Indira Gandhi, a CUNY
undergraduate recently wrote on his final exam, was the wife of Mohammed
Ghandi. This startling bit of information reached me in the same week that a
friend who teaches at Princeton raved about brilliant screenplays and short
stories his freshmen had just written about Bahadur Shah Zafar and communal
riots.
I reacted somewhat ungraciously
to my colleague’s joy. Taking pleasure in the excellence of one’s students is
only natural, of course. But the week of final exams, for professors no less than for
students, can have overtones of Hum ne
maana, yeh zamaana, dard ki jagir hai. (For non-aficionados of filmi shairi, that’s “I accepted that this age is the fiefdom of pain.”) Needless
to say, the pain is worse in the trenches. In those circumstances, for
Princeton faculty to exult “Where do they make these kids?” is a bit like
buying a car at a Mercedes dealership, exclaiming about what a nice car it is,
and asking (rhetorically) where it was made. But mostly, my dard had to do with the discovery of
Mohammed Ghandi in my classroom.
To be fair to CUNY undergraduates,
howlers like that are rare. We usually get one per class per semester.
(“Buddha? Have we heard of this guy?” greeted me in my first year.) And
usually, there is a prosaic explanation. The student answering the question
about Mrs. Gandhi, for instance, had not come to class very often. Nearly every
other student knew who Indira Gandhi was
(although one did try to cover her bases by describing her as “the daughter of
Nehru Gandhi”), because they had not been absent the day I lectured about
Indian politics in the mid-1960s. Nevertheless, a missed lecture is not much of an excuse, since anybody who has finished high school can
reasonably be expected to have heard of Buddha, and even to know that ‘Mohammed Ghandi’ is not an alternative
spelling of ‘Mahatma Gandhi.’
To say that the public schools of
urban America have major problems is to understate the obvious, and I will not get
into those issues in this short essay. I will limit myself to noting that at
CUNY, where training schoolteachers is a large part of our mission, we
contribute to those problems by taking in, and then sending down, people who are sometimes shockingly
unqualified to teach. Still, bad teachers and poor funding are not adequate
explanations for the crisis of secondary education in this country; if the
institutions are at fault, so are the clients. I am not talking about problems
of ‘intelligence’ or even about learning disabilities. I have in mind a more
diffuse problem of culture that is laid bare at an institution like CUNY, which
seeks to provide – or rather, confront – the products of urban high schools
with a standard liberal-arts university curriculum.
The symptom of this culture is a
pervasive indifference to academic work that sometimes reaches the level of
hostility. Its commonest form is not mistakes on examination papers, but
missing class. On the first day of every semester, I make an earnest – and, I
hope, frightening – speech about the importance of regular attendance, the
correlation between attendance and grades, and so on. Students look surprised
and skeptical, and many do not shake that skepticism even after the results of
the midterm examinations have driven my point home. Come to class every day?
What an idea. In one class, I encountered a sardarni complete with turban
(something you rarely see on Sikh women in India, but immigrant subjectivities often
call for overcompensation): highly intelligent, reasonably
well-informed, confident, articulate, entirely promising. The A was there for
the asking. Yet she displayed a curious habit of skipping class every once in a
while, ignoring the polite warnings. On the final exam her luck ran out and the
missed lectures caught up with her. Schade.
Examinations themselves become
rituals of cultural revelation. Students will simply fail to show up for an exam,
without prior notice or subsequent anxiety, and expect to be given a make-up
test. During any two-hour final examination, some students will stroll in half an hour
late, not looking the least bit flustered. During the same test, a few will
hand in their blue-books thirty minutes into the session, so that some students
are leaving while others are still walking in. Nobody cries, hyperventilates, goes into convulsions or faints, in the way that thirty or ninety minutes of forfeited
examination time might trigger at, say, Princeton, not to mention an Indian
university. It’s just not that big of a deal.
There are, of course, gratifying
exceptions. In general, there are two kinds of exceptional students at the CUNY
colleges. One is the exceptionally diligent. In the past semester, I had two
young women in my class who had taken the course, and failed, the previous year.
They came back, as failed students sometimes do, to try again. But unusually,
they tried very hard, beginning with identifying where they had gone wrong the
last time. One contacted me before the semester began to ask for reading
assignments, and did not miss a single class. The other, sullenly silent last
year except for occasional displays of ‘attitude,’ was impressive with her eager
participation this time around. (She began the semester by sending me a note
reading “I’m back! Boo!”, but I refused to take the bait.) Both students
finished the semester with B’s.
CUNY is, indeed, a mecca of second chances. It is a place where people who have made a mess of their initial encounter with higher education, but become more determined and disciplined, can start over. They include faculty with burned fingers and broken ladders, but mainly it's the students: the public-school teacher's aid who has realized she can do better, as well as the Olympic-level show-jumper, so academically driven that I would tease her about it in class (she was one of the few who did hyperventilate about the clock during exams), who writes an essay on gender and class identity that is so good that I read it aloud to my mother, herself a former professor. When they are aware of their limitations, they tend to rise above them. Teaching such students is in some ways more satisfying than teaching the ones that shine immediately and effortlessly. But even the easy shiners – the other exceptional type at CUNY – have a tendency to stumble at the finish line, tripped up by the limitations of what we have been able to do for them, and by the culture of Mohammed Ghandi.
CUNY is, indeed, a mecca of second chances. It is a place where people who have made a mess of their initial encounter with higher education, but become more determined and disciplined, can start over. They include faculty with burned fingers and broken ladders, but mainly it's the students: the public-school teacher's aid who has realized she can do better, as well as the Olympic-level show-jumper, so academically driven that I would tease her about it in class (she was one of the few who did hyperventilate about the clock during exams), who writes an essay on gender and class identity that is so good that I read it aloud to my mother, herself a former professor. When they are aware of their limitations, they tend to rise above them. Teaching such students is in some ways more satisfying than teaching the ones that shine immediately and effortlessly. But even the easy shiners – the other exceptional type at CUNY – have a tendency to stumble at the finish line, tripped up by the limitations of what we have been able to do for them, and by the culture of Mohammed Ghandi.
It might be argued, not without
merit, that the ‘culture’ that I have in mind is nothing more or less than a
culture of poverty: that absenteeism and tardiness are bread-and-butter realities
for a student body that comes substantially from the working class and
small-business backgrounds. Many students have jobs that necessarily take
priority over classes, and/or must take care of children or other family
members. But it quickly becomes apparent to the professor who those students
are: they are slightly frantic, apologetic, and will almost always explain the
problem. They are rarely the casual late-comers and no-shows. One of my best,
most serious, students this past semester was a mailman, who would – as often
as not – rush into class late, postal uniform soaked in sweat, mumbling with a
wry smile that he had not been able to get away from work in time. Another
student, after having missed a couple of classes, waited sheepishly in the
corridor with her little daughter for permission to enter the classroom; she
had not been able to find a babysitter. She wrote a fair paper analyzing
Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night from
a Gandhian perspective, comparing (Mahatma, not Mohammed) Gandhi’s utilization
of the press in the Salt Satyagraha with the handling of the media by anti-war
marchers in Washington in 1967. No CUNY faculty member that I know is
unsympathetic to such students or unwilling to accommodate their needs, even if
it means turning an indulgent eye to a seven-year-old in the classroom. (The
children, I should say, are almost always impeccably behaved.)
The majority of the absent and
the late, however, have no excuses beyond dead grandmothers. (“I had to go to
Guyana for the funeral,” said a student who had missed an exam and was demanding
a make-up. I asked for a boarding pass stub or ticket receipt, which was not
forthcoming.) They don’t come to class because they have better things to do; the
notion that school is the most important thing in the life of a college student
is not a part of their cultural make-up. The dynamics of a commuter school,
which is not one’s home like a residential college but a place that must
compete with the obligations of home, come into play. Their families are often
struggling but they are rarely destitute. Families do, however, become a
problem in ways that are unimaginable at Princeton or Berkeley. They are often
profoundly ambivalent about university education. In an abstract sense, they ‘support’
it and want their children to have the degrees that come from it. They typically
make the necessary financial sacrifices. But at critical moments, they fail to
provide the necessary push, or actively get in the way.
It is, for instance, a ubiquitous
experience for faculty at Queens College, and presumably the other CUNY campuses as well, to find themselves trying – and failing
– to persuade their best students to look beyond New York City for graduate
school. Queens may be New York’s most ethnically diverse borough, but it is
also, paradoxically, highly provincial. (The other boroughs are no different,
for the class of New Yorkers that goes to CUNY.) The world beyond the bridges
and tunnels might as well be Uranus. Parents balk, and not just with girls.
Last year, one of my students was accepted into the Ph.D. program in
history at the University of Edinburgh. His India-born parents refused to let
him go, although they would have been quite willing to finance his studies had he
been accepted into the CUNY Graduate Center. Another student – a vivacious, sardonic,
absurdly promising young woman, also of South Asian origin – was, likewise,
given to understand that while marrying ‘out of state’ was acceptable, studying
‘out of state’ was not. A brilliant Orthodox Jewish girl who could,
potentially, have entered any doctoral program in the country was told firmly
that she would remain in New York City and study accountancy.
These restrictions are, to some
extent, the peculiarities of immigrants who come from outside the
university-educated upper classes of their old countries. Having been
dislocated, dispersed and stripped of social status once by emigration, they
are reluctant to see another dislocation, dispersal and demoralization, brought
about this time by the prospect of children moving away to ‘find themselves’ at
distant universities, beyond the cultural oversight of parents and husbands.
What is liberating to the ‘model minority’ at Stanford and Columbia is deeply
threatening, and not quite as important, to the classes – often from the same
ethnic backgrounds – that sell the model minority their ethnic groceries. For
the latter, higher education is not just about upward mobility, it is also
disruptive: a place and a current where one can tread gingerly, but not become
immersed or swept away.
For professors in the classroom,
this ambivalence on the part of the clientele poses all kinds of problems,
which I flippantly summarized as dard.
Faculty in the CUNY colleges come from the same undergraduate and graduate
programs, and usually the same class backgrounds, that feed any other university
in this country. Dealing with a student body that does not share the standard
priorities of university education – manifested in very basic things like
coming to class, taking notes, and taking examinations seriously – is almost
inevitably a shock, and it would be disingenuous to represent this as something
other than a type of culture shock. (I would add grinning inanely at your cell
phone to the list of shocking behavior, but I suspect that happens at Princeton
too, and that my horror is generational rather than class-based.)
Beyond culture shock, and far
more serious, are the problems of pedagogy. There are, I think, two issues
here: one tactical, the other strategic. Tactically, it becomes very difficult
to teach the serious and the semi-serious, the capable and the severely
underprepared, in the same classroom and from the same syllabus. Mohammed Ghandi
inevitably imposes restrictions on what can reasonably be assigned and what
questions can be asked, either in discussions or in examinations. There is no
point in assigning a book or article that two students will read and one will
understand. For the sake of Mohammed Ghandi, readings are cut to the bone,
which necessarily undermines the education that we might offer to those who can – and would like to – read, discuss
and write at a much higher level. These students, like the young Indo-Guyanese-American woman who wrote this paper on Orwell and Kipling, then become
lost exceptions, awkwardly stranded in classes where nobody else is on the same
page. Strategically, it becomes difficult to answer the question of just what
CUNY’s undergraduate programs are supposed to achieve. If the goal is to train
university graduates of a recognizable standard, then the current arrangement
is seriously flawed; those of our students who reach that standard do so in
spite of the system, not because of it. If, on the other hand, the goal is
merely – as one colleague put it – to ‘make them a little better,’ then is it
reasonable to deploy the title, curriculum and credentials of the university? There
are no answers – nothing practical, at any rate.
There are, of course, all kinds
of imaginable institutional fixes. CUNY is a sprawling, bloated structure that (except at the level of doctoral study) desperately
prioritizes quantity over quality, so changing that would be an obvious place
to begin. We can call, quite reasonably, for significantly higher standards for
admission, a clear separation of missions between the community colleges and
the four-year colleges, the early and aggressive identification of the severely
challenged and the promising, and their separation into discrete academic
tracks, smaller classes for seminars and writing workshops, and the provision
of discussion sections for all lecture courses. When grading papers, I am often
struck by the phenomenon of the half-understood concept, which is also,
ironically, a gateway into unexpected insight. Answering a question about
nationalist thought in India and Pakistan, several students wrote that while
Hindutva is incompatible with secular democracy, the Two-Nation Theory is not.
It was clear from their answers that they had only a partial understanding of
the Two-Nation Theory, and the fault is undoubtedly mine to share. But it was
also evident that they were not entirely wrong and had stumbled into a complex
analysis. The only way to unearth and unpack these things in time is discussion
in a small group, in addition to the usual three hours of lecture each week. But
additional hours of instruction and the small-group format are expensive,
beyond the financial reach of CUNY in the age of budget cuts. And other reforms
– higher admission standards, for instance, or the dismantling of CUNY altogether
to restore the autonomy of the individual colleges – are politically untenable.
The political aspect of the
problem is, of course, inseparable from the financial: CUNY is paid for with
votes just as much as it is paid for with money. As an institution, it is
curiously representative of post-colonial democracy, in which the Brahmin
institution of the university has been taken over by Dalits – and the notorious
Mohammed Ghandi – for their own purposes and imaginations, creating a hybrid
that is necessarily somewhat painful for the pundits. But that pain is
inseparable from unusual compensations that are also hybrids: turbaned sardarnis,
rebellious girls in hijabs, intellectually inclined mailmen anticipating the demise of the postal service, retired dentists who
remember Kissinger’s stance on the Bangladesh war, a brilliant young feminist
who asks, worriedly, if there is a lot of violence in the Mahabharata before she begins to read Vyasa's poem. CUNY is
a backwater, but it is also a frontier, the Deep Space Nine of higher education, and sometimes it becomes necessary to
remind ourselves of that.
May 25, 2012
