Rediscovering Pleasure in the English Classroom

Jamil Mustafa

My spring-term evening section of “Understanding Fiction” began in a marketplace-

oriented fashion ideally suited to its venue, a suburban shopping mall. I asked my students

(mostly mid-career police officers) what they hoped to gain from the course, what skills and

knowledge they wanted to take away from it. They explained to me without a trace of self-

consciousness that their principal aims were to accumulate general-education credits toward

graduation (which would lead to promotion), and to avoid paying for the course. Since this latter

goal might puzzle some readers, let me hasten to explain it. Because—to use a term favored by

the business analyst and higher-education apologist Roger Herman—my “student-customers”

(34) would receive full tuition reimbursement from their employer only by earning A’s, they

were hoping that my grading policy would prove generous. Eyeing their firearms, I made a

mental note to omit the essay portion of the final exam.

Disclosing the consumerist mindset that has come to dominate higher education, my

students had cast themselves and the Chicago Police Department in the role of consumers, and

me and Lewis University in the role of providers. Put more bluntly, they recognized that their

tuition paid my salary, and they expected a solid return on their investment in my course. Sadly

enough, their businesslike, even mercenary approach to education failed to surprise me, since I

have learned to expect just such an attitude from many—in fact, most—of my students.

Consumerism is rampant in institutions of higher education, even in those that the Carnegie

Foundation classifies as liberal arts colleges. It manifests itself not only among “non-traditional”

students who hope to use their diplomas to change careers or seek promotion, but also among

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“traditional” undergraduates who presumably enroll in a liberal arts institution to pursue

knowledge for its own sake. (Considering this last phrase, “to pursue knowledge for its own

sake,” I am struck by how outmoded it sounds in contrast to the currently fashionable notion of

“investing in your education,” a slogan that colleges and universities seem increasingly to favor

in their TV and print ads.) Research conducted by Michael Delucchi and Kathleen Korgen

demonstrates that, rather than teaching within “a learning culture,” today’s faculties confront “an

undergraduate student culture characterized by a sense of entitlement indicative of a consumerist

approach to higher education” (100). While Delucchi and Korgen’s work focuses on the field of

sociology, I would venture to claim that their conclusions extend to all disciplines—certainly, at

least, to my “Understanding Fiction” class.

Settling into my now-familiar job of professor-provider, I directed my student-customers’

attention to the painstakingly crafted and ever-growing section of the syllabus devoted to

calculating grades (complete with scales, templates, and everything short of a pie chart). As we

began going over the numbers, I wondered just when and why pleasure had disappeared from the

learning and teaching of English, and how students and professors might rediscover it.

Granted, I overstate the case somewhat. Certainly the students who major in English, and

the professors who teach them, still find plenty to enjoy in reading and discussing literature. But

while our English majors are an ever-growing group, for the moment they comprise a relatively

modest percentage of all those enrolled in English classes here at Lewis University. The English

major’s delight in reading and writing is seldom shared by students in general-education English

courses, who typically view these activities as difficult, burdensome, and even frightening—in

short, as anything but pleasurable. When I ask students in “College Writing I” or “Introduction

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to Poetry” what and how often they read and write for pleasure, more often than not I hear that

they have neither the time nor the inclination for such esoteric pursuits.

Indeed, the premise of my question—that they might choose to read and write outside the

classroom during unstructured moments of free time—seems alien to the majority of them for

two reasons. First, most of my students work, and many of these student-workers spend upwards

of thirty hours a week on the job; they have precious few blank spots in their overcrowded

schedules, and what little off-time they do enjoy is devoted, understandably enough, to

minimally demanding diversions. Second, reading and writing are associated in many students’

minds not with play but with work, whether in school or on the job. Students who do value these

skills tend to see them as useful because, as Herman notes, “The emphasis that the liberal arts

curriculum places on critical and creative writing, speaking, and critical thought is appreciated

by employers,” since “Too many of their employees have serious difficulty constructing written

sentences and producing quality memos, letters, and reports.” Thus, “Liberal arts, with its

concentration on developing these skills, [offers] a definite advantage” to college graduates

seeking employment or promotion (34). Guided by a pervasive careerist mindset that predates

the current economic downturn but has no doubt been exacerbated by it, those few students who

read and write outside the classroom increasingly do so not for pleasure but for career

development and advancement.

Consumerism and the Liberal Arts

Over the past few decades, a narrowly pragmatic approach to education in general and to

the liberal arts in particular has been widely adopted, not only by career-oriented students but

also by the many colleges and universities that seek to protect their market-share of these

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students. As James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield observe in “The Market-Model University:

Humanities in the Age of Money,” students’ interest in the liberal arts has been steadily and

dramatically declining over the past few decades. On campuses across the nation between 1971

and 1994, business majors effectively crowded out those studying English, foreign languages,

philosophy, religion, and history. Following the lead of their peers in college, high-school

students have increasingly come to see education purely in careerist terms. By 1998, only nine

percent of those taking the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test showed any interest in studying

the humanities (50). The national trend in favor of pre-professional studies at the expense of the

humanities appears to be continuing, according to the author and essayist Jack Miles. “As more

and more colleges and universities adopt the market model, providing students not what tradition

says they need but what the students themselves say they want,” Miles notes, “the liberal arts are

being squeezed out of the curriculum” (303). Although a solid case can be made for the liberal

arts as a means of career preparation and enhancement, some schools have chosen to “abandon

or sharply scale back their arts and sciences [curricula] in order to accommodate student

preoccupation with the immediate job market,” so much so that “the retention of a liberal arts

claim in the academic mission statements of these colleges [has become] inconsistent with their

professional [curricula]” (Delucchi 414). Now liberal arts institutions in name only, these

colleges have blurred the distinction between themselves and vocational schools by consenting to

the proposition that higher education is not an end in itself but merely the means to an end—that

end being a job.

Students and administrators are not the only ones to blame for the plight of the liberal arts,

however, for faculty members too have contributed to the current situation. I confess to having

played my own small part in expediting pleasure’s disappearance from the English classroom. I

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have often promised those enrolled in “Understanding Fiction” and other general-education

English courses that these courses would help them to develop the writing and critical-thinking

skills so highly prized by employers. Seeking to bolster my claims about the utility of English

studies (and, perhaps, to justify my seemingly impractical discipline and profession to my

students and myself), I have looked to the business world for validation. I have described the

hefty consulting fees earned by graduate students in English who teach ambitious mid-level

executives how to write. I have even gone so far as to explain to my students that while newly

minted Ph.D.s in the humanities generally have great trouble finding suitable positions in

colleges and universities, they often discover lucrative employment in high-profile consulting

and financial-services firms that have finally awakened to their value as writers, analysts, and

public speakers.

I stopped making this last point after realizing (somewhat belatedly) how culpable

business-minded schools are in the seemingly unending “job crisis.” The job market in the

humanities remains so tight, not because enrollments have dropped, but because colleges and

universities are looking and acting like corporations. Following the lead of “downsizing” big

businesses, institutions of higher education are relying ever more heavily upon temporary and

part-time workers. On average, adjunct faculty now comprise nearly half of the professoriate.

At present, “In the academic labor market as elsewhere in the American labor market, the goal of

management is, increasingly, to keep the number of permanent, salaried employees as small as

possible by transferring as much of the aggregate workload as possible to temporary employees

who are paid on a fee-for-service basis” (Miles 303). To staff multiple sections of first-year and

general-education courses cheaply and efficiently, to lower the cost of faculty salaries and

benefits, and to create a market-sensitive and easily reduced workforce, the administrators of too

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many self-described liberal arts schools have curtailed academic freedom, imperiled the identity

and legitimacy of their institutions, and helped to erode the quality of American higher

education. What Miles characterizes as the “deprofessionalization or proletarianization of

college teaching” has contributed greatly to “the decline of the liberal arts on campus” (303).

Small wonder the liberal arts are threatened and careerism wins the day, when a retiring tenured

faculty member in the humanities is routinely replaced, not by one tenure-track junior professor

devoted wholly to one institution, but by two or three non-tenure-track adjunct professors (each

often working at multiple institutions) who have so little ability to shape curricula—indeed, so

little influence or security of any kind.

Two General Approaches to Rediscovering Pleasure

As the invisible hand of the marketplace throttles the liberal arts and those who serve

them, what might professors in the humanities—and, more to my present purpose, professors of

English—do to escape the chokehold of consumerism? How do we avoid selling out or

becoming irrelevant? How can we rediscover pleasure? First and foremost, we must never seek

to justify general-education English courses in wholly consumerist terms—not because reading

and writing are not valuable on the job (of course they are), but because when we sell the study

of literature and language as if we were peddling a Palm Pilot, we diminish our field, our

students, and ourselves. I am not suggesting that we ignore the practical benefits of studying

English. Indeed, I stress to my students that the close-reading strategies they use to interpret the

forms and meanings of a limitless range of texts—an Emily Dickinson poem, a computer game,

a job application letter, a music video, a boardroom meeting—will serve them well both on and

off the job. But there is a difference between emphasizing the utility of English and justifying

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the field solely on the basis of its utility, and that difference has everything to do with pleasure:

the private pleasure that readers take in making texts their own, the public pleasure that teachers

and students take in sharing their individual experiences of texts within a supportive community

of readers.

Accordingly, my second main contention is that professors and students of English—and,

indeed, of the liberal arts in general—should teach and study only what brings them pleasure.

Some readers will no doubt reject this claim on the basis of the (too) commonly accepted

pedagogical principle that not all study can or should be pleasurable. This tenet compels us to

teach certain concepts and texts, not because we enjoy teaching them or imagine that our

students will enjoy learning them, but because they are inherently worthwhile. (Sentence

fragments, the “Cetology” chapter of Moby-Dick, and the differences among the APA, MLA,

and Chicago-style essay formats all come to mind.) We do neither our students nor ourselves

any good, however, by treating knowledge as if it were an unappetizing dish to be consumed not

for its palatability but for its nutritional value. Furthermore, I would argue that in opposing

pleasure to worth, utility, and canonicity we create a false and pernicious dichotomy, for learning

is worthwhile only if it is retained, and it is retained only if it brings pleasure.

My point is illustrated by an example from my own college education. As an English-

communications double major, I resented being compelled to study physics and delayed taking

the class until the last semester of my senior year. Fortunately, my physics professor—who

acknowledged that many of us humanities types were in his class under duress—understood that

if we were to learn anything lasting about his field we had to enjoy it, and so he delighted us with

the wonders of science even while drilling us in its rigors. To this day I can recall his teaching

us complex formulas by calculating the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, and his

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drawing us into Einstein’s theories of General and Special Relativity by describing how

astronauts would age more slowly than those they left behind on Earth. (Students here at Lewis

University have shared with me stories of a similarly gifted professor of chemistry who allays

their fear of science and draws them deeply into his field by using everyday occurrences to

illustrate complex chemical processes.) Far from being inimical to education, pleasure is

essential to it.

Just as pleasure is necessary to learning, so choice is indispensable to pleasure. I firmly

believe that one of the most fundamental steps we can take toward fostering both learning and

pleasure in the classroom is allowing—indeed, compelling—students to assume control of and

responsibility for their own work. Thus, I require students in my literature and writing classes to

choose their own essay texts and topics. I explain to them that the most important and

challenging part of the writing process is settling on a subject, and I note that professional writers

are generally responsible for determining the content and focus of their own works. I do

establish broad parameters within which my students make their selections (literary texts should

be of quality, non-literary sources should be scholarly); I do provide them with whatever

guidance they require in making their selections; and they do receive an assignment sheet that

defines their essay’s purpose, structure, length, number and types of sources, and format.

Ultimately, however, my students must decide for themselves what to write about, keeping in

mind not only their own interests and desires but also those of their readers (that is, myself and

their peer reviewers).

This practice is not without its disadvantages, foremost among which is the fact that it

exponentially increases my workload. Allowing students to choose their own texts means

requiring them to provide me with copies of their sources, so that I might ensure their accurate

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and honest use of these materials. It also often means rapidly familiarizing myself with wholly

foreign subjects and writings. Offering students a limited menu of texts and topics from which

to choose would certainly streamline my paper grading. It would also alleviate the anxieties of

those few students who are so profoundly estranged from their own interests and desires that

they freeze at the prospect of assuming even partial responsibility for their writing choices. Yet

these disadvantages are far outweighed by the great pleasure that newly liberated writers take in

working with ideas and texts that fully engage them and in sharing their work with receptive

readers—to say nothing of the pleasure that I take in watching my students grow as independent

writers and thinkers.

Education vs. Pleasure

Unfortunately, pleasures of these sorts are more rare than they should be, for we learn

from an early age that we are not to delight in our studies. Far too many bright and enthusiastic

learners—my graduate-school peers, my professors, my students, and my colleagues—have told

horror stories of how their schooling completely drained the joy from a particular object or field

of study. (I learned to detest math in the third grade, and my love of English survived graduate-

level study in the discipline only because, unlike many of my classmates, I refused to let it sicken

and die.) From grade school to graduate school, we are told what to study, how to speak and

write and think; our own desires, our own enjoyment, are downplayed. By the time students

reach college, they have come to expect little pleasure in school; thus, when I ask those enrolled

in one of my general-education English courses whether they want to be in the class, they are

shocked at my question. (Why should it matter to me what they want?) After I offer them full

immunity from gradebook persecution in exchange for their candid answers, most of them

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respond that they would rather be elsewhere, studying something that they like. I thank them for

their honesty and ask them what they do like, and whether it might conceivably relate to the

study of English. In this way, at least the topic (if not always the actual experience) of pleasure

is admitted into the classroom.

The self-alienating process whereby pleasure is stifled at all educational levels particularly

concerns English professors, because it so often centers on writing—both our own and our

students’. Consider the case of Scott Russell Sanders, a professor of English at Indiana

University. “During [his] long apprenticeship in school,” Sanders was trained to silence his own

voice and to cultivate the ostensibly objective writing style prized by his teachers and professors,

to produce “the anonymous prose that mumbles like elevator music in the background of our

industrial civilization—the prose of memos, quarterly reports, grant proposals, program

summaries, newscasts, run-of-the-mill journalism, court briefs, perfunctory scholarship, and tidy

English papers.” Sanders (who obviously rebelled against his training) describes quite richly and

precisely the sort of thoroughly bloodless, neutral prose that students expect me to expect of

them—no “I” statements, no references to the writer’s own experience, no personal investment

of any kind.

This spring, in a session of “College Writing II,” I discovered the degree to which students

have become estranged from their own writing—indeed, from their own thinking. I was

explaining an assignment (an argumentative essay requiring the writer to synthesize multiple

source texts), when a student frowned at me, obviously puzzled. “I know we can choose our

own topics and sources, but we’re not supposed to put our own opinions into this paper, are we?”

she asked. “Actually,” I responded, somewhat taken aback, “since this is an argumentative

essay, it must, by definition, consist of your own opinions—supported, of course, by evidence

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and analysis.” Her frown deepened. “But I’ve always been told not to put my own opinions into

a paper.” “Yes,” I agreed, “that approach is fine for a purely informative essay, but it goes

without saying that an argumentative essay expresses the writer’s opinions.” We talked for a few

more minutes, and several other students joined us. I noted that all writing—even journalism,

even scientific reports—is to a greater or lesser extent shaped by personal opinion, insofar as it

expresses subjective choices made by individuals: which story to choose for the front page,

which research project to pursue. Referencing the Sanders essay, I paraphrased his compelling

point that in all writing, “even if the self is not on display, an actual, flesh-and-blood human

being still composes the sentences.” But my students remained skeptical.

During our discussion, I was shocked to realize that they were struggling to grasp even the

concept (never mind the practice) of argumentative writing—that is, writing that draws on the

voices and beliefs of others but is dominated by the writer’s own voice and belief. Sanders faces

a dilemma similar to mine: “After learning to wrap the views of experts into neat packages from

which their own views have been carefully omitted, some students are dismayed when I insist on

hearing what they themselves think about the hard questions.” So many students have been so

thoroughly trained to write “objectively” that they have no sense of how to express their own

opinions, however well considered and well evidenced those might be. They seek in their essays

merely to replicate the opinions of others. Not surprisingly, they take little pleasure in writing

and feel fundamentally alienated from the texts that they produce.

Strategies for Welcoming Pleasure into the Classroom

Fortunately, there are a number of ways in which we can encourage our students to enjoy

and to invest in writing and reading. To improve their writing and to reconnect them to their

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own work, we might suggest three simple yet crucial sentence-level changes. First, students

should substitute “we” or, where appropriate, “I” for the vague and stuffy “one.” Second, they

should move from the passive to the active voice. Third, they should avoid nominalizations

(verbs or adjectives turned into nouns—for example, “conclude” becomes “conclusion,”

“beautiful” becomes “beauty”). Individually and especially in combination, these three methods

work very well to prune dense and tangled writing by eliminating deadwood (unnecessary

expletives and prepositions, to-be verbs) from sentences. For instance, “One can see that there is

a pressing need for members of the board to reach a decision immediately” is revised to “We

realize that the board members must decide immediately.” As students work to invigorate and

clarify their prose, they can avoid sinking into the morass of wordiness wherein the authors of

their textbooks so often flounder. Furthermore, as they focus sentences on clearly identifiable

actors and actions, they can assign responsibility where it is due and thereby reacquaint

themselves with their own voices and thoughts.

Sanders describes how he used revision techniques similar to these in rediscovering his

own authorial individuality. Early in his schooling, he “graduated from using the first-person

singular” and “learned to compose entire essays without revealing who gathered the evidence,

constructed the argument, arrived at the judgments, or chose the words.” He then “became slick

at hypothetical phrasing, in which equivocal, unattributable views dangled from that handy

weasel-word, ‘it’: ‘It might be concluded,’ ‘It would seem to be the case.’” He likewise

“became adept at the passive voice, that essential tool of bureaucrats, corporate pirates, and

flimflam artists.” After breaking with these conventions, he sought to free his students from

them: “Instead of ‘one might deduce from the foregoing examples,’ I would suggest, how about

‘I think’? Instead of ‘the white whale inspires dread in the reader,’ try ‘the white whale scares

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me.’” When encouraged to assume responsibility for their own opinions, Sanders concludes,

“Most students [. . .] welcome the chance of writing more personally, more concretely, more

passionately.” Reconnected to their own work, these students “often produce essays that are

lively and engaged, a pleasure to read” and to write.

Professors seeking practical, concrete means of improving student (and professorial)

writing should read Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams. Another

useful and popular source is Patricia Nelson Limerick’s “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble

with Academic Prose.” Tired of having to slog their way through assigned readings that are

often nearly impenetrable, students take tremendous (if somewhat malicious) pleasure in

Limerick’s argument that insecure professors have pledged themselves to “a cult of “obscurity”

and have chosen to “hide behind the idea that unintelligible prose indicates a sophisticated

mind.” Obscure writing, Limerick contends, is a means of professorial self-defense, for “When

you write typical academic prose, it is nearly impossible to make a strong, clear statement. The

benefit here is that no one can attack your position, say you are wrong or even raise questions

about the accuracy of what you have said, if they cannot tell what you have said.” Limerick’s

article is helpful in the classroom as a complement to the stylistic exercises offered by Williams,

for together these authors invite students to consider both composition and rhetoric—that is, the

words on the page, and the intended effect of those words on the reader.

The relationship between composition and rhetoric is crucial in assisting students to regain

their voices and to rediscover pleasure in both writing and reading. This relationship, however,

is by no means clear to many of those enrolled in general-education English courses. While

these students tend to be fairly comfortable in discussing a text’s content, they are much less

secure in analyzing its form, and even less confident in considering its rhetorical tactics.

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Moreover, they typically have trouble recognizing how composition and rhetoric shape each

other. For example, my “College Writing I” students can easily summarize the Brent Staples

essay, “Black Men and Public Space,” but they run into difficulty when identifying its (inferred)

thesis statement and investigating its cause-and-effect structure. They are often perplexed when

I ask them what effect Staples is seeking in his conclusion, and how the essay’s final paragraph

contributes to this effect. Likewise, although students in “Understanding Fiction” can provide a

plot summary of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” they seldom perceive the ways

in which characterization and point of view join in the story to produce an unreliable narrative

whose purpose is to unsettle and disorient its reader.

We might awaken our students to the rich and mutually constitutive relationship between

composition and rhetoric by evoking and employing these terms as frequently as possible. I

introduce and define them during the first session of a course, and then I ask members of the

class to apply them to our first text—the syllabus. What materials are contained within the

syllabus and why? Which of its sections are designed to inform and which to persuade? Why is

the section on grading so detailed and extensive? (This last question always provokes lively

discussion. Occasionally, an especially discerning student will observe that by using a template

to quantify essay grading, I am seeking to persuade those who read my syllabus that evaluating

papers is not the suspiciously subjective process that students imagine it to be, but rather a

transparently objective exercise.) In analyzing the syllabus, my students begin to see how words

on a page produce specific effects—and, conversely, how a given effect requires certain words

arranged in certain ways.

We use the same method when discussing effective introductions and conclusions. I draw

two categories on the board and label them Composition and Rhetoric. I ask students to describe

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the components of an effective introduction or conclusion (for example, a thesis statement or a

summary statement), and I place these in the Composition category. I then ask them what effects

an introduction or conclusion is designed to produce (to orient the reader, to remind the reader of

the essay’s main point), and I put these in the Rhetoric category. As students identify specific

links between composition and rhetoric (noting, for instance, that a thesis statement is designed

to orient a reader), I draw lines between elements in the two categories. This technique is simple

but effective. Students quickly realize that content and purpose, composition and rhetoric,

depend wholly upon each other. This realization enables them to envision writing not as a dead

product but as a living process, a complex exchange between the ultimate form that an essay

takes and the desires of writers and readers alike. Intent and its concomitant, pleasure, assume

new importance as students learn to ask, “How can I design a paper to please both myself and

my readers?”

Composition and rhetoric are also invaluable in shaping subject-based writing courses

designed to delight students while introducing them to relationships within the liberal arts.

Taking advantage of the fact that students are initially more adept at discussing an essay’s

content than its form or rhetoric, these courses are organized not by skill sets but by subjects.

Rather than moving from, say, prewriting to drafting to revision while studying essays on a

variety of loosely related or unrelated topics, students concentrate on a single topic or a closely

linked group of topics while polishing their reading and writing abilities. For example, a writing

course focused on the relationship between humanity and technology might include units on

cloning, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. Within each unit, students would study

sophisticated and challenging texts of various sorts: argumentative and informative scholarly

essays in different disciplines, films, speeches, literary works (including essays), editorials,

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visual art works. While representing the liberal arts in their rich diversity, these texts would

nonetheless cohere because they would inform or argue about a single subject.

The course would favor the study of texts that college students are expected to produce

(that is, researched academic essays), but it would also be inclusive enough to demonstrate the

structural and rhetorical qualities of genres that students tend not to see as persuasive—namely,

imaginative literature, art, and film. For instance, by analyzing various types of texts alongside

one another, students would realize that the thesis statements of scholarly essays and the themes

of works in other genres function in a similar fashion. Subject-based writing courses foster

pleasure in the classroom not only by developing students’ strengths rather than targeting their

weaknesses, but also by providing students with the content that they crave and so often miss in

skills-oriented writing courses. Here at Lewis University, such courses could be complemented

by interdisciplinary Arts and Ideas presentations and, ideally, by synthesis-oriented essay-writing

projects in courses outside of English.

Sharing Our Delight

In “The Ivory Tower of Tearlessness,” the art historian James Elkin, whose research

centers on emotional responses to paintings, regrets that “tearlessness is a criterion of good

scholarship,” that “virtually all academics are in the tearless camp,” and that, when faced with

artworks that move others to tears, “The overwhelming majority [of academics] don’t cry, never

have, and don’t wish they could.” He takes comfort, however, in the fact that a small minority of

art historians “are clearly transported by works of art: Something in the pictures takes hold of

them, and (as Plato would have said) they catch fire.” These emotional few, I suspect, are the

most gifted teachers of art. Those of us who teach should allow ourselves to become

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emotionally involved in our subjects, so that our students might come to appreciate—and,

perhaps, even to share—our feelings. When I was a student, my most pleasurable and

memorable moments in the classroom occurred when my instructors were so staggered and

delighted by the richness of a text that, in the middle of a discussion or a lecture, they simply

threw up their hands and declared, in effect, “This is wonderful!” Now that I am a teacher, I

relish such moments of pure pleasure in my own classroom. The most important thing that we

can do to welcome pleasure into all our classrooms is to demonstrate to our students that the

great works and ideas of our fields still have the power to move us—if not to tears, then to joy.

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Works Cited

Delucchi, Michael. “‘Liberal Arts’ Colleges and the Myth of Uniqueness.” The Journal of

Higher Education July-Aug. 1997: 414-26.

---, and Kathleen Korgen. “We’re the Customer—We Pay the Tuition’: Student Consumerism

Among Undergraduate Sociology Majors.” Teaching Sociology Jan. 2002: 100-07.

Elkin, James. “The Ivory Tower of Tearlessness.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 9 Nov.

2001: B7.

Engell, James and Anthony Dangerfield. “The Market-Model University: Humanities in the

Age of Money.” Harvard May-June 1998: 50.

Herman, Roger E. “Liberal Arts: The Key to the Future.” USA Today (Magazine) Nov. 2000:

34-35.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose.” New

York Times Book Review 31 Oct. 1993.

Miles, Jack. “Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual: What Happens to

the Liberal Arts When They Are Kicked Off Campus?” Cross Currents Fall 1999: 303-18.

Sanders, Scott Russell. “From Anonymous, Evasive Prose to Writing With Passion.” The

Chronicle of Higher Education 10 Oct. 1997: B4.