It’s my understanding that today’s high school freshmen, hoping to secure admission four years hence to a competitive college such as my alma mater, Cornell University, are advised that though straight A’s are a commendable start, it would be prudent to give their summer vacations to the service of humanity – perhaps digging up unexploded mines buried in near-forgotten battlefields, or volunteering for household chores in a leper colony. [Generous parental contributions to the university’s endowment play no part whatever in admissions committee decisions but are never unwelcome.]
Fortunately for me the standards for admission to Cornell were far less lofty in my day. An apparent downside of such laxity, however, was the University’s finding an alarming number of incoming freshman, though reasonably well-spoken, to be functionally illiterate – that is, incapable of writing out a simple, grammatically correct, declarative sentence, let alone stringing several together into a cohesive paragraph. Miraculously, after four years of consuming Cayuga’s celebrated waters, many would graduate as learned, eminently publishable scholars, some even capable, it is said, of Shakespearean eloquence.
Having personally experienced no such metamorphosis, how this improbable elevation from barbarian to bard was effected remains a mystery. Cornell’s pre-med curriculum to which I was committed was 95% laboratory sciences – physics, zoology, embryology, inorganic and then organic chemistry and the like, along with advanced courses in calculus, statistics, etc. This challenging course of study might foster thinking in clear, coherent sentences, but not a word on how to write one. As a consequence I was no more lettered my last day on campus than I was on the first.
To Cornell’s credit, having recognized the magnitude of the problem, the university promptly instituted remedial action. Orientation week, incoming freshmen were given an examination in English composition. Perform poorly – which I did – and no matter your major, you’d be required to also take English Composition 101, known to the student body as “Bonehead English”. In my case it was to no avail. The course progressed but I did not and was awarded a calamitous failing grade of 59, by far the low watermark in my long academic career.
Overseeing the Bonehead English curriculum that semester was a Professor Park, one of very few Cornell instructors whose name I’ll not forget. Even after having detonated the GPA-decimating final grade, Professor Park was not quite done with me. As I started toward the door of his classroom for the last time, with a crooked finger he beckoned me to his desk and asked if English was my first language? I assured him that as far as I knew — save for a brief Dutch occupation — the Bronx had always been part of an English-speaking nation. What Professor Park then said remains engraved on my brain:
“Well, it’s most fortunate you’re going into the sciences, Blinder, where you will be working exclusively with numbers, formulas, measurements and the like. For it would appear you have absolutely no aptitude whatever for communicating via the written word!”
He needn’t have worried. Being “pre-med” meant communications via four solid years of hard sciences and not much else. There was little to no room in that curriculum for the liberal arts – philosophy, history, literature, psychology, economics and such – the underpinnings of civilization.
That was bad enough. Unfortunately, because science advances so swiftly, almost everything I had shoehorned into my head during those four difficult, joyless undergraduate years had fallen to obsolescence before the ink on my diploma had dried. I had thus managed to graduate from one of this country’s most prestigious universities without an education.
[The subsequent twelve years of medical and psychiatric instruction were spared a similar comprehensive decay of serviceable knowledge only by dint of the stubborn refusal of the human mind and body to “upgrade”. Thus an osteopathic maneuver that relieves the back pain of a 15th century bricklayer will work no less effectively on a bricklayer today – assuming he has insurance.]
After three and a half years devoted exclusively to the purely technical disciplines, my last Cornell semester I somehow managed to squeeze in a single traditional liberal arts course – just one – in the humanities. The 19th Century European Novel was being taught by a middle-aged, heavily accented, obscure Russian novelist, his published works entirely unknown in the United States. As I recall, it was the fourth or fifth week into what was to be a four-month course, and our professor had just advised us of next week’s planned transition from Flaubert to Zola when the latest of his heretofore little-noticed novels hit The New York Times’ bestseller list. All at once the entire literary world recognized the pedophilic brilliance of Lolita.
So far as I know, Vladimir Nabokov never set foot in a classroom again, having fled Ithaca with such alacrity that for several days no one even knew he had left. We, his former students, entering the classroom the following Tuesday found Nabokov’s place at the lectern taken by the chairman of the English department. He assured us that the “European Novels” course of instruction would resume, to be taught by another distinguished Cornell professor.
Guess who?
Providentially, Professor Park appeared to have forgotten me and his earlier jaundiced assessment of my writing skills; this time my final grade was a semi-respectable 79 – in Cornell parlance a B-minus, which I took as exoneration for the grammatical high crimes and syntactical misdemeanors purportedly committed three years before.
I was certainly glad for that but even more gratified to now have in my possession Professor Nabokov’s prescient handwritten notation on my submission for the first and only examination in that class given prior to his deliverance from academic bondage:
“Your reinterpretation of my instruction on the birth of the modern novel suggests a sensibility less of the novelist than that of the obstetrician.”
This now yellowed document resides in an old baroque frame affixed to the wall above the library shelves delivered of my own published works – the latest and most problematic of which you are (I hope) about to read . .