The Future to a More Accepting Campus

It is now spring, and it stands to reason that an Exonian senior thus far, in his or her last term before graduation, would become less of one out of wear and tear. Please understand that one can only be so elite, so bright, for so long, before burning out. Still, the degree to which a senior, after spending four years pulped by this institution, can sit back come green grass, tawny sun and the promise of a laurel, having nothing to say about the torment prior, has astonished many. This must be the post-adolescent conformity that we have heard so much about. Who knew adulthood began Senior Spring?

I won’t digress. There is something sorry about an argumentative Exonian turned meek at the journey’s end. The journey has only begun, and thank goodness that we can start it armed with four years’ worth of constructive criticism. I write this probably to remind myself more than others. I am critical to a fault—one which will only be worsened if I suddenly stopped. So to my benefit and then hopefully the Academy’s, what follows is a memorandum on her English Department, and a little suggestion I’ve formulated for it after four years.

To be clear, the department is a terrific one. The faculty is largely good—but just the curriculum less so. Here, the reader may criticize my judgment having divorced the teacher from what he or she teaches. I would be inclined to yield, except what might be a flawed teacher, I would much rather make the faithful servant of a flawed curriculum. We are all bureaucrats.

So on the bureaucracy, the curriculum—the higher calling of the English teacher—I claim that the department would benefit from the linguistic rigor of the Classics, namely in grammar. Two years of comprehensive grammar for the lowerclassmen: exhaustive instruction in the fundamentals of their language from parts of speech to cases and constructions, is my proposition. There is a present grammatical vacuum in our early English curriculum. It sucks at our identity, our culture and our reason.

“Language is the only homeland,” said Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish-Lithuanian poet. I myself spent my formative years in Taiwan, and was brought up in a mangled tradition of Mandarin, Japanese and English—only to leave Taiwan, and then to leave Japan. Now I am in America, and language, indeed, is my only homeland. Knowing a country’s grammar makes its soil richer, its landscape more prominent in one’s mind. Ignorance in this respect is an existential matter.

And once you have learned your prepositions and participles, your conditionals and correlatives, when you have learned your neighbors’ names and the composition of the earth, what delights is to take a step back and marvel at the world carved inside your head. The English countryside is the ever-rolling construct of the Anglo-Saxon will. Greek grammar, I have found, is a savage landscape perverted with pitfalls and cliffs. I have no authority to advertise Sapir-Whorf, but I will testify that my mind is more careful when its way of speech is littered with rough footings. No wonder it was the ancient Greeks that produced all those philosophers.

Speaking of logic, facetiousness aside, it is good exercise to understand technically how a language communicates things. What’s more, the knowledge of a grammatical construction’s necessity or utility is transferable. Such is the multilingual nature of grammar that has enabled me to learn more English grammar from the Latin Department than from the English. I am lucky to have been provided this opportunity, and I only wish it were provided to all. Would that future citizens know the fundamentals of language that they may then identify rhetorical figures beyond alliteration and metaphor.

Language is so often the first victim of degeneracy and despotism. In times seemingly fraught with both, grammatical instruction is less pedantry and more preservation of one’s faculties and being. For this reason, I urge more of it at Exeter.