I worry about teaching. I was once reassured by a senior professor who told me that always, until the moment she retired, she trembled nearly uncontrollably before giving a lecture. I am not as bad as that, I thought.
At least not quite.
There’s a lot to worry about, and not just the literal business of teaching. So much of what we as professors do now — especially in Britain, where I teach — is evaluated, usually by people we used to call colleagues and now call assessors. We are asked for “feedback” on everything except how we feel about this. So long as our work is “aligned” to the “mission,” we hope everything will be OK.
We work under conditions of surveillance, the new Benthamite Panopticon of the campuses. Our universities provide us with enhanced opportunities to worry about whether we’re “performing” to the right level. Is this research good enough? Is this teaching good enough? Is this public-engagement work valuable enough? Am I showing “leadership,” doing “collaborative research,” applying for enough grants? Oh, yes, and have I got my “work-life balance” right?
The modern university is a breeding ground for worry.
Increasingly, too, we encourage our students to become worriers. We give them more chances to fret about their futures and their ability to meet our “criteria” for their “assessment.” How ominous all that language can sound. The “feedback” is meant to be constructive, of course, but the downside is that we implicitly invite students to be at least partly dissatisfied with what they have just done. Feedback has to be advice about how to manage things more ably. It’s an invitation to fret about what students have achieved and whether they’ll do better next time.
Worrying is reason gone slightly wrong. Worrying is thinking merged with sorrow; it is the analysis of a problem that finds more problems than solutions.
It’s no longer good enough to give a student the confidence to develop his or herself by penning a few well-chosen words of praise. When my undergraduate tutor stopped writing “Good” at the end of my essays and wrote “Very good,” I knew I was getting the hang of literary criticism. I would have found lists of how I could improve both daunting and deadening.
Feedback culture has increased the opportunities for worrying. We tell students that they must be “employable,” and we pile on the pressure to achieve the grades to acquire a good job so that they can become successful, and we tell them what success is. We don’t have much time to suggest alternative forms of success. We answer to their institutionally and socially produced anxieties for a very particular notion of life after university.
I know anecdotally that students of literature, my subject area, are heavy users of counseling services. They seem to worry more than most. And I spend a good deal of my time teaching them exactly how to worry. Not deliberately, of course, but worry is the collateral damage of thinking strenuously about what is true. Worrying is reason gone slightly wrong. Worrying is thinking merged with sorrow; it is the analysis of a problem that finds more problems than solutions. But worrying is thought nevertheless. We worriers are strange kinds of emaciated philosophers, insomniac inheritors of the porches of Athens.
For those teaching subjects that require us to reflect, ponder, and feel, we’re encouraging students to develop their skills as worriers.
We provoke them to challenge what they think they know, to question the reliability of what they’ve been told.
Original thinking is rare, but at least students can try independent thinking.
I invite them to worry about what they think they think. “You’ve been told,” I say, for instance, that “Milton was on the side of Satan,” or “T.S. Eliot was a snob,” or “James Joyce’s writing is elitist.” “You’ve been told that the Victorian period was all about patriarchy and everyone believed in empire,” I say. “You’ve been told that the 18th century is the ‘age of reason,’ and that in the 19th century God was killed by Charles Darwin. But is any of this really the case?” I teach frowning at things.
It’s exhausting. I ask students to be troubled. I encourage them to feel insecure.
The cultivation of fretfulness is in defiance of the general direction of higher education. Britain’s National Student Survey asks if students are “satisfied” with their education. It is one of the most deadheaded questions that could be posed about a university degree. I invite students, in an important way, to be dissatisfied. I want them to find a firmer intellectual footing, a confidence in their own thoughts and uncertainties. Yet the process — the business of thinking in this way — is, of course, destabilizing. And for those inclined to worry, it nourishes nervousness.
We literary critics search out ways that language holds unexpected meanings. We explore ambiguities and ambivalences; we open up complexities rather than close them down. Our starting point is the assumption that literary words are special things because they work harder than ordinary words.
There are influential books about this. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) is an example. It explains how a single word or phrase or line of poetry can contain divided and even entirely opposing meanings. The seventh type of ambiguity in Empson’s scheme is radical contradiction, in which a line of poetry means simultaneously one thing and its opposite.
Empson set terms for understanding poetry that remain serviceable. Readers of verse are still in his debt. Yet his study is a worrier’s handbook. If it helps us comprehend the richness of poetic language, it also prompts us to see meanings that are not obvious. It enables us to realize that there are secrets and surprises in what we thought we’d read.
We worriers are strange kinds of emaciated philosophers, insomniac inheritors of the porches of Athens.
Seven Types is all about complicating apparent simplicity, whether at the level of a society or of a small cluster of words in a single poem. “There’s more to this than you think,” we learn. “If it looks simple, it probably isn’t.”
It’s easier to get on cheerfully without challenging what you believe. It is one thing to pull out Empsonian layers of meaning in a Keats ode or a soliloquy from Hamlet or an exquisite line of Colm Tóibín. It is another to do so with a pressed-for-time, bad-tempered friend. “Did she really mean to suggest x when she said y to me in the photocopying room?”
Trained to be highly attentive to the ways words can signify, the student of literature develops a capacity for being bothered by what’s actually meant. We think hard — and then can fret — about the furtive meanings that lurk beneath ordinary sense.
The relationship between sophisticated intellectual skills and the peculiarly cerebral business of worrying is disconcertingly close.
As I sit worrying about my teaching, about how I’m teaching students to be better worriers, I also realize that I am teaching them to talk about those worries.
Anxiety can be known only through words. No brain scans of a worrier will show you something indisputable about the difference between his or her brain and anyone else’s. There’s not a single unambiguous physiological trace of fretfulness. Worriers might look pale and fidgety; they may not wholly be concentrating. They might bite their fingernails or grind their teeth. But they might not. We really know that someone is worrying only when he tells us.
What we understand of another’s worries is dependent on language. Our knowledge of someone else’s anxieties relies on how well the sufferer can describe them. Worry needs words.
Could it be that literary students are such frequent users of counseling services in part because they are peculiarly adept at the management of words? They are trained to be articulate, to have some complex control over language. I asked my own therapist a while ago about the endpoint of his sessions. “Well,” he said, “to encourage the client to talk openly about their feelings.” Hmm, I thought. As a professor of literature, that’s my starting point.
There are invaluable advantages in learning to manage words. The skill is at the heart of living. If you can’t articulate how you feel or what you think, you’re disadvantaged in any serious profession. You’re also, more important, disadvantaged in any serious relationship.
At the very least, being articulate is a going-out-for-a-meal skill: If you don’t have it, you are — in terms of the person trapped inside your head — on your own. If you can’t use language adeptly to say or write what you think or feel, you’ve something like a life sentence in solitary confinement.
It may well be the case that literature students don’t really worry more than anyone else does. But they are particularly accomplished at shaping the only means by which worries are known to others. They can use language well to express their interior lives. They have a refined verbal apparatus for talking about problems. I worry about this.
I can cheer myself up. There are unintended consequences to the best of decisions and the noblest of motives. I shouldn’t worry that my aspirations for my students have downsides.
And the more I think about it, the more I believe I can cheer myself up in another way, too.
I’ve realized that I don’t mind students’ getting better at worrying, especially in one sense. I’d like them to worry about the meanings of the words around them. I’d like them to do this not only for George Eliot but also for the rhetoric that circulates through universities. I’d like them to ask whether it means very much.
I’d like my students to worry about, and therefore to critique, the National Student Survey as rigorously as they debate Marx or Freud. I’d like them to ask the same tough questions about words wherever they find them: as much in Milton as in the latest statement from management.
And I’d like them to start worrying about what kind of education the modern world seems now to think is good for them.
I don’t know what happened to the dissenting or rebellious student. I find it odd that so many have so quickly embraced the market with eagerness and without taking a step back. A whole group of managers and advertisers and marketers and politicians appears to have done the students’ thinking for them.
I want students to think about that — to worry about it, in fact. I want them to mistrust what they have been told; to fret about the very structures in which they are asked to form their values, make their life choices, derive their opinions. Encouraging them to worry is valuable because worrying is an inevitable part of independent thinking. Worrying is an intellectual skill.
Being an accomplished and well-trained worrier, then, might unexpectedly give us a chance. It might offer us a strange, pale glimpse of light. Worrying might be a painful virtue of the Way We Educate Now, an ironically hopeful indication that students in the new generation can think for themselves.
Worrying is not only a nuisance but a gift.
Francis O’Gorman is a professor of English at the University of Leeds. He is the author, most recently, of “Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History,” just out from Bloomsbury.
