There was a time not so very long ago when academic study was free from politics. Universities may have been full of political activity, students went on demonstrations complaining about Margaret Thatcher, but the subjects everyone studied were mainly free from politics. I wonder sometimes if I am part of the last generation in Britain to study in this way.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly
when the change happened, because it happened so gradually. The subjects I
studied mainly, philosophy, theology, history and Russian literature were about
themselves and nothing else. I would study Hegel and try to understand the
text. I would read what some others thought about it and begin a sort of
dialogue between Hegel, these others and myself. The task was to produce
arguments. The same went for every subject I studied. If I had a tutorial, I
never discovered the political position of my tutor. That would have been
something superfluous.
Even then however I began to see
the beginnings of what has now come to dominate academic study.
I spent a year studying in an Ivy
League college in the United States. I found the standard of study to be
pitiful. The problem was that the American system of education had not been
able to produce a single united school leaving exam and so had to rely on
multiple choice aptitude tests. These tests no doubt told the testers something
about ability, but they told little about knowledge. The result was that
courses of study began from the beginning (101) and assumed no knowledge of a
subject whatsoever.
With each course I studied in New
Hampshire we were assigned four or five books which we were expected to buy at
the local bookshop. During each class we were told to read a few pages. If you
read the pages you passed the course. The exams lasted twenty minutes. The
essays required minimal levels of thought. The students spent their afternoons
napping and their evenings setting up their sister at the sorority. You said Hi
to everybody but knew nobody. It was as superficial as people in the
supermarket wishing that I had a nice day, when they were not at all interested
in either me or my day. It was here that I first came across something called
Women’s studies.
It’s hard to explain to people
now that the issues that obsess so many academics today and much of society too
were once considered fringe issues at best.
Race was a subject that would
only come up if you were studying racial conflict in history or some other area
of contemporary life. It might involve some subjects, but certainly not every
subject.
The college had been almost
exclusively white until a short time before, but it wasn’t now. I hadn’t met
many black people until then, but they were just like other Americans. They
didn’t make an issue about race. No one did. Most people treated others as they found them.
There was no overt prejudice that I saw.
Homosexuality was a non-issue. I
had only ever met two or three people I knew to be gay. In all Western societies homosexuality was
legal and gay people had as much chance as anyone else to become successful,
not least because it was generally impossible to tell from someone’s appearance
who they went to bed with.
Women I knew were uninterested in
feminism. As a subject it was sterile, because only certain answers were
acceptable to certain questions. This became clear when I discussed what
happened in the Women’s studies course. There were one or two men doing the
course, who had apparently been stumped by the requirement that they learned
how to examine their breasts. The rest of the course consisted in blaming men
for everything and trying to create grievances where none had existed up until
then.
I found the American dating
customs to be completely baffling. Men and women might be dating any number of
people. In Britain a drunken snog usually meant you had begun a relationship,
but in America it might mean nothing. In Britain at that time it was common
enough that you might sleep with your boyfriend, but generally there was a
relationship that had lasted more than a few days. In America they had a
concept of “fooling around” which was much more casual. You could fool around
with someone who was just a friend, but what was involved was never quite made
explicit, nor was it defined.
Drunken fraternity parties could
rapidly end up with people who had just met ending up in bed with each other
not quite knowing what should happen next. Drunken mistakes were made. No doubt
they have been made in such ways since time began. But at that time women still
took responsibility for their actions. It was your choice to get drunk and go
to the room of a man you’d just met. Nobody forced you to go.
But anyway, it wasn’t much of a
problem. While I found Americans more willing to kiss people they’d just met
than had been my experience at home and while sex was perhaps a touch more
commonplace than in Cambridge, it was still the case that most men and most
women normally slept alone and if we did share our beds it was usually with
someone we knew well and with whom we had some sort of lasting relationship.
But like everything else this was changing.
Transgender was an almost
complete non-issue when I was a student. I might have read somewhere about men
who thought they were women and women who thought they were men, but if it was a
subject to be studied it was part of medicine. There were men who dressed as
women. In Britain it had been an established part of theatre and comedy for
centuries. There were likewise women who preferred to dress as men. But no one
thought that these people wanted literally to change sex. We assumed that they
were mostly gay or lesbian. I had never met nor heard of anyone meeting a man
who literally thought he could become a woman. The idea never occurred to me.
If it had I would have considered it to be simply impossible. I think this is
how nearly everyone felt then.
I’m not sure what we really
thought about those very few people who had had sex change surgery. Had a man
become a woman by means of cutting off some parts and adding other parts? I
think we were all willing to treat these people with sympathy, but it rather
resembled someone in a war being given a new leg. An amputee might have an
artificial leg, but it was just that. It was artificial. It was the closest
approximation to a real leg, but it wasn’t the same thing as real leg. It never
would be. It never could be. So too the man who had surgery so as to become a
woman had been turned into the closest approximation of a woman that was
possible. But he wasn’t a woman really. How could he be? I think that is what I
would have thought back then if I had thought about this issue. But of course,
I didn’t think about it, almost no one did.
Continued
Continued
