Learn for learning's sake
Scott Blaszak
The Early Essays
Fear. You can see it anytime a professor assigns a creative assignment. The classroom becomes silent as the students open their eyes wide in fright. Whether it's a short story in a particular author's style or a first-person anecdote in a foreign language, the class will grow nervous and inevitably hands will begin shooting up across the classroom.
How will this be graded? Is this what you want us to do? Can I show you a draft? And when the professor fails to provide them with a clear formula, a deliberate recipe for a good grade, they panic.
Notre Dame does not have a creative student body. Its strongest colleges are science and business which I think sets the tone for the rest of the University. Our alumni are known for their mergers and I.P.O.s, not their debut novels or feature films. Even the campus seems to lack that philosophical feel to it that you get when you walk through Ann Arbor or one of the Ivy League campuses out east.
No, you'll never confuse South Bend for Oxford, but what we as intellectuals lack in creativity we make up for in elbow grease.
For a Catholic university there's quite a Protestant work ethic here — weeks like this it's especially evident — and it's heightened by a Catholic sense of guilt that I suspect is the pulling force keeping so many students home studying on weekend nights.
I've been told that in a national study our average workload at Notre Dame was in step with the top four schools in the nation. I question how scientific such a study can be but even so it's a telling ranking and to me not a surprising one.
Part of the reason our workload is so heavy is because people here seem to thrive on it. Notre Dame students are like academic Rudy's. We may not be the smartest or cleverest or most privileged in our previous education but we'll out-work, out-hustle, out-extra-credit you into the ground.
Check that. Extra credit at Notre Dame doesn't really exist. Extra credit is offered, don't get me wrong, but the whole notion of extra credit is that certain students will do additional and more challenging work in order to raise their grade in relation to others. At Notre Dame, more often than not, virtually everyone in the class does the extra credit. Since most classes are graded on a curve this means extra credit acts like required credit.
And no matter how ludicrous the ways of generating credit get, the students never flinch. A few years ago a science professor here promised extra credit to any of his students who went to watch his elementary school son play soccer. Off they went, 50 strong, to watch an Indiana children's soccer game in the name of higher education.
But don't misunderstand me; I'm not coming down on a healthy work ethic. No doubt it's an admirable characteristic for a student body to have — and it's why big Chicago accounting firms swoop in every spring and take Domers by the hundreds off to cubicle lives on the Golden Coast — but with everyone working so hard here grading becomes tricky.
Grade inflation is a problem at universities across the country, especially in the liberal arts where objectivity is often lost in a tiring web of opinions. With no right or wrong answers or no clear cut grading key how do you justify giving an A, B, C or (gasp) a C- to a student?
If you grade according to how hard the students work then nearly everybody deserves an A or high B because at this school as with other top universities students will work themselves silly to beat the bell curve. If you don't award most of them A's, they could do serious harm to themselves.
But it's wrong to give grades based on the amount of effort a student gives. Working hard is a means to success but not an end. In America, we tend to champion work ethic as a byproduct of our rugged frontier origins — but work ethic shouldn't carry too much significance in academia.
This could be why America has never excelled at producing top of the line intellectuals compared to, say, a less otherwise productive country like France. You don't want the French to go to war for you or even to roof your cottage for that matter, but they know how to think.
In fact, the whole continent of Europe seems a little smarter than North America, a little more prone to contemplation. Meanwhile we Americans, specifically arts and letters majors at small Catholic universities in Northern Indiana, don't think much but work really hard.
Which circles back to my point that as students sometimes it feels like we're a little too wrapped up in the means to an education. You didn't come to college for midterms, thought pieces, grade point averages or Greek honor societies. Take a step back and consider how ridiculous this game is.
And at the risk of sounding too much the intellectual — admittedly I hung up my tweed jacket with the elbow patches more than a year ago — sometimes it's a nice change of pace to learn simply for the sake of learning.
Scott Blaszak's column appears every other Wednesday.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, March 7, 2001
