'Good' is never enough for Princeton precepts

A brief note in a recent issue of the Daily Princetonian noted that student contentment with the preceptorial system was relatively high, with 65 percent rating precepts as "Good." Contentment, of course, is not the same as enthusiasm — a fact that was reflected by only eight percent who rated preceptorials to be "Excellent," and more revealingly, a full quarter of respondents who could only muster a "Fair" judgment. While the poll was interpreted, it seems, by collapsing "Good" with "Excellent" and thereby arriving at a combined 73 percent endorsement of the system, I wondered whether "Good" might not in fact echo more the response that I usually get from my son when I ask him how his day at school was, i.e., invariably "Good," which in fact means "Fair," which in turn really means "don't bother me Dad." By that calculation, instead shading "Good" toward "Fair," a full 90 percent of the student body in fact are anything but content and, in response to this bothersome inquiry, may have heaved back a big "Whatever." This latter suspicion was reinforced by the all-too-brief revelation that "many comments in the free response section were negative."

The report included a few minor recommendations, such as calling for mandatory training for all graduate student preceptors. Why it should be assumed that professors are better equipped to run precepts than graduate students escaped me, but I suspected that it was a prudential judgment on the U-Council's part not to spark any animosity among faculty in these days of attempts to curb grade inflation. Beyond this fleeting consideration, however, I was curious why students thought that they were more naturally endowed than any of the rest of us to participate successfully in preceptorials. There was no recommendation of mandatory training for students in the art of small class discussion. Coming into Princeton, we assume that students need help learning to write well, require intellectual breadth through distribution requirements, need to master the rudiments of a foreign language, should gain some knowledge of how a laboratory works, want grounding in particular subjects that is supplied by departmental prerequisites, but never once that they might need something other than training by happenstance in the difficult art of face-to-face deliberation, debate and discussion. It's the one thing we all assume that every of us can do well without further reflection — everyone, that is, except lowly graduate students, who sometime after finishing their undergraduate careers apparently forget what they once knew and sometime before they become professors suddenly recall what they had forgotten. Such a conclusion is, I dare say, absurd.

I believe that some mandatory training for professors ought to be on the table, and, perhaps even more importantly, we ought to re-think the easy assumption that undergraduates take to precepts like fish to water. Such face-to-face discussion is hard work, made all the more difficult by the intense desire not to make a fool of oneself, and compounded by the fact that students today are just plain nice. In fact, it may paradoxically be the case that all the training that students do receive in sensitivity to issues of diversity, multi-culturalism, mutual respect for differing perspectives — all amounting to a form of philosophical relativism — ultimately undermines the underlying ambitions of the preceptorial system. What students today are trained in may lead to an unwillingness to engage differing viewpoints for fear of being perceived as "judgmental," a denunciation one seeks to avoid today as much as people once sought to avoid being deemed a "sinner." Instead avoiding the scarlet "A," today we fear the invisible scarlet "J."

A recent article in The New York Times (March 23) suggests that this phenomenon is giving rise to what it called "the silent classroom," populated by students who are "guarded and private about their intellectual beliefs," generally "more respectful of authority," and "more reticent about public disputation." The article recalled some of the acerbic criticisms of college students (and more forcefully still, of their professors) lodged by the late Allan Bloom in his best-selling 1987 book "The Closing of the American Mind" — a book which many of today's students will not have heard of, much less read. Decrying most of the legacy of the 1960s, Bloom's book denounced various forms of easy-going, Americanized Nietzschean relativism. It was itself the object of frequent denunciation on campuses and in the press, and for a time nearly every professor and student on every campus had something to say about the virtues and vices of relativism — and about Allan Bloom — on America's campuses and beyond.

Curiously, The New York Times article concluded that, "thankfully, these excesses have begun to die down, as bipolar dogmatism has started to give way to scholarly eclecticism." Yet that seems to me a conclusion hardly meriting thanksgiving if the result has been the silencing of the discordant yet energizing noise that animated college campuses about 15 years ago. If such "relativism" is today the only game in town, then it has become as dangerously "absolutist" as that absolutism it sought to dethrone.

In the end, maybe "Good" precepts mean "nice" precepts, and that's what prevents them from being excellent. Most of the time I like the fact that people around here are nice, but in precepts such niceness becomes among the biggest obstacles to intellectual inquiry. One can be civil without being nice. One can be considerate while still strongly articulating one's views. One can appreciate another's position even while criticizing it for perceived shortcomings. One can't avoid being "judgmental;" one must simply decide whether one will make judgments silently or with sound if not fury. It's something we ought to talk about — maybe, hopefully, we'll end up having a debate. Patrick J. Deneen is an assistant professor in the Politics department. He can be reached at pdeneen@princeton.edu.