Quote of the Day (Garry Wills, on Students’ Declining Knowledge of History)

“Every professor says that what surprises them is how little the new students remember about anything more than two or three years ago. It was very revealing the first time I realized that a student had no memory of the civil-rights movement or Vietnam. They live intensely in the now, and there’s practically no ‘then’ that they have a workable knowledge of.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning historian-journalist Garry Wills interviewed by Cal Fussman for “The Men of Our Time,” Esquire, October 2015

(Photo of Garry Wills by Lauren Gerson, taken on March 10, 2015 at the LBJ Presidential Library, where he was joining the Friends of the LBJ Library to discuss his book, The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis.)

Joke of the Day (Michael Palascak, on What He Should Have Learned As an English Major)

“I was an English major when I was in college. I didn't get a lot of job interviews, being an English major. I should have seen that coming. Foreshadowing.”—Stand-up comic Michael Palascak, Comedy Central special, Nov. 6, 2019

Quote of the Day (Rose Horowitch, on College Students’ Fewer, and Slimmer, Books)

“Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.”—American journalist Rose Horowitch, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” The Atlantic, December 2024

I well remember the shock all over an English teacher’s face in my parochial high school in the mid-1970s when one of her students confessed that he’d never read a book all the way through. When she was finally able to recover her composure, she demanded to know how he’d managed to get through 11 years of elementary and secondary school without accomplishing what she saw as a basic educational task.

My high school classmate would have plenty of company these days. Rose Horowitch’s report from the current groves of academe begins with a student telling a teacher in the literary humanities course at my college alma mater, Columbia University—an institution considerably more selective than my high school way back when—that she, too, had never read a book cover to cover.

Columbia is hardly the only college facing this dilemma. Most of the 33 academics contacted by Horowitch related similar experiences.

So, what gives? The article offers several reasons for this, including:

*Electronic devices that compete for attention with apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

*New educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core that led to short informational passages that mimic standardized tests, rather than longer texts.

*Shifts in values rather than skill sets—i.e., students can still read long books, but they don’t want to.

*Jobs and extracurricular activities that sap the time they need to read in depth.

*Identity politics that makes young readers less inclined to tackle the thinking of writers far away in place and time.

*Grade inflation that doesn’t penalize students for failing to keep up with the course load.

I read with particular interest an admission by Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American Studies professor at the school, that, in now teaching a seminar on short works in American literature rather than a full survey course, he had dispensed with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in favor of the author’s Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

For my American lit survey course back in the day, my class had to read these shorter works and the epic novel. Our professor urged us, if we had time, to get a jump on Melville’s stab at the Great American Novel: “It’s a long whaling expedition,” he joked.

I finished reading this article right after listening to a podcast on the English novelist Anthony Powell, who created a 12-novel sequence chronicling more than four decades in 20^th-century life, A Dance to the Music of Time. Powell’s style is not daunting, and believe it or not, readers years ago managed to plow through most, if not all, of this work.

But it’s inconceivable to me that many readers today will make it through just one of his novels, let alone all of it.

It should also be said courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) have made the appeal of humanities course offering mass immersion in reading less lucrative.

That high school classmate of mine, for instance? He entered the armed forces, where he learned computer sciences—and ended up making considerably more money, after he left the military, than fellow high school graduates who took the time to make it through one long book after another.

(The image accompanying this post, if you haven't guessed it from the guy with the long hair, is a relic from a bygone era, in more ways than one. It shows a Shimer College student reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under a tree on the school's original campus in Mount Carroll, IL. The photograph was published in the school's 1973-1974 catalog. I hope that this seminal work of political science, at any rate, continues to be read in its entirety, but I’m not betting on it.)

Quote of the Day (Douglas Coupland, on College Teaching as a Nerve-Racking Form of Public Speaking)

“One form of public speaking not usually recognized as such is teaching. I’ve had a few experiences in educational situations and they’ve been worse than flies crawling over my face. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work-shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the tiniest of PC infractions. You can’t pay teachers enough to do what they do. Having been in their shoes, even briefly, has converted me into an education advocate. Double all teaching salaries now.”— Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist Douglas Coupland, “Observations: Getting Off the Stage,” originally printed in The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015, reprinted in Bit Rot: Bit Rot: Stories + Essays (2017)

The image of Douglas Coupland that accompanies this post was taken Mar. 17, 2022, in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, by the Wylie Agency of New York City.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Affairs of Dobie Gillis,’ on a Subject on the Minds of Many College Males Shortly)

Advisor [played by Donald Elson]: “What subjects would you like to study?”

Dobie Gillis [played by Bobby Van]: “Well, I don't rightly know.”

Advisor: “What are you interested in?”

Dobie: “Women.” — The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), screenplay by Max Shulman, directed by Don Weis

This post is for a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!) whose favorite subject was women when he entered college five decades ago—and it remains so to this day.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis turned out to be a diverting surprise when I came across it a couple of weekends ago on TCM. I had heard of (but was way too young to watch when it originally aired) the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The show, which ran from 1959-1963, starred Dwayne Hickman as the title character and a pre-Gilligan’s Island Bob Denver as his beatnik friend, Maynard G. Krebs.

In the movie musical, Dobie was played by Bobby Van, who enjoyed a busy career on the big screen, television, and the stage without ever achieving the level of stardom that his dancing talent deserved, while his fresh-faced, funny girlfriend was played, in her ingenue stage, by Debbie Reynolds—who certainly did achieve celebrity.

I didn’t expect The Affairs of Dobie Gillis to be Singin’ in the Rain or The Band Wagon, let alone the stage and screen musical classics later brought to life by Van’s onscreen friend Bob Fosse, Cabaret and Chicago. But it transported me to a time and place in which the biggest crisis was Reynolds’ klutzy experiment in a chemistry class.

And that, during these last fevered weeks in American history, couldn’t have been more welcome.

Quote of the Day (James Thurber, on Gym, A Horror of His College Experience)

“If I went through anguish in botany and economics – for different reasons – gymnasium work was even worse. I don’t even like to think about it. They wouldn’t let you plays games or join in the exercises with your glasses on and I couldn’t see with mine off. I bumped into professors, horizontal bars, agricultural students, and swinging iron rings…. In order to pass gymnasium (and you had to pass it to graduate) I had to pass a swimming test. I did not like swimming and the swimming instructor, and after all these years I still don’t. I never swam but I passed my gym work anyway, by having another student give my gymnasium number (978) and swam across the pool in my place….Another thing I didn't like about gymnasium work was that they made you strip the day you registered. It is impossible for me to be happy when I am stripped and being asked a lot of questions.”—American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961), “University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times (1933)

Quote of the Day (David Spade, on His College Aspirations and Reality)

“In my junior year, I told my counselor I wanted to go to Princeton or maybe UC Santa Barbara. She goes, ‘If I pull all my strings, I can get you into the community college across the street.’”—Comedian, actor, and TV-show host David Spade, on being a high-school underachiever, interviewed by Marc Myers for “Snide Remarks Made Him Cool in School,” The Wall Street  Journal, Sept. 13, 2019

(Picture of David Spade taken Nov. 19, 2016, from a YouTube video, by thepaparazzigamer.)

Quote of the Day (L. Frank Baum of ‘Oz’ Fame, on College Life)

“You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.”— L. Frank Baum, Ozma of Oz (1907)

(The illustration accompanying this post was done for the original edition of Ozma of Oz—the first in which the author was consciously creating as part of a series—by John R. Neill.)

Quote of the Day (Dave Barry, on the ‘Biggest Crisis’ Facing Colleges Today)

“Parking is the single biggest crisis facing American higher education today. Despite the fact that colleges are, theoretically, institutions of higher learning, it apparently has never occurred to the geniuses who run them that anybody would be arriving by car. The result is that most colleges have approximately one parking space per 150 students, which means that many students spend their entire college careers cruising around looking for a legal spot. Many students are forced to park illegally and receive parking tickets, which at your top Ivy League schools can cost $5,000 per violation.” — Dave Barry, Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar? (2007)

Quote of the Day (Mary McCarthy, on Postwar College Students)

“These youths, for the most part, were still squirming in the straitjacket of puberty; their hands trembled when they lit a cigarette; their wrists protruded from their very coat-sleeves; they lived in an existential extremity; every instant of communication was anguish. Besides the beer-and-convertible crowd—the ex-bootleggers' and racketeers' sons, movie-agents' sons, the heavy-walleted incorrigible sons of advertising geniuses who had been advised to try Jocelyn as a last resort—the male part of the college included an unusual number of child prodigies, mathematical wizards of fourteen, as well as some spastics and paraplegics, cripples of various sorts, boys with tics, polio victims. There were a deaf boy, a dumb boy, boys with several kinds of speech-defects; there were two boys who had fits, boys with unusual skin diseases with ordinary acne, with glasses, with poor teeth, a boy with a religious complex, boys who had grown too fast, with long, chickeny necks and quivering Adam's apples. The girls, by comparison, were blooming, healthy, often pretty specimens, with the usual desires and values, daughters of commercial artists, commercial writers, radio-singers, insurance-salesmen, dermatologists, girls who had failed to get into Smith or nearby Swarthmore, girls from the surrounding region, narcissistic, indolent girls wanting a good time and not choosey, girls who sculpted or did ceramics of animals or fashion-drawing, liverish girls, older than the rest, on scholarship." —Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952)