John Haber, Danyll Wills, Andrew Towne, and Christopher Bernard

Art Versus the Academy: An Email Debate

This past May I found a review of Mark McGurl’s new book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, in a recent issue of The New Criterion that so well reflected my experience of creative writing programs and the writers that emerge from them~to say nothing of writers workshops and writers groups and what might be called the collectivization of writing~that I sent along a link to it to a number of my literary colleagues. 

The responses, especially one series that turned into a very long thread of emails dashed off between more urgent tasks, proved so engaging, for myself at least, that I thought it might prove of some use to make them public. So, below, with some mostly minor editing and fixes, you will find most of the emails of that exchange, leaving out only a few brief replies that were erased early on.

The principal emailers were the New York–based art critic and theorist John Haber; composer, writer, and theorist Andrew Towne (San Diego); China scholar and writer on technology (part American, part English; now based in Hong Kong) Danyll Wills; and myself.

~Christopher Bernard

The Exchange

Hello my fellow writers and others concerned with the state of modern language and letters,
 
The review at the end of this link says something I feel you might find of interest. It certainly reflects my own feelings:
 
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Deprogramming-the-MFA-4071

I can’t say I hold with the New Criterion’s echt captitalist commitments, a frequently reluctant stockholder as I am myself, or with its brayingly philistine views on modern art. But every so often they seem able to see clearly enough, and opine openly on, what’s right under their eyes. They pull no punches out of a pernicious desire not to hurt anyone’s feelings, and at least don’t dabble in the petty hypocrisies of the little mutual admiration societies called “writing groups,” etc.

The “creative writing” program, group, class, workshop, et al.: that most effective device (pace Louis Menand, who wrote approvingly on the same subject for the New Yorker) for seducing the originality out of minds young, middle-aged, and old since the invention of~well, take your pick: the Marine Corps, public education, the Communist Party, the PC mafia, church.

Regards,

Chris 

Reply from John Haber:

Fair enough. We all dislike it when scholarly prose and theoretical sophistication devolve into jargon and gibberish. We all share a concern, too, for the careerism of writing workshops and MFA programs. I can sympathize in much the same way with a dislike of art-world connections founded on who went to Cal Arts or Yale. 
 
But when that becomes, “oh, you artists are out of touch,” I see an unjustified shift in target. That shift, so closely coupled with a dismissal of scholarly language that precludes argument, becomes a distrust of scholarship and social critics in and of themselves. It becomes an anti-intellectual-ism boasting of itself, not to mention using that boast to choke serious creative or critical inquiry. In the guise of rebelling against authority, it becomes a cheap excuse for an authoritarian agenda. Are there more writers than readers? Judging by the number of blogs and comments on blogs, it’s hard to count, but I would hesitate to call that in and of itself a shame on writers rather than on readers. 
 
It’s become pretty obvious that in my lifetime conservatism has allied itself with anti-intellectualism. I can only speculate about the reasons. A distrust of thought? A fear that conservative ideas wouldn’t hold up to serious thought? A manipulative and pretended populism, like much of the culture wars and the old Southern strategy, to gain votes for an economic elite? 
 
The article is absolutely right to subject to criticism the insider complacency of poor writers and the programs that nurture them. To do so only to celebrate a broader complacency, however, is disgusting. 
 
 John H.

Reply from Danyll Wills

Master of Fine Arts? I had never heard of this.
 
Who wrote this article? Did I miss the name somewhere? Great stuff, though. I agree completely. Then again, I also think the worst thing to happen to businesses in the world today is the MBA. I have a friend who consistently looks at CVs and puts those with Harvard or Stanford MBAs into one pile and all the others in another. When he has done 
that, he takes the Harvard/Stanford pile and throws it in the rubbish bin.

Reply from Andrew Towne, Followed by a Debate with Christopher Bernard

Good article. Thanks for sending it.
 
I would even go farther and say that the universities have made “serious” books, art and music irrelevant.
 
The only surviving art forms are those with commercial appeal (more or less) -- that means movies and popular music. 
 
It is fortunate that all art forms are incorporated into movies -- an assurance that art will live on a while longer.
 
Granted, most movies and pop songs are not good.

But that is nothing new. For every classic work from the past that survives into the present, there are probably a hundred works that didn't survive mainly because they weren’t very good.
 
Andrew

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Dear Andrew,

Glad you liked the article.
 
I must read too much history: it makes me optimistic. History has already tried its worst against serious art~from the Dark Ages to the Iconoclasts, from the Reformation to the Nazis. And the Yahoos keep winning the battles and losing the wars~remarkable. 
 
Well, the serious stuff has always been a minority interest, so the fact it is so currently doesn’t bother me, except on occasions when my “democratic” conscience gets the better of me (a corruption that one can hardly avoid if one has grown up here). 
 
A mistake American intellectuals often make, I think, is believing that serious art somehow ought to be popular. But my feeling, really, is that it should not be~in fact cannot be, just as most people will never understand the delights of the infinitesimal calculus. And they don’t have to (I’m glad to say, since I certainly don’t).
 
I’ve just been listening to Philip Glass’s recent opera Waiting for the Barbarians, premiered, naturally, in Europe, where they understand these things, and fund them, better than we do (they aren't afraid of that nasty word “elitist”). It is a work in many ways, and despite many imperfections, beautiful and profound~to say nothing of being spookily topical, even though it was originally conceived many years ago. It’s an example of art that may be difficult for many audiences, however, not because of complex and demanding artistic procedures (it is certainly easy enough to listen to), but rather because of the moral complexities of the material: its “realism,” in a word. American audiences, I know, reject too much reality in their art: they want the sugar coating thickly lathered on, and truths more wishful than verifiable (especially the postmodern canard that there is no truth~ this gets everyone off the hook). (Postmodernism= Disneyland for the intellectuals?) They’ll even take opera if it’s easy to swallow. Well, I recommend Glass’s opera highly. And it may help assuage your gloom.
 
Chris

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Thanks, Chris.
 
I agree that challenging art is not going to win over the masses right away, but the Academy has sealed a lot of art off from any real audience at all. The result is almost no art at all coming out of the universities, just garbage. 
 
For every Glass composition (and he has written scores for popular movies, by the way -- I'm thinking of "Hamburger Hill," a movie about the Vietnam War), there are hundreds if not thousands written by composers who are only listened to by other composers or their own students. 
 
The first rule of art is that it must be emotionally engaging. Otherwise why bother -- you might as well do crossword puzzles or play chess. 
 
The second is that it must have a real audience, not just a professional audience. 
 
I would even go so far as to say an art work isn't complete until it is listened to, seen or read by someone, and that someone is emotionally moved or aesthetically pleased by the experience.
 
Emotional engagement, a real audience: Those are exactly what most contemporary “serious” art, music and literature lack. 
 
The result is inbred, pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, sterile rubbish. Then the authors of such travesties hide behind the "I'm ahead of my time" pretense. So even a person of education and taste is not going to be very interested.
 
Be glad, Chris, that you are independent and not in the pay of the universities. I should think it would be a very corrupting experience. 
 
But I agree that I was being a little too gloomy. Composers like Messaien, Glass and quite a few others buck the academic trend. And you've written some damn good music. I think your music is really your best work.
 
Also, I didn't mean to sound gloomy. 
 
I actually love a lot of the music that I hear in movies. It is the one area where you can still write original tonal music. Music that is not just derivative, but fresh (so much for the "tonal music is dead; been there, done that" school of thought.) 
 
Three movies (with good music) that I can think of off the top of my head: Nico the Unicorn, The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie, My Life So Far...All are family or coming of age-type movies.
 
Of course, it's a matter of personal taste. I can't say you'd like those particular movies or the music in them.
 
I agree with you that great art is not going to die. But it is certainly being challenged by an army of poseurs with academic positions and salaries.

And the ludicrous stuff that UCLA prof wrote (referred to in the article): What an embarassment. 
 
Where is there a Moliere to heap well-deserved ridicule on these people?
 
Andrew

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Andrew,

A very well thought-out position~thanks for giving it so much time. 
 
I agree with most of your points~and certainly that there is some very strange art and music about, often promoted by the academy. But it’s important to remember that the antecedents of this very culture were, ironically, not only outside the academy but often militantly opposed to it (from the Impressionists to the Expressionists, the early modernists, the surrealists, etc., etc.)~and the academy, for many years, repaid them in kind. It was only in the ’60s that the universities began to accept and actively promote modernism. 

One of the things that has happened since the early 19th century (and this has been noted time and again by cultural historians) is a breakdown in communication and trust between many serious artists and the general public~ partly to do with the deep distrust felt by serious artists for democratic and egalitarian norms that have increasingly defined the cultural and political outlook of the 
economically most power interest in Western culture. Many artists hated them~they hated liberalism, hated democracy, hated the common man. And it became a point of pride to epater not only the bourgeoisie, but the republicanism and democratization that made the bourgeois flourish.
 
I think we’ll never understand much of modern serious art until we realize how deeply antidemocratic it is at heart: serious modern artists do not want to be accepted by modern democratic society (to be heard, popular or successful)~if they were honest with themselves they would realize that they want to overturn democracy and end the modern world as we know it.
 
Therefore of course they don’t want to be popular~that would defeat their purpose of cultural (and eventually political) revolution. (And by the way, I don’t mean a revolution from the left!)
 
There is a parallel thing going on, I believe: and that is the notion that there are no eternal artistic principles on which all successful art is founded~that these principles change with time, and that the most difficult and thorniest of modern music will, in the fullness of time and with an appropriate change of social relationships (the cultural and political revolution), will become completely understandable and enjoyable. It is like learning a new language: once you master the vocabulary and grammar, what sounded like coarse babble becomes at least comprehensible and even beautiful.
 
One of the reasons, I think, for the weirdness of many American artists and composers is that they are profoundly conflicted, culturally, psychologically, politically: they are trying to be true to democratic ideas and ideals (see their desire to be popular in current society) and yet also true to the artistic principles they have committed themselves to, which in many cases are antidemocratic to the core~but often they cannot face this fact, and it hobbles them.

Anyway, that's how I’ve come to see it. High art in a democratic society is a contradiction, and it can only flourish by deception, often self-deception, and by waiting until democracy collapses (as democracy always has in the past) and the return of some sort of aristocratic society that will honor the existential commitments of high art.
 
Boy, I didn’t meant to get so involved, but your message got the brain cells going.
 
Really good to hear from you~will you be in SF anytime soon? I owe you a lunch!
 
Chris

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Thanks, Chris. 
 
I do hope to come to San Francisco in the next three months. I'll let you know as I firm things up.
 
Excellent points~many I hadn't thought of, or didn't realize.
 
I like the "outsider now the insider" observation. 
 
Maybe the sterility that I find in academic art is basically caused by its loss of the only "soul" that it really ever had~the soul of the rejected, the misunderstood, the outsider looking in, the professional revolutionary who needs the struggle, but not the victory.
 
To become the Establishment when you began in opposition to it does seem to be a contradiction that is all too much to bear, especially when it comes to art. 
 
Where, then, is the adventure; where is the freedom? The adventure and freedom of making up the rules instead of enforcing them?
 
Once you become the policeman, can you still be the outlaw? 
 
I think our academics would like to think so, but the very idea is silly.
 
That, I think, is why art needs something much more transcendent to rely on than politics, social revolutions and the like. 
 
In fact, I would go even further and say that politics is the death of both art and thought.

Once the political left identified intellect with political and social revolution, it became  morally and spiritually bankrupt. Thomas Molnar discusses this extensively in his book "The Decline of the Intellectual." 
 
I am not suggesting that art and thought can be divorced from politics.... Politics is a part of life, and art and thought must deal with life.. 
 
But they must also in some sense be independent of it, contemplative, critical, uninvolved. The watcher rather than the participant. The translator rather than that (life) which is translated into an aesthetic or philosophical statement.
 
A simple way of thinking about this is to observe my own reaction to stand-up comedy whenever its themes are political (which they almost always are.) 
 
It's not funny at all. 
 
The surprise that a good joke depends upon is absent once you have scoped out the comedian's political biases. 
 
Then it all becomes a tiresome lecture, and one given by someone whose educational qualifications are almost always insufficient to make that lecture interesting and informative.
 
Indeed, the only stand-up comedy that can be both political and funny is either comedy that is outrageously politically incorrect or the comedy of someone like Jay Leno who uses politics as a subject, but who doesn't reveal his own political bias~who can lampoon both parties, as it were. That is rare.
 
Of course, when you are talking about music (as opposed to art, theater, or literature), then you are automatically removed in most cases from an overt political expression that is intrinsic to the notes. Beyond program music that is explicitly political (explicitly as in a commission for a political benefit concert, or an overtly political title or accompanying text), the desired revolution intended to shock the Establishment must be a formalist revolution.
 
Thus the endless, and now monotonous, tinkering with form and efforts to be ever more novel or revolutionary. Impressionism, Expressionism, cubism, futurism, serial music, surrealism, symbolism, pop art, etc. Here you have composers and artists who are constantly under the gun to radically innovate in the formal sense or simply be deemed irrelevant. 
 
And they are necessarily wedded to a linear, forward-driving "progress" that views the future as ever more enlightened than the present or the past. Art transformed into science, so to speak.
 
I find this Weltanschauung to be highly questionable, especially when even sophisticated audiences begin to lose interest and have to be cajoled and reassured that it is only because they are such boobs and so challenged in an evolutionary sense that they don't "get it"~"but in the meantime, do write another check to support our arts group, and thus, art as such."
 
This just seems to be too easy an "out" for an artist who might in fact simply be untalented, inartistic and a bore. 
 
That is why I try to counter this tendency by demanding that art be emotionally engaging and attract a non-professional audience.
 
Yes, I agree that art has certain natural elitism that does not fit in well with mass society and democracy.

The artist, after all, is supposed to a talented genius, not a typical person. He is supposed to see what the rest of us can't see, and translate it into something that we find enlightening, something that can even redeem humanity when nothing else can redeem it.
 
That being said, I don't think that such elitism is inimical to Democracy. The reason I don't is that the artist’s best subject will often be the common man, the ordinary person. He must sympathize with that person in order to create great art that speaks to a significant audience. 
 
I would say this was true even during the time of royal and church patronage. You might be a prince, but you're still a human being with human problems and limitations that are widely shared. The same emotions~sadness, happiness, love, etc. There are just too many universals out there for art to be able to neatly divorce itself from ordinary people.
 
And an art that does try to divorce itself in that way is just "art", not real art: a sterile game in which a small group preaches to the choir, and everyone falls into a state of self-satisfied ennui.... 
 
Consider Moliere (I wonder why he sticks in my mind so much) as opposed to, say, a professor of music composition at UC Santa Cruz teaching his graduate students and trying to win various academic accolades. 
 
If that professor were like Moliere, he would be mocking his little circle of elitists, not circling the wagons to protect it.
 
Anyway, those are just some thoughts I've had off-hand. I'll reread your email later to see if I have any more to say on the subject.
 
Andrew 

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Andrew,

Very good points, all.
 
One of the big problems when dealing with the question of art is cultural and historical: as you know, many cultures don't even have a word for art, or don't see it as an autonomous activity, don't (for example) treat it as independent of religion, say, or decoration. So we're stuck with dealing with a local, time-bound understanding of it~one that, happily or not, is bound up with our limited (and short-term) cultural circumstances. 
 
I totally agree that the politicization of "cultural production" (the current awful term for it) is deadly. If the artist does not have an independent mind and take on his material and art, he's pretty useless. The modern artist needs to be politically incorrect on all fronts - he needs to be a kind of congenital traitor to the cause, or at least one should never be able to guess his allegiances from his work. 
 
I also agree that the artist, when he becomes part of the academy, is in danger of losing at least some credibility. But only if he lets it~only if he is more eager to belong than is consistent with his honesty.
 
But everything I have experienced demonstrates to me, anyway, that there is a fundamental tension between high art and modern democracy and its egalitarianism: art is based firmly on the idea of talent, which is inherently anti-egalitarian. The marketplace is the worst purveyor of modern egalitarianism: it worships the common man and shows the most florid contempt for "intellectuals" and artsy-fartsy types.

The serious artist is at times put in an impossible position, if he is unwilling to join the carnival of the marketplace, advertising, and Hollywood, and can be slowly crushed by the indifference and contempt of the surrounding culture unless he gives in and sells his integrity and therefore his cultural worth. Of course, he is not outright killed or put into prison, and he may even win awards and accolades in the major media and the occasional website. But the contempt he faces may be worst. There's nothing better guaranteed to rot a person from within: it undermines your faith in yourself. I know from personal experience: the total lack of response to my novel by the American media has been a very bitter experience, balanced (fortunately) by the strong support of a handful of cultural "outliers."
 
But of course, artists aren't the only persons facing threats to their integrity - it's something that, I guess, any honest person feels - they just feel it more keenly, and express it more forcefully, for obvious reasons.

I'd like to develop these ideas in greater detail but my supervisor just brought me some work to do!
 
Talk to you soon.
 
Chris

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Chris,

Thanks:
 
Being the contrarian that you know I am (I am in overall agreement with many of your points), I would note that popular, Democratic culture is not anti-elitist per se. 
 
Look at how we worship great athletes, for example. 
 
Rather, it is resistant to things that are not quickly and easily understood. 
 
This means fine art has a choice: it can be obscure, or it can be accessible. 
 
I used to think being obscure had to be part of the package in order for art to have depth and significance. 
 
But now -- perhaps because in many ways I am unsophisticated in my tastes -- I don't think so. 
 
No, I think there are wonderful things a composer can do even (for example) with a family-kids type movie, and that people will appreciate his contribution.
 
Why do I think this? 
 
Because art deals with universals that have an impact on everyone at least within this Western culture of ours. People fall in love, they hate, they win, they lose, they enjoy nature, etc. All of this is material for the artist to base his work on and have that work be accessible to everyone.

Yes, it does have to be presented simply in order to be appreciated. That simplicity, however, does not mean that the art is a lesser art; on the contrary, that's where I think the real aesthetic challenge lies -- reconciling the simple and accessible to the novel and unexpected. You have to write music that people can understand on an emotional level, but you can’t just repeat what has been done.

Now let's say that you've done this successfully, and your work has been appreciated by large numbers of people. 
 
That appreciation will nevertheless be largely unconscious, as the elements of music, drama and cinematography work together in a seamless whole throughout the movie. 
 
In this sense, art does become like decoration -- something we appreciate but don't really pay any attention to in a direct and technical sense (unless we also are artists). 
 
Unless you're in the decorating profession, you're not likely to ask someone about their decor. You'll just say, "Nice place" and leave it at that. 
 
So I would say that the artist as someone who stands out is a feature of Western culture that has been overstated. 
 
And that overstatement might be largely responsible for a lot of the bad art that is out there. Bad art that is mistaken for good art because of a clever alibi. The alibi that the artist who is promoted from the servants’ quarters to the salon in the rich man’s house can always give by claiming that he is getting his due because his genius is ahead of it time.

But back to my idea of an excellent film composer, doing real art. No one is paying any attention to his name as it scrolls by in the credits….
 
But does that really matter? He can still say that he is a working composer, and I presume that with repeated work he will earn a decent living doing something he loves. People will respect him, especially if his fellow movie composers are also doing good work. 
 
On the other hand, we know that market goes for a lot of garbage, and to that extent anyone working in Hollywood is tainted. 
 
But was there ever a time when all art being produced was good art? I doubt it. There is no more reason to think that this would ever have been the case than to think that at one time, all restaurants were great restaurants. Instead, I think there were times when bad art couldn’t “come to market,” so to speak. The apprenticeship system in Florence during the Renaissance probably did the necessary weeding out.
 
Now there are some artists who really do want to press the envelope a la Schoenberg and they have the talent and intellect to do that -- but they can't expect people to embrace their work. Especially not if they are being politically incorrect. So the very last place I would expect to find a composer who was "ahead of his time" would be in our conformist and politically correct universities. 

I think a lot of artists want it both ways -- they want to be challenging, but they don't want to take the consequences that come with that. 
 
Well, of course they don't; why would they? 
 
But they don't have a choice in the matter. 
 
All they can do is compensate for those unpleasant consequences in various ways -- by being deliberately outrageous and politically controversial, by cutting an eccentric figure, by using their charisma to gain a cult-like following. Or by just not caring that much (e.g., Charles Ives.) 
 
All of these things and more have been tried in the last 120 years or so. Oscar Wilde would be a good example of someone who did this. And one the consequences he faced for "living his dream" was going to prison for sodomy.
 
Now we have the academy to do the compensating for us. Our "rebellion" has become institutionalized, a new "profession".

We artists can jump on the academic bandwagon, get the requisite seals of approval, have tenure and a secure income and retirement, and have a ready-made and largely captive audience. Or not.
 
I myself think this turning of "rebellion" into a Ivory Tower profession is a travesty, a joke. It is a perfect example of what Marcuse called repressive desublimation, or to put it more bluntly, selling out. How these people can take themselves seriously is beyond me. I imagine a lot them have bad marriages, or drink too much. Or maybe their kids hate them. Who knows?
 
Since you don't have an academic position (that I know of), you can't ease the pain of being challenging and therefore misunderstood (who makes any real effort to understand anything anymore unless there's money in it, anyway?) by being able to say, "Well, my colleagues at the University respect me, and in music generally, and my students are winning awards and getting into great music programs blah blah blah." 
 
You have to swallow that pain whole, and then spend a great deal of time earning a living doing something (again, I am assuming this is so) that is not related to your passion.
 
You've chosen a hard road. Given that you refuse to compromise your aesthetic and intellectual standards, I respect you. 
 
So (unsolicited advice from me) be proud of yourself. 
 
And above all, keep doing it because you enjoy doing it. That's what really matters.
 
Andrew  

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Andrew,

Of course I take your points, which are very well taken indeed, and I agree with much of what you say. But, being as unable to agree with anyone completely on anything as you are, I must point out that ....

Point 1....

Point 2....

Point 3.…

Etc., etc., etc....

And furthermore....

Etc., etc., etc., etc.

Therefore, [choose a conclusion of your choice], and [choose another conclusion of your choice], and [choose another conclusion of your choice], even though etc., etc., etc., despite the fact that etc., etc., etc. Nevertheless, etc., etc. etc., etc.

Q.E.D.

Chris

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Chris,

Lol.
 
Well, I hope nothing I said offended you. 
 
Overall, I think it's a great thing that you are independent. 
 
I am independent too, but also lazy.
 
However, I have gotten excited recently about the English composer Patrick Hawes (he has a website), especially the Pavane he wrote for the movie (which I probably already mentioned) "The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie." I just copied out the music (a piano reduction, which I edited a bit) and am learning to play it.
 
He does a lot of church music in England and is apparently developing a big reputation there, at least with the general public.
 
Andy

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Andy,

Of course I wasn't offended~merely aggrieved. ;-S
 
Glad you saw the humor of it~actually, I didn't intend to send it as is~I was writing it quickly at work when my boss walked in; the finger slipped, and off it went.
 
I have an idea: I'm thinking this thread of emails might make a interesting essay, with a title like “Art versus the Academy,” for Caveat. It would be nice to have another one of the Founders back in the pages too, especially for our 20th anniversary issue. We could look the “essay” over, maybe polish it up, and post it on the website. 
 
We could open it with a link to the New Criterion article, and pretty well let our email exchange take off from there.
 
What do you think?

I’ll end it with my own summing up: Creative writing groups, workshops, programs have not only made the literary world safe for mediocrity; they have made intellectual second-rateness a kind of badge of honor. What is that I hear from sea to shining sea? The baying of the literary Yahoos.

Chris

“Universities are a bit like hospitals”: 
An Appendix From Oxbridge via Hong Kong

(Note from Danyll Wills: I read Chinese at university in England, after spending a few years doing odd jobs, mainly for architects, in Germany and France. When I finally left in 1976, I went to Japan – I couldn’t at that time go to China – and stayed there for 17 years. I came to Hong Kong in 1993 and have been here or in China ever since. I have an interest in most of what you and Chris have been talking about, but I know absolutely nothing about music! I have worked as a writer and editor but I also go very deep into computing while I was in Japan. I learnt to program computers using Japanese books – that was a pain but great fun. I now help technology companies with their communication needs.)

Chris, Andrew,

I have had the unusual privilege of having studied officially or semi-officially at a host of universities in several countries. I have been to the University of Hawaii, sat in on lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, done the same at the Sorbonne, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Bonn, Kyoto and Kobe. When I finally did “settle down,” it was at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where I wanted to be near Joseph Needham (but that is a very long story for another time).

One of the most interesting aspects of all this to me was the way in which most of the American universities treated their undergraduates. I was quite appalled at the way undergraduates were treated by the teaching staff. Friends of mine who went to Harvard were never taught by any of that institution’s great scholars. If they were lucky they would get an occasional lecture by one. Most of the actual teaching was done by graduate students working on their own Ph.D.’s. They needed the money and the universities wanted cheap labor. I felt there was a dreadful snobbery as well, especially among the students. The biggest surprise to me was the discovery that so few American students could write. In Europe, it is impossible to get into a university unless you can write your own language. There are no beginning courses in writing taught at university level. Nearly all work is delivered in the form of the essay.

My life on the continent was most enjoyable. There was at that time – the 1970s – no sense of urgency and no sense of “what kind of job will I get after I finish?” Perhaps that has changed, but it was most refreshing at the time. By contrast, many of the American students I met thought of little else (apart from the likes of Christopher Bernard, but we know all about him, don’t we?).

Studying at Cambridge was both extremely rewarding and great fun as well, but for rather different reasons. It does indeed live up to its reputation but not in the way one might expect. Tradition and history are very strong, and it is difficult not to be both awestruck and intimidated by it. This year the university celebrates its 800th anniversary. My own College was founded in 1348, and our neighbor, Trinity (200 years our junior), boasts some rather interesting members of the College: Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Tennyson, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Betrand Russell, John Dryden, Byron, James Clerk Maxwell, Wittgenstein, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, etc., to name but a tiny handful. Kim Philby was there as well, of course. (Philby was one of the handful of Communist spies recruited at Cambridge just before the Second World War. He came very close to heading up MI6 and fled to Moscow just before the government found him out.)

The sense of elitism is strong but also subtle. We are led to believe it is privilege to be there and that we only got in because of luck. The Admissions Tutor of the College you apply to (no undergraduate applies to the University itself, only research students do that) makes the decision, and it often depends more on your interview than anything else. 

It took me a few days to realise that the “system,” at least in Cambridge, was designed to create people who would have no problem interacting with anybody, and by that I mean the President of the Bank of England, or the President of the United States, or the Queen. You are taught to stand up for what you believe is right. You must do it with tact, scholarship, diplomacy, humor if possible, but you never shy away. The exams given at Cambridge are called Tripos Exams, and you must do at least two to complete a degree. Most people do a Part I and then a Part II in the same subject, and you do this for three years (unlike America’s four). It is possible, if you get permission, to do two Part I exams or – and this is rare – a Part I in one subject and a Part II in another, provided you can prove you can handle it. There are lectures and supervisions (the latter called tutorials at Oxford). The lectures cover numerous subjects directly related to what you are doing. The supervisions are one-on-one sessions of about an hour a week with a supervisor from your college if possible. The supervisor will assign an essay subject, give some guidance about what you may want to read to prepare, and one week later you will sit in front of him and read the essay. Often, as you read, he asks questions about why you made a particular statement. None of the supervisions or lectures has any direct relation to the Tripos Exam. If you are studying English, for example, there was in the 1970s a mandatory Tragedy section for the Tripos Part I. That was divided into three sections, Classical, Medieval, and Modern. A sample question from the first of those back then was this: “All Greek tragedy is religious: discuss.” There was a question on the history of English that referred to about a half-dozen English translations over the past 1000 years of the same short Biblical passage. The question asked was: “Show how the following translations have been influenced by West Saxon.”

The point about the lectures, supervisions, and exams is that they are not really connected in the way they are in America. There are no “dictators” in the Oxbridge system: you go (or not, as the case may be) to lectures; you attend supervisions (or not); then at the end of the year you take an exam that is graded by people who may well know you but at least one who does not because one of your examiners will be from outside Cambridge. This will be someone who knows nothing about you or what you have done during the year. The outside examiner not only grades the exams, he is asked to set some of the questions. This is done to ensure personal relationships do not “get in the way.” (The one person who got a starred First in History when I was there was a well-known Marxist. The History Faculty was extremely conservative. They still gave him the highest marks ever in History because his essays were brilliant, even if they did not agree with his conclusions or even like him.)

As a student, you are very much on your own. Your College probably has a late night bar (mine did!), and you can go there every day to drink yourself silly, if you like. If you fail an exam, you are out; there are no second chances. 

Imagine, for a moment, that you were an 18-year-old studying mathematics at Trinity College in the 1960s. You just might have had Bertrand Russell for a supervision on Logic. If you could write an essay for him, have him tear it to pieces, but still stand up for your arguments, what else could you not do? Who could ever intimidate you? Of course, you would get the benefit of his views on the world as well, and that would also have been worth it. (And if you were really lucky, you might be able to have a sherry with him later!)

One of the fundamental ideas behind education at Cambridge is that you arrive with “basic tools,” and it is the job of the University to extend what you can do with them. There is no concept – as there would seem to be in America – that the University must behave in loco parentis (and yet the term derives from English Common Law with specific reference to universities). You are treated as an adult. Nobody takes temptations away: if you cannot learn to deal with them then, when will you?

There is a great emphasis on dealing with what you do not know. In my Chinese exams - and it must be remembered that, unlike European languages, Chinese is taught from scratch so they know exactly what they have taught you, they know how many characters you know - they make certain that the texts of the exams contain 15 to 20 per cent of characters you have never seen. They want to know how well you can guess the meanings from the context. This gives a rather different interpretation to the expression “an educated guess.” Other subjects are similar. The one thing that is nonexistent is the single point of correctness: you do not attend classes of one person who then sends in a grade.

How does all this relate to the subject of the modern fiction and creative writing? The European approach is that you start with basic tools~the ability to write “decent” prose, for example. Then you study as much of what has come before, and you try to move on. It is difficult to rebel against something you do not really understand, so history is important, even if you are intending to reject it.

It seems to me that the American system, where just about everybody goes to some kind of university, has resulted in the diminished value of the university itself. Why must so many people go? There was a time when we used apprenticeships to teach – what is wrong with that for those who are mainly interested in learning something that will allow them to earn a decent wage?

One of the more interesting consequences of America’s “radical democratization” of education is that it has spawned a new kind of elite: the Ph.D. For many, a B.A. is no longer enough, one must go on to get a higher degree. Who benefits the most from this? Surely it is those institutions that confer those degrees.

I have always had a bit of a problem with intellectualizing  “art.” That may be for critics to do, who study the arts professionally. (This does not mean to say that artists cannot be successful critics. The reverse, however, is rare.) I just had a look at some of the other universities in the UK, and they also seem to teach “creative writing”~an American disease? Makes them some money, I suspect.

If I were asked to advise a young person who was accepted at a reasonable university and was unsure what to do, I'd say, “Do history or some kind of liberal arts subject. Learn as much as you can about what has been before. Read as much as you can. Absorb, observe, experience the world, think!”

My point is that a university is a place to explore, a place to learn as much as you can without too much worry about survival. The idea of teaching “creative writing” at a university is simply absurd to me. You need to get out into the world, read a lot, experience a lot, live  life, get on with it. Universities are a bit like hospitals: very good at looking at the world dispassionately but not a place for creativity. There is a reason we think of them as ivory towers: they allow you to examine things in comfort without a concern for the “real” world.

The pursuit of “creative writing” is something you do after you have something original and significant to say. I know that some young people think they do~and a very small minority may well have!~but the vast  majority has not. Put simply, I think the whole idea of teaching “creative writing” at a university is a joke. It is surely one huge wank for those who teach and a waste of time for those who study.

Clearly the email debaters could have gone on and on: none of them is likely to consider the statements made in this exchange to be their last word on any of these issues, or will feel they have responded sufficiently to points raised by others (I was very tempted to “pull rank” as editor and respond to any number of, to my prejudiced mind, dubious assertions and risible assumptions by the two other most active respondents~but I stayed, more or less, my itching hand.) However, this is not meant to be a comprehensive statement either of the issues or of the participants’ positions: consider it a taster, a provocation, bait~meant to stimulate, but by no means conclude, debate.

Please feel free to join in, if you feel so inclined, by responding to editors@caveat-lector.org.