"The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community."
~David Bartholomae
"Inventing the University"
On first glance, DB's essay is an elitist piece of academic snobbery at its finest, and the anti-authoritarian in me rejects him. "Don't listen to him," my heart screams, "listen to Zarathustra instead! Write in blood; blood is the spirit. Remember Peter Elbow: 'If I want power, I've got to use my voice' (Berlin 675)." But then I think that if, as a freshman, I'd been drilled in the academic language like Bartholomae argues for, I wouldn't be propped up in bed here at 2:30 AM, trying to find meanings between unrelated essays (Coleridge would be proud), struggling to write in big, unnecessary words like a true-blue scholar but failing, and regurgitating these complex ideas to people who don't care what I have to say anyway. Ah, the world of academia!
But Bartholomae is right. In order to be successful in college and in the scholarly community, students need to learn how to speak the language, walk the walk, quack like a duck, etc. "In composing," Berthoff states, "we make meanings" (648). Well, duh. But what she fails to tell us is that academics make meanings in entirely different ways than students. They regard texts with a hypercritical eye that notices the vaguest subtleties in a work. Bartholomae is a perfect example of this; in "Inventing the University" he analyzes students' entrance exam essays and infers meaning not by what they say but what they don't say. As I read over his intricate and oftentimes brilliant thought processes, I wondered if I would ever be that good. That kind of an eagle-eye is not inborn, it is learned. Even he states as much and argues for rigorous training:
"The most substantial academic tasks for students....are matters of many courses, much reading and writing, and several years of education. Our students, however, must have a place to begin. They cannot sit through lectures and read textbooks and, as a consequence, write as a sociologist or write literary criticism. There must be steps along the way. Some of these steps will be marked by drafts and revisions. Some will be marked by courses, and in an ideal curriculum the preliminary courses would be writing courses, whether housed in an English department or not. For some students, students we call "basic writers," these courses will be in a sense the most basic introduction to the language and methods of academic writing" (623).
In other words, a student must read a lot, write a lot, and spend years in school in order to learn how to skillfully speak and write in Academic Esperanto.
So pessimism and exhaustion notwithstanding, I am grateful that I begin my Masters Program with classes so rigorously structured. They will prepare me for the things to come. But I just wish I had this level of training when I was a freshman.
I agree that all of us face the problem of incorporating our own identities into the academic discourse demanded of students. I believe that incorporation is the main idea here. It is possible to express revolutionary ideas using the dominant discourse even if that discourse is representative of the very ideas you are rebelling against. One of the first essays that we read, Tom Fox's "From Freedom to Manners.' discusses the power of slave narratives. The writers of those narratives were expressing radical ideas about the nature of slaves and slavery while using the dominant discourse as a vehicle. During Autumn's presentation on bell hooks, we discussed that fact that while she fights against the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," she has still become a part of that system. Ultimately, this is an issue of ethos. Being able to use academic discourse and being accepted as a part of the academic community, lends an ethos that could not be otherwise engendered.
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