Down with the Research Paper

A recent article by William Deresiewicz exposes the farce that is contemporary academia.  What is interesting about Deresiewicz’ piece is the way he demonstrates that the ideological rigor of the university and the careerist ambitions that dominate the minds of its professoriate are not two separate phenomena, but mutually reinforcing evils.  The upshot, as his narrative of his own career powerfully captures, is that young people with a passion for books and learning – precisely the sort of people who ought to gravitate to an academic career – are fleeing from the futile charade of university life as quickly as they can.  Deresiewicz’ article serves as another reminder to those of us in the world of classical education that the inevitable next stage in the growth of classical ed must unfold in the realm of higher education.

What I found particularly interesting in Deresiewicz’ account of the modern university’s grotesque failings was his description of academic writing, the sort of “research” that professors are expected to churn out regularly as the price of their tenure.  He makes the drudgery and the futility involved in producing this material sound almost nightmarish, a process of producing scholarship characterized by “an enthrallment with jargon, a commitment to verbal opacity, and a suspicion of clear, conversational prose; by intellectual dishonesty and flabbiness and sloppiness, all implicitly excused by the alleged rightness of the cause… all for a single precious line on your CV and a readership of approximately zero.”  It is a mode of writing motivated by entirely careerist concerns, that makes no contribution to the intellectual vitality of society and hardly pretends to do so, that is resented by its practitioners and ignored by the public at large.  It is just about the last mode of writing you would condemn a young person to endure who did not have the professional motives to endure it.

And it just happens to be the one mode of writing that dominates secondary curricula across the country.  The “research paper” which is a staple of nearly every high school English or History syllabi is nothing but the scholarly paper adjusted for the capacities of teenagers.  The same revolting task that Deresewicz bemoans so bitterly is the same task assigned to nearly every high school aged child in America.  The same crippling dependence on secondary sources to make a single assertion, the same picayune obsession with documentation, the same bloodless prose and formulaic arrangement that marks the sort of academic writing he describes is the same sort of writing asked of those very same students in classrooms across the nation.

A long story would have to be told to explain how secondary writing instruction came to this calamitous pass.  It’s a story that would center around the continuing hold which the model of the 19th century’s research university exerts on modern educators, but it would also tell of the modern high school’s single-minded goal of preparing students for college.  The teaching of the research paper in high school is almost always explicitly presented to the students as an exercise in “learning how to write when they get to college.”  The absurdly disproportionate emphasis on footnotes and bibliographies in classrooms filled with students who have yet to master the sentence is only one of more inane results of this drive to make students college-ready writers.  That experience of “writing-as-a-mode-of-social-advancement” which Deresiewicz lamented in the life of the university professor actually gets shoved onto every adolescent in American high schools as a matter of course. 

Classical educators reject the idea that college preparation constitutes the lone or even primary end of the courses of study they offer their students.  This means they ought to reject any form of instruction that finds its complete purpose in rendering students “college-ready.”  But the whole point of the high school research paper is to make students college-ready writers.  So it has no place in a classical school.

Does this mean that I reject the use of sources in student writing, or think that a competent use of sources is no legitimate expectation for high-school aged students?  By no means.  I simply reject the conception built into the research paper of what it means to use sources competently.  When my students are writing about the Crusades, I ask them to take a look at some primary sources from the people involved in those events.  When they are writing about a sonnet by Shakespeare, I ask them to take a look at what some critics have written about that sonnet already.  I call this reading, and I try to convey to the students the sense that their opinions on any given topic are of little value until they have read up sufficiently on that topic.

But this is not research, in the sense that word carries in most academic circles, because they are not proving or verifying anything.  Research as the term connotes in our highly scientific modern worldview means gathering data or information in order to confirm or contradict a given position.  When students are given an essay assignment which asks them to start with a thesis, and then trawl through secondary sources for material that “supports” this thesis, they are being asked to work within the parameters of the same mental model as the physicist who pores over the records of radio waves emitted by black holes, in order to determine whether they confirm or contradict Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The inappositeness of this model to content in history or literature cannot be overstated.  Here, the content is always some form of reflection on human experience, and human experience is always a thing that is subject to multiple interpretations.  The goal in these disciplines is to sift through interpretations to see which are the most compendious and can subsume the others.  It is a synthetic act of the mind that is called for in the humanist’s use of sources, one which accounts for the truth in a variety of perspectives but which ideally arrives at an articulation of the truth that transcends them all. 

The mere proving or disproving of a thesis cannot be reconciled to this act.  In fact, in most cases, the research paper asks students to confirm their thesis through their resources, so the mental framework thrust upon the students is even narrower.  What they are being taught is that they can enter into the discussion of complex modes of human experience with some preconceived position, and then simply regard that position as proven once they have adduced a number of sources in the proper format.  The research paper is typically one long exercise in special pleading.  It inculcates a horrid narrowness and self-sufficiency in students – just the last traits we would want humanities instruction to inculcate – by training them to regard the task of argument as a process of finding evidence that people agree with what you already believe.

The goal of student writing, as it regards the use of sources, should be to use their reading to shed light on the host of topics they might be writing about.  Read any interesting essayist, and this is what he or she is doing.  Montaigne, for instance, puts his tremendous learning to use in his essays not as a quasi-scientist confirming the conclusions he has arrived at through classical allusion, but as one who has been broadly conversant with the great minds of the past, and who can effortlessly draw upon their insights to enrich and enhance his own.  Whether he is writing about friendship or education or the duties of leaders, he has read someone who said something wise on the topic before him, and he can make use of their insight in his own attempt to make sense of the issue at hand. 

In some way, this should be the model for our students, which is to say, erudition is the virtue to be aimed at when we are teaching students how to use sources effectively.  When we read a really outstanding work of scholarship, we hardly ever get the sense of the author displaying the fruits of a mere period of research; rather, we encounter the results of a life-long inquisition into the contours of the question at hand.  It is hardly a surprise that the ascent of academic, research-oriented writing has corresponded to the disgraceful decline in true erudition among the professorial class, and it is too obvious that the formal apparatus of academic writing has become a means of cloaking the fundamental ignorance of the people who produce that sort of writing.

Similarly, the equivalence of academic writing with clear, disinterested prose – usually conveyed to the students with prohibitions on the use of “I” or reference to qualitative opinions – has become a mere pretext for refusing to teach students how to write interesting sentences.  The pretense of objectivity that underlies such admonishments is one that ought to be foreign to all classical educators, resting as it does on the entirely modernist notion that truth is accessible only through some purported “view from nowhere” which prescinds from all qualitative, subjective experience.  Classical education rests on the conviction that subjecthood is a realm of truth discovery, that in reality, those truths that are most concerning and imperative to human life are only disclosed to us through qualitative perspective. 

What this points to is the centrality of the rhetorical tradition to the task of teaching students writing.  In that tradition, students are trained to give constant thought to the way their words are liable to strike the ears of their audience, which is the basic concern which all stylistic choices are an attempt to address.  Rhetoric is the art that teaches a person to write as a human being to fellow human beings, appealing to common motives and affections, whereas research perniciously trains a young person to think that the proper attitude in which they are expected to address their fellow human is as expert, in possession of a knowledge their audience lacks. 

In fact, we know that academic writing has given rise to its own grotesque house style, a jargon-laden, pseudo-philosophical mélange of vapidity and falsehood that has no precedence in the barbarism of past ages. Deresiewicz tells us that his inclination to write with some kind of literary flair was actually regarded as a demerit in the academy, a place where a complete lack of sensitivity to the aesthetic resources of language has become a kind of prerequisite for tenure.  But the anti-style of modern academia is the direct result of generations of high school students who have been actively discouraged from giving stylistic considerations due place in their own writing assignments.

Not coincidentally, David Hicks makes much of the term “style” is his justly appreciated text, Norms and Nobility.  It is actually quite surprising at first to see how often he couches the project of classical education as an attempt to instill a capacity for style in students.  Certainly, his notion of style extends well beyond the task of writing, and encompasses the whole range of contemplative and moral instincts in a young person that are susceptible to aesthetic modelling.  But it should not be lost on us that the task of writing presents us teachers with one of the most effective disciplines through which to instill in students a sensitivity towards the impressions we make upon others through our own expression.  Good style is in many ways just good manners in words.  When students in the past were enjoined to emulate the Latin of Cicero, it was above all his style that they were taught to see as a model, a style that was the linguistic manifestation of a certain definite attitude towards political life and the duties encompassed therein.

This regard for the social dimensions of writing, which informs the classical rhetorical tradition, is of a piece with the sort of erudition I have already advocated.  A good writer is one who is conversant with his sources, who thinks about life’s perennial mysteries alongside them, and invites his reader into the polyphonous discussion he is already undertaking with his sources.  A good high school writing assignment is one that invigorates just such a discussion.  We do not want our students to write about books, but to write about life, using books to expand and synthesize their thoughts. 

How far removed is the ubiquitous research paper from any such conception.  Far from serving as an invitation to the students to reflect on some important question, the topics upon which students typically write the research paper are often left up to them, and can be completely frivolous or faddish, as the students whims dictate.  The content of a research assignment is usually regarded as besides the point; the goal is simply to train students in the formal apparatus of academic writing, in the way one trains a new employee at the DMV how to file the paperwork correctly.  That is all that a student is asked to learn when completing the research paper.  What a waste of time and energy, and what a waste of an opportunity to disclose new intellectual vistas in the minds of students.

To my mind, the ideal writing assignment in a classical humanities course is one that draws upon the students’ reading in a manner that renders them discussants in a long-standing  and meaningful conversation.  Students in a history class might read Herodotus’ account of Themistocles’ character alongside that of Plutarch’s, and perhaps that of a modern historian; then, they might be invited to reflect on the traits that made him such an impressive leader.  They might spend time in a Biology class reading passages from Aristotle’s De Anima, followed by passages from Darwin’s Descent of Man, followed by one or more ethological studies of primates, and then be asked to write an essay considering the ways human beings differ from other animals.  The work entailed in such assignments is not research; it is reading.  The task placed before students is not to prove a thesis, but to expand their understanding of an important topic.  The mental habits to be inculcated in students are not affiliated with academic competence, but with civic virtue.  This is the kind of written work that is consonant with the high ends of classical education; that is the kind of work we want our students engaged in.