Bright students are subtly discouraged

Dear Joe,

I've been reading your articles for almost a year now, and you've often written things that were so dead-on that I almost emailed you, but this last essay ("A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard") was so eerily in line with my own situation that I had to write back about it. I'm an undergraduate English major at Boston University (which you've clearly visited, since you know about our philosophy department's direct connection to the Almighty), and I came across your essay while putting off work on one of my final papers, a feminist analysis of James Joyce's The Dead. This time last semester, I was a philosophy major, and I was probably working on my discussion of Aristotle's conceptual debt to the Eleatics.

I don't know, Joe. Maybe I'm spoiled. I took the last year off and worked for a nonprofit downtown, where I could see the differences I was making, and could shake hands with the people I was helping. When I went back to school, I was struck by two things:

One, the perfect assurance of my professors that their work in academia is shaping events in the world. This assurance extends backward in time as well: if you squint hard enough, the thinking goes, you'll see that the major events in world history have followed the intellectual trends of their time. But history is a Rorschach blot, and the more you attempt to group events together as exemplifying a single concept or movement, the more simultaneously true, false, and useless your analysis becomes. Meanwhile, back in the present: there's probably some articles circulating in periodicals right now that pretty closely resemble my paper on Joyce and feminism, and their publication means that Our Culture has gotten less sexist, on some vast, invisible cultural thermometer. Woo hoo! Here come the Big Changes!

Two, I was struck by the assumption that none of these ideas had occurred to us students before. This is especially a problem in our philosophy department, and various incidents in the classroom led me to one possible explanation. The whole academic hustle depends on maintaining the illusion of your own relevance, and no student must be allowed to interfere with that illusion. This means that bright students are actually discouraged in several subtle ways. You've talked about America's anti-intellectual culture many times in your articles, and as weird as it sounds to say it, I can tell you that the same anti-intellectual sentiment is alive and well in America's universities.

The thing is, I really like my major. I like James Joyce, and I think literature is important. But it's silly and dangerous to mistake the insular political dialogue that takes place between academics for real action. This confusion takes real discontent and channels it into something harmless. Which is, as far as I can tell, the primary function of the university: to concentrate the intellectuals in a place where they can do the least harm, while training my classmates in the business schools to inherit the earth.

Patrick
Boston

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Dear Patrick,

Obviously your time at Boston University has not been wasted. You've summed the whole thing up far better than I did in far fewer words. But then too, you may simply be one of those millions of dangerous Americans who are purposefully unacknowledged because they scare the fuck out of our institutions with their outbursts of common sense.

In art and labor,

Joe