I do think that every student must invent the university for him/herself. This is a very disorienting and sometimes disheartening process. I think a lot of romantic ideals about what the university experience is going to be or ought to be are mangled by it. A skeptical, jaded, but acclimated and prepared for success student is what emerges. In hindsight, I think inventing the university for myself has been more of a positive thing than a negative thing. Aside from the above mentioned, there is a sense of initiation connected to learning how the academy operates, and once the rules are understood well enough that the student can begin to leave some of them behind with a measure of confidence, I think the experience even becomes a liberating one. Surely a convincing argument can be made that the process is unfair to the student. But all students have undergone it. It's no less fair to me than it was to my professors. What would really be unfair is if it changed and new students no longer had to go through the process that older students did. On the surface, I think learning the "discourse" is silly and petty and geared primarily towards appeasing laziness. Beyond this, though, I think it is important. It prepares the writer for the expectations of peers (i.e. other academics) who will judge their work critically. To engage in a conversation, it is best to be familiar with the conversation up to the present moment, and to understand the methods by which said conversation is being approached. This doesn't mean a newcomer must conform to existing attitudes. But he/she must understand those attitudes in order to make an informed argument against them. All of this is taught through the pretense of engaging in a discourse of which the writer is eggregiously unqualified to comment on. It's all part of the learning process. The most important part of it, I think, is the attitude of the teacher. If the teacher understands his/her role as the person charged with acclimating new writers to the discipline, offering advice and encouragement until the new writer can be weened off a mentor, then the process works well. If the teacher has the attitude that he/she is privileged and the student is unprivileged, the teacher will most likely have a counterproductive influence on the new writer, since in subtle ways the teacher's goal will be to sabotage the new writer's advancement in order to preserve the privileged/unprivileged status.

You Look Too Young to Receive an "A"

I am a long-time fan of the five paragraph essay; however, I have learned to expand the three paragraphs in the middle into many more paragraphs. This has been my major accomplishment in "inventing the university."

The most awful moment of learning to do this occurred at BYU. I was in my second year of studies there but already had status as a junior. Consequently, I had taken "composition" in high school as a concurrent enrollment class, and I had also already taken my upper level writing class at BYU. So, when I received a B- on a paper after spending hours in the library researching and writing it, I felt crushed. I visited the professor and asked why my grade was not an A, as I had been used to receiving. He used the opportunity to tell me that I looked really young and asked if I had taken my upper level writing class. Well, I turned on the waterworks and explained that I had taken the class and received an A. He looked baffled, unbelieving, and a tiny bit uncomfortable. So, after more tears and some explanation about the work I had done on my paper, he raised my grade to a B+.

What did I learn about inventing the university? I learned that if you look young, you can be discriminated against. I also learned that if you cry a little you can get your grade raised. This is a bad thing. Instead, I should have been mentored. My professor should have offered to let me rewrite. He should have explained what I could do better instead of just telling me that I looked too young to receive a good grade. I did not learn anything about entering the discourse in my field (English) from the discussion I had with him.

So, yes, it is unfair to expect students to participate in writing about a field without helping them to do so. I eventually figured things out because of other, more patient, kind, and skilled professors. The key to fairness in giving students grades is giving them a chance. If all students are expected to crack the code without some sort of inclusion in the club first, then giving grades for failing to converse well is wrong.

A PERFECT 10…OUT OF 20

When I first went away to college at USU (100 years ago or so) I simply wrote five-paragraph essays like my favorite high school English teacher had taught me. This method seemed to work wonderfully on most assignments; intro, three paragraphs, conclusion, and voila! Instant essay. When I changed majors—four times—I struggled a bit with the different conventions, but don’t remember being frustrated by it. These conventions were just something else to learn while at college, like where to park or how to deal with annoying frat boys.

Four years ago, after another major change (back to my first love, English) I registered for an online English lit class here at WSU. The assignments seemed straightforward enough—read the story, summarize, and then compare. Sound familiar? I wrote a lovely five paragraph essay which received a “10.” Right on. I wrote four more and collected my 10s. I was stunned when my sixth essay came back with a note from the professor saying that he would not grade any more of my work until I rethought my essays. What?! Apparently each assignment was worth 20 points…and I was crashing.

After a short period of mourning I rewrote those six essays, learning as I went what this professor was looking for. It was a long and frustrating process, but I was grateful for a second chance. By the end of the semester I had a better grasp of the discourse. I earned a good grade and the savvy for another semester of English courses—I didn’t have to change my major or run screaming. Incidentally, I saved those first essays so I can pull them out once in awhile and wince.

This experience would have been a lot less painful if I had seen an example of what those assignments should have looked and sounded like before I ever started to type. I would have mimicked the language and conventions—Bartholomae would have been proud. Was it a “fair” experience? Nah. But life never is, is it? We learn by doing, and re-doing.

This reminds me…I know I’m not supposed to use contractions in academic writing, and yet my newspaper editor loves them. Different discourses, different conventions, and I’m still blending them after many years of practice. Just ask Dr. Rogers. In a good week I’ll get my English paper back without all the contractions circled-- and my news story printed in full contraction mode. Go figure.

The Real World is not Ideal

Since my university experience is going on about five weeks now, I haven’t had much variety for “Inventing the University” in the different papers I have written for professors. Of course, there are distinct differences between my papers for my Physics class and this Methods in Tutoring course, but my first real experience with having to learn how to mold my writing for the subject concerning it probably occurred within my high school years. My senior year in high school, I was taking about six different AP courses that required different types of writing for each subject. Whereas Art History and Psychology focused on short, concise arguments that painted the concept being asked about in a detailed manner, my English class required personal analysis with eloquent, academic writing. In every class that I attended, I had to, metaphorically, “put on a new hat” that matched the discipline I was studying. It didn’t matter what I really wanted to say on the subject, all I had to do was give the readers what they wanted. This knowing of a writer’s audience is, perhaps, the single most important point in developing good writing skills, in my mind. Even within this individual class, I write differently for blogs than I do for my reading responses. This ability to adapt to the situations in different classrooms comes more naturally to some people than it does for others, but in order to succeed at a university level, it is pivotal that all students learn how to utilize these skills in their specific discipline.
In my mind, I think that it isn’t necessarily fair for students to be expected to automatically know how to speak like an expert in their fields. Since there are no specific classes that focus on learning how to write a good paper, it is outrageous to expect that every student will be able to intuitively know how to succeed in college papers. Different people have different skills that they excel at, and because of this, it is inherently unjust for teachers to lump all students into a general category of writing and judge them against each other. However, although this system of creating set standards for students no matter what their individual interests are is ultimately unfair, it is still necessary. Writing is a huge part of any discipline, even if students don’t think so when they first begin their studies. Along with this idea, each discipline carries with it conventions and certain marks that define it as uniquely relating to its respective field. This makes it important for students, no matter their individual background, to understand what is expected of them and what measures they should take to ensure that they can succeed. To make sure that students are learning these conventions, professors do have to set up a certain grading system that will measure whether or not their students are attempting an academic sounding paper. However, I do think that certain guidelines should be set in place for students who might not find writing as natural as their peers.
Individuality should not be lost, but unfortunately, in the education system we have today, it is necessary that students sometimes learn things that are uncomfortable for them. Ideally, it is unfair that classrooms measure students in the same way as their fellows no matter their individual skills or interests. In the real world, sadly, students will have to be compared against others of their discipline and thus have to learn a way to “invent the university” like everybody else.

Inventing the Teacher

My first semester as a student at Weber State found me in a variety of general-ed classes. I had science, history, English, and some FYE class that they made the freshman student athletes take. Just like everyone else, I had to write papers in all of them. While my English 1010 professor read my paper to the class as an example of what to do, because I proclaimed myself as Bobby Freaking Lambert and gave hilarious reasons for why I should be called such, my History teacher gave me a "C" on everything because my language was overly colloquial. At the time I thought I was a great writer because I could make my English teacher laugh herself into giving me all A's, and at the same time I felt infuriated because my dull history teacher wasn't getting it. The real problem was that while my history teacher expected sophisticated academic language in her essays, my English teacher just wanted us to write with a fresh creative voice.

The definition of academic language is sort of mysterious. I can write a literary criticism on a book in one class and get a great grade on it, while I hand in the same paper based on the same book, having been given the same requirements, and I could fail miserably. Much of the definition of "academic language" is left up to the individual teacher's preferences.

While it may not be fair to expect a student to have to adjust their language, organization, thoughts, and voice in their writing for each individual teacher, it doesn't matter because that is how it is going to be. Even if specific rules and laws were made up and written down to define what academic is and is not, the red grading pen would still be in the hands of individuals with free will. Each teacher would still decide what they thought was acceptable/non-acceptable and grade accordingly.

In real life it is almost completely frivolous for a student to try figure out what "academic language" is and how to write it. The real trick is figuring out what your teacher wants as early on as possible and adjusting accordingly. This I realize is not the ideal, but it is the reality.

Here’s to the University

When I first started classes at a university I don’t remember changing my writing to fit any specific stereotype or genre I imagined the university to have. I just wrote how I thought I should write and it seemed to work well. Until I took my first theory class. For those students in this class who are not English majors, your theory class is composed of the literary critics. They’re the people that have somehow managed to become famous in the English discipline by inventing strange ways of looking at language. They’re people like Foucault, completely unreadable, but required for the degree. Now some of you might be saying you loved theory, and I did too, but let’s be honest, it’s a bit of shell shock to start reading dense theory when all you’ve been reading before are novels. When I entered that class I became aware of a different kind of academic writing, and this is the writing I equate with the university. At that point I began trying to write like a critic. Of course, I was not any good at it. My attempts were mere appropriations, as Bartholomae would call them. From that point on I have been consciously aware of trying to write like an academic. Whatever that means. As I have entered graduate school that has been even more important as I have become aware of being published and presenting at conferences. These are things that help you get noticed and to do that you must appropriate the language of the university.

But my journey may have been unique. I have watched other students who know they need to write a specific way, but they are not quite sure how to get there. Oftentimes this means that they add a bunch of words trying to make their paper sound important when in reality they just muddle their meaning. I think most students realize they need to write “differently” in order to succeed, but they don’t understand what this difference is, and they have not quite learned how to mimic the language they see in academic essays or other readings. It takes a few papers in order to get the style down and then you switch professors or subjects and you have to start all over again. If only writing weren’t so changeable!

But seriously, is this fair? In order to defend my profession (can I call it that if I’m only a graduate student? It’s kind of a profession) I say yes. If you want to be a doctor you have to learn how to operate. If you want to be a lawyer you have to learn the law. If you want to be a teacher you have to get some kind of certificate that says you’ve taken pedagogy classes. So if you want to graduate from college and be a writer (or even if you just want to graduate) you should have to learn how to write in a university language. In reality it will only improve you as a person and we could all use better writers. Trust me, I edit customer complaints and if I see one more “I did appologize” I might scream. So here’s to the university and their ability to make people mimic a certain style of writing.

Inventing the University

I'm interested to hear your reactions to Bartholomae's argument.  Did you find yourself having to invent the university when you went to college (or graduate school)?  Did you find it frustrating?  Do you still?

I think the most important question contained in all of this is an ethical one: is it fair to students that this happens?  Is there a way to avoid it?