Generous Scholarship to Founder's College

The new Founder's College in Berry Hill, Virginia, is offering students up to $3,000,000 through a variety of scholarships, including The Victor Hugo Writing Scholarship.

According to their website, the scholarship is "open to all full-time incoming students, first year or transfer." To qualify, here's what applicants must do:

"Choose an actual person or fictional character. Identify three character traits about that individual that you most admire. Explain why you admire those traits. Submit a maximum 500-word essay, double-spaced, typed, and sealed in a 9" by 12" envelope. Send to: Founders College at Berry Hill, 3105 River Road, South Boston, VA 24592, Attn: Victor Hugo Essay."

Looking at the college's curriculum solely from the perspective of a would-be fiction writer, I must say that this college looks like it could be a great place to start. (Not for me, of course, but for younger students.) The true test will come when they announce their faculty in the spring.

Why I Didn't Get an MFA in Literature

Camille Paglia, in an interview on Bookslut (a blog), nails the reason I became a technical writer and refused to pursue an MFA in Literature:

I feel that post-structuralism has deadened not only the students, but the professors themselves, to literature. There’s been over 30 years of it now. Over 30 years. Where is the great work of criticism by any of these people? Where is the great critic? What have they produced? Nothing.

It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook, all reflecting each other. There’s no single great work that’s come out of criticism in the last 30 years, in the way Cleanth Brooks’ Well Wrought Urn has that kind of relationship, a book you could recommend to let someone know what’s happening in literary criticism. It is such a dead end, a terrible dead end, and what has happened is that talented people have fled the graduate schools. People have to wake up to this. The people at the top now, people from my generation, who are in the Ivy League, from coast to coast, to Berkeley, their work is mediocre. They have not done what they claim to do, and what they’ve done is driven out talented people.

I meet them everywhere, people who started graduate school and left it, OK? They’re in publishing, they’re in media, they’re in all kinds of jobs, because they couldn’t stand it. They wanted to study literature and art, but had every obstruction put in their paths. They not only had to read Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, who had nothing to do with literature, but they had to read critics talking about Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, none of whom are philosophically trained, okay?

I had professors telling me that I should pursue a degree in Lit. They would often select my essays and recommend them for scholarships, awards, readings. Even my fellow students enjoyed my work. There was great promise. But I wouldn't be a part of the nightmare that was Lit studies at the time. I'd seen enough of that as an undergrad. Following that path would have been suicide for me. (And anyone who knows my intense personality would understand that comment.)

If I ever become a successful fiction writer — and I fully intend to — it will be due to my own self-study and hard work. Sure, I could wish that I had been born during some other time, but unfortunately that's not reality. Instead, I just put my head down and drive on, and I know that I'm much happier for it.

I do hope, though, that I will live long enough to see some kind of rebirth in Literature, a vibrant new class of scholars, writers, and students flooding our universities with new blood. As my partner likes to tell me, "You just might be a part of that rebirth." That's a nice thought.

Paglia on The Death of Academia

Camille Paglia is one of the oddest ducks on planet earth. She's like a living, breathing Freudian slip, except that she seems to mean what she says. You never know what she's going to say next. Even so, I occasionally find myself agreeing with some of her arguments, especially when she takes on academia. Here's one good example, from Canada's Globe and Mail:

Paglia is not a huge fan of deconstructionism, the long-reigning gospel in academe. Western culture is in serious decline not only because it is being overrun by the Philistine armies of the entertainment industry, she says, but because on college campuses across the United States, political correctness has run amok.

"I was in Kansas City on my book tour and met this woman studying public administration, and she was complaining about having to study [poststructuralist French thinker Michel] Foucault. I mean, it's absolutely absurd. It's become doctrine. It's everywhere."

Consuming a force-fed diet of the French intellectual method of Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, she adds, students emerge "passive to language, indifferent to fact, and arrogant towards culture."

Academic dissidents have been silenced.

"Philistine armies of the entertainment industry"? I have no idea what she's getting at there. But the rest is true to a word.

I am sure that most people today have no earthly idea just how unearthly the humanities, and literature in particular, have become. The quality of Lit studies has fallen so low that it simply can't go any lower. The problem is not merely that of graduating low-performing students or spending too much time on only one style of literature. It's even lower than that — much, much lower in some schools.

Ever more students seem to be reporting entire quarters spent in 100- and 200-level courses never once reading a book let alone writing an essay about one. They also report spending more time arguing in Lit class about current events and politics (full-time Bush bashing) than they ever spend doing that in their sociology or political science classes. And while not studying literature in a Literature class is bad enough, the situation is made worse by the fact that there's very, very little dissent. It's a wasteland. Any non- Far-Left point of view is snuffed out faster than you can say the words "narrow minded", usually by sneering ridicule from the professor.

I had the same experience myself. I remember hoping that my Lit classes were merely aberrations, but reports coming from other students demonstrated that they were not. Any hope that I did manage to retain was finally demolished some years later when I was invited to teach a writing course at my alma mater. After one term, I refused to consider taking a job in academia ever again. A person of integrity couldn't be a part of such a program.

Literature in American Universities is dead. It's been replaced by a grab-bag of so-called Postmodern doctrines: Structuralism/Post-structuralism/Marxist Dialectic Theory/Critical Theory. Together they all start from one fundamental premise: Reality doesn't exist and you can't know anything. They then proceed to the next phase of education, telling you exactly what you should know: You must accept all of my Leftist propaganda on faith or be cast out. And finally they gird up their newly created Leftist roboticons for going out into the real world: Now we'll show you how to restructure the way you use language so that you can make your enemies think you're smarter than them and at the same time help you believe that you're still being reasonable even when you're not. That's postmodernism in a nutshell.

Philosophically, who's to blame? I'm no philosopher, but I routinely encountered the names Paglia mentioned, especially Foucault and Derrida, and if you've read anything by these language whores, then you'll already know why Literature is dead.

In my view, these men (and Barthes) are so evil they almost make Ellsworth Toohey, the villain in The Fountainhead, look like an understatement. That so many professors in academia seem to revere these mind-destroying, deceitful bastards is one of the scariest aspects of our current world, scarier to me even than a born-again Christian being President, and that's pretty damn scary.

[Edit: Add Paul de Man to the list of witch doctors. I just remembered him.]