Until September of this year, such had been my only educational experience. I had been homeschooled in a Catholic, military family for four years; for another eight, I attended a private girls’ school directed by Dominican Sisters; for a final four, I studied liberal arts at the above-described College of St. Thomas More, in Fort Worth, Texas (unfortunately, since then closed due to financial constraints). For me, visible and strongly upheld Catholic authority in my education had been the norm from the beginning. Then I was simultaneously accepted to an MFA program at a state university in eastern Washington, and hired to work at the university’s writing center. This move heralded my entrance into an entirely different educational atmosphere.
My first warning of this came while I was studying my training materials. Each essay or article that I read emphasized the autonomy of students who visit university writing centers for help with their papers and projects. Rather than consulting experts who can point out errors and give guidance on improving their work, students enlist the writing center consultants as audience members. The consultants’ job is to give feedback on whether the writers’ message is effectively expressed, whether their logic is intelligible to the audience, whether their ideas are clear. Writing center employees are expressly forbidden to mark student papers in any way, or to tell them that something is wrong with their expression or content.
Of course, some of these directives for the consultants are perfectly justified, due to the need for academic integrity. It would be neither just nor helpful to the students if they came to have someone rephrase their ideas, alter their research, or otherwise correct every error, because such interventions would blur the line between the students’ and consultants’ work and leave professors confused concerning to whom credit for the writing belongs. However, the foundational ideas of the writing center still reflect a current crisis in educational authority which I see present in my university. I hear rumors, moreover, that the crisis is prevalent and perhaps even more extreme in other schools. I would argue that this crisis is not only reserved to education. Since the revolution of the 1960s, both in culture and in the Catholic Church, the ancient structures of authority, and even the presumption that learned men and women have the right to instruct and correct those who are not learned, have been crumbling. Now that I am immersed in modern academia, I find it tragically telling that the trend is having a negative effect even on the quality of education offered to young people.
Many students who come to the writers’ center are bright-eyed, enthusiastic persons of immigrant status, lower socio-economic standing, or international background. They desire intensely to better themselves, but they struggle with English expression and academic writing, not to mention the challenge of being a college student, often in a culture wildly different from their native one. However, they are full of good will and are motivated to do well on their written assignments—or at least to earn the extra credit their professors offer if they visit the writing center. Many of these students arrive with very specific papers to write: annotated bibliographies, literature reviews, personal narratives, research abstracts—to name just a few. Most are freshmen whose longest assignment in high school had reached two or three double-spaced pages. They are often overwhelmed by the idea of a five-page paper, or meeting a set of predetermined standards, or the need to find scholarly and credible sources to support their ideas. Sometimes they do not even know what they are expected to do to complete a particular assignment, and simply hope for me to give them an idea of how their finished project might look. Poorly equipped by their high-school educations, and in some cases by their current professors, they come seeking help with organization, clarity, grammar, proofreading.
I myself taught English (and even more rigorous, Latin) grammar and composition for four years. There was no illusion at the private Catholic girls’ school where I worked concerning the expertise of the teachers; we were admired and respected and consulted because every student knew that their authority came from years spent earning college degrees and practicing skills. My own background in liberal arts and languages means that I understand very well how to structure a sentence, how to arrange ideas, how to construct a thesis and then relate every idea in a paper back to that. Without boasting, I can say that academic writing is a strength of mine, but even so, my skills are less than my new coworkers’ at the university writing center. We have a consultant with a doctorate in history, another with a doctorate in teaching English as a second language; several others have masters’ degrees in creative or technical writing; most have collegiate teaching experience. However, because of the crisis in authority, the center prohibits us from wielding our expertise most effectively to help students. When they read papers to us, we answer only those concerns which they bring up ahead of time. Perhaps they want us to listen for organization or clarity. If that’s the case, their entire paper may be a mass of poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation, but we can say little to address the problem, simply because the student-writer had not requested any such intervention. The strictures against interfering with the students’ writing are so ingrained in the training materials for the center, that even when students do request grammar corrections, we are advised only to point out general patterns of error, instead of systematically helping the student find every problem area for the sake of improvement.
I am painting an overly grim picture of the situation. In reality, because each consultant is allowed to develop his or her own style of helping writers, and students often come specifically requesting instruction or constructive critique, we are often able to help them more directly than the writing center’s guidelines seem to allow. I often see students’ eyes light up when we establish that singular subjects always need singular verbs, or settle on a strategy for making sure they actually accomplish what they propose in their thesis. These break-through moments depend largely on my exerting some sort of authority based on my writing expertise. These young students seldom intuit what they should do, or even deduce it based on gentle questions directed their way; often, they simply need and want to be told what the best method and techniques are, so that they can then discuss, assimilate, and adapt them to suit their individual strengths. Watching them respond so positively to authority, I think about the probability that they encounter little of it in their lives. Many parents are absorbed in careers and have little time for their children. Social and political figures seem more interested in fame or propaganda than in true leadership. The Catholic Church, once the touchstone for authority in the Christian world, is awash with confusion and ambiguity. Overall, the world seems to have decided that the only valid authority is autonomy.
Such a viewpoint results in unwitting cruelty. Young people who are desperately in need of, and consciously or unconsciously looking for, guidance from those who know better have nowhere to turn. Even in their universities they are told that their own ideas and experiences are the defining factor in their education. And of course, it cannot be denied that individuals come with certain backgrounds and cultures which add unique elements to their intellectual life, making them potentially valuable contributors to the sphere of human knowledge. However, at age eighteen, who but the most extraordinary of persons is equipped to be completely self-directed and to claim ownership of all his or her academic activities? Is it not a sort of disservice to these young people, practically children still, to refrain from telling them that many of their sentences are fragments (for example), simply because they did know to not ask for an instructor to mention this problem? The training literature for my writing center suggests that by allowing them to take responsibility for their work, students are encouraged to become the proud shapers of their own education. Perhaps that is a noble goal in the long run, but without first equipping them with the tools they need to succeed, instructors are setting these children up to struggle unnecessarily and perhaps eventually fail.
The analogy with teaching faith and morals is clear. The modern world has declared the individual conscience sacrosanct, and the documents of Vatican II did little to clarify that such a view is overly simplistic and misleading. The result has been a slow movement toward relativism, acknowledging all religions and ways of life, no matter how perverted or pointedly anti-Catholic, as having a certain validity for those who hold them. Perhaps not explicitly, but certainly in practice, the individual is held to be autonomous, and who are parents, teachers, clerics, to tell the individual what to think or how to behave. Thus faith, which is knowledge based on divine authority, is worn away, and morals, which depend on the dictates of God—whether revealed or imprinted in our conscience—are abandoned. Human beings are told to discover their own paths, and immediately they go astray because Original Sin has weakened the human capacity for finding truth and goodness alone. Mankind needs guidance for salvation, but lately, in the wake of the Synod on the Family, and the publication of Amoris Laetitia, Church leaders seem to indicate that little should be done to correct those struggling with the most monstrous and burdensome vices. Even we hear clerics suggesting that such sinners, while still in their sin, may still offer good to the body of the Church. With such a wholesale abandonment of authority underway, it is no wonder that institutions are now faltering even in areas as seemingly trivial as grammar and syntax. If we cannot say that fornication, adultery, and sodomy are wrong, what grounds do we have to nit-pick about a missing period?
Recently I was made aware of an anti-racism statement issued by the writing center at University of Washington, Tacoma. Based on the assumption that latent racism lurks in every action and decision, especially those where an authority figure is of a different racial background than the subordinate, the statement suggested that writing center consultants should take special care to avoid forcing their conceptions of correct English expression upon students. Understandably, conservative news sources read guidelines such as, “Emphasize the importance of rhetorical situations over grammatical ‘correctness’ in the production of texts” (tacoma.uw.edu/university-writing-program/writing-center, 2017), and interpreted them to be a declaration that English grammar is racist. A more balanced consideration of the statement concludes that the writing center is hoping to prevent unfair treatment of non-native students based on their unfamiliarity with the English language. However, my own experience tells me that such writers are acutely aware of their struggles with grammar and intensely grateful when an expert can explain their mistakes. In short, most students crave the stability and support which a well-regulated system of authority can give, and universities are doing them a disservice by abrogating such systems in favor of the students’ autonomy.
In broader terms, this problem in universities mirrors an even greater disservice, which amounts to active destruction, which is enacted on a global scale thanks to the relaxing of authority in the Catholic Church. This state of society testifies to a crisis of faith. It was Christ’s choice, after all, to govern His Church in a hierarchical model. Fed by the truth of Christ and the guiding grace of the Holy Ghost, authority should be passed from Pope, to bishops, to priests, to faithful. Because of the human element of the Church, at no time has this system been enacted without interference from human frailty, leading to abuses throughout history such as lay investiture and the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy. However, even these abuses indicated an awareness of the power and stability inherent in the Church’s authoritative structure. Currently, though, lay persons the world over exist in a confusing atmosphere caused by emphasis on the importance of an individual’s relationship with God, over and above the changeless teaching of the Church.
What can we do in such a world? Luckily many Catholics who have seen the wisdom of the Traditional Magisterium of the Church do not find themselves mired in such ambiguities. For us, authority is a holy thing, established by God and invested in certain figures—parents of families, teachers, rulers, priests. If I am placed in a position where my duty is to instruct a young student in the rules of correct writing, I can uphold the order of God’s creation by doing just that. All of us, insofar as we are called to exercise authority, can contribute to the restoration of Catholic culture by executing our duty towards those placed in our care. Insofar as we find ourselves placed under authority figures, we can also uphold and acknowledge their God-ordained position. Such an attitude and course of action call to mind the centurion who asked Christ to heal his servant with these remarkable words: “I am a man subject to authority, having under me soldiers: and I say to this, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it” (Matt. VII, ix). Delighted by this pagan’s understanding of the true order of authority, Christ praised him more highly than any man in Israel for his faith, before healing his servant with a single word. Taking this man as our model, we too can make it our life’s work to uphold authority in the Church, in society, in the eyes of every man, and thereby open channels for Christ’s grace to act in the world at large, as well as the arena of individual souls.
