthy dose of which I’ve wallowed in since I saw the first headline yesterday morning. Although there are many troubling aspects of this event, I’ve been struck by the insistence of most people to brand the shooter “evil” (Mitt Romney and Barack Obama), “deranged” (Anderson Cooper), and “a lunatic” (EJ Dionne). One thing people across political, religious, and news network lines agree on is that the man was crazy. I understand, and even agree, that these characterizations of the shooter may be true, but I’m troubled by what they seem to me to imply about where responsibility lies.

Certainly, the lion’s share of responsibility must be laid at the shooter’s door—hell, he shot 71 unsuspecting people. It’s both inconceivable and horrific, and there’s no excusing his actions.

What concerns me, however, is that the characterizations of the shooter as evil, crazy, deranged, disturbed, unbalanced, etc. leave ALL responsibility on his doorstep. He was solely, individually, and unstoppably responsible for his actions. You can’t stop evil, after all, you simply must resist it where possible and heal when evil manifests. I heard one commentator, David Brooks, make this point on the radio yesterday—he essentially said, you’ll never be able to prevent a psycho from wounding innocent people if they’re determined to do so. He implied, "So why even try?" The commonplace acceptance of the shooter’s “insanity” reflects our real understanding of what makes a person randomly open fire on a crowd of strangers, but it also indicates that we believe his craziness made us helpless to stop him. We have no responsibility because you can't prevent evil, so why even try?

 If we’re talking about stopping him once he made the decision to arm himself and rampage, I suppose I agree. But to a significant degree, I think that dismissing this shooter (and all the others, at least since Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin in 1966) as “crazy” is a cop out that allows the rest of us—the "normal" people—to excuse ourselves from thinking or worrying about our own involvement in this kind of violence. Calling the shooter "crazy" and "evil" excuses his actions by pretending they couldn’t have been prevented with better mental health care in America, stronger gun control laws, less general romance attached to violence, more social support for students, and on and on. If the perpetrator was "evil," we don't have to bother talking about these things—not really, not for any longer than it takes for the news cycle to pick up something else worth repeating over and over again. Because again, there's nothing we can do.

I’m not, necessarily, advocating better mental health care, gun control, etc., though it shouldn’t be hard to see where I stand on these issues. What I am advocating is a realization that Americans' naïve idealization of individualism, personal responsibility, and social insularity are intimately involved in this shooter’s actions. We are, at least partly, responsible for his actions because we are, at least partly, responsible for the conditions that allowed him to act. The political, religious, and cultural decisions we make collectively create the conditions for these kinds of horrific mass shootings. This should be clear in the shooter's actions—he didn't set out to hurt an individual; he set out to hurt society, presumably because he felt that society hurt him. There's no other reason to attack a theater full of strangers.

While a good deal of time is being and will be spent on determining who's to "blame" for the shooting in Colorado, I submit that we all are in some way because of decisions we make collectively. When we vote to defund mental health institutions in order to save ourselves the tax burden, as was done in California in the 1980s and in several places since, we collectively accept the responsibility for turning people with mental health challenges out of hospitals and into the streets, prisons, and our neighborhoods. When we devise and accept movie ratings that punish moviemakers with strict ratings for sexual content but don’t punish moviemakers with equally strict ratings for violent content, we accept that we will be continually exposed to depictions of graphic violence, as will our children. When we advocate education systems that equate “rigor” to over-working and under-supporting students—where students earn their stripes by surviving the gauntlet—we accept that students' mental and physical health will be tested, and sometimes broken, in the service of “weeding out the weak.” (Incidentally, this happens at every level of the education system, not just at the highest levels of graduate education.) When we claim, as Texas Representative Louis Gohmert and others have, that mass shootings are some sort of divine retribution, we reaffirm the attitude that only "good" people who think like us and believe what we believe deserve our support and care. We also reaffirm the romanticized American attitude that tells people they’re on their own because no one cares about anyone else unless they’re legally or economically obligated to be.

Defining the "evil" people in the world lets us imagine they're not us, and we therefore have no responsibility to them or for them. When we spend our time defining who the good people are, who the bad people are, and who the people are that just aren’t worth our time and money, we accept that some people will be left to struggle and suffer on their own. We accept that some of them will be estranged, and we ultimately accept that some of them will become violent against "us" because we've cast them aside. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a world shared by 7 billion people, but it’s something I think we should do better to try to prevent because it ultimately ends up hurting us all.

To reiterate, the political, religious, and cultural choices that we make collectively create the conditions for the evil, deranged, lunatic actions of people like the shooter in Colorado. If we genuinely want to stop them, we need to collectively decide that “every man for himself” is not the best way to live together. But such decisions take serious dialogue, and they take the realization that “evil” isn’t something that exists beyond the responsibility of “normal people.” Maybe if we’d collectively take more responsibility, instead of writing these kinds of horrific acts off as “crazy,” we’d be better able to have conversations that reach beyond what's good for everybody individually. We'd be able to talk about what we can and should do for ourselves as a collective—a group of people who live together and need to be responsible to and for everyone else, not just the people who agree with us. Or to put it another way, instead of waiting for an evil, deranged lunatic to shoot up a movie theater, college campus, or summer camp to bring us all closer together, maybe we try and get our collective goals together before tragedy happens. Maybe, if we take a little more responsibility for one another, we even end up preventing it.

"Where Have You Gone, Joe Paterno?"

In the week or so since Jerry Sandusky was arrested for violations that don't need rehearsing here, Penn State officials have been under the microscope. In particular, Joe Paterno, the revered coach of Penn State's football team and apparent icon of moral righteousness, has been castigated for his inaction after learning in 2002 that an assistant coach witnessed Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room showers. Paterno claims that he “referred the matter to university administrators,” but he didn't call the police, he didn't follow up with the people to whom he reported the matter, and he seems to have put the whole sordid situation out of his mind. This week, he paid for his inaction by being unceremoniously relieved of his position after 46 years as head coach.

A common refrain among commentators in the past week has been, "How could they let this happen?" The answer that seems to be emerging, especially in light of what looks like widespread covering up of Sandusky's crimes, is that Penn State officials and others were determined to protect the power and prestige of the school and its football program at the cost of failing to protect Sandusky's victims. In a number of commentaries, Paterno is painted as a power-monger, a back-room politician, an arrogant egotist, interested only in keeping his iron-grip on the football program. It is suggested that he knew Sandusky was raping children and simply cared more about his program than he did about children. Why else, asks ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski, "didn't Paterno contact the police when first informed in 2002 by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary of an alleged locker room incident involving Sandusky and a young boy?"

Wojciechowski's question invites a more thoughtful answer than much of the torch-and-pitchfork analysis of the past week has allowed. I want to state unequivocally here that I have no intention of excusing Paterno's behavior or inaction. He owed everyone, especially the victims, better. And I'm not interested in arguing that his firing was wrong--honestly, I have no skin in that game. But, I have been really rather disturbed by the reaction I’ve witnessed because of the anger directed at Paterno. Not that he’s without blame, but I’ve heard far more anger directed at Paterno than I have at Sandusky. Sandusky, it seems, is just some pathetic pervert, while Paterno is the real villain.

I want to grant Paterno a modicum of humanity. However arrogant and egotistical Paterno may be, and whatever power he exercised at Penn State, (Wojciechowski says "often vast and overpowering") I imagine that Paterno must also have experienced an awful lot of fear when he learned of Sandusky's violations. Nothing that I’ve read has been willing to grant Paterno that fear in any kind of real way, and I think it’s worth considering.

The fear that I'm talking about may well include the fear of damage to the football program. After all, Paterno was Penn State football. Penn State football was his identity, and as any rhetorician worth their salt can tell you, there is an incredible, often irrational, kind of fear that accompanies any threat to a person's identity. That's why people often hold tight to ideological commitments even after they've been logically and empirically disproved. But even beyond the fear of damaging the football program, Paterno had an awful lot to be fearful of. For one, I'm sure he feared losing Sandusky's friendship. Paterno had known Sandusky for at least 39 years by 2002. They'd worked together as coaches for more than 30. It may sound stupid to fear losing a child rapist's friendship, and rationally it is. But when you've known someone, especially someone you consider a close friend, for decades, it's hard to turn on that person, even in the face of horrible, disgusting acts. You don't want to see your friends humiliated and punished, even when you know they deserve to be.

The loss of Sandusky's friendship is just the tip of the iceberg. If Paterno thought consciously about things he feared, he probably thought about losing his own job. By 2002, they'd coached for 33 years together. Certainly questions that have come up this week would have come up then. Among them, "How could Paterno not know Sandusky was a predator after working with the man for 33 years?" After all, how can you be intimately involved in everything having to do with Penn State football and not know that your assistant coach and heir apparent is a pederast? If Paterno was in the considering mood, he would have considered the possibility that he'd face serious scrutiny from university officials and the public that might have cost him his job.

Paterno might also have feared misrepresenting, and thereby ruining, Sandusky. After all, allegations of sexual misconduct can ruin a person's life, even if that person is innocent (The McCuan-Kniffen case from the 1980s is one of the more famous and sensational examples). I imagine for someone in Paterno's position, there is always the fear, probably rarely acknowledged aloud, that a disgruntled student or colleague will level false accusations about sexual misconduct as a way to get even for some perceived slight. That fear, I might add, is fairly common among men who hold positions of power, even when that power is relatively minimal. It may very well be irrational, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And I'm sure it crossed Paterno's mind that his actions could contribute to just such a situation.

What seems most likely to me, however, is that Paterno experienced a deep and abiding fear that was both indeterminate and inchoate. The kind of fear that small children feel when they're lying in bed at night. Something unnamed, but very-deeply felt. Except unlike the fear of a bogey monster, the fear I imagine Paterno felt was that everything he knew about his life and believed about himself would be slowly (or quickly) unraveled.

None of these fears justifies doing nothing. But the strain of moral damnation in newspaper articles and blog posts that elicited Paterno's removal suggests that he was malicious and uncaring, driven only by power and prestige. I don't doubt that there was an element of unacceptable self-preservation involved in his decision to “refer the matter to university administrators,” but we would have to accept that he's a monster on par with, even perhaps worse than, Sandusky to accept the characterization of Paterno as full-aware and still completely callous. The fact that he reported it up the chain of command weakens this reading, even if it doesn’t completely undercut it.

If you're still with me, you might be worried that I want here to let Old JoePa off the hook because he looked fear in the face and took some action. He may not have done enough; but he didn't exactly do nothing. I don't want to let him off the hook. But I do want to consider that his fear is indicative of a systematic failure as much as it is a personal one. To put it a different way, whether or not Paterno actually experienced the fears I introduced above, it's not hard to imagine that he did. Fear is indicative of the culture we live in, particularly where there are entrenched systems of power. Indiscretions (or crimes) are routinely covered up for financial and political gain. The examples are too copious to begin naming. Confronting those systems, most of which sustain the lives we live, the jobs we have, and the communities of which we're a part, is to risk being exiled by family, friends, and employers.

It's hard enough when the accuser is also a victim because of how injury is heaped on injury. To take a prominent example, in a recent “news” story about one of Herman Cain's accusers, the "journalist" speculated about the fact that this woman had filed sexual harassment charges at another job she'd held. The unstated verdict: gold digger. Suddenly, she's under as much scrutiny as Cain. This is not an isolated example. Bill O'Reilly famously noted that abductee, Shawn Hornbeck, found things to like about his imprisonment by Michael Devlin. When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of harassment, she was all but accused of being a whore. And, rape victims are routinely accused of "asking for it" by the authorities to whom they report, especially when the alleged rapist is rich, famous, or both. It is no surprise that many victims of one kind of abuse or another choose never to report it. But victims who do report can at least draw from their personal experience to help steel them in the arduous pursuit of justice.

For whistle blowers who aren't victims, like Paterno, the choice is much different. They generally do not have to live with the pain of having been victimized. As a result, their choice is whether to keep quiet or to subject oneself to the kind of pressures that accusers seem inevitably to face. Take for example, Thomas Tamm. He was a Department of Justice lawyer who reported NSA wiretapping during the Bush Administration. For his troubles, Tamm was subjected to a six-year FBI investigation, which continued even after it was widely acknowledged that the program was illegal. During that period, he spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, lost his job at the Department of Justice, and faced imprisonment at the hands of the government.

For people like Paterno and Tamm, the moral decision is clear. You report the crimes because it is the right thing to do. But faced with the available options, it's not hard to imagine that saving the football program is only a small part of the calculation involved in making such a decision. Paterno's silence, while shameful and immoral, is not entirely incomprehensible. His decision to keep his report in-house seems like an attempt to balance the two options available to him. He followed protocol and contented himself that he'd done the right thing and saved himself in the process. It turns out he was wrong on all counts.

All this points to an incredibly complicated situation that raises many more questions than it answers: How should we hold people accountable for turning in possible criminals? How do we begin to reconcile our moral duties with the fears of complete undoing? What does it mean to fulfill ones responsibilities when the people to whom you report are at liberty to forgo their own? In a culture that values everything (and I mean everything) as a potential asset, how do we protect children, and other people, from being coveted as things to “have”? How do we begin to unravel the unacceptable relationship between economic success and silence in the face of sickening crimes? There aren't easy answers to these questions, but they need to be asked, along with many other complicated ones. The real danger is in not asking these questions to begin with and being content with the punishments that have been, and will be, meted out.

Which brings me back to Paterno's ouster. I suppose what I find most disturbing about Paterno’s dismissal is the level of contentedness it seems to grant people. Paterno's dismissal (coupled with Sandusky's arrest) allows people to go back to believing that, now that the cancer has been excised from Happy Valley, things can return to normal. The evil has been purified from the system, the monster has been chased out of town. Except it hasn't. Sandusky's actions aren't the result of football; the cover-up isn't a failing that can be localized to central Pennsylvania; and JoePa's forced retirement doesn't solve a thing other than to soothe the seething mobs (with the exception of the rioters who turned out to support Paterno by destroying their beloved campus--they were apparently not soothed). Paterno is gone, Sandusky will most certainly end up in jail, but the system will roll on until the next shocking abuse of the system and the revelation of its cover-up demands that more heads roll (Even as I type this, I am reading an article about the Catholic Church’s lead investigator into child sex scandals being arrested for possessing troves of child pornography images). The Penn State tragedy isn't just that kids were harmed and the violator was protected; it's also that what happened in Penn State is part of our culture in a way that the tarring-and-feathering of all involved can't touch, much less solve.

The End of Books

I just finished reading an article by Urusula Le Guin in Harpers about the precipitous decline of book reading over the past few years. Le Guin, herself a novelist, is not particularly worried about the decline of book reading. (She notes, for example, that the polls surveying people's reading only accepted "literary" works as valid. Non-fiction books apparently don't count as books.) After, all, people have only really read novels regularly for a few hundred years, at best. Rather, she's concerned that the corporate mentaility of booksellers and publishers compromises the quality of the books that are published.

Like Le Guin, I'm weary of the doomsayers who claim that the decline of book reading is a sign of the apocalypse. There are ample sources claiming that literacy and reading comprehension are declining, but in my experience, the people writing those sources generally define reading, literacy, and decline in really limited ways. The polls that Le Guin's critiques which don't accept anything but "literature" as books are a great example. Another of my favorite examples comes from Mark Bauerlein, who argues that young people are "the dumbest generation" because they don't engage information as their forbears did. Bauerlein denies that social networking is literate work because it's self-involved and lazy. His evidence? Kids don't pass standardized tests the way the once did. The list of doomsayers is long with polemicists.

What seems always to be ignored by doomsayers, though, is that literacy as the ability to read and write is higher than it's ever been. For the majority of human history, the majority of humans couldn't read or write anything. Less than 200 years ago, Americans were actively preventing slaves and many women from learning to read or write. And as Le Guin points out, literacy has always been rationed by the ruling classes as a way to maintain class privilege. In 2009, more people read and write more kinds of language than our "brilliant" forbears could have even imagined 30 years ago. For example, the Senate passed a resolution designating October 20 the "National Day on Writing" in recognition of the way writing shapes our world, and the National Council of Teachers of English sponsored the National Gallery of Writing to showcase a small fraction of the important (and not-so-important) writing that people are doing--people including all those dumb, illiterate young kids that worry Bauerlein and his friends.

I'm not going to claim that all the things people read and write today are better or worse than anything written or read in the past, but in a country that continues to support arguments about everything from health care to drinking water on the twin pillars of choice and competition, it seems a little silly to think that everyone needs to read The Brothers Karamazov to be considered intelligent people, much less contributing citizens. The landscape of new literacies in our digitized, globalized world gives people lots of choices and gives books lots of competition. And people are choosing. They're reading (this blog, hopefully), and they're writing (not this blog, hopefully). Books, contrary to popular belief, are no more moral than any of the choices competing with them for people's literate attentions. To sum up, boo to doomsayers, yay to Le Guin, and three cheers to rampant reading and writing, even if it isn't in the form of language accepted by the doomsayers as valuable.