Responding to (Undergraduate) Criticisms

If you have time and would like to read a superb text/letter written in British English - see below. It is a great model for any response to uneducated criticism. The letter has 10 points, but I only transcribe and edit a few as not to bore you too much. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do - sent to all my undergraduate and post-graduate students, and selected faculty and friends.

Cheers,

Paulo

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Responding to (Undergraduate) Criticisms

- I freely admit that when I wrote for Broadsheet it never entered my head that I ought to attend exclusively, or even especially, to such undergraduate criticisms as have appeared in print. I assumed I was to draw on my experience as a teacher, an examiner, and one who meets undergraduates. I still do not see what advantage there would have been in the other course. If what gets into undergraduate periodicals were strikingly better or worse, or strikingly different in any way, from what is offered in weekly essays and examinations, it ought, no doubt, to be treated separately, though not exclusively. But I am not convinced that it does. Certainly, I cannot remember having often seen work in any such periodical which I thought equal to the best that is done by first-class candidates in the examination room.

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- Drawing thus on my total experience of the undergraduate as critic, I did not support my censure with quotation. But on one point, fortunately, your article provides me with the very thing. I complained that the tone of undergraduate criticism was too often ‘that of passionate resentment’. You illustrate this admirably by accusing me of ‘Pecksniffian [hypocritically benevolence] disingenuousness’, ‘shabby bluff’ and ‘self-righteousness’. Do not misunderstand. I am not in the least deprecating your insults; I have enjoyed these twenty years l’honneur d’etre une cible [‘The honour to serve as target to the enemy’] and am now pachydermatous [insensitive]. I am not even rebuking your bad manners; I am not Mr. Turveydrop [ a well-dressed and poised man] and ‘gentlemanly deportment’ is not a subject I am paid to teach. What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong.

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- I do not understand why you think it so improper of me to say that you have learned some of your faults from your elders. This rather condones than aggravates your offence. Do you yourself not admit, in a cool hour, that you have been influenced by them? Will you not admit, even as a theoretical possibility, that you may have imitated those elements in their work which least deserve imitation? Alexander’s courtiers, you remember, imitated the droop of his shoulder rather than his strategy. It was easier. It is not difficult, least of all when you are angry, to write as harshly.

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- You accuse me of contempt for undergraduates. Why? I have used of them no such opprobrious terms as you lavish on me. I gave an unfavourable opinion of their critical work. To tell a young man that his work is in many ways bad is not contempt; especially when one’s opinion has been asked for. It is often a plain duty. If I had been given to understand when I was asked for an opinion that I was really expected to produce a eulogy, I would have refused the job. If you think that your work has no faults, ‘I entreat you to believe that you may be mistaken’. If you think it has any you must learn to listen with patience to those who attempt their diagnosis. If you don’t learn to do that, you can never learn anything else. No doubt the diagnostician may be in error; so, may the patient. But there are reasons (which you at any rate should meditate) for thinking that error in the patient is a priori more probable. Self-love is involved on both sides, for each cherishes his own opinion. But it is doubly involved on the patient’s side. To believe that you have such and such faults does not flatter my vanity; to believe that you have them not, flatters yours. I have another advantage over you. For thirty-six years at two different universities [Oxford and Cambridge], I have had to read a great deal of undergraduate criticism. I thus inevitably have a standard of comparison which you, no less inevitably, lack. You may overestimate the value of your own work not through conceit but because you have seen so little really good work on the undergraduate level. A man who reckons himself tall in Japan might change his view if he visited Patagonia or even Norway. The anger my article so clearly aroused in you is a symptom which both you and your teachers will do well to note. There was, I believe, little or no novelty in my strictures. These things are often said about you; it seems they have too seldom been said to you. You appear to be young people who have been so long shielded and softened by flattery that they can no longer bear unexpurgated criticism.

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- The syllabus has been under continual discussion by the Faculty ever since I joined it. And not only by the Faculty; advice (not always foolish) from our pupils as to what we should teach them and how, has never been lacking. It is not, however, likely that the advice of any particular undergraduate group will make so much difference as that group would wish. You, I feel sure, will attribute our disobedience to ‘contempt’, or even to some more sinister motive. You will be mistaken. The Faculty is a democracy. The most diverse conceptions of English meet and contend there. Almost every undergraduate conception is already represented on it. Because it is a democracy, no one conception is likely to secure a complete victory. Compromise is inevitable. If (which heaven forbid) we were a dictatorship you could have a consistent scheme expressing a single conception. But this would be something narrower than a school of English. None of these would please all. Each of them would inflict far more serious hardships and frustrations on some students than are inflicted on any now. Those very conceptions of English studies which you now cherish were able to emerge and colour the syllabus just because the school has been a free-for-all. You inherit a freedom which you would deny to your successors. For you are not the only kind of undergraduates. From the very nature of our job we know more about undergraduates in general than you do. Your intercourse with your fellow-students is mainly voluntary; you therefore, naturally and properly, meet mostly men of your own kidney. But we have to meet whoever comes. We know, and must take into account, the sort of students you never heard of. Their needs and desires often differ from yours; so do their talents; not always, by any means, for the worse.

For Research as practised at this and other universities today I make no defence. I detest it.

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Yours, etc.,

Clive Staples