ADMINISTERING THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FUTURE
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make an impression in a social setting as rigidly choreographed as the upper
reaches of Elizabethan England. Speaking, writing, dancing-even sword–
play-were to be practiced with the precision, grace, and glee of a natural.
Half a millennium has a way of changing things. Penelope does not
possess sprezzatura.
It
is safe to say that she cannot pronounce it, and is like–
wise disinclined to look it up. Students may still desire effortlessness, but
they now more commonly take the direct route.
It
is indeed easy to appear
effortless in the absence of any effort.
Sprezzatura, the graceful appearance of effortlessness, cannot be
achieved by idleness.
It
requires hard work. And one of the effort-ful things
I would like to see re-introduced into the university of the future is an old–
fashioned regard for, and pursuit of, high verbal competence.
American higher education is, of course, not unaware that large num–
bers of students are admitted to college unable to write well and that many
of these students graduate four or five years later still unable to craft a
coherent paragraph, let alone a graceful essay. The academy has irnpassified
this problem, and so does not have a solution; it has, however, at least begun
to acknowledge that the problem exists.
But I
think
our rhetorical quandary goes much deeper than the wither–
ing of effective writing instruction in elementary and secondary education.
We have reached an even more arid desert, one in which most American
children have a profoundly attenuated sense of how language can be used.
Some--not all---of this is due to popular culture. We live
in
an environ–
ment that is oddly divided. One large part is saturated with direct expression
of feelings, which even when not vulgar, vulgarizes. Another large part pays
homage to the ethos of "coolness;' in which affecdess understatement and
inarticulateness are cultivated and expressiveness, passion, and other indica–
tions of involvement are studiously avoided. Nevertheless, people whose sense
of language is shaped by carefully calibrated "age-appropriate textbooks;'
television dialogue, rock lyrics, or even by contemporary religious and polit–
ical expression do develop a fine sense of the nuances of demotic speech.
I do not mean this ironically. Clearly, everyday speech does have its
nuances, and cliches can be wielded to great cornic effect or to elicit a cer–
tain kind of pathos. We even have playwrights such as Pinter and Marnet
who specialize in that territory.
What we widely lack is an understanding that language can perform
more complicated feats. Or, more specifically, what we lack is language that
is available to the average high-school graduate to express thoughts that the
average young adult should
be
able to think. Ease of thought on difficult mat–
ters can never be achieved
if
an individual's repertoire of language is stunted.
American rhetoric has been stunted in numerous ways. The loss of
working vocabulary is not easily documented, but to compare a typical
