A Literary Education and Other Essays by Joseph Epstein

Author:Joseph Epstein [Epstein, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Axios Press
Published: 2014-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Part Five

Education

A Case of Academic Freedom

(1986)

My office in the English Department at Northwestern University is in University Hall, an American gothic joke of a building whose architect might have been inspired by Charles Addams, if the building weren’t much older than the cartoonist. Yet I have grown enamored of this absurd pile of limestone, where for the past twelve years I have had an office and done most of my teaching. Located on the second floor, my office overlooks what is known on campus as “the rock.” The rock is a boulder, roughly seven feet high, perhaps six feet in diameter, and a marker and meeting place for undergraduates. Fraternity and sorority pledge classes regularly paint the rock, students set up tables near it to sell T-shirts or yearbooks or campus magazines or to collect for charities. From ten minutes before the hour until the hour is struck, there is fairly heavy traffic near the rock, with students passing on their way to classes or back to their apartments, dormitories, fraternities, and sororities.

Fancying myself old Mr. Chips(tein), sometimes I stand at the window of my office and gaze down upon the students as they congregate around the rock or on the steps of University Hall. I note especially students who have been in my classes, many of whose names, only a year or two later, I have quite forgotten or will soon forget. As I watch them pass, I wonder what plots life has in store for the two upper-middle-class girls from a suburb outside Minneapolis who are in Ralph Lauren duds, or for the punkily dressed theater major who was such an atrocious speller, or for the Chinese pre-med student who did so well in my course in advanced prose composition. I wonder, too, about the future of the students who are members of the campus political organization that is known as InCAR (standing for International Committee Against Racism), who frequent the purlieus of the rock perhaps more than anyone else and are always there on heavy political business: to collect funds for striking coal miners in the north of England, to aid the guerrillas in El Salvador, to crush the guerrillas in Nicaragua, to beseech the university to divest from South Africa, to halt a showing of the film Birth of a Nation, and more, always much more. Like the village idiot hired by the shtetl in which he lived to await by the village gates the coming of the messiah, the students of InCAR appear never to be out of work.

No one would ever accuse the InCAR kids of having flair. Say what you like against the sixties—and I would say a very great deal against them—the students who took part in the tumult of those years at least appeared hugely to enjoy the Dionysian fringe benefits that went along with their ostensibly Apollonian goals. The pleasure of the sixties, after all, was in doing exactly what one pleased while appearing at the same time to be doing good.

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