Editorial: Intellectual discussions still abound on campus

If during any given lunch hour, you were to eavesdrop on as many Market Central conversations as… If during any given lunch hour, you were to eavesdrop on as many Market Central conversations as you could, the odds that any of them would concern chaos theory or postmodernism are astronomically small. Contrary to the assertions of certain academics, however, on-campus intellectual discourse is anything but impoverished.

James M. Lang, an associate professor of English at Assumption College, wrote a column last Tuesday in The Chronicle of Higher Education declaiming, among other things, the state of outside-the-classroom discourse. Independent, informed student conversations, he says, have diminished since his college days; no longer do undergraduates spend nights talking about philosophy, literature or politics in their dorm rooms.

Lang says he arrived at these conclusions after reading two books: “My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student” by Cathy Small (published under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan) and “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture” by Susan D. Blum. The former is an account of the author’s one-year stint at Northern Arizona University. The latter, while ostensibly centered on cheating, examines many of the same subjects. What both Small and Blum conclude is that, in Small’s words, “academic and intellectual pursuits … had a curiously distant relation to college life.”

Although, in our experience, it’s true that a large number of Pitt students will eschew weighty debates (insofar as they can be defined by subject matter) in favor of everyday banter, it’s also true that opportunities abound for the intellectually inclined to engage their peers. Joining a philosophy club, for instance, will not only guarantee an hour or two of stimulating discussions, it will also introduce you to a network of people willing to have such conversations outside a formalized setting. Enrolling in an honors course, as well, is bound to land you in the company of genuine intellectuals.

Of course, it’s impossible to gauge with anything other than anecdotal evidence whether on-campus intellectual life has actually declined. We suspect, however, that professors like Lang associated with particularly brainy circles during their undergraduate years — circles as uncommon then as they are now. Many of us at The Pitt News travel in similar crowds, and thus find his eulogizing of intelligent discourse premature.

Because he believes out-of-class dialogue has lessened, at the end of his op-ed Lang commits to intensifying the intellectual rigor of his courses as a counterbalance. This is an admirable objective. But he and his colleagues should realize that, in spite of a seemingly pervasive disregard for humanistic inquiry, on-campus intellectual life is alive and well, albeit among a select group of people.