Adapted from David Bartholome’s, “Inventing the University”
Every time a student sits down to write, he has to invent the university for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes—to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and as an experimental psychologist the next, to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argument are both distinct, and even to a professional, mysterious.
The student has to appropriate a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy or a historian or an anthropologist or an economist; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other hand. He must learn to speak our language. And this, understandably, causes problems.
I think that all writers, in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being “insiders”—that is, the privilege both of being inside an established and powerful discourse and of being granted a special right to speak. But I think that right to speak is seldom conferred on us—on any of us, teachers or students—by virtue of the fact that we have invented or discovered an original idea. When a student is writing for a teacher, the student, in effect, has to assume privilege without having any. This is a difficult dilemma for most students, and is also difficult for teachers to deal with.
In my opinion, education has failed to involve students in scholarly projects, projects that allow students to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise. Much of the written work that students do is test-taking, report, or summary—work that places them outside the official discourse of the academic community, where they are expected to admire and report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, where they can do its work and participate in a common enterprise.
Students must have a place to begin. They cannot sit through lectures and read textbooks, and suddenly, instantly, begin to write like sociologists or chemical engineers or literary critics. There must be steps along the way. Some of these steps will be marked by drafts and revisions. Some will be marked by courses. Others will be marked by beginning to read the academic discourse in their own disciplines. But there needs to be a place for students to begin—some opening for them to begin understanding the complex contours of academic writing at the university.