Aeron Haynie
English, WMC-UM
Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, reflects on her experiences as a student and a teacher and questions the nature of formal education in America. Unlike many recent works that castigate the current state of higher education, this book is an insider's critique, a memoir of a successful student who achieves the "academic dream." Jane Tompkins, an eclectic scholar, is currently teaching in the high-powered Duke English department; nonetheless, she finds her success unfulfilling and the structure of the university inherently flawed: "At the age of forty-nine, having spent most of my conscious years inside the walls of academic institutions, I realized that I no longer had much use for the things I'd learned in school. By this I don't mean that what I had been taught was worthless, but that the subjects I had studied and taught...were secondary to the real concerns of my life" (xi). Tompkins recounts how her education sharpened her mind, yet left her without any true self-knowledge. As she attempts to broaden her education spiritually and emotionally, she relearns what it means to be a classroom teacher.
Tompkins's book represents a new sub-genre of personal accounts written by respected essayists and scholars who deliberately choose a more personal, informal tone: bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress, Jill Conway's True North, and Richard Rodriguez's The Achievement of Desire are other critical memoirs of university life, all equally fascinating and frustrating. They chronicle, with passion and eloquence, how these professors negotiate the complex power struggles within their institutions, yet each is limited by the particularities of the writer's own situation. For example, the institutional problems Tompkins faces as a full professor at Duke, with its privileged students and ample research funding, will differ widely from the concerns of most faculty members whom I know. Nonetheless, it is illuminating to read a critique of one of the "top" research institutions, a place that many universities assume they should model, and to realize how fundamentally unsatisfying such places can be.
Tompkins's book is full of personal example, confession, self-absorption, and revealing insight. At its best, it pinpoints phenomena that will be achingly familiar to many within academia, such as her description of her almost physical need to hear her own voice during meetings:
There are situations that set going in me an electric current that has to discharge itself in words. I sit in meetings, and before I know it, I've spoken, passionately, sure there's some point that has to be made, which no one but me can see. If the meeting lasts long enough, I have to speak twice, three times. It's got nothing to do with the topic, or very little; the dynamic is almost physical; if I don't talk I'll explode. (65)In contrast to these revealing insights are somewhat clichéd accounts of Tompkins "finding herself" through Buddhist meditation, Karate lessons, and cooking.
The first half of the book is an autobiographical account of a gifted student whose love for learning is both nurtured and squelched by school: "At P.S. 98 it was the structure of learning that was so stultifying, the repetitiousness, the formulaic quality" (32). Tompkins describes the intense pressure to succeed that marked her education, and suggests that her love for the subject itself often had to be suppressed in order to achieve the "detachment" that intellectual success demands:
[M]y idealism about literature...was an expression of love and the best thing I had to offer. At Yale I spent five years learning how to strangle my love, and I never quite got over it" (76). Tompkins goes on to argue that the "fear of shame" that motivated her as a student is what often motivates her as a professor: "the failure of one's authority...[is] the heart of what it means to be a teacher (1).
She faults not only the competitive nature of modern scholarship, but the structure and organization of the university itself. While I admire her willingness to work with administrators and make some changes in the campus (including setting up a campus coffeehouse), I'm not sure that attending management seminars on group dynamics is the answer to the systemic problem in universities. Tompkins observes that professors replicate the spiritual vacuum of their professional lives in their classrooms and she calls for an
educational system...[that] focus[es] on the inner lives of students [and] help[s] them to acquire the self- understanding that is the basis for a satisfying life" (xii).While this is a noble and timely charge, Tompkins's proposal is not original, nor does it offer much practical advice for changing our institutions of higher learning or our individual classes. How can we enrich our students' "spiritual lives" when I am unsure what the term even means? The need for a more "humanistic" educational experience, one that recognizes the complex subjectivity of the student, is not a revelation to those of us teaching at smaller, liberal arts colleges. In fact, Tompkins's ideas sound much like an endorsement of the value of an old-fashioned liberal arts education, where the focus was on developing the whole student. It also echoes standard critiques of traditional education systems, critiques that have been made more thoroughly and convincingly elsewhere.
While Tompkins makes many moving and insightful observations, readers may be frustrated that she makes no attempt to connect her criticisms to the wealth of literature in Education or "critical pedagogy," both of which offer ample discussion of the issues in higher education that Tompkins discusses. In fact, Tompkins states early in the book that she felt "no desire to pick up a book on teaching" (xii), although, on the next page, she names four influential authors who have inspired her: Paolo Freire, Parker Palmer, Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and Maria Montessori. While these are ground-breaking educational theorists, much new work has been done, specifically critiques of the "alienated" classroom experience in higher education and the need to "empower" college students by letting them take a more active role in their own education. There are conferences, journals, and graduate programs that focus on these issues; therefore, Tompkins's intellectual isolationism seems either naive or arrogant. One cannot, I suppose, fault her for not turning her memoir-style book into a research project on educational theory. Yet it is odd that she seems so unaware of current works that address the same question she raises, or that many of her "experimental" teaching practices were tried during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Amidst this critique of the educational system is the fascinating story of Jane Tompkins's academic career: her college years at Bryn Mawr in the late 1950s, her graduate years at Yale in the 1960s, her early teaching jobs--including a harrowing description of being an adjunct instructor at Temple--and her involvement with early post-structuralist thought (Jane Tompkins is married to the noted post-structuralist critic, Stanley Fish). Tompkins's education could be read as the development of modern literary theory. Her account of attending the 1977 School of Criticism and Theory evokes a time when post-structuralist theory was revolutionary instead of hegemonic as it is today:
The sheer excitement of it was unlike anything I'd ever experienced; it was intellectual and it was visceral at the same time. This was nothing like Yale, where the stakes had been so low as to be barely visible, and everyone had been so polite. Now we were arguing about the very basis of our profession (101).Here, as elsewhere, Tompkins illustrates the passion and intellectual generosity which characterize her scholarly work and, I assume, her teaching.
Tompkins's memoir shows us the often awkward life of the female academic. In one chapter, she explains how the Chair of her department at Temple denied her a tenure track line because he claimed that her higher qualifications would put her male colleagues at a disadvantage. In this way her memoir echoes Jill Conway's book: both describe the early efforts of feminist professors in gaining equity, efforts that women of my generation often overlook.
Tompkins spends little time discussing her own works of criticism in any detail, although fans of her work will appreciate reading some of the snippets she includes of her scholarship. For example, she describes the difficulty of getting her first book on American Literature published because Harriet Beecher Stowe was not considered a "serious" topic. She also describes the mix of personal and professional motivations for her scholarship:
I embraced exactly the kind of literature [T.S.] Eliot hated: books written by women, books millions of people had loved, books that were full of feeling, books that changed people's minds by capturing their hearts (117).She also describes how her estimation of T.S. Eliot changed over the years--from the resentment of being forced to read The Waste Land and to dutifully note all references, to an awareness of suffering: "If I could have read Eliot in full consciousness of what I was feeling as a freshman, as a sophomore, I could have begun to face myself. But instead I was like the character at the beginning of The Waste Land who, only vaguely aware of her disease, says, 'I read, much of the night, and go south in winter.' I knew I was like that woman and that her reading and her vacations were a defeat" (130).
The main argument of Tompkins's book seems to be that professors need to reimagine their own lives so that they are able to bring passion and spirituality into the classroom. In one experimental class, "American Literature Unbound," students read only two texts: Moby Dick and Beloved. While reading Moby Dick, the students took a trip to one of the barrier islands on the North Carolina coast and took turns reading the book and writing on the beach. Later, while discussing Beloved, the class spent time on an old slave plantation, doing the work slaves had done and writing about it afterward. Students composed videos, listened to recordings of call-and-response songs of slaves, and reconstructed the room where two of the slave characters had been incarcerated. Some readers will be skeptical of Tompkins's account of "experimental teaching," some may feel she is reinventing the wheel, and some may be jealous of the time and privilege she had to make such experiments (after all, few of my students have the money or time to spend a weekend on a class trip to a beach retreat where we take turns reading Moby Dick aloud). However, I was impressed by her honesty in recounting failed experiments, the occasional poor student evaluations, and by her admission that many of her experimental classes are only succeeded halfway: they accomplish the formidable task of re-structuring the students' expectations of a class, shifting the balance of power, and of establishing a rapport, however often they end just as the students are primed to engage the content material.
Inspired by her own moves away from traditional forms of teaching, Tompkins attempts to create a new form of memoir writing:
This kind of teaching seemed to require a new kind of writing, a form that would reflect the spasmodic, concentrated quality of the experience, its precariousness, the constant sense of teetering on the brink (140).The experimental form of writing that Tompkins attempts in her book is structuring her chapters as letters. This letter/journal form might be pleasurable or freeing for the writer, but it doesn't work for this reader. I'm unsure what is gained or what would have been lost by regular chapter format. In addition, the letter form does not really achieve anything particularly interesting with language: it's just informal. Perhaps critics feel the same way about her teaching. It is ironic that some of the very evils that Tompkins bemoans--the lack of a university community, the professor's need for individual voice and achievement--should be replicated in her own book. To say that a memoir is solipsistic may be redundant; however, it seems telling that Tompkins seems unable to look beyond the particularities of her own experience and the magic of her own voice.
Yet, despite the above noted flaws and annoyances, this book is written clearly and without jargon, it deals with central issues in higher education, and it attempts to speak honestly about vital personal and professional issues that confront many professors.