To the Editor:
I was pleased to see James Traub’s complimentary portrait of my teaching appear in his recent book on City College City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College, Addison-Wesley), which was excerpted in The Chronicle (“Philosophy Recalled, as No Other Field Did, the Era of City’s Vanished Glory,” Ex Libris, October 26). However, at the risk of seeming unappreciative, I feel obliged to say that several of the inferences he draws from this portrait are questionable. Furthermore, some of the views he has me express are inaccurate attributions.
Mr. Traub and I differ on the significance of my Wittgenstein class, Philosophy 118. Mr. Traub sees the students in it as highly “unrepresentative” and as constituting a “tiny elite,” “isolated from the rest of the college.” While my students are indeed remarkable (one is now at Dartmouth medical school, two others are pursuing doctoral work in philosophy [at CUNY] and Sanskrit [at Harvard], others are working for their M.A.), it is wrong to suggest, as Mr. Traub does, that this kind of intellectual and analytic energy is not to be found elsewhere in the liberal arts at City College. Just last week students in my section of the “core” course, Philosophy 101--a course required of all our undergraduates -- were able to anticipate with remarkable quickness three of Arnauld’s classical criticisms of Descartes before having read Arnauld himself.
This is not to say that every City College student is or should be headed for graduate school in the liberal arts. Rather, it shows the error in holding that students who are not on that path suddenly fall to the level of dull normal, lacking any genuine intellectual skill and energy and finding themselves “isolated” from the so-called “elite” of their peers.
The nearly one thousand students currently enrolled in Philosophy 101 are, as Mr. Traub asserts, “survivors” of the earlier “core” sequence. But they cannot be dismissed, as they are by Mr. Traub, as an “unrepresentative group” of undergraduates irrelevant to an assessment of City College’s intellectual climate. Nor ought the remarkable students who Mr. Traub so justly praises be denied their rightful place in a canvassing of our diverse student body. All of these students are true representatives, and products, of City College. They must be regarded as counterexamples to Mr. Traub’s (and others’) contention that the level of intellectual exchange at City College is glaringly low. At the very least an accurate assessment of the college’s academic character must take into proper account its successes as well as its failures.
In his zeal to compile a readable narrative Mr. Traub paints a too-simple picture with sharp dramatic contrasts. His novelistic method leads him to personify conflicts. The result is an accessible and entertaining account of Mr. Traub’s responses which, however, suffers from significant gaps and inaccuracies.
For the record, I wish to state that I do not see myself as in any way an unrepresentative or isolated outsider on the City College faculty. Mr. Traub is wrong to claim that I fail to “fit the City College mold,” that I have found but few “kindred souls throughout the campus,” that I see the faculty as “completely divided” over the issue of standards, and that I feel myself to be “a threat to the entrenched order” of a 20-year-old “ethos of mediocrity” at City College.
On each of these points, as well as in numerous details of his account of our conversation, Mr. Traub’s assessments are misleading and I disavow the quotations he ascribes to me. Also, for the record, despite what Mr. Traub reports, I have not been offered teaching positions at Georgetown, Wellesley, Wesleyan, or Williams.
Juliet Floyd
Professor of Philosophy, City College and the
Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York
