Shit Floats

Three thousand miles from here, in that human Porto-Pottie, Tucson, many thousand fledging fleshpots and thugs will begin classes at The University of Arizona. For the first time in nearly seven years, I will not be there, though I have not escaped entirely; I begin teaching at The University of Rhode Island on 6 September.

Nevertheless, my distance from the former institution (you may take my use of this word in more than one way) grants me a certain freedom of reflection no longer stifled by outlandish professional pieties, imposed from above in the UA Writing Program, which, in their simpering delusiveness, often clash with perception. We graduate students in the program's employ were, for example, encouraged to regard all of our charges as incipient geniuses who brought "different skill sets" (read: "ADHD and near-illiteracy") to the classroom, presenting us with "unique pedagogical challenges" (read: "discourtesy and fecklessness verging on sociopathy"), and that any one of these bright young things would flourish, given the proper instruction (I. e., reinforcing in their minds that critical writing is tantamount to assembling a bookcase from IKEA; in other words, that it is not an exercise in intellection, and certainly not an art; and that the university composition classroom is a place, or "space," to use the Writing Program's milksop nomenclature, in which all opinions, or "feelings," about a text are equally valid and meaningful, the instructor's being just one more opinion. The larger implication here is that the letters after the instructor's name are irrelevant. Who can grade another's feelings, after all?). These "unique pedagogical challenges" one invariably attempted to overcome by instituting embarrassing disclipinary measures in order to prevent his class from falling into utter disorder.

The upshot? I am sorry to impart this to you, mon cher lecteur, but the overwhelming majority of undergraduates at The University of Arizona are animals. Their "unique skill sets," stemming from a lifelong immersion in popular media, the repository of all things brutish and vulgar, and exacerbated by the total collapse of American public education, renders them impervious to instruction. The males are slovenly. (UA recently filmed in-house a video, shown to all incoming students, which illustrates for them "inappropriate behavior"; one such behavior is students who allow their personal hygiene to fall in arrears to a significant degree [no pun intended].) They are impassive and disaffected, and write like they speak -- typically, the textual equivalent of simian grunts and hoots. The females are whorish and as stupid in their way as the males. And, as a body, they are an impossible, treacherous, often mutinous bunch. I liken the first day of the semester to being locked in a room with twenty-five angry badgers.

The ivory tower is being deluged ... and shit floats.