Excerpt Submitted By: John Janovy, Jr.
This excerpt is from a chapter entitled “The White Gate.”
During the first 30+ years of CPBS’ existence, students would routinely gather
outside the White Gate to have a couple of beers and engage in some of the
biggest Big Talk I’ve ever heard. Numerous research projects, fiction books,
theses and dissertations, and professionalism training occurred outside the
CPBS White Gate. That tradition seemed to end when students built fires, played
loud music, and thus attracted the attention of law enforcement. But to those
hundreds of CPBS alums from the first thirty or so years, the White Gate
represents an idyllic environment in which every idea, no matter how strange or
outlandish, got discussed seriously with little or no interpersonal politics.
In the following excerpt, “Camelot” is what we often called CPBS and this book
was originally entitled EXPORTING CAMELOT. The publishers changed the title because
some editor thought it sounded too much like a book about the Kennedys.
The excerpt:
What is it about Camelot that
produces Big Talk? The answer is several things, but foremost among them is the
White Gate at the entrance. During one administrative changeover, Big Talk was
evidently deemed so dangerous that Camelot’s Director decided to paint the
White Gate a different color. Instead, it got painted with a new coat of white.
Apparently it dawned on this individual in his first administrative job that he
could paint it black and students would still call it the White Gate, although
safety also had something to do with the decision. When you put up a heavy
steel barricade across a gravel road in western Nebraska, you’d better paint it
bright white so it will catch a pickup’s headlights a long way off. Most nights
at the field station, students and some faculty members gather outside the
White Gate to talk and watch the stars. This gate is the boundary between
university property and a sort of no-man’s land probably owned by an irrigation
district or the Corps of Engineers but of virtually no use except as a dumping
place for construction rubble. Getting off-site—away from the university if
only a few feet—seems to have a releasing effect on communication. Outside the
White Gate it’s also possible to drink a beer although it’s not really clear
that such consumption is legal there, even in no-man’s land. It is clear that
beer is not permitted on state property inside the White Gate. The two words,
“not permitted,” represent a larger and somewhat abstract authority that ends
precisely at the Gate. But even if beer were permitted inside, students would
very likely go outside.
This
short description of a social phenomenon is intended as a parable. It’s the
break with, or perhaps release from, authority, no matter how symbolic, that
stimulates Big Talk outside the White Gate. The teacher’s job, of course, then
becomes that of producing a metaphorical White Gate and leading his or her
students through it. Alternatively, perhaps the teacher’s first task is to
recognize that he or she represents
the authority that must be defied or traversed. What is the most common and
familiar manifestation of that authority? Obviously in the classroom it’s the
right to speak, given first, and often always, to the teacher. As the game is
played in universities, whatever comes out of a teacher’s mouth is
automatically considered Big Talk, at least for exam purposes. Such Big Talk
may be later deflated in dorm rooms, but at the time it’s uttered it
establishes authority. In the classroom, the right to speak, and the content of
this speech, is further constrained by the list of appropriate questions and
comments, as well as the paralanguage commentary that is part of every school
experience at all levels.
Academic
paralanguage includes attitude, tone of voice, posture, respect for the
furniture, clothing, newspapers, cell phones, pagers, headsets, and even
whispered conversations with neighbors. Yes, all of these subtle—and at times
not so subtle—forms of communication are seen regularly in university
classrooms across the country, and especially in the large, introductory course
multi-media auditoriums. When a student takes, or makes, a cell phone call in
the middle of a lecture on genetics, then that student might as well have told
the teacher directly that his or her version of Big Talk is total bullshit. When
a professor lets a student read a newspaper in class, that professor is telling
his students that whatever they are doing in that room is not very important to
him, implying there is no reason why it should be important to them, and in
fact that the teacher is talking Small Talk. The newspaper and cell phone
represent assumptions of authority; that’s why I tend to tell people to either
put them away or leave when I see them being used out in the audience. Such an
exchange does not result in my students being led through a White Gate; more
often than not, when I have to ask a couple of lovebirds discussing their
wedding in the 37th row to shut up or leave, the gate is slammed
shut for everyone. From such experiences come my strong belief that students
themselves have far more control over the quality of their own institutions
than do either the faculty or the administrators.
There
is probably a massive psychological literature on various forms of authority,
but this book is not the place to get too sober about that subject. Instead,
I’ll point out some of the most obvious ones, then discuss various methods for
stepping outside the White Gate, no matter where it’s located. The authority
forms we deal with every day in university settings include institutional
grading systems, faculty testing and grading practices, any syllabus,
textbooks, lists of graduation requirements, standards of beauty, athletic
traditions, class schedules, and whatever students have been taught during
their first 18 years by relatives, siblings, public schools, and religious
institutions. All of these factors can be quite intimidating and oppressive,
especially when faculty members use or submit to any or all of them, even in
subtle or subconscious ways.
Any
elimination, by a faculty member, of the authoritarian content of our typical
business accoutrements is a step outside The White Gate. The most vulnerable of
these accoutrements, and the one over which faculty members have total control,
is their own grading system. That’s why I look continually for ways to subvert
my own system, which is at least in part controlled by the authority of both my
institution and my profession. In other words, I must be able to defend
whatever I enter on a grade roster at the end of the semester. The defense
requirement results from both professional ethics and liability. The teacher
profession itself maintains its integrity only if we grade fairly and evenly,
and at the university level capriciousness often ends up being formally
appealed, that is, if the grade awarded turns out to be too low in the eyes of
a student. For all these reasons, work done by young people in response to the
words I write on the blackboard and utter in front of class must be convertible
into numbers.
This link between words and numbers is quite vulnerable to
subversion, however, and indeed much of a teacher’s power lies almost solely in
his or her ability, or perhaps willingness, to subvert the system. Remember,
that what we want to accomplish is Big Talk, about ideas, instead of about
football. Or, to generalize, maybe we are looking for words about ideas instead
of about worldly concerns such as health, agriculture, money, politics, the
military, sex, sports, and organized religion. The task, then, is to find a way
to accomplish the Small Talk-to-Big Talk conversion, then evenhandedly, in fact
by means of an intellectual contract between teacher and students, express that
conversion into numbers that “the system” understands. The student whose work
you read in Chapter 5—Billie Jean Winsett—again provides an excellent example
of how this task might be accomplished. Her name came up recently in a
conversation that on the surface seems almost eerily contrived, but in
retrospect almost equally pre-ordained. The conversation was with another of
Ms. Winsett’s teachers, a man whose classroom was a volleyball court.
My wife and I had received an
invitation to a rather unusual event. Naturally, we accepted. Thus on a bitter
cold, late December, evening, we parked beneath a viaduct in the dark,
deserted, warehouse district of our city, then walked carefully across
snow-dusted bricks to a building entrance. Inside a barren atrium, we took an
elevator to a third floor loft, where we were greeted by Judy and Larry Roots,
attorney and artist, respectively. Inside, an elegantly dressed woman took our
coats, handed us a catalog, and pointed us toward the wine and shrimp. A flute
and classical guitar duo played softly from a darkened corner. Giant panels,
made of canvas and pipe, divided the large room into long sections, and also
served as walls to display Larry’s work of the past year. Forty abstract
pieces, most of them 6 feet tall, bearing names such as Causation Srs. No. 27, stared down at the growing crowd. We were
fans; every guest bought Larry’s paintings when he was “on the way up.” A
friend remarked that “there are now a lot more zeros than there used to be” in
the prices. I noticed a person I’d not seen in several years contemplating 18 Simultaneous Moments (48 x 96). I
greeted the man, Terry Pettit, one of the most successful university volleyball
coaches in the history of the game. The last time we talked, he’d just won a
national championship. We reminisced about former students we had in common. At
this artsy in-crowd event surrounded by abstractions, Billie Jean Winsett’s
name came up naturally. For Terry, she was a dominating all-American hitter;
for me, she produced the epitome of Big Talk.
“She was
the most determined individual I’ve ever known,” Terry recalled. “Even in
drills, she wouldn’t yield her place on the floor until she’d perfected
whatever we were working on.”
“She wrote
four papers in my class,” I said; “two of those I think about every day.”
Thirty five years in the college professor business, and I think daily about
two of the nearly 30,000 student papers I’ve read in that time? Terry Pettit’s
wife was suddenly curious. By the look on her face, I could tell she was
wondering what this gifted athlete on a national championship team might have
written so that the words would stick forever in the mind of a teacher. “The Light Not on the Horizon,” I
answered her unasked question. “It was about how a snail shell might have been
the inspiration for Barnett Newman’s Horizon
Light.”
JJ’s comment on this excerpt: The Light Not on the Horizon was filled with what anyone from the
first 30+ years of CPBS Big Talk at the White Gate would recognize instantly as
being filled with truly challenging ideas about the way we humans view the
natural world and by extension, our place in it.
