My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #46, May 25, 1998

A FIELD OF DREAMS

A student once asked me when a particular event happened, and while I knew it had happened when I was in college, that didn't really help me pin it down at all. You see, I have spent nearly my entire adult life in college. I got my bachelor's and my MA in the sixties, earned another MA in the seventies, and have been a librarian at a university ever since.

I admit it's an odd way to spend a life. A college is a strange sort of place, where there is the most extraordinary mismatch between the "customer" and "vendor." Once, to be sure, students came to us claiming to want what we were good at showing them how to find: a philosophy of life. (Personally, I never believed that; I think students had simply learned early and well to circle the most impressive of the multiple choices offered on all their standardized tests.)

These days, however, they mostly don't bother to pretend a philosophy of life is what they're after. Their answers now to what they expect to get from college are a career or profession, and a lot of money. Many of them come to college to learn exactly as much as they need to know to get these, and no more.

The faculty, on the other hand, and even us academic hangers-on like counselors and eternal graduate students and librarians, not only came to college to get a philosophy of life--we got one. We came with, or acquired, a lifelong love for reading, for writing, for learning things just because they're interesting, for playing with ideas for a living.

And we are determined to pass this love on to our students, even if it means forcing them to take history and philosophy and literature and biology before they can get to the advanced accounting courses. We make a bargain with these reluctant scholars: we will give you your ticket of admission to the middle class as long as you give us a chance to show you there are more things to know and think about than are dreamt in your philosophy, and more ways of going about knowing and thinking. We ask you to trade your certainties for the ability to ask questions.

No matter how snowed under we may get with our work (and yes, preparing twelve classes a week IS work), no matter how grumpy we become on days when all the student papers are awful and we have to pretend that some of them deserve an A, many of us, in our heart of hearts, can't get over the fact that somebody is honest to God PAYING us to read, to create knowledge, and to pass it on It's a lot like being paid to play baseball, and for many of the same reasons.

Like baseball, college is a fantasy, an escape, a world of measurable excellence in an impossibly green field in the middle of a gray industrial landscape devoted to getting and spending. It's a time out from reality, a chance for adults to remain in touch with eternal truths and wisdom, and for kids to stall for time while they figure out what they want to be when they grow up.

And, like baseball players, they will go from amateurs to professionals, from kids with nothing but raw talent, wanting to tear up the leagues, to veterans with more skills, slower reflexes and a slightly tamer vision of their future. They will leave, but we, the aging coaches and managers, will stay, because we love the game too much to quit. We need to keep the game alive by passing it on to a new generation of kids.

Of course, as we grow older, they seem to become younger all the time, and each year it gets harder to understand them as we share fewer and fewer experiences. Once I was showing a nice young man pictures of the changes in the image of the little Morton Salt girl over time, from the chubby six year old of 1900, to the Shirley Temple-ish little girl of the 1930's, to the Caroline Kennedy lookalike of the 1960's. A look of wondrous blankness came onto his face, and I realized with a shock that when Caroline Kennedy was playing hide and go seek in the Oval Office, this young man had not been born yet.

College is a true multicultural experience, the culture of the old crashing into the culture of the young and attempting to change it. The best we can do, as in any clash of cultures, is to try to rub off on each other a little. We try to teach them scientific method, analytical reasoning, and the use of evidence in argument; we try to drill a few facts into their heads here and there, show them how the human race got itself into its current fix.

But they teach us, if we are only willing to hear them, not to be old farts. We get to share vicariously in their energy, their ideals, their snarky disrespect for pomposity. We have a chance to unjade ourselves by picking up their belief that life doesn't HAVE to be unjust, and government doesn't HAVE to be stupid, that we CAN do something to change the way things are.

We get to see our culture made new again, as we hear our music played with a different sensibility, watch our theatre performed with strange new costumes and points of view. Wordsworth cannot be the same to us, year after year, because his words are constantly infused with the viewpoint of students who have never seen the lake country or anything like it; Nora in her doll house, and Hester Prynne with her scarlet A, are forever changed by young people raised on feminism.

We never know how we're going to rub off on them, what's going to stick in their minds. The course evaluation forms tell us little that is useful, because what matters is what stays with them five years from now, or fifty. If we're lucky, we have made their worlds a little larger, given them a little history and perspective and skepticism about our society and our politics.

And if we're lucky, while our bodies may start to sag and droop, our minds get to stay elastic and capable of change.

Now, none of this means that what we do is unimportant or irrelevant. In our own way, we are an important cog in that getting and spending machine, as our research leads to new inventions and drugs, and better understanding of ecosystems and global warming. We are teaching kids to become chemists and occupational therapists and teachers and computer analysts (who, please God, will prevent disaster when the clock strikes 12:01 on January 1, 2000).

But still, it is a Peter Pan sort of life we lead in academe. Which is fine with me, because as long as the crocodiles don't get us, and Tinkerbell is on our side, it's a place where most of us can actually live by the words of my favorite quote, a Nigerian folk saying:

Not to know is bad
Not to want to know is worse
Not to hope is impossible
Not to care is unforgivable.