Hope and Pope in the Penny Press!
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The latest issue of Harper’s very much wanted me to pay most of my attention to 
William Deresiewicz’s cover essay on how colleges and universities these days have been co-opted by a “neo-liberal” agenda that infests institutions of higher learning – and how the students themselves have also been co-opted by this agenda, now solely concerned with what practical, business-world advantages they can get out of their college years instead of, I suppose, wandering the quad in togas contemplating the nature of perfection, as Deresiewicz implies they did in the good old days.
This kind of silliness is the main Harper’s stock-in-trade: Subject X isn’t as good as Subject X used to be back when we were young, and the reasons why are both a) the product of lazy indulgence, and b) not our fault. Deresiewicz uses the formula almost without deviation (the raw chunks of misunderstood or just-plan-wrong information from America’s educational history are a bonus), worrying for thousands of words that students aren’t coming to colleges anymore in order to commune with the Muses but rather to hustle, to make connections, to grab what information they need in order to hurry on to create business start-ups and the like. Whither Pope? Whither Swinburne? “It is not the humanities per se that are under attack,” he writes. “It is learning: learning for its own sake, curiosity for its own sake, ideas for their own sake.” According to him, students aren’t coming to college anymore in order to reflect and think and grow, and the change is having a demoralizing effect on those lonely warriors on the front lines:
All this explains a new kind of unhappiness I sense among professors. There are lots of things about being an academic that basically suck: the committee work, the petty politics, the endless slog for tenure and promotion, the relentless status competition. What makes it all worthwhile, for many people, is the vigorous intellectual dialogue you get to have with vibrant young minds. That kind of contact is becoming unusual. Not because students are dumber than they used to be, but because so few of them approach their studies with a sense of intellectual mission. College is a way, learning is a way, of getting somewhere else. Students will come to your office – rushing in from one activity, rushing off to the next – to find out what they need to do to get a better grade. Very few will seek you out to talk about ideas in an open-ended way. Many professors still do care deeply about thinking and learning. But they often find that they’re the only ones.
This piece wasn’t the first thing of Deresiewicz’s that made me wish he’d occasionally (maybe out of a sense of intellectual mission?) set one foot off an Ivy League campus, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. This is an author who can do all the background research necessary to write a piece like this – research about the internationalization of the jobs market, and about the skyrocketing of college costs, and about the increasing deficiencies of high school education – and come away from it all blissfully untouched by any sense of what it means that college costs at least $25,000 a year, or that for most people, $25,000 a year is a lot of money. Come away from it all still content to write a piece carping at young people for not majoring in the Pre-Raphaelite Aesthetic and then, fully ensouled, leaving college and living the rest of their lives on the annuity Grandfather Bigelow set up during the Pierce administration.
As I mentioned, the magazine clearly intended Deresiewicz’s headline piece to grab my attention, but the real goodies were to be found elsewhere in the issue (just as last month readers had to grit their teeth through a headline piece on parenting by loathsomely self-absorbed people like Sarah “Kid or no kid, it’s still all about me” Manguso before they could enjoy a great essay by Sam Sacks on, well, what’s wrong with war fiction today), ranging from Elaine Blair’s fantastic review of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel to Matthieu Aikins’ searing piece on a dangerous gangster running the streets of Karachi.
But my favorite thing in this issue was the photo-spread by the great Glenna Gordon,
“Romancing Kano,” in which she gives readers a vibrant, complex glimpse into the lives of the women of Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city. She concentrates this Harper’s collection around littattafan soyayya, the “love literature” homemade romance novels written by women and bought by women in a city under siege by a strain of mouth-frothing Islam that would forbid women physical freedom, let alone literacy.
I’ve been to Kano, and I’ve experienced the immense hospitality (and utterly infectious laughter) of Nigerian women, and these beautiful photos both brought back memories of those days and also raised old familiar fears about the candles of those lives being snuffed out. One of Gordon’s photos shows a woman laying on a bed in her home, reading one of these Kano-market novels, and it’s a lovely image, and it takes a minute to remember how enragingly, doubly blasphemous (a woman reading, and a woman reading something that’s not the Koran) such a picture is to the armed Islamic fanatics currently destroying 2000-year-old ruins and mass-kidnapping schoolgirls for sex slavery. It was the highlight of this issue, seeing these slender glimpses of hope.