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Letters
To The Faculty Newsletter:
My colleague John Hildebidle's remarks on the problems, rewards, and value of teaching Humanities at MIT [Vol. XI, No. 1, September/October 1998] are especially timely, since the Institute is now engaged in the process of developing a new "communication" requirement, in response to alumni complaints about the deficiencies of their MIT training in this area. I believe that Humanities faculty have a particularly valuable contribution to make to this effort, so long as the aim of improving communication skills is not defined too narrowly.
A narrowly conceived aim of improving communication skills would be mainly instrumental: students ought to be trained to communicate effectively in the professional settings in which they will find themselves after graduation. This is a perfectly worthy aim, one that might best be addressed by each student's major field of study, probably during the student's junior and senior years. Biologists need to learn to write and speak effectively as biologists; engineers as engineers; and so on. No single method or standard would cover all fields, since the precise professional demands and the relevant expertise would vary from one to another. Furthermore, there could be no general consensus about which of the two components of "communication" – speaking and writing – ought to have more time devoted to it: Field A may place greater weight on oral presentation, Field B on writing. At any rate, training in those specific modes of writing or speaking that are deemed necessary for the accomplishment of professional goals would have the greatest impact if it were carried out within each student's chosen discipline during the second half of the student's college career. Having mastered their disciplines' basic principles, juniors and seniors would then start being prepared to conduct themselves as professionals who, in the normal course of their work, must be able to communicate effectively with each other.
But it is obvious – or it ought to be – that there is a much broader, not so immediately instrumental manner of interpreting the aims and benefits of "communication." Besides devoting itself to producing the best young practitioners of various professions, MIT is – or it ought to be – in the business of helping to shape citizens. Or rather, MIT is in this business, willy-nilly, as an institution of higher learning; but it is not turning a profit in it. Our interest in seeing that the holders of MIT degrees are capable of expressing themselves in effective writing and speech goes far beyond the legitimate desire to see them do better in their jobs. To the extent that, after they leave MIT, we are still going to be living with them, voting alongside them, handing over important institutions of the country to them, we have a vital interest in making sure they can use language – as writers, speakers, and "readers" – to reason well, to analyze, interpret, and argue persuasively, to experience and share new areas of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure, to enrich their lives and ours.
We are very, very far from achieving this goal. The majority of the students I teach here (and I believe my experience is not out of the ordinary) are very bright, and they are often very interested, but most of them are terribly deficient in the ability to read closely and critically, and their writing and speaking comes nowhere near doing justice either to the complexity of the material they are confronted with or (and this is the saddest part) to their own intelligence. None of them get to spend anything like the time it would take to develop the skills and knowledge they would need for this; none of them have the time even to cultivate the "interest" in developing such skills and knowledge.
And these are the students, as John Hildebidle points out, who are not compelled to take my courses, but who arrive in them through some combination of choice, HASS requirements, and the coercion of an otherwise crowded schedule. Behind them lies that larger body of students I never see. Some of these, of course, are taking other HASS subjects that do place a premium on verbal abilities, but others of them find ways of fulfilling HASS requirements in courses that do little to assist them in this area. Exploiting the loopholes in the current HASS-D system, the members of this last group, no doubt because they accurately assess their own weaknesses, avoid courses in which their writing will be held up to serious scrutiny, courses that will challenge the notion that the "what" of writing is something entirely separable from the "how."
If it can be agreed that good writing and speaking are matters of more than simply professional concern, that they are skills adaptable to and essential to all areas of public life, then how are we to nurture them? There are both narrow and broad, instrumental and non-instrumental answers. People will profit from intensive work on their writing and speaking, conducted in small classes with lots of individual attention and lots of practice. The "Freshman English" classes offered at many institutions are the most familiar model, though the gains achieved in them are often lost in the ensuing college years, after the minimal requirement has been fulfilled. As the faculty has properly grasped, students ought to work at their writing and speaking in each of their four years at the Institute: there should be no way out of or around this principle.
But beyond mere competency lies the region of real sensitivity to the possibilities and perils in language, of full appreciation for the range of achievable effects. No one ever gets to this Shangri-La; improvement is never finished. But to get anywhere near it, even to become aware of its existence, can be done only by those who spend time reading, thinking about reading, talking about reading, and writing about reading. Good writing – and I mean writing whose effectiveness resides not just in making no mistakes but in lifting the writer's perspective and voice above the merely competent, in rendering it distinctive and memorable - is achieved much more by absorption, imitation, and experimentation than by drilling; which means that it is gained more slowly.
The recent debates and deliberations over the communication requirement have had the effect of clarifying a problem with MIT's identity that has been long in the making. Now more than ever before, MIT wants to be regarded as the peer (or superior) of institutions such as Princeton, Stanford, Cornell; it cares enormously about how it is ranked in comparison with these. Yet they are universities, whose curricula at least attempt to reflect the universe of learning which the title conveys. Our Institute has always rejected that model; so that, in appearing on those lists of "top universities," its name will always be accompanied by an invisible asterisk, its claim to a place among the others will always remain moot. Full and unqualified membership in that exclusive club comes only at a price MIT has been unwilling to pay, or even to consider paying.
For my part, and at the risk of being thought delusional, I would advocate the creation of a core freshman and sophomore curriculum in the Humanities and Social Sciences, requiring all undergraduates to take certain writing-intensive courses that would introduce them to an important body of literature, history, philosophy, and social and political thought. Such a program might best begin with small writing-intensive workshops, offered by the Literature and Writing sections, and then proceed in the second year to more substantive courses in the above areas. At a minimum, one course per term for the first two years, with the amount of class time devoted to writing workshops declining and the amount devoted to substantive intellectual issues increasing, as one went along. No doubt there would be much debate about just what such courses should cover, but that is a secondary matter. The first is to acknowledge the benefits that could be derived from such a program, both for the Institute and its students. I agree with John Hildebidle that teaching only those students who have chosen to take our courses is a blessing, but it is the blessing that comes with accepting our marginality.
I hope you will credit my sincerity when I say that I went into the Humanities because I believed the kinds of things I've written here, and that my believing them is not just the result of my wish to improve the institutional standing of the discipline to which I happen to belong - though, like everybody else, I am hardly averse to that idea.
James
Buzard
Associate Professor, Literature
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