Two articles, one in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Why Johnny Can’t Write, Even Though He Went to Princeton”) Jan. 3 and the second appearing on National Review Online Feb. 19 (“College Students Can’t Write?”) raise troubling questions about the courses in which college students should be honing their writing skills.
Time was, a couple of generations ago, that students who graduated from high school were at least competent writers. Now, however, writing has been taken over by the same sort of faddish nonsense that dominates in reading. Instead of teaching students how to use the language correctly, how to construct coherent paragraphs, and how to organize essays, in many schools writing is “taught” by leaving students alone so they can develop their “authentic voices.”
The results are pathetic. In my own teaching experience, I used to have large numbers of college students who not only couldn’t write an intelligible paragraph, but also couldn’t even correctly use “there” and “their.”
So you might think that colleges and universities, which now perform a great deal of remedial education, would be working especially hard to make sure that students master this most basic of skills. Wrong. They aren’t.
When I emailed the two articles mentioned above to a friend who teaches English in the SUNY system, he replied that he had recently been in a departmental meeting in which the subject of teaching writing came up. One female professor sneered that “literacy is oppression.” Alas, that demented opinion is widely shared among professors who are supposed to be teaching students how to write.
In many English departments, hiring decisions depend on whether candidates adhere to the right ideology. Departmental chairmen often want to hire not the most competent teacher, but ideological replicas of themselves, and that often means that consideration is given only to those who espouse Marxist and postmodernist views. To such people, teaching students how to write English well is “hegemony.”
The degradation of the faculty in that fashion has been glaringly apparent at Duke. In his National Review Online article, Stanley Ridgley, a Duke student in the late 1980s, writes, “(former English Department Chairman) Stanley Fish was destroying the English Department with his dubious and expensive radical faculty hires and recruitment of substandard graduate students steeped in bizarre postmodernist theory.” Professors hired to ensure that the English Department remained true to the Fish philosophy have ignored the manifest writing weakness of their students because clear writing (and I’d add, clear thinking) just aren’t a part of the leftist design for America.
Duke isn’t an isolated case. The malfeasance of college writing programs is a national problem. A common complaint among employers from Maine to California is that college graduates they interview and hire can’t write well.
All of this suggests that a highly beneficial project would be to test college students’ writing ability before they graduate. Naturally, such a test would have to be created and administered by atavistic traditionalists who believe that clear and correct writing has nothing to do with ideology and that enabling students to write well is not “oppression” but instead empowerment. If such a test could be devised, those colleges and universities that have not caved in to the dumbing down of writing would have a big selling point in their favor.
George C. Leef is director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.