Education,+ Admission + Passionate Teaching and Learning

Who has changed your life for the better? Aside from family and friends, who do have on your list? I hope that most have named at least one teacher. Teachers, at least the best of them, inspire us but also nourish passion. One such teacher who has done this for many is Laird Durley. Laird has been teaching about thinking, writing and living for quite some time. He now helps students develop these skills while also exploring the colleges and universities that will solidify the foundation he has instilled. After you read his words I think you will understand a lot more about learning and living an examined life.

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Can you talk a bit about your academic background and interests?

The single most important educational experience in my life happened in 5th grade at Foothill Country Day School in Claremont, California. 

Laird in 4th grade

Of course such a statement ignores everything that led up to being able to take advantage of that moment, but in 5th grade I read all of Shakespeare's plays. My parents were readers, my mother especially, as were most of my fellow students, and I had devoured, starting in 2nd grade, all of the Landmark Books (remember them?) but every thing changed in what I guess must have been about a 6-8 week long experience. What happened was 8th grade Petey Weismiller left his copy of Macbeth in our car when we took him home. Our 8th grade put on the Scottish Play every year so I would have seen it K-4. I remember thinking " Ooo I could be just like the big 8th graders!" So I read it that night. It was wonderful!!! I wanted more. I asked my teacher ,Mrs. Webb, if I could get credit for 'a book'  for reading if I read a play. She said yes, I went to the library and tried to check out the only copy we had of "the complete works" The librarian, Mrs Vogle, was resistant at first, but I got a note from Mrs Webb and I was off. I couldn't stop. It's just what I did for a while. Oh ... and people were impressed... I liked that. Probably kept me going through Coriolanus and King John: I didn't like them much. 

How much did I get of what I was reading? Who knows, 5%? But this is actually my point: who cares? Reading Shakespeare has always been for me a joy and easy. And that has shaped my life, and not just as a reader. I wouldn't say I'm particularly brave but I try stuff people say is hard: it just never occurs to me not to. Shakespeare gave me that I think, Shakespeare and my parents. 

I went on to the Webb School of California and the Ripon College where I majored in English after starting out in Biology, another great passion inspired by a great teacher Thad Smith at Webb: I wanted to be Thad. And I wanted to impress Thad and I just couldn't get enough of Biology: I pretty much memorized our college level text. Lesson #2: never ever underestimate the power of a teacher that students love. And yes, that is the word I meant to use. I led the section in our honors Bio class in college, but finally Shakespeare called and I could not refuse. 

Laird at Ripon College

 Then after an obligatory 4 months wandering in Europe ( It was 1971). I came back, tried my hand at grad school at UCSB and MIIS (then MIFS) and two years at prep school teaching at the Dunn School of California. It was so easy to get a job back then: you showed up with a BA and they gave you one. Then I heard, again as it turns out, about St John's. I was on my way to a doctoral program in Elizabethan Studies at U of Washington when I read the famous " guess who's teaching at St John's next year?" poster and decided to do a semi-simultaneous MA in Santa Fe and Ph.D in Seattle-- summers in Santa Fe, the rest of the year in Seattle....  ah, the arrogance of youth.  4 weeks into the Santa Fe MALA program and I knew: this was it. I was happier than I had ever been about... well, I was going to say "school", but really I think I should have just left it at "I was happier than I had ever been." I was ecstatic: this was what I had always thought school would be like. I ate it up and it ate me. I was sleeping maybe 4-6 hours a night. I couldn't leave; so...  I didn't. I applied to the undergraduate too. Even I knew this would preclude Seattle. I had a fellowship and classes were due to start in a month. I called UW. The English Dept. graduate adviser was... not amused. 

But I wasn't quite in at St John's. They had this rule that you couldn't get an MA at St John's after getting a BA there as  the MA was a new, and somewhat lesser regarded at that time, program that was considered ' a BA lite' for those who couldn't take the BA. So I pointed out to them that I would be doing it the other way around and semi-simultaneously they had no rule for trying to do what they considered the harder course of study after the easier one... .And they let me in. I am the first person ever to have both degrees from the College. After Shakespeare Immersion 101 and The Passion of Biology--- my first two experiences of simply wanting to know MORE, maybe of what Aristotle had in mind when he said "Man by nature desires to know---St John's is my first experience of "wanting to know it all." And of course I found my limits. I'm no mathematician or linguist as it turns out: good enough to appreciate others but decidedly limited in my abilities. And I did have a flare for the dialogue and dialectic. 

Laird in his last year of teaching at Reedley

I went on to study Rhetoric at Berkeley under Art Quinn, quite possibly the finest teacher-scholar I have ever met. It was Thad Smith 2.0. I loved the class work, especially as it had a mandatory teaching component, but I really was, and quite to my surprise, not at all interested in the whole world of research university Ph.D existence or the world it led to. I wanted to go back to teaching and I wanted to go back now. I was 30, I wanted to get married and I wanted a real job. After 1year I quit. I was invited back after 4 years, tried another year and quit again.

But after those 4 more years in Prep schools I wanted something else. I tried community college teaching and loved it. 3 and a half years of P/T teaching at 6 Bay Area CC led to 20 years F/T at Reedley College in Fresno County as the Philosophy Chair.

As to interests I would have to say that academically I am most interested in ethics and rhetoric and their interrelation. My doctoral dissertation was going to be rewriting Plato's Phaedrus for our American times following Cicero's lead in De Oratore, his rewrite of the Phaedrus for his... a modesty of aspiration on my part that at this remove somewhat takes my breath away. Somewhere through my second year at Berkeley I realized that my Greek and Latin were simply never going to be strong enough, and I simply wasn't bright enough to pull an Aquinas 'I only need my William of Moerbeke to translate for me.' and I wasn't really interested enough in just grinding through some more quotidian project to stick with the program. It was a hard revelation.   

If you had a chance to enroll in Plato's academy or Aristotle's lyceum which would you choose and why? 

Oh, you are cruel. You are forcing me to choose between my love and my best friend, between the teacher who stuns me and the teacher that has taught me most. I like to think that at 65 I would finally make the wise-for-me choice of Aristotle over Plato, of what I know I can handle if I work really hard as opposed to just blowing my socks off but...I wonder... as time's winged chariot hurries near choosing the good choice over passion might prove hard. And remember it was Shakespeare that was my first love and Plato is the poet... . If I truly were the rational person that both Aristotle and Plato exhort me to be  and I say that I aspire to be I would choose Aristotle... but I bet I' choose the Academy with one caveat... Early Academy with Aristotle still in attendance . And that is not a 'cake and eat it too' answer: I just want Plato before he effectively kicks Aristotle

 
Are there philosophers out there now who you think should be read?

I'm not very good on contemporaries, or even moderns but here are some 

Michael Sandel esp Justice

Richard Tarnas' The Passion of the Western Mind is the best compilation

I admire Richard Rorty's attempt to span the embarrassing analytic-continental split.

Philippa Foot and Annette Baier and Judith Jarvis Thomson have all offered bridges to the individual vs. society duality that has dominated much of Western ethics post Plato/Aristotle. What a surprise that some women should have noticed that 'the family' and 'friendship' intermediate, moderate and enrich that supposed antagonism.

What do you think makes a great teacher and what do you think makes a great student?

 

1) Listening and listening

2) Being prepared and being prepared

3) Caring about the material and caring about the material

4) Caring about the students and caring about one's fellow students

5) The ability to be flexible with the syllabus to accommodate needs of this particular class
 and the ability to let one's self get lost in the material to hand and go where the argument takes one.

And then the big and scary one

6) Be able to make the student fall in love with you, be worthy of love and use that love responsibly
and fall dangerously in love with a worthy teacher.

I could have said less controversially 'be able to make the student fall in love with the subject" but I think that that phrasing attempts to bury the real and dangerous experience of really good teaching and what it feels like to the student. Of course finally the object of great teaching is the realization on the part of the student that it is the subject and not the teacher that one loves, but look how even Aristotle phrases his separation from his great teacher: "Not that I loved Plato less, but that I loved truth more." Nothing mild and safe there. And where did he learn to love truth more? At the feet of his master whom, if he is to be true to what he has learned from him, he must finally see through and to the truth beyond.

Nothing but nothing motivates and inspires like love and to deny that this passion is involved in really good teaching is delusional. Paulo Freire is right to fear the temporary loss of self implied by this 'falling in love' kind of teaching; he is wrong to think it can or should be avoided. To try to avoid it is to sacrifice excellence for safety.)

 You have also taught critical thinking courses. This phrase gets thrown around in all sorts of articles and media and I am still not sure I know what it means. Could you help me?

Classical Rhetoric's understanding of the relation of logical, ethical and pathetic appeals offers the building blocks of any well thought out critical thinking class whether the teacher happens to use that terminology or is in fact even aware of it or not. The same discipline's understanding of deliberative, forensic and epidictic rhetoric put those appeals in action in the service of particular goals.

IMHO Philosophy teachers when they try to teach critical thinking classes tend to err on the side of an over emphasis on logic, sometimes denigrating all ethical and pathetic appeals and on the side of forensic (if they are inductive logic and epistemology guys) or deliberative (if they are deductive logic and ethics guys) and always against epidictic rhetoric. Their paradigm tends to be the syllogism, tending to view the enthymeme, the argument form of almost all of human critical thought, as merely Aristotle's 'a defective syllogism with a missing major premise,' forgetting Aristotle's other definition of the enthymeme: while the syllogism is his model for dealing with certainty and  'situations that cannot be other than they are' it is the enthymeme that he sees as the appropriate model for dealing with the probable and ' situations that can be other than they are' In a word philosophers teaching critical thinking classes tend to get trapped looking for timeless truths for all perfect audiences when they ought to be looking for what is appropriate to this audience at this time.

Equally IMHO English teachers when they try to teach critical thinking classes tend to err on the side of an over emphasis on the emotional appeals, forgetting or not knowing that logical appeals form the back bone of all good and sound rhetoric. They tend to get trapped in thinking only about 'what works right now with an emotional audience,' not whether it should work, or could work, with a thoughtful one. Their paradigm, if they have or will admit to one, tends to be either that of the New Critics of total internal reference in the particular work or the postmodern deconstructionist narrative. The former tends to emphasize authorial intent apart from any but a perfect and usually highly educated audience while the latter, the freedom of the any audience to interpret however it wills. Each relegates the other to the outer darkness seemingly unaware in their ideological purity that it is the relation of audience and intent, of the discovery/creation of the intended audience with all of its interesting peculiarities and that is the subject matter of critical thinking about the written word.

If the philosophers of critical thinking classes are too structured/formal, the English teachers of it aren't structured/formal enough. Rhetoric teachers tend to get it. And what is it? That analytic critical thinking is the ability to penetrate the author/audience relation and understand the author's intention and the ploys he uses to persuade his intended audience of some particular claim he wants to make. By extension, synthetic critical thinking is the ability to employ the methods learned in the analysis of others arguments in the creation of one's own. I think the single biggest change that rhetorical critical thinking requires of a student who has been trained in expository writing is the shift from "what do I want to say" to "what does my audience need to hear in order to believe me?" It is the change also curiously from viewing the audience as the enemy to viewing the audience as a potential ally from whom one might learn.

Laird with his younger son at his older son't graduation

"Do you find that many students today have little or no knowledge of some of what were once thought of as basics for understanding what makes words work?   Do you try to instill this knowledge on the side or at least get them to understand the importance of the craft that is writing?"

Yes oh so very little. The local schools do absolutely and pointedly nothing to teach the parts of speech or the parts of the sentence in English or Language Arts classes and one is looked at as an elitist snob if one suggests that they do. The teachers themselves are largely innocent of any subtle distinctions: and I don't just mean cases or tenses. My son's 6th grade teacher, well respected and a teacher of 24 years once said to me "What do they really need to know all about those little infinities for anyway?" That's verbatim.  If students haven't received some foreign language instruction, and sometime even then, they are clueless. If they haven't grown up in a family who speaks well, they are in some ways cooked because the apparatus for correction is simply missing. And even if they have grown up in such a family, the apparatus for correction, except by analogy, is largely missing.

(2) yes Students regularly say they learned more about writing from me than they did in four years of high school English. It is SO hard not to just jump in and edit essays for grammar or lambaste the students for not having a clue about who and whom. But here is something that helps: once they really buy into the idea that their audience might be offended by the laziness of someone who doesn't try to make understanding easy by using standard grammar, many of the problems seem to disappear... it seems that it isn't that they don't know, can't hear, what is right... curiously Plato may be on to something in the Meno.

(1)"What do you like about helping students with essays? (2)What don’t you like?"

(1)That when we are done they know themselves far better, have grown beyond what they were and will do better in college wherever they go.

(2) What poor training they have had. The expository essay emphasis in high school is pernicious: I know why it is there--- the 'teaching to the bottom of the class, leave no child behind' predilection--- but I hate it.

In your years of teaching have you seen some skills improve and others decline? Has the Internet and technology and access to virtually all that’s been said and done made us any smarter?

I would say that the mid 90's were absolutely the bottom as far as writing skills and general education knowledge were concerned. Students knew the least and were most resistant to being called out on it. I would have to say that narcissism, which is supposedly at an all time high now, was worse then as we were still firmly in the self-esteem movement's unquestionable grasp. Now there are voices that question that stance; then there were virtually none. Also whatever deleterious effects the current financial situation has had on education, one good effect is that students don't think they are quite as entitled just for being young as they did and they are a little less 'know-it-all' and more willing to entertain instruction.

Grammar skills, as I have said above, have all but disappeared.

Except for cross-generational awareness of music/movies/tv, which is much much much better than mine or in my time, their understanding of history is "Now" and "Ancient Times": I was never ever since I began to read so ignorant of either history or geography. I used to give my students an essay attributed to Tecumseh and dated 1810, preceded by a one paragraph bio setting the scene as "in the early years of the American Republic" and "in the Ohio River Valley" in which he says,

" Our Great Father over the Waters is angry with the white people, our enemies. He will send his brave warriors against them; he will send us rifles, and whatever else we want-- he is our friend--- and we are his children."

I then asked them who this 'Great Father' might be and who the 'enemies' might be. Clueless and clueless of how to be come unclueless except to Google those exact questions: no sense that one just ought to know after 4 American History classes what was going on in 1810, what war might be being fought in America, whom it might be between, or where the Ohio river valley might be. Or how to quiz the text to figure at least something about the questions ( e.g. notice 1810, Google 'what wars in us?') When I say 'clueless' I don't just mean answers such as French and Indian War, I mean Revolutionary War or Civil War. No one ever-- not ever--got the War of 1812 even when prompted with 'it's 1810...' I would get the wrong protagonists (French, Germans, Russians, never the English and US) for all of those wars. I would get China as the source of the rifles. I am not making this up. I finally gave up on asking in open class and made it a take home quiz which I said have to be turned in before I would read their essays on this speech as they couldn't possibly write a cogent essay on the audience if they couldn't answer these questions that clearly the audience simply knew.  They though and often said, "It's unfair to ask history questions in a philosophy class; you can't expect us to know that." I don't often agree with ISI but geesh the ignorance of students in general about things they are supposed to have studied (American History) at least 4 times before 2nd year of college says we certainly aren't going about that instruction in the right way.

Math and science, except among those who can't do anything else, is unstudied. By them it is studied and becomes the go to excuse for not studying anything else.

   On the other hand my kids have far more friends who are of different cultures and ethnicities and genders than I did or do nor can they imagine a world in which this is not so. However trying to get them to read 'The letter from Birmingham Jail' with any sense of its audience as being alternatively 1) any different from them selves or 2) simply evil, was challenging but incredibly rewarding when they finally 'got' it that getting white liberals to join him in direct action is his goal, that no, he's not trying to convert hard core segregationists, and no, they don't know what 'white southern liberals' worried about in 1960 but MLK probably did and if only they will listen carefully to what he is saying they too will be able to figure out just the problems he faced with getting his audience to act.

One more approach: Since most people have little practical training in writing is it time to embrace the descriptivist camp of language and forget the presciptivist camp?

No... At least not until those reading college applications agree to do so... a time that may be fast approaching as fewer and fewer college graduates know themselves... oh cute, I meant that 'know the grammatical nuances themselves' but I think I'll let that stand in deference to both Socrates and Piaget: can't express themselves accurately= don't know themselves accurately.

Given your background you bring unique sills to help students think about education and college. Can you talk a bit about how you approach student first when helping them select schools to apply to. What resources do you think are valuable?"

Wow this is hard because while it does vary by student, there are some commonalities. I do have a 28 page 'packet' with an outline of what we are likely to do together that I go over in a free first meeting. (Parents are neither specifically excluded or invited to that meeting though I would say about 86% choose to attend, and I do find that having the parents there that first meeting is helpful but if they are I stay away from alot of my 'intake questions.') I include the Hedberg 1200+ college map which they all seem to love in the packet and we peruse it for a while. We talk about the Reach-Target-Likely schools relation. We talk about Fit. We talk a bit, a bit more if parents are there, about financing the college years. I show them the Complete Idiots Ken Clark book on Paying for College.I send them home with some intake questions to work on. I show them my web page. I show them the Oberlin/Annapolis lists websites. I show them the Common App page. I show them the  Guided Path and a few of its bells and whistles, some of which I am still learning. I do try to get them all to read at least parts of Looking Beyond the Ivy League and CTCL or at least go to a CTCL event. My office is festooned with pennants  and I reference them whenever a student brings up a particular interest. Steven Antonov's books and assessments have been very helpful.

Are there things that you think are pernicious or at least not helpful those students often turn to for help?

caveat: I'm out in the hinterlands and the students who go away to boarding schools and whose families and friends are already aware of say the ACM colleges or the NESCAC schools are not my clients. Yes, my clients are generally at one of the magnet/academic/charter publics or the local Catholic but still knowlege of Grinnnell or St John's  or even the Claremont's or Occidental is pretty limited here.

Their friends... the most college limiting source of misinformation.

Rankings, esp USN&WR

Kat Cohen's various books.. the most effective guilt tripping of parents I can even imagine... no, better than I can imagine: she's always more subtlely  twisting the knife even when I don't at first catch it.

The Insider's Guide

What do you think about the way highly selective schools evaluate students? Would you change anything dramatically or even a little bit?

If I were the God of Admissions I would force each college and every applicant to 'do' an application to each college modeled (mutatis mutandis ) on Bard's Bard Entrance Examination or Bard's Immediate Decision Plan: just how foolish a god I would be is easily seen from the fact  that even Bard only offers these as options to the far more common CA app.

If colleges really wanted to get serious about 'fit' and holistic admissions and getting out from under the hegemony of the UCN&WR/whoever ratings, this would be the way to do it; if students ever wanted to  find out who they were in order  to figure out where they should go, this is the way to do it; if counselors ever really wanted to have selectivity ratings go back to meaning anything more than a popularity contest and put themselves under some real pressure to generate a really good 4 school application list--- one certainly couldn't expect any human to do more than 4 such applications at most----this would be the say to do it; if college admissions offices ever seriously wanted to read interesting applications rather than the increasing volume of 'why not, it's a Common app box check' blah ones, this would be the way to do it. And if I can't have this ultimate demiurge wish then how about a more modest one of making all ED applications be modeled on one of these two options?

Laird at St. Johns

What should students look for to find a good fit in a college?

The cleverness of my answer to question #2 is that it enables me to beg off of answering #3

...but more seriously I think Steven Antonoff's College Match and College Finder are about the best mechanical tools for pursuing that elusive concept out there in printed form, and better than any online I have found. Speaking more holistically, I think that Loren Pope's collective musings on fit in LBTIL andCTCL especially when read as single---- what word am I looking for, gestalt ?---work, is (sic)  the single most useful "Guide for the Perplexed about Fit" whose individual comments need be read always in light of all the others, not out of context or severally, and can give a willing reader wonderful insight into what he or she might be looking for in a college. To put that more succinctly: when I try get a student to read the whole of CTCL--- or even just to attend a CTCL event--- it is not to try to sell any one of those colleges so much as to get him or her to read about all of those colleges and discover his or her selves(sic)  (and for him or her self ) their sense of fit(s) by doing so. I honestly believe that in considering carefully the various opportunities afforded by  that group of schools as LP presents them one will experience a growing awareness of what constitutes fits for oneself. Because fit is a series of trade offs: 'two things at College A  I really like vs one thing at College B that I really really like.' (And how much do you really really like it?) 

( Of course all of the above works best with girls... sigh) do you have a copy of Jennifer Delahunty's I'm Going to College--Not You!  handy? if so, turn to pages 206-7: that about says it all.) 

What advice do you have for parents about how to help their children through the process? What advice do you have for students?

 It of course varies but it one common factor is always some variation on ' don't panic... but get serious' I like to tell the probably spurious (and highly ethnically suspicious) story of the joint Franco/German Brigade which is part of Eurocorps. Supposedly they were on a joint exercise in some Belgium bog in the middle of winter, unable to move and in a very bad situation. The French radioed back to headquarters that their  situation was 'desperate but not serious' whereas the Germans radioed ( yes, you can guess it) 'serious but not desperate.' I tell the parents/ students that there are situations in which 'being French' or 'acting French' is appropriate but right now is the time to assume a more German attitude. They always laugh.. but I am disappointed that one ever asks... except one very interesting girl... when it would be appropriate to view a situation through French ... I almost said Montaigne... eyes. 

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Laird has given us enough insight to conduct a seminar that would last a semester. What Laird also does is contribute his vast intellect and persuasive words to closed Internet groups that discuss topics and issues related to admission.

Some of his responses are simply so good I asked if I could include a couple of them here and he kindly agreed.

Isn't that the real problem: they want college application to be something... convenient with little thinking; they think that somehow getting into college is, or can be, completely divorced from what one does after one gets there, just hoops to be jumped through to get to the prize... and the prize is not the college education but admission. And who gave them that idea?

I was just this last week talking to two admissions officers at two major player colleges in the Boston area about why was it so hard to find in their respective websites any sort of picture of what the nuts and bolts of the academic program at that school looked like: it was taking me at least 4 (and not always very intuitive) clicks under Academics on each home page to actually get to things such as Breadth Requirements, Core Courses, how majoring worked at that school, contents/structure/intention of FYS's, how various signature programs worked, etc. and was informed by each that 'well, they really thought that was more appropriate to discuss after the student had arrived.' (!!!) Wow: talk about a divorce of product from marketing....

And we are surprised that then students and their parents often want the diploma ... without the education; they want to have gone to college... without going; they want the sizzle... who cares about the steak? Gimme the diploma with the (interchangeable big name U) seal on it...who cares what I learned there?

We're not going to do it, but weren't we all (colleges, high schools, students, parents, counselors of all stripes, admissions offices, etc. and et al.) better off when students wrote on average 4 separate and distinct applications to schools that marketed their qualitative 'non-commonness' not just their quantitative rank on a common list, that is before we all drank the Kool-Aid and joined the Common App/USN&WR caravan to the dark side, a caravan that began, lest we forget, with good intentions in the ACM of making the application to those 10 similar and under-applied-to SLACs more appealing to... whom exactly? Hardly the vast array of applicants and colleges now using it.

Laird in his first year of teaching

In what follows Laird helps us to understand how dramatic change can and does happen on campuses. Is it the faculty who can move things along or student protesters? No, it’s something much more powerful that these two groups.

Trigger warning: Rant to follow

I just finished reading HB’s most recent comments here on the University of Missouri racism/free speech entanglements and her statement of solidarity with the demonstrating students at Missou, and a wonderful and moving statement it is and one with which I find myself for the most part in agreement. Nevertheless and at the risk of people saying I'm distracting from the main issue which is racism and the students' response to it, I would like to raise another point I don't remember being treated in this context : I could be wrong and if so I apologize preemptively.

People keep saying that it was this out pouring of student anger and protest that forced the University's President and its local Chancellor into stepping down: it wasn't. Nor was it the faculty's letters of condemnation of the administration and/or support for the protestors. Nor was the actions of a hunger striker nor some high-minded member of the board. Nope. Nor was it an accumulation of pressure from all the above sources. And we all know what it was ...

It was the football team threatening---not to 'not play a game' but to 'not practice' for god's sake --- that led in two days, (two days!!), along with their $4 million dollar a year coach's belated if somewhat tepid support of their threat, to both resignations. We should, I think, as college counselors reflect just a bit on what that sort of clout, this time admittedly used for good, implies about who really runs the university and to what end.

It seems to me that the whole cat is finally out of the bag and that at least at most D-1 colleges it isn't the administration or the board or the faculty nor is it for the good of most of the students. Racism and preferential treatment rampant? or freedom of speech challenged?... meh. But the outcome of a football game threatened by non practice!!! Now you're talking serious concern for the University's mission!...which is clearly to---I guess above all else--- win football games or perhaps just to provide a training ground for a very few for the NFL.

The issue to me is not that the team used their power for the good as they did this time but that they had that power at all: part and parcel of the disenfranchisement of most blacks is the super enfranchisement of the football team, the 100 or so players on an FSB or FCS team, and especially their 85 full scholarship players. We give respect to a select few, many of them blacks, deny it to most other students (and black students most specifically) and are surprised that sometimes football players don't take their studies seriously? or that many black students think the only road to respect is athletics ? Seriously? Go read John Barth's 1966 "Giles Goatboy".

In Columbia it has finally been laid out starkly and undeniably if hardly for the first time: athletic money, and especially football money, trumps everything else at a D-1 school, everything else. One might even make the case that the NFL runs these universities for its own benefit beneath the fig leaf of 'academics for many' which is allowed... as long as it doesn't interfere with the primary mission: player development of a few.

Bread and circuses ladies and gentlemen, bread and circuses.

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The last treasure trove of wisdom I will quote from Laird comes from an exchange we had about how students should write essays and who their audience is. I wrote a blog entry about this and posted it on a LinkedIn discussion group for counselors. There were many great comments but I am editing all but Laird's words and mine out in the interest of space and in order to keep privacy of others (Laird has given me permission to quote his words). 

I hope if you read the blog entry and then read our comments you will see how Laird draws from his seemingly unending depth of knowledge and experience to make his many persuasive points. I also put these comments here to demonstrate that people like Laird care a great deal about students, about education and about providing a great education for the next generation. Discussions on the part of counselors take place every day on forms and Facebook pages in conference or on phone calls or Skype sessions. Laird brings his passion tor education and learning to all those he reaches out to. The question that stirred up our exchange is based on this question:

Who should be editing college essays? How much help is too much? A politically incorrect overview: 

Parke Muth

Students certainly don’t need Ezra Pound editing their essays (frankly, he would not be a very good person to work with students). My words attempt to prove a point that I try to get across to students—any time you pick a huge topic you will miss lots of things. The comments from the great people on this forum underscore this in all sorts of ways. Trying to cover what students, parents, counselors, educators etc. should do when editing essays should be covered in books. But so few read books these days sometimes the broad brushstrokes and quick sketch is all we get. Such is the case with what I have written. Sorry about that. But if there is one take away from what’s been said so far I’d summarize it this way: each kid is different. But it’s also true that each has some stories and experiences that need to be teased out, and this often takes time. And this isn’t just true for essays. I meet with lots of students getting ready to do interviews with the big names in banking, consulting, graduate school etc. and among the things I tell them is to become a subset of 1. They have a passion and a story no one else does and if they can bring that out in the interview it will humanize them in ways that does not often happen. But this raises another point too. The kids I tend to talk to are all superstars reaching for the top of the top. Last night I met with one who has MIT 2/2 interview coming up and another who’s interviewing with BCG next week. These students have virtually perfect gpas, and have had experiences most of us never will. But perfect stats don’t mean that much given the pool they are in; unless they can impress people used to seeing the perfect gpas and wonderful extras on every resume they likely won't get an offer. 

I would argue that for students in secondary school looking to get into the colleges and universities or merit scholarship programs that offer to fewer than 10% of their applicants that they need to do far more than, as you say “ show colleges a student can write well enough to survive college”. For some students you are absolutely right. The schools are deciding if the student can graduate. But at some schools or for some honors programs too, the last thing the people are thinking is whether the student can survive. The word thrown around at the tippy top is “thrive”. They want to read words that are better than ok. Maybe not Eliotic verse, but certainly in the top 5% of writers. And that’s a high bar. For any of us. Essays that sway a committee at the most selective schools usually consist of a story that sticks. It’s more than just words well ordered; instead, the words must move the reader’s mind or heart or, in the best cases, both. I would never initially expect a first generation student or an international student to write an Eliot level essay. If they did, but had some modest scores and not top English classes, then I’d be worried and would not necessarily give them points unless I had done some follow up (through email or interviews). My view is skewed. I was in charge of accepting students for the honors programs at my already highly selective university. In effect I was in charge of selecting best students from around the world. I expected these students to do far more than write a good essay. In the Orwellian world of highly selective admission good is bad. Great essays (and there are lots of ways to write great essays even for STEM people) tend to be the expected norm for the people getting into the most selective schools.

Laird Durley

Dear Parke,

I agree with so much of what you say that I feel bound to add a slight caveat on your understanding of audience. You say in part:

"It’s one of the reasons I tell students to see if they can find out who the person is who will be reading their application. A bit of research might help gather enough intel to help find the right voice that would appeal to this particular reader. (A number of people have told me they find this approach cynical...) " 

I think this understanding of a 'particular audience' is less cynical than potentially misleading. To try to determine who one's audience is from research into particular admissions readers is, I think, a project that will undermine a student's essay. Example: Say I find out one reader is a 27 yr old black handicapped woman graduate of Smith who lists her life partner as Jane who likes sushi . What have I actually found out of use about my essay's audience? I would submit 'nothing,' or rather 'worse than nothing.' Such demographically interesting data is misleading: it assumes that all (or most) of those who fit in these compartments think in predictable ways. They don't, and what is worse the assumption that they do distracts from the real audience to be persuaded, the 'intended audience.' Far more useful is to figure out exactly what a reasonable person might object to1) what ever portrait the student is trying to paint of him or her self and 2) the particular claims the student is trying to make about him or herself as someone the college, as it presents itself, would like to have as a student. A student's audience for this essay is some one who needs to be persuaded that his or her college will benefit from having this student as their student. The intention is not so general as "admit me" so much as it is the because clause that follows: "admit me because____" "Why might people not believe me when I say____? and what can I say to reassure them?" "What values that they claim to value can I use as tools to show my desirability as a student, my meeting their reservations about me?" "I like telling this story about myself but why should they want someone like that?" "What in my presentation is getting in the way of my becoming a student at that school; why might they not like or believe what I am claiming?" In sum: what is getting in the way of this audience believing what I have to say and what can I do to deal with that disbelief? These are the questions that need to be foremost. The hardest time I have is in showing student the difference between the expository essays that have populated their high school years and this rhetorical one. To put it formally: your Audience is someone who 1) disagrees with your conclusion but 2) agrees with a major premise so 3) if you can show the minor premise by allaying their doubts will, all other things being equal, 4) agree with you conclusion. This has been the formula for successful persuasion since Aristotle.

The best example in reverse that I can think of is Dostoevsky: Dostoevsky was paid by line and had 19 hangers-on to support so he was motivated to write long novels... and did. But we don't read them because of these biographical particulars: we read them because they are good; not because they meet his motivational needs but because they meet ours. You must write to meet the needs of the audience, not yours. That Dostoevsky wanted to sell novels is clear; that we should want to buy them he needs to persuade us... and we certainly don't buy them because he needed to support his family. That you want to go to our college is clear; why we should want you to go here is less so: convince us, not that you want to go here but rather that we need you.

Parke Muth

Dear Laird, 

Thank you for your response. 

Your philosophic training and teaching comes through clearly. Your use of formal logic to bring readers to an indisputable proof would, I think, carry the day in the agora. But the world we live in has changed and the way we make decisions is often far from rational. 

Let me see, however paradoxically, if I can my logic work to prove my point. Let me start with your fictional example of a reader 

" Example: Say I find out one reader is a 27 yr. old black handicapped woman graduate of Smith who lists her life partner as Jane who likes sushi. What have I actually found out of use about my essay's audience? I would submit 'nothing,' or rather 'worse than nothing.' Such demographically interesting data is misleading: it assumes that all (or most) of those who fit in these compartments think in predictable ways. They don't, and what is worse the assumption that they do distracts from the real audience to be persuaded, the 'intended audience." 

I think the person you have described helps me prove my point about readers. I cannot say what I will submit is a logical proof that is sure to be correct. People are far too unpredictable for that, but given a certain amount of data I can play the odds. 

If a student applying to this college had been involved in an effort to get gay marriage passed in her State, had founded a group to raise awareness on the issue, and had gone to the capital and protested against the current office holders who vowed to fight against gay marriage then I would tell the student this essay had a high probability of making a positive impression on this particular reader. On the other hand, if the student was convinced that her religious beliefs prove that gay marriage is against God’s word and wanted to write an essay on this topic because it was her passion and something she truly believed in, then I would tell her if she did so her chances of being accepted to that particular school would be jeopardized. 

It would be great to think that passions are not a part of admission decisions and that dispassionate proof is how such decisions are made. If you think I am the sole person who thinks this way I would simply point to the way those with lots of money hire people to advise attorneys about jury selection. These high-paid experts make sure, based upon a few questions, that some potential jurors are dismissed. Why? Because when making decisions about a case rhetoric based, as the sophists used the term, words persuade people, even though they may not add up to an Aristotelian proof. 

I think my philosophic line of thought extends from Thrasymachus, the early dialogues of Plato, Seneca and up through Machiavelli and Richard Rorty. Yours I think are different. My experience with most application readers is that they have never taken a class in logic and proofs of the sort you put forth and thus essays using this frame may not have the effect you might hope for. 

Which is true and can be proved? That’s what makes discussion in philosophy (or almost anything else) open for continued debate. Thanks again. 

I have always loved Fyodor’s work. I am afraid that I identify with his underground man all too often: 

“Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human”

Laird

Dear Parke, 

This is, I think, going to be fun because we actually share so many assumptions understandings and goals, although I suspect that an admiration for Thrasymachus, at least as Plato presents him, the man who argues that "justice is the advantage of the stronger" and 'what ever it takes to win is is justified by success' is not among them. But who knows? Perhaps by the end of this dialogue we will, as Socrates says to Thrasymachus, "have just become friends, though we weren't even enemies before." And I am impressed by your extensive knowledge of both ancient and modern rhetoricians that are his followers. So the question becomes: Parke knows Laird's ancient world; does Laird know Parke's modern one? 

But there I go, seemingly proving your point that my arguing for logical over and against emotional appeals is, while perhaps admirable in a classroom and among those trained in reason, somewhat misplaced... and shall we say 'quaint' (c.f. "carry the day in the agora")... in the modern application process where emotional appeals rule and thus knowing one's particular audience's prejudices is key: I start quoting a bunch of old guys in togas [ actually , 'himations' (see, I can't stop myself!)] thereby probably sounding just like a fuddy-duddy professor whose argument 'smell of the inkwell', who can't get his head out of his books and arguing for the way things ought to be rather than how they are, who wants to talk perfect theory rather than down and dirty practice which our audience really cares about, who needs ,in short, to think more about the actual initial hip and young and social media savy readers of his clients' essays than about WWSS: (What Would Scorates Say). Did I get the precis about right? 

I would have to agree with you that, by my own argument, I should have paid more attention to our audience and their needs and predilections in my initial post, because, indeed, as we both know, they are our true audience. You are my ostensible audience as I am yours, but the only people whose opinion finally counts are those who are overhearing this conversation and who we are both trying to persuade, I, that ferreting out information on the particular reader of a student's application and a student's using that information to shape his or her essay is time ill spent, you, the opposite. 

Of course if I were to persuade you that would be more than just icing on the cake: your post and this conversation is a chance for me too to rethink and question my understanding of what my job as an editor for my clients should be and I think you better, and more attractively, frame a position that I run into all the time from the parents... that I can or should provide an inside track on admissions for their child by my personal understanding of/acquaintance with the admissions staff or will at least direct their child to the places where such insider information can be found... than I have ever heard before. I have never thought that that was my mission before, considering such a role as " help (that) crosses the line between what’s ethical and what’s not" but I admit so much of the rest of your post was appealing that I am almost persuaded ... no, I am persuaded...that I ought to reconsider. So this is my attempt to do so. Perhaps you will yet persuade me...or I myself as I try to defend the proposition that a student's spending any time on the issue of his or her particular audience is ... ok I'll just say it ...pernicious. 

So where to start. Perhaps by admitting that while I have taught persuasive writing and critical thinking for over 30 years, I am pretty new ( this was only my third full year) at working directly on college admissions essays, though I have helped with a number of those essays over the years. So my experience in the field is far more limited than yours.  Still, though I'm sure that your list is far longer and more impressive, students whose essays I helped edit last year were accepted into Gonzaga (honors), Santa Clara (honors) St Mary's CA (honors) LMU (Honors) Boston College, Whitman, Pitzer, CMC, Pomona, UCLA, USC, UCB, Alabama, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Middlebury, Dartmouth, U of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford, so I don't feel that my approach can be called completely antiquarian. 

So where to start... perhaps I might follow my own advice to students when I say it is not enough to simply claim that one shares ‘assumptions and understandings and goals': one must demonstrate that one does. And there is so much in your article that I like. 

I very much like your argument for a 'Poundian' "ruthlessness” in editing. We should not be as afraid as many of us are of getting involved at fairly fundamental levels with our students’ essays and your Elliot/Pound example is well chosen to make the point. 

Similarly I like the ‘pluses and minuses (mostly minuses) comments’ on parental and peer editing, especially your teasing out of the not unrelated related short comings of poor and wealthy parents when it comes to dealing with the underlying agenda of the Common App prompts and the 'split or dual audience' problem. I particularly liked the order of presentation of your arguments, which seemed to me well calibrated to meet audience objections as they occurred. These are common problems and I've dealt with them all but not so eloquently or succinctly as you. 

But for me your essay really shines when you take on peer editing. I too always use reading out loud both by peers and the writers and have had some vague understanding that it works but your explanations as to why and how it does, and especially when it doesn't, were revelatory. I'm stealing everything down to, "It’s one of the reasons I tell students to see if they can find out who the person is who will be reading their application A bit of research might help gather enough intel to help find the right voice that would appeal to this particular reader“ where I think you go astray or at least not far enough. 

I can see from the parenthetical that immediately follows (i.e. “(A number of people have told me they find this approach cynical, but the voice we use with parents, friends, teachers etc. differs so that effort of finding one ‘true’ voice seems a bit off the mark –I take what I say here from the prof who has taught essay writing at U of Iowa, the number 1 writing program in the US)”) that you too are aware of the debateableness of that advice for your audience, and I too started this dialogue with a similar worry about "help" that as you say, "crosses the line between what’s ethical and what’s not:" it is, after all, the Quora.com prompt your essay starts from. I was then also, I admit it, disquieted by what I took to be an oblique acquiescence on your part to some clients’ presumption that my job entails providing them an inside track through my personal contacts with the admissions staff at various colleges. I was pretty sure you didn’t mean that, but a client told to research and gather intel on a particular reader might easily think ‘and where better to start such ‘research’ than with you who know them?’ And I do remember the parent who walked out the door when I refused to trade in this way on a personal friendship, saying, “ Well, what’s the point of paying you then!?” 

Strangely enough though, as I have been writing your praises my concern about your focusing students on particular readers has shifted from that ethical/cynical one to one of efficacy. I just don't think it works, or rather that as stated I don’t think it works. But before I explain that elliptical comment, I need to clear up a couple of confusions I seem to have created in my first post. 

Perhaps I am wrong but it seems to me that you have gotten the impression that I am against all emotional appeals, favoring only rational ones. I can see in rereading how that might seem to be my stance but nothing could be further from the truth. In deed, I would say that I spend about half my editing time with students helping them clear up tone and voice problems, or perhaps more accurately pathos and ethos problems, that is to say problems in their emotional appeals that have to do with their understanding of their audience's emotional reaction to their words about the subject or themselves, most particularly their character, their ‘ethos.’ 

Perhaps students under your guidance don’t have this problem but I find that given the type of intel likely to be found about a reader from the ‘meet our staff’ page or social media sites, or Googleing teenagers with perhaps one AP psyche class under their belts think they ‘psyche’ the reader by clinging to some small fragment about him or her, a fragment that they torturously attempt to link to the subject of their essay. One reader at (a famous Connecticut university) told me she was so tired of reading essays twisted to appeal to her rather rare ethnicity that she took down her Facebook page in disgust… and then put it back up when, in her words (as closely as I can remember them), “ I realized I could use it to help filter out the inauthentic pandering low lifes and for laughs, to see just how far they would go.” 

But I find ‘write for a particular audience’ is not only, as in the above example, risky advice it is also limiting advice, it is advice that doesn’t take advantage of what a better version of your audience might offer. 

Unless 

Unless---and perhaps you meant this all along---unless it is only with a particular audience in mind that you start to write. Listen to this and see if it sounds familiar. 

(I’m quoting a classmate and a professor of mine in the Rhetoric department at UCB who wrote a book together called Audiences and Intentions (Bradbury and Quinn 3rdEd. 1997 Allyn&Bacon) still in print in that edition. After years as chair he is now dead but she just stepped down as chair of the English Dept. at Smith. Last year she told me she still thinks they got it right so why change it.) 

“You sit down to write out an idea that you first explored in a discussion. All through that discussion an intelligent thoughtful friend had disagreed with your position. She was open minded, despite her firm views and she listened intently to you points. She took you very seriously, but she did not agree with what you said. Thinking back over the discussion, you begin to see why she thinks so differently: she starts from different preconceptions; her underlying assumptions are not the same as yours. With this new understanding, you begin to think of points that would make your position clearer and more acceptable to someone with her assumptions and beliefs. You take her as your particular audience and begin to compose your written argument. 

You find that writing to this classmate makes the paper easier to compose. But then a change occurs in your focus (emphasis added), almost without your realizing it. You find that as you get more absorbed in finding out what you really think, you are concentrating less and less on this individual classmate and more on her assumptions and beliefs. You broaden your notion of the audience to include others who think as your classmate does. In your written essay, especially in revision, your audience becomes even more open-minded, even better informed, even more thought provoking than the individual who disagreed with you in discussion. In your mind, you have moved from contemplating your particular audience to creating your implied one. 

…you …also find that taking the opposing viewpoint so seriously begins to affect the very point you are making. … When your audience becomes a genuine part of your essay, a sort of partner in investigation, …your essay (becomes) not only more persuasive but fuller and more thoughtful as well. If you discover that you have changed your mind quite radically in the process of considering the alternatives, so much the better. Argument is inquiry, not war. In an inquiry, changing your mind is learning, not surrender or retreat.” 

Can you say yes to this modification by extension of your ‘particular reader audience?’ If it turns out we were always on the same page, just using different vocabulary, or talking about different stages of writing I, for one, will not be disappointed.

Parke Muth

Laird, 

“Sophrosyne” doesn’t get much press these days and I think it should. But the problems start right off when trying to translate it from the Greek. The most common choice is temperance and that will do for at least saying that your comments and insights approach what I think the dialogue Charmides moves towards. As this early dialogue is not often discussed, maybe the Cliffs’ notes version might be useful. The dialogue largely centers on how to define the word “Sophrosyne”. Charmides, Critias and Socrates suggest many different definitions. And what this amounts to is not in any sense a rational proof; instead, it’s a proof that dialectic brings meaning into being. It is the back and forth of words and minds that slowly create a meaning that may not be agreed upon but still has some shapes and sides that can be recognized as “Sophrosyne”. 

While what I’ve written may seem far afield from the topic, I hope it isn’t. Almost all the people's comments in this discussion fall under my definition of Socrates’ dialectical method. There is a back and forth of words between the experienced thinker and the young novice that goes wit essay training. I am not sure I’d go as far as the conclusion from the dialogue “Meno” and say knowledge is remembrance, but drawing out the words, sentences and essays from students is Socratic. 

There are more than a few guru’s of the new at Harvard and Silicon Valley who say that the way communication works now allows us to return to the agora. So this means that going back there is anything but quaint. You are way ahead of the curve. So too with most people who’ve commented here. Working with a student, one on one, recognizing a passion and allowing it to take shape—ths is the future and not just the past. And as the cliché goes "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." That is a sad fact and it will be accurate for some time to come. Those who know how to find people who can tease out thoughts of others are not that common and those who can pay for this are even more rare. So like the agora of long past, it is only the select few right now who have a chance to find this future from the past.

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I have met a lot of smart people over the course of my life and had a lot of wonderful teachers who have changed me. But I sure wish I had the chance to take one or more of Laird’s classes. His wisdom comes form a love of language and love of thought.  I know quite a few English Profs who have never read all of Shakespeare, I have not met anyone else who read them all in 5^th grade.

Laired covers the ends of the learning spectrum. He is both precocious and life long learner. He is on top of the current issues in education and uses his powerful tools—words—to help us understand things in new ways. He has done this for me again and again on a wide variety of issues.

One other thing that Laird does that is now more dangerous than ever (to him and perhaps to others too). He makes his views clear and will try to demonstrate instances of false logic and weak thinking by providing rhetorical and factual support for his views. In a time when most of us are afraid of saying almost anything about anything for fear of offending someone, Laird still is willing to share his words and to defend them when others disagree. There may be some who think, for example, that the seduction that happens with teachers is a bit too controversial. And yet this idea is not his alone. Plato certainly underscores it in a number of his dialogues but then so does one of the foremost feminist theorists writing today—Judith Butler. There are other terms for it. Freud called it transference, but it is true that people try to give their best for those they respect and care about.

I am certain that Laird’s students write and think better in part because they care enough for him that it matters what t words they use and the way they use them. They will carry his lessons on to university and in to life. Those who think independent consultants do little more than find a list of schools and edit quickly a few essays need to look no further than Laird to have their stereotypes undermined. In many ways having someone like Laired may be one of the best academic experiences a student will ever have.

I would like to thank Laird for letting me share some of his words here. I hope that many will learn from him and to perhaps feel the pull of how philosophy and words matter, now more than ever, in our world.

For those who would like to find out more about what laird does to help families and students here is his website:

http://find-a-great-college-for-you-fresno.com/