What to do is obvious, but in English departments of America the last thing they want to do is provide leadership. Why do we have tenure when they would rather not lift a finger?
We have plenty of superb texts now—including in applied linguistics. There is such a need for advanced English language instruction, even for native speakers.
In university and high school they would rather do nothing. Why are they getting paid?
Stupid, aimless teaching is racist and classist.
Three years ago in The New Yorker in “The End of the English Major” Harvard Dean Amanda Claybaugh made this comment:
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.” (The End of the English Major in The New Yorker.)
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I can’t speak for Ivy League profs, but at my level, all the pressure is on passing as many students as possible. Lots of perverse incentives in public higher ed. Lots of problems. Very complex set of circumstances that stem from problems in government, education programs, overwhelming leftist dominance of institutions, student preparation, the gobsmacking growth of administration over the last few decades, and other things. Ironically, many problems stem from well-meaning efforts to hold higher ed accountable.
Government is to blame for a lot of it. But the fact remains that if we were a culture that valued true education, we would have it.
