Heart of Smartness – Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) (blog)

So you think youre so smart?

Somewhere in one of his novels, David Lodge gave us the game of Humiliation. You know, the one where people who are supposed to have read everything (yes, Im talking about you people in literature) have to admit to what they havent read.

Think Truth or Dare, the Doctoral Edition.

There are lots of Important Books that we dont read. And I mean those of us in the Reading Business (dont worry, Ill run out of capital letters soon), whatever our fields. But there are works that speak with such what to call it? continuous urgency, that not to read or have read them cuts a hole where we imagine our brains and hearts to be.

So heres my confession for today (and my list is long, let me tell you): The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois published it in 1903. Its the famous document in which he enunciated one of the great truths of American modernity: that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.

Im reading it now, for the first time, and with two calendars in my head: one set in 1903, one in 2017. I want to recover, if I can, Du Boiss sense of immediacy this was a great mind thinking about race four decades after at least the official abolition of slavery in the United States while also reading it as a document written today.

Im not a Du Bois scholar. Im barely a Du Bois amateur. Yet Im turning the pages with an electrifying sense of the books appositeness to the damaged world of 21st-century America.

The problem of the color line may be Du Boiss most famous phrase, but the essay-chapters of The Souls of Black Folk present us with even more of what teachers and students want, namely, language to think with.

Let me bring up just one phrase: Du Boiss characterization of America specifically white America as a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Two familiar potentially generative obsessions, and then that dusty desert speaks volumes.

Du Boiss perception about dollars has lost none of its punch. But smartness? Now that cuts close to the academic bone. Surely smartness is that quality we in universityland prize above everything.

Washington Irving may have given us the phrase the almighty dollar in the 1830s. (As far as I know, nobody has deployed the phrase almighty smartness or should.) But those of us who work in education know far too well our own almighties the obsession with measurables and deliverables, with calibrating scores, with winnowing and sifting, even long after the agricultural metaphor has lost its cultural potency.

Du Bois was writing about African-Americans caught then they are still caught now, as so many other Americans also are in a place where dollars and smartnessconverge.

Its no coincidence that Du Bois, the first African-American to earn a doctorate at Harvard, spoke to the necessity of the humanities and humanistic inquiry.

Whatever it is, humanistic inquiry is surely something beyond the literature classroom. Its a way of positioning oneself in relation to ideas, to people, and to the world, and that means it can happen in any field, from astrophysics, microbiology, and nursing to politics, music, and anthropology.

If you think Du Bois is a historical curiosity, youre partly right. He wrote of a moment and is a window onto it, for those of us who are curious about the urgencies of the past and the living problems of our own modernity.

So why read him? You dont work in Afro-Am, you say? I dont either. And thats my point. A celebrated and surely underread, century-old text can bring us back to important questions, like casting smartness in an ethical perspective.

Why were teachers.

Why thinking like a humanist is critical to using our intelligence.

And why being brainy is as least as much an obligation as a gift.

Follow me on Twitter @WmGermano

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Heart of Smartness - Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription) (blog)