Column: Dear Students

.
Advice for the New Semester

By Ted Pease
Professor of Interesting Stuff
Utah State University

Dear Students;

At the start of this academic year, The New York Times asked some professors who know what they’re doing for advice they would offer students.

I know, I know. Everyone is FULL of advice for you. But these people are worth a listen.

The whole collection of shorts (like 200 words each) can be found at this link to The New York Times.

Let me pause here and tell you that you will be a smarter person if you were to read the Times every day. No brag, just fact.

The first snippet is from Stanley Fish, who teaches at Florida International U and also is a regular columnist for the Times. Here’s the slice of his advice:

• Fish: “I would give entering freshmen two pieces of advice. First, find out who the good teachers are. . . . Second, I would advise students to take a composition course even if they have tested out of it. I have taught many students whose SAT scores exempted them from the writing requirement, but a disheartening number of them couldn’t write and an equal number had never been asked to. They managed to get through high school without learning how to write a clean English sentence, and if you can’t do that you can’t do anything.” (Click here for full text.)

Next, Gerald Graff, an English professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago and former president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), says you need to know how to summarize—boil the argument down to its basics:

• Graff: “Freshmen are often overwhelmed by the intellectual challenge of college — so many subjects to be covered, so many facts, methods and philosophical isms to sort out, so many big words to assimilate. . . . What the most successful college students do, in my experience, is cut through the clutter of jargons, methods and ideological differences to locate the common practices of argument and analysis hidden behind it all.” (Click here for full text.)

Harold Bloom, a Yale English prof and author, advises re-reading to retain the best substance of the best:

• Bloom: “More than ever in this time of economic troubles and societal change, entering upon an undergraduate education should be a voyage away from visual overstimulation into deep, sustained reading of what is most worth absorbing and understanding: the books that survive all ideological fashions. . . . Many of these authors are difficult and demand rereading, but that doubles their value.” (Click here for full text.)

Baruch College history professor and author Carol Berkin says students need to connect with their professors to get the full pull. Don’t alienate your teachers, she says.

• Berkin: “Ask questions if you don’t understand the professor’s point. Do not, however, ask any of the following: ‘Will this be on the test?‘ ’Does grammar count?’ ‘Do we have to read the whole chapter?’ ’Can I turn in my paper late?’” (Click here for full text.)

Author and emeritus history professor at Northwestern Garry Wills has five tips for students. All require you to be proactive, which means that you need to know your goals.

• Wills: “1. Play to your strengths. . . . [C]hoose courses and write papers on topics where you already have (or think you will have) some interest, some knowledge, some enthusiasm.
2. Learn to write well. Most incoming college students, even the bright ones, do not do it and it hampers them in courses and in later life.
3. Read, read, read. Students ask me how to become a writer, and I ask them who is their favorite author. If they have none, they have no love of words.
4. Seek out the most intellectually adventurous of your fellow students.
5. Do not fear political activism. I was once at an event where a student asked Jimmy Carter how he, formerly the guardian of American law, felt years earlier when his freshman daughter was arrested at a protest against apartheid. He answered: ‘I cannot tell you how proud I was. If you young people cannot express your conscience now, when will you? Later you will have duties, jobs, families that make that harder. You will never be freer than now.’” (Click here for full text.)

Martha Nussbaum, a philosophy/law/divinity professor at the University of Chicago, says students need to stop and smell the roses while they can.

• Nussbaum: “It’s easy to think that college classes are mainly about preparing you for a job. But remember: this may be the one time in your life when you have a chance to think about the whole of your life, not just your job. Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger. You need resources to prevent your mind from becoming narrower and more routinized in later life. This is your chance to get them.” (Click here for full text.)

James MacGregor Burns is a retired government professor at Williams College. He says students need to look beyond their immediate horizons. The world, after all, is bigger than tomorrow’s Econ paper.

• Burns: “Try to read a good newspaper every day — at bedtime or at breakfast or when you take a break in the afternoon. If you are interested in art, literature or music, widen your horizons by poring over the science section. In the mood for spicy scandals? Read the business pages. Want to impress your poli sci prof? Read columnists. . . . The newspaper will be your path to the world at large. . . . A great newspaper will help you in the classroom — and it will be your conduit to the real world outside the classroom. Become addicted.” (Click here for full text.)

Nancy Hopkins is a biology professor at MIT. She wants you to fall in love and to boldly go where no one has before.

• Hopkins: “Fall in love! Not with that attractive person sitting three rows in front of you in calculus class, but with an intellectual vision of the future you probably can’t even imagine at the moment. . . . For the next four years you will get to poke around the corridors of your college, listen to any lecture you choose, work in a lab. The field of science you fall in love with may be so new it doesn’t even have a name yet.” (Click here for full text.)

Physics professor Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas-Austin has been teaching since 1958. Life is tricky, he says, so expect to change course.

• Weinberg: “[A]t Cornell, the mathematics department offered a course on Hilbert space. Who knew that there were different kinds of space? . . . I took German, in which the main thing I learned was that I have no head for foreign languages. My courses in philosophy left me puzzled about how ideas of Plato and Descartes that seemed to me absurd could have been so influential. I did not become wise.
“But I did graduate, and took away with me memories of several inspiring professors, of walks with friends under beautiful old elms, and of hours spent reading in the music room of the student union. I discovered that I loved chamber music and history and Shakespeare. I married my college sweetheart. And I did learn about Hilbert space.” (Click here for full text.)

And finally, through some inadvertent oversight, I’m sure, the Times forgot to include my column of advice to students: Care enough to kill apathy.

• Pease: “Somewhere in there, whoever we are, lives a curiosity, a love of something—whether it’s Chaucer, or how chemistry shapes life, or what it takes to push a rocket from here to Pluto, or how this fall’s presidential race might affect the world—along with some kind of desire to ignite the same excitement in others. For people with those kinds of passions, it is intensely demoralizing to be faced with apathy, but a tremendous rush to be able to displace it, to wake up students who bring to the university experience what author Peter Sacks calls a ‘disengaged rudeness,’ and replace it with a re-engagement of a 20-year-old’s attention, a new kindling of the same passions.” (Click here for full text.)
.