There is, of course, a reason for this nonsense. The rewards to a competent novelist are so much greater than the salaries of professors of English at even our top schools that once he/she learns this racket, teaching holds no charms.
There are exceptions—successful storytellers who
like
to teach so well that they keep their jobs and write only during summers, vacations, evenings, weekends, sabbaticals. I know a few—emphasis on "few." But most selling wordsmiths are lazy, contrary, and so opposed to any fixed regime that they will do
anything
—even meet a deadline—rather than accept a job.
Most professors of English
can't
write publishable novels . . . and many of them can't write nonfiction prose very well—certainly not with the style and distinction and grace—and content—of Professor of Biology Thomas H. Huxley. Or Professor of Astronomy Sir Fred Hoyle. Or Professor of Physics John R. Pierce. Most Professors of English get published, when they do, by university presses or in professional quarterlies. But fight it out for cash against
Playboy
and Travis McGee? They can't and they don't!
But if you are careful not to rub their noses in this embarrassing fact and pay respectful attention to their opinions even about (ugh!) "creative writing," they will help you slide through to a painless baccalaureate.
You still have time for many electives and will need them for your required hours-units-courses; here are some fun-filled ones that will teach you almost nothing:
The Fortunes of Faust
Mysticism
The Search for a New Life Style
The American Dilemma
—Are "all men equal"?Enology
—history, biology, and chemistry of wine-making and wine appreciation. This one will teach you something but it's too good to miss.Western Occultism: Magic, Myth, and Heresy.
There is an entire college organized for fun and games ("aesthetic enrichment"). It offers courses for credit but you'll be able to afford noncredit activity as well in your lazyman's course—and
anything
can be turned into credit by some sincere selling to your adviser and/or Academic Committee. I have already listed nine of its courses but must add:
Popular Culture
—plus clubs or "guilds" for gardening, photography, filmmedia, printing, pottery, silkscreening, orchestra, jazz, etc.
Related are
Theater Arts
. These courses give credit, including:Films of Fantasy and Imagination
—fantasy, horror, SF, etc. (!)Seminar on Films
Filmmaking
History and Aesthetics of Silent Cinema
History and Aesthetics of Cinema since Sound
Introduction to World Cinema
Sitting and looking at movies can surely be justified for an English major. Movies and television use writers—as little as possible, it's true. But somewhat; the linkage is there.
Enjoy yourself while it lasts. These dinosaurs are on their way to extinction.
The 2-year "warm body" campus is even more lavish than UCSC. It is a good trade school for some things—e.g., dental assistant. But it offers a smorgasbord of fun—Symbolism of the Tarot, Intermediate Contract Bridge, Folk Guitar, Quilting, Horseshoeing, Chinese Cooking, Hearst Castle Tours, Modern Jazz, Taoism, Hatha Yoga Asanas, Aikido, Polarity Therapy, Mime, Raku, Bicycling, Belly Dancing, Shiatsu Massage, Armenian Cuisine, Revelation and Prophecy, Cake Art, Life Insurance Sales Techniques, Sexuality and Spirituality, Home Bread Baking, Ecuadorian Backstrap Weaving, The Tao of Physics, and lots, lots more! One of the newest courses is "The Anthropology of Science Fiction" and I'm still trying to figure that out.
I have no objection to any of this . . . but why should this kindergarten be paid for by
taxes
?
"Bread and Circuses."
I first started noticing the decline of education through mail from readers. I have saved mail from readers for forty years. Shortly after World War Two I noticed that letters from the youngest were not written but hand-printed. By the middle fifties deterioration in handwriting and in spelling became very noticeable. By today a letter from a youngster in grammar school
or in high school
is usually difficult to read and sometimes illegible—penmanship atrocious (
pencil
manship—nine out of ten are in soft pencil, with well-smudged pages), spelling unique, grammar an arcane art.
Most youngsters have not been taught how to fold 8½" x 11" paper for the two standard sizes of envelopes intended for that standard sheet.
Then such defects began to show up among college students. Apparently "Bonehead English" (taught everywhere today, so I hear) is not sufficient to repair the failure of grammar and high school teachers
who themselves in most cases were not adequately taught.
I saw sharply this progressive deterioration because part of my mail comes from abroad, especially Canada, the United Kingdom, the Scandinavian countries, and Japan. A letter from any part of the Commonwealth is invariably neat, legible, grammatical, correct in spelling, and polite. The same applies to letters from Scandinavian countries. (Teenagers of Copenhagen usually speak and write English better than most teenagers of Santa Cruz.) Letters from Japan are invariably neat—but the syntax is sometimes odd. I have one young correspondent in Tokyo who has been writing steadily these past four years. The handwriting in the first letter was almost stylebook perfect but I could hardly understand the phrasing; now, four years later, the handwriting looks the same but command of grammar, syntax, and rhetoric is excellent, with only an occasional odd choice in wording giving an exotic flavor.
Our public schools no longer give good value.
We remain strong in science and engineering but even students in those subjects are handicapped by failures of our primary and secondary schools and by cutback in funding of research both public and private. Our great decline in education is alone enough to destroy this country . . . but I offer no solutions because the only solutions I think would work are so drastic as to be incredible.
The high school I attended (1919–24) was an early experiment in the junior and senior high school method. The last year of grammar school was joined with the freshman class as "junior high" while the sophomores, juniors, and seniors were "senior high."
There was a company of junior ROTC in junior high and two companies in senior high. Military training gave no credit and was not compulsory; it was neither pushed nor discouraged. A boy took it or not, as suited him and his parents. Some of the subfreshman (aet. ca. 13 an.) were barely big enough to tote a Springfield rifle.
Kansas City had a regiment of Federalized National Guard, with one authorized drill per week, 3 hours each Wednesday evening. For this a private was paid 69¢, a PFC got a dollar, and a corporal got big money—$1.18.
The required & paid weekly drill was not all, as about half of the regiment showed up on Sundays at the "Military Country Club"—acres of raw wood lot until the regiment turned it into rifle range, club house, stables, etc. No pay for Sundays. Two weeks encampment per year, with pay. For most of the regiment, this was their only vacation, two weeks then being standard.
That regiment ran about 96% authorized strength.
About 1921 Congress authorized the CMTC, Citizens Military Training Corps. It proved very popular. A month of summer training in camp at an Army post, continued through 4 years, could (if a candidate's grades were satisfactory) result in certification for commission in the reserve. Civilians submitted to military discipline in CMTC but were not subject to court martial. Offenders could be sent home or turned over to civilian police, depending on the offense. There were few offenses.
CMTC candidates got 3¢ per mile to and from their homes, no other money.
In 1925 I was appointed midshipman. There were 51 qualified applicants trying for that one appointment.
240 of my class graduated; 130 fell by the wayside.
One
of that 130 resigned voluntarily; all the others resigned involuntarily, most of them plebe year for failure in academics (usually mathematics), the others were requested to resign over the next three years for academic, physical, or other reasons. A few resigned graduation day through having failed the final physical examination for commissioning. Three more served about one year in the Fleet, then resigned—but these three volunteered after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 28 of the 129 who left the service involuntarily managed to get back on active duty in World War Two.
So with four exceptions all of my class stayed in the Navy
as long as the Navy would have them.
About 25% were killed in line of duty or died later of wounds. Neither at the Academy nor in the Fleet did I ever hear a midshipman or officer talk about resigning. While it is likely that some thought about it, all discussion tacitly carried the assumption that the Navy was our life, the Fleet our home, and that we would leave only feet first or when put out to pasture as too old.
Enlisted men: When I entered the Fleet,
before
the Crash of '29 and about a year before unemployment became a problem, Navy recruiting offices were turning down 19 out of 20 volunteers; the Army was turning down 5 out of 6. The reenlistment rate was high; the desertion rate almost too small to count.
I have said repeatedly that I am opposed to conscription at any time, peace or war, for moral reasons beyond argument. For the rest of this I will try to keep my personal feelings out of the discussion—as I did in the rosy picture painted above. I reported
facts,
not my emotions.
I will not review details showing that the USSR is today militarily stronger than we are as the matter has been discussed endlessly in news media, in Congress, and in professional journals. The public discussion today concedes the military superiority of the USSR and centers on
how much
they are ahead of us, and what should be done about it. The details of this debate are of supreme importance as
the most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment,
good but not good enough to win. At the moment the three-cornered standoff is saving us from that silly way to die . . . but I cannot predict how long this stalemate will last as key factors are not under our control, and neither our government nor our citizens seem willing to accept guns instead of butter on the scale required to make us too strong for anyone to risk attacking us. Polls seem to show that a controlling number of voters think that we are already spending too much on our Armed Forces.
What I set forth below comes primarily from an article by Richard A. Gabriel, Associate Professor of Politics, St. Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hampshire, author of
Crisis in Command
. I lack personal experience with Army conditions today but what Dr. Gabriel says about them matches what I have heard from other sources and what I have read (I belong to all three associations—Army, Navy, Air Force—plus the Naval Institute and the Retired Officers Association; I get much data secondhand but no longer see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears).
Readers with personal experience in Korea, Viet Nam, and in the Services anywhere since the end of the Viet Nam debacle, I urge to write and tell me what you know that I don't, especially on points in which I am seriously mistaken.
Summarized from "The Slow Dying of the American Army," Dr. Richard A. Gabriel in
Gallery
magazine, June 1979, p. 41 et seq.:
Concerning the All Volunteer Force (AVF): Early this year the Pentagon admitted that all services had failed to meet quotas.
30% of all Army volunteers are discharged for offenses during first enlistment. Of the 70 per 100 left, 26 do not reenlist. The desertion rates are the highest in history . . . and this fact is partly covered up by using administrative discharges (—i.e., "You're fired!") rather than courts martial and punishment—if the deserter turns up. But no effort is made to find him.
According to Dr. Gabriel, citing General George S. Blanchard and others, hard-drug use (heroin, cocaine, angel dust—not marijuana) is greater than ever, especially in Europe, with estimates from a low of 10% to a high of 64%. Marijuana is ignored—but let me add that a man stoned out of his mind on grass is not one I want on my flank in combat.
Category 3B and 4 (ranging down from dull to mentally retarded) make up 59% of Army volunteers . . . in a day when privates handle very complex and sophisticated weapons and machinery. Add to this that the mix is changing so that a typical private might be Chicano or Puerto Rican, the typical sergeant a Black, the typical officer "Anglo." And that officers are transferred with great frequency and enlisted men with considerable frequency and you have a situation in which esprit de corps
cannot
be developed (an outfit without esprit de corps is not an army unit; it is an armed mob—R.A.H.).
Today we have more general officers than we did in World War Two. Our ratio of officers to enlisted men is more than twice as high as that of successful armies in the past. But an officer is not with his troops long enough to be "the Old Man"—he is a "manager," not a leader of men.
Dr. Gabriel concludes: "The most basic aspect is the need to reinstate the draft."
I disagree.
My disagreement is not on moral grounds. Forget that I ever voiced opposition to slave soldiers; think of me as Old Blood-and-Guts willing to use any means whatever to win.
Reinstating the draft would
not
get us out of trouble, even with the changes Dr. Gabriel suggests to make the draft "fair."
As everyone knows, we were in the frying pan; shifting to AVF, instead of producing an efficient professional army, put us into the fire. Dr. Gabriel urges that we climb back into the frying pan—but with improvements: a national lottery with no deferments whatever for any reason.