Free The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo Page A

tendency to hold the advantage over the student is not a new development, either. It too was worse when I was in school. But then it was considered normal, and it did not turn students away from the literature courses. Students were less sophisticated and assumed that superior knowledge gave license for behaving as if one had superior social status. A lot of students today would rather not learn Milton than be made to feel inferior because they didn’t already know his work.
    That makes academics sound petty. But damn it, some of them are petty. In one large university the senior faculty voted against publishing the graduate catalogue because they objected to their names’ appearing with names of junior faculty members. It’s a wonder what so-called educated people will do to look important. It’s no wonder that a lot of young people don’t want to study under them.
    If I had to limit myself to one criticism of academics it would be this: they distrust their responses. They feel that if a response can’t be defended intellectually, it lacks validity. One literature professor I know was asked as he left a movie theater if he had liked the movie, and he replied, “I’m going to have to go home and think about it.” What he was going to think about is not whether he liked the movie, but whether he could defend his response to it. If he decided he couldn’t, presumably he’d hide his feelings or lie about them.
    Academics like these, and fortunately they are far from all the academics, give students the impression that there’s nothing in literature that could be of meaningful personal interest. If I seem to be sniping, forgive me. There are great academics and I’m proud to know some of them, glad that I can work in the same profession with them. If my criticism seems harsh, please know I still consider academic professors indispensable to an English department. Whatever the curses of creative writing, it is still a luxury. If there’s a choice between dropping Shakespeare studies or advanced poetry writing, I would not defend retention of the writing course. It is not as important to the education of the students.
    Whatever my criticisms of some academics, I’m old enough to know that education as a way of improving the self remains a fluffy ideal. Academics have no corner on human failure. We creative-writing teachers have at least our fair share, and speaking personally, I’m in no position to be critical of the weaknesses of others. We must live with some things. There may not be enough good people to go around, and most people aren’t very good at what they do. The excellent teacher may be as rare as the excellent automobile mechanic. The Ph.D. system may not attract enough good people, but the M.F.A. system in creative writing has some shortcomings too.
    One glaring weakness of the system is that it places in teaching positions people who have not demonstrated that their impulse to write is real and lasting. It is simply too easy to pass oneself off as a writer in a university. I’m in favor of all M.F.A. graduates remaining out of school for at least ten years before they are considered for a teaching position. This is a cruel proposal, given the economic pressure to build a a career. For it to work humanely, schools should be willing to count that ten years as time on the job and to hire the writer at the associate professor level, but without tenure until the writer demonstrated his ability to teach creative writing. This way, one will have already published and presumably would continue. The writing is there to be judged, published or not, and the writer has demonstrated a durable impulse to write. One would hold or lose the job on the basis of one’s ability to teach. Creative-writing instructors often write and publish because that is their role and they must do it to hold their job. Once they receive tenure, they stop writing. We are perpetuating ourselves and the system.
    Some may hop on this idea