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SAM PICKERING
It was a period of muddy thought and marked, I believe, the decline of higher education.
--James Thurber
Summer has arrived. Classrooms are empty, and professors are at the beach, throwing sticks to Labradors and golden retrievers. For the lucky in my generation of teachers, life can't get easier. Come fall, Indian summer will stretch through the year, provided only that I shower words through auditoriums and across pages like an old tree shedding dead leaves. Over the horizon, though, a tsunami is brewing. By the time the storm breaks across campuses, ripping greenery off the cardboard and silly putty of academic matters, I will be continuing my education elsewhere. Before I shift my library from the office to a box in the hall in hopes that graduate students will recycle tired pages for me, I want to recommend David Solway's Lying about the Wolf. English teachers should toss all the claptrap written by low-flying left-and right-wingers into the round file and read Solway. Lying about the Wolf is one of the most entertaining and sensible books about university matters that has ever been published.
Solway is Shandyesque. A lover of words, he squeezes humor and meaning from the same phrase, making reading Lying about the Wolf a verbal delight. Puns abound. Asides divert us, and his footnotes (or endnotes, as he labels them) are intellectually and playfully vital. He calls the endnote section a chapterette, urging that the "text itself should be negotiated with as little interference as possible despite the cloud of dancing, numerical gnats that often distract the eye. They are simply part of the bibliographical climate." Readers should ignore Solway's directions and instead should hop from front to back. Thought then just might slip the moorings of educational platitude. Of course not all the book is entertaining. Two or three of the essays are dry as Death Valley, and sometimes Solway relies upon diagrams, tattoos for the page, ink that strikes me as vulgar on paper as on flesh.
Solway blasts the "incompetency-based learning that goes on in our
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schools." Unlike many folk who teach in institutions that are athletic departments with classrooms attached and who are kept comatose by grants which allow them to ignore the artificial...