When a tenure-track faculty member in English at George Mason publically remarks that “The student essay is a twitch in a void. A compressed outpouring of energy (if we’re lucky) that means nothing to no one,” we as educators get a sense that we are in trouble.

In “What’s Wrong with Writing Essays,” from the open-access Hacking the Academy, Mark Sample goes on to advocate for more public forms of writing as well as for repurposed essays–that is, assignments which involve critical thinking in the form of different, often mingled media. Sample envisions his students not as “miniature scholars” but as “aspiring Rauschenbergs, assembling mixed media combines, all the while through their engagement with seemingly incongruous materials, developing a critical thinking practice about the process and the product.”
My immediate response to his derision of the essay form is ambivalent. On the one hand, I agree that the traditional academic essay often feels alienated from audience and from author–it has a sense of being projected into the void. On the other hand, I have written and read many well crafted essays which made me ecstatic, proud, even joyful. There can be some great moments of discovery in the void. However, thinking back on these, I wouldn’t call them authorless, audienceless, or monotonous. Rather, they were all written by a student deeply engaged with the material, and they were directed to a caring faculty mentor. The question that I would like to pose, then, is whether this is a real crisis, and if so, what are its parameters and pressures.
First of all, I would like to point out that we, at CUNY and nationwide, are in an atmosphere where higher education is increasingly being looked at in terms of its value in the job market. Part of the reason for this is that, despite adjunctification, the price of higher education has risen quite dramatically while average wages have stagnated. When students must break the bank to fund their education, the life of the mind begins to look like this:

In this environment, departments which don’t offer a high real world value struggle to stay “relevant.” This has played out in particularly ugly ways as foreign language programs have been shut down and the graduate Fulbright-Hays program has been defunded. However, it has also played out in rather positive ways as humanities scholars have woken up and realized that it is no longer enough to ventriloquize one another’s arguments in closed-access journals.
At the same time as higher education is being questioned from a financial standpoint, the ways in which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and disseminated have undergone revolutionary changes, at least for those highly fortunate ones who are literate and who have free access to the World Wide Web. The question then becomes why people should bother going to school when they might design their own curriculum and test it out in life’s laboratory. I would thus read Mark Sample’s provocation as a symptom of this rather painful moment–as a move to regain cultural relevance.
Communication across the Curriculum presents opportunities for students to master, interrogate, and modulate between different literacies and modes of communication. Low and middle stakes writing in the form of private reflections or public blog posts give students the chance to situate themselves in relation to a number of different, often overlapping, networks. Unfortunately, in academia and in life, not every task can be completed in the form of a Rauschenberg combine, a pastiche of different elements.

Yet, I would like to suggest that behind every polished product is a smoothed-over assemblage of seemingly disparate elements. In a strong sense I agree with Sample. As educators, one of the most valuable gifts that we can give students is the space to work through some of the tensions they feel between their own intellectual expression and the different communicative forms imposed upon it. For example, I believe that if I am teaching a basic composition course, I do my students a disservice if I don’t teach them the standards of the college essay. I also do a disservice to them if I reify the college essay, if I fail to discuss and critique some of the reasoning behind said standards. In the end, though, I disagree with Sample’s final assertion that text, or specifically the college essay, cannot be ambiguous or woven from different elements. By rejecting the essay Sample risks imposing his own hierarchy of modal value, his own idea of multimodal form, on student expression. Although he is staging the conflict as a drama between forms, what is really at play is a drama of audience, the dramatic question being “Who will read my boring old essay?” Behind that question lie insecurities about who is paying attention to scholars in the humanities.
The crisis of audience with regards to faculty publication is expressed in John Unsworth’s “The Crisis of Audience and the Open Access Solution” in the same Hacking the Academy collection. Unsworth states that the “humanities scholar…has an imaginary audience” and offers hope that this imagined audience might materialize through open access publishing. Our urge to publicize and “make relevant” our own work to wider audiences has been catalyzed by the demands and skepticism of students; as a result, many faculty members have begun to craft lesson plans and assignments involving analyses of popular culture and appeals to non-academic audiences.
Are public, repurposed, or popular culture assignments a solution to the ennui of academic writing? Yes, inasmuch as they guide students in the development of their intellectual identity and in their comfort with different modes of communication. Ideally, such assignments would help students develop their voice and situate themselves in various forms of communication so that they might forge their own purpose, their own message. Only when that work has been done can the traditional essay form be fruitful for both faculty members and students.
One final thought: as educators, we should strive to at least be conscious of and explicit about what pressures we are transferring onto our students, lest our own anxieties fall upon them too heavily or without explanation.


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