Rogueish

In the 1950s and early ’60s campus leisure increased considerably, and college costs were low enough that relatively few students worked very many outside hours. Demands on faculty were relatively light. The phrase “publish or perish” goes back a long ways, but it is remarkable how many full professors even in many major schools had published rather lightly. Certainly no pressure to publish a book for tenure. Faculty had almost feudal privileges in their classrooms, and many classrooms were not much more than bull sessions. There was growing pressure to eliminate freshman composition. (The Harvard professor who originated that monstrosity spent the rest of his life condemning it and hoping for its liquidation. “Writing” bears no relation to even literary intelligence and it is a sort of torture to impose a standardized skill in writing on students as their passport to a semi-decent job. School is leisure or it is not school. That is, if freedom consists in living in the present without being terrorized by the future, and if learning is in any way linked to the freedom of the learner. (Job skills simply don’t belong in schools; they should be part of the job. Probably Marx had this in mind when he suggested that child labor would be part of a good society, that labor of course being plentifully interlaced with learning and just lain loafing.)