SUMMER 1968 SEEK REPORT

Miss Toni Cade
Sections B, C & D

One of the final requests I usually make of students before they depart for final exams is to design a course that they would like, that would fulfill their needs, now that they’ve completed one, two, or three semesters of college. Based upon that feedback, this summer’s classes tended to focus on Black literature, contemporary preoccupations, techniques of argument, and free-form writing assignments, newspapers were used to accompany texts, and little use was made of the blackboard or mimeo machine; good libraries and bookstores were suggested to the students, and the instructor’s home phone was given to the students.

The Wednesday night group began in early June in the Seek dormitory. The group consisted of a core of twelve students with a rotating group of eight or nine additional students from other campuses and from the 71st Street project. After several hours of preliminary discussions of courses designed by former students, of topics offered by the present group, of books listed on sheets provided by the program’s instructors, the students finally mapped out their summer course: Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism and Liberation. Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was requested and other texts and fiction related to the theme were ordered. Many of the students had already begun reading one or more of the books but had been unable to buy up every newspaper sold in New York and to pay attention to articles and writers that used rhetoric related to colonialism and liberation. For several students, particularly the freshmen, this was the first occasion to read papers other than the Times,Post,News, and Amsterdam News.

The course began with a perusal of the Fanon book and some texts on African history and a discussion of the book’s impact on the current radical movement. Special topics were assigned for research as they came up either in the reading or in the discussion: Senghor and the Negritude Movement, Pan-Africanism since 1950, “The Battle of Algiers,” etc. While students worked on reports and did background reading for the Fanon work, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul onIce was tackled. We then moved into LeRoi Jones’ Home and took a look at the novels. It became clear, however, by the third or fourth meeting that the texts were not the focus of the seminar; the “I” took precedence.

What was most noticeable about this group, consisting of fairly radical third yearers, politicized second yearers, racialized first yearers, and stumbling in the dark first termers was their personal involvement and investment in the course. These were not students boning up for some exam or other, or feverishly taking notes that would guarantee a spotlight in an upcoming course. These were not students approaching subject matter with a critical attitude equipped with Theme, Plot, Technique and other tools of the trade. These were students painfully aware of the gaps in their education, frantically alert to their need to establish a viable position, a stance in what is for them a daily toe to toe battle with the uglier elements of this country. It was, then, a course with few limits, no specific end, personal, often agonizing—without a doubt the most difficult kind of course to ‘teach’ for there can be no ‘control’ in the usual pedagogic sense, and without a doubt the most worthwhile kind of educational adventure for it lends itself so easily to two-way learning.

Because the sessions were perforce free wielding, muscle flexing, I tended to find first the kind of structure the students were imposing on the meetings and then to fix it. For the first half hour I or someone would summarize the assigned readings, raise questions, ask for parallels in their own experience that would make Fanon’s or others’ statements valid, relevant, incidental, phony, half-baked, or suspect. The next hour or so was devoted to discussion, which often ran far afield of the text or original topics and were often quite heated. At least one hour was given over to students who felt they had either acquired a skill which they wanted to demonstrate (the ability to persuade, refute, recruit, mobilize to action, cool out, dissuade), or had hit upon some salient material while working on the special reports in libraries of the city or foundations or other institutes, or had beaten their way toward a ‘position’ and wished to use the group as a sounding board. The last meeting, for example, ran two hours over the usual end because one student needed “uninterrupted time to rap.” He delivered non-stop machine gun style interrupting his interrupters on the third or fourth syllable a two and a half hour dissertations on at least 80% of themes we had touched on in the two and a half month time and hit upon related ideas which cemented the themes together: the irrationality of logic, the impossibility of objectivity, the stultifying effects of the English language, the masking role of reason which makes mental gymnastics pass for reality, the defects in Black Nationalism, the holes in Fanon, the criminality of education, the paternalism of the SEEK Program, the stupidity of students who kept raising their hands to challenge him as he spoke (“Do you think Paul McCartney and John Lennon ran all the way up to the mountains to bug the guru with “‘Hey, Mahareeshi, you wrong baby?’ No, they sat and listened.”) point omega in one’s consciousness, the square people versus the globular people, the evolution of the Black man, the foolishness of ‘things are getting better,’ the limited role of regular teachers as opposed to real mentors. After his treatise on the freedom and limits of learning, he offhandedly congratulated the instructor as the only one who had sense enough to listen and urged the others to realize that had they been sure of who they were, they would have felt no compulsion to argue audibly but would simply have checked him out and separated the brass from the gold quietly, privately, within their own ‘globe.’ Quite a wind-up.

I must mention, too, an observation which I suspect is valuable to all teachers who use fiction. During the meetings which were devoted to the novels, I noted that discussion, once we had drained off the historical elements, was sluggish. It was not until the second meeting that I raised a question about the sudden spotty attendance and the lack of enthusiasm, that I realized what was happening. I had thought that some members were bored with Man’s Fate because they had read it before in another class, were cool to Cry the Beloved Country because it was so dated. But after a long period of silence, one student said, “I don’t know about the others, but I’m tired of living through fiction.” The vigorous nods that accompanied his remark and a phone call I got that night from a student who had absented himself from a few classes who said “identifying with heroes in books is like masturbating” made me take a good look at my previous reading lists and at the notes I’ve kept over the years. And I do not exaggerate the case by saying that many a student becomes quickly impatient if not guilty with living vicariously in these times that demand vital and total participation. The wary students find sanctuary in literature; the alert student prefers to respond to writings produced by his fellow classmates.

The writings that were produced by this group, which were not given to me until almost the last week with the sotto voce instruction ‘Not for public consumption, Please return with some hints as to how to finish’ are among the most unusual I’ve ever gotten. Some were random musings from their journals (personal notebooks they were encouraged to keep instead of the usual class notes book); others were scenarios for films they one day hope to make (inspired, I imagine, by “Battle of Algiers”); others were dialogues, poems, notes for compositions, blueprints for courses they’d one day like to take— one topic given priority by many in the past and almost all from the summer is Western Traditional Values; a propos to something or other, I had made a brief foray into the history of confidence, began with Descartes and Pascal then got diverted, had trotted out Aristotle and a few others whom they’ve met in other courses when the talks got around to such notions as Universality, Objectivity, Either/Or, Standards, etc. I suspect that quite a few students are eager for a survey course that they can better articulate what it is in the Western Culture they are objecting to on so many levels. After one class, four students remained behind to discuss the ideology and methods of many of the New Left factions, again expressing a need to know what it is in traditional ways of analysis, research, etc. they are reacting so vehemently against in some intuitive way and what it is they find both seductive and worrisome about groups who have abandoned bourgeois methodology and aim for meaning only in the process of activity, the next step.

While attendance was spotty, weather singularly lousy, classrooms unbearable, and attention not always rapt, while no one at the end could state with any clarity or precision what we had accomplished or left undone, while the final departure left us drained and in some inexplicable state of frustration, convinced on the one hand that something got done, on the other that nothing got done, four things I can point to as by products of the summer: one, a committee was formed to talk with and attend sessions of the Experimental College which has been in the past year or so conducting courses on campus in abortion, guerilla warfare, the radical press, etc.; two, several students are corresponding with the Sol Alinsky Institute in Chicago in hopes that the Sociology Department at CCNY will one day be ready to offer meaningful courses in community organization; three, a meeting for a much talked about journal of literary, critical, and political work was set up; four, members of the Ecumenical Institute were invited to give a course in African and Afro-American history at the dorm.

The freshmen courses, members of which trickled in, disappeared, reappeared at odd hours in my office or on the phone, were not especially fruitful I’m afraid. I had asked each student as he appeared for the first time to tell me what she or he thought he most needed to be prepared for or confident about or at least not in a state of panic because of the Fall semester. Four items were listed with frequency although it was never discussed in class after the first meeting with two students: To know what to talk about when a teacher assigns ‘It’ when writing a book review; to learn some ‘grammar’ (which meant at the outset a bag of magic tricks they could dip out of when the ruthless red pencil marks got too numerous to be ignored); to learn some vocabulary so they wouldn’t feel like complete dunces when they had to read contemporary material (the list they submitted at the end of the course contained ‘ideology’ ‘Left’ ‘militant’ ‘pacifist’ “Marx’ ‘Freud’ ‘plastic’ ‘technologue’ ‘labyrinth’ ‘middle class liberal’). The course began with an essay by LeRoi Jones—“Cuba Libre” from the collection Home. Its topic, among other things, is lies, in particular the kind of lies we are forced to abide by in a country with a powerful press. This topic led to a general discussion of euphemism, distortions, censorship, propaganda, language manipulation. The first batch of papers in response to the essay covered lies they had encountered growing up, but tended to rely heavily on summary of the essay. The papers were mechanically weak, flabby in content, bearing very little resemblance to the sophistication, wit, sharpness of the class discussions. But this had become all too predictable in this program. Papers rich in mechanical mayhem are often written by very skilled speakers. And often the student who makes gross blunders in literacy is, in contrast, competent in both written and oral discussion. One summer student, for example, who submitted three papers has the ability to recognize a subject’s boundaries, to support and order assertions, to distinguish between the relevant and the irrelevant, to nonetheless, fracture sentences, misspell, use wrong parts of speech, has faulty agreement of subject and verb, blurs relationships with ambiguous pronouns and manufactured conjunctions. I mention this example simply to illustrate a distinction between literacy and competence.

In subsequent meetings, held in class but often in the office or the cafeteria to catch the students falling in and out of the program, it became clear that this topic of lies was very meaningful, that Jones had triggered off something they’ve ‘been meaning to think about for a long time.’ Even as we moved onto other essays, other writers, other themes, some students would always extract a point—sometimes incidental, often times completely absent—that would lead us back to the topic of lies. Students began on their own to bring in examples of language manipulation from advertising, political speeches, sports columns. One fairly mute student offered to read from his journal (the private notebook students kept in addition to their class notes) a series of reminiscences about the kind of conditioning that went on in his home (“If you’re black, you gotta be twice as hard and twice as good”) and in school (“You must make realistic choices about your career. Now an electrical engineer has to be very good in math. And do you think you have the marks and money to go to college? After all…”). This bit of personal sharing provoked a discussion of the myths that inform the national temperament and how they are perpetuated by the schools—brotherhood, melting pot, land of the free and home of the brave. That led to an appraisal of the history course they had in high school and a re-evaluation of “heroes.” Students began, on an individual slink-up-to-the-desk basis, to ask for books they should read that would offset their previous education, an antidote, a book that ‘tells the truth.’ Alas.

The repeat broadcast of “Black History—Lost, Strayed, or Stolen” forced us to abandon the lesson on the short story that had been planned to talk about brainwashing. One student literally leapt out of his seat to pass around the room his subway pass which bears the official New York City seal—“A grim looking Indian with a hatchet and a bow and this damn pious ole Pilgrim with a book, Get to that!” Students then were given five minutes each (to avoid the noise/bedlam that forced instructors along the hall to close their doors) to rake over the coals, Ebony magazine came under attack.

It was with mutual annoyance that the course came to an end, I because I had realized too late the significance of the topic to really exploit it, they because they were just becoming aware of the fact that a subject cannot be adequately put down on paper in one off-the- top-of-the-head-composition. But I feel they are somewhat prepared for their first English course if their enthusiasm for how and why language is used and what it can effect is anything to go by. Had I been more attentive to the quality of response the students gave that first assignment, I would have dumped post haste the rest of the books and devoted all the time to that one theme until it was at least nearly exhausted, assigning the same paper over and over in various disguises so that at the end they could fuse the papers and discover what a real composition looks like, how much time, energy, thinking, initial drafts go into the paper of substance.

At this point, I would like to mention one segment of a session which struck me as fairly important at the time, extremely important with subsequent think throughs, and divinely revelatory as of a phone call last night. Apropos to nothing—I was presenting the careers of some of the Black writers listed in our short story anthology—a student mumbled “Is that why the youth are so mad?” This non sequitur was accorded the expected confusion. He went on to explain that he had been thinking about lies again, the deformation of truth in newspapers in particular, and the ‘credibility gap.’ We were off again on the old track, momentarily derailed by no less a giant than Richard Wright. “That’s why they hate…authority so much (students offered the speaker ‘authority’ ‘government’ ‘ruling class’ ‘whitey’ ‘the big guys’—he chose ‘authority’) because they lie so much.” We went over the old ground again—the tricky language of contracts that ensnare the poor, the sly fine print on electrical appliances’ guarantees, the maunderings of politicoes, the news conferences of the president. What my ears were picking up was the term ‘the youth’ always spoken in alarming detachment (I had heard it often, all summer in fact) as if the heirs of the traditionally shut out, powerless, mute, nobody self notioned blacks couldn’t even identify with the youth of this country, much less the power, the heroes, the dreams, the myths. After the discussion, I asked whether it was my imagination or if indeed they regarded ‘the youth’ as some separate body of unknown people foreign to their lives. Shifts of posture, screwed up faces, no verbal response. Wright was put aside and we talked about the movement of the young, filling up all six blackboards with names of individuals, organizations, magazines, newspapers, books, slogans. One student, long after the course had ended, called and announced that he was ready to answer my question. He didn’t know, he said, that he was one of the youths. He then read some clippings from the AmsterdamNews about the Mount Morris Park concerts, a passage from the Post article about an East New York ‘gang fight,’ and an excerpt from the Times story on the Brooklyn Panther’s confrontation with the police. “I was at the concert and in East New York and in Bedford Stuy too but it was like I was not there at all. The papers make out like these ‘youths’ were freaks from another planet doing weird things in some Disneyland place.” He called back to say that I should add to my files on student-designed courses a course that would send students to meetings and its demonstrations and then follow them up in the papers, then produce their own version in their own paper.

I am at a loss as to what to say my particular approach in the classroom is. I’m aware that there is very little academic distance, that an unreasonable amount of energy and participation is demanded of the student and an enormous amount of seemingly divergent material is tolerated. I think a good teacher provokes rather than assuages, raises questions rather than provides answers, allows the students to discover techniques rather than teaches them, and equips the students with skills so that he can sever ties with the teacher quickly and teach himself. One reason I use LeRoi Jones’ collection Home is that the material, the content, the personality seems irresistible but the techniques frustrating. One assumption, for example, that determines his style is that his reader grew up with him and has shared a similar world. He frequently, then, leaves definitions hanging, arguments truncated, assertions unillustrated. Most students are quick to notice this, to complain about it, to fill in the gaps. It forces some to the library or other sources to find out the significance of this date or the identity of that name. And many come to ‘know’ before they have to ‘learn’ the technique of developing an idea through examples, of rounding out portraits with description because they experience frustration as readers. One reason I use student papers a great deal in class is that it develops the much neglected skill of listening. Students usually pay extra attention to a reading of a class theme because they are interested in knowing why I’ve chosen it and not some other, and also because they are trying to guess who the author is. This rapt period of listening enables them also to hear implications, suggestions, hints that normally would have gone unnoticed. They more quickly hear the ‘holes’ in students’ papers than in textual material, not because there are more numerous gaps in the students’ works, but because they have no awe for the non-professional essay. On occasion I slip in an essay of Thoreau or a passage from Plato or of whomever else is relevant to the topic and they tear into it too until they learn it’s not a student’s piece. It takes a student a while before he will admit that he has an unreasonable amount of reverence for ‘high class literature’ which prevents him from learning from it. One freshman from last term reported that his greatest moment in school came when he realized that Shakespeare has written some bad poetry in his life.

The aim of my stumble trial and error approach, then, is to make the classroom unsafe, to bomb the hiding student out of his corner, to blast the insulating walls down, to nimbly take the most rash and contradictory positions so that students do not feel they have to preach the party line to pass the course, to demand that each student participate in the content, direction, and goals of the course, and to provide the kind of relationship in which the student will always feel free to terminate or to change, to walk out of the room to work his project, to do advance work on material he feels more important than what is offered in the classroom.

The summer seminar has confirmed a suspicion I’ve held for some time and which is often voiced by the student—publicly, most recently at a retreat at which time a student asked “What should a student do when she realizes that her work in the community is pulling her away from her academic studies? I’ve seen so many students drop out of the program because they can’t join the two worlds.” (The answer offered by the speaker on stage was too asinine to repeat here) namely, there is still, despite some furtive modifications of syllabi in many departments, a terrifying gap between academia and the real world. Even the incoming students during the early sessions said that on the one hand they wanted to get prepared for the Fall but also wanted to talk about things that concerned them, about things they wouldn’t have the opportunity to cover in school, intimating that they did not expect college life to be very real. The older students too, especially the ones that worked this summer for the first time, frequently mentioned that they have to ‘psych’ themselves into going back to school because they felt the insulation of campus life not only perpetuated the out-of-it ghetto existence, but postponed ‘real’ learning. I think, for example, that the interest the Seek students have in the Experimental College is a last chance grasp at something before they just drop out altogether or turn off and continue toward the degree. One of the courses one student designed for me included information on the FSM’s courses and asked for information relating to many of the experiments in counter courses now taking place in universities all over the world. The Liberation School and the Free University has captured the imagination of, surprisingly, quite a few of the seemingly rah-rah malted milk-house plan beanie wearers who are convinced that their sojourn through the halls of ivy is going to be damaging if not killing. One of the third year students from the Wednesday night class is making up a directory of foundations as her ‘term paper’ in hopes that she can mobilize student and faculty support to establish a ‘real’ college within the mock college.