Hidden Intellectualism

Gerald Graff

Pedagogy, Volume 1, Issue 1, Winter 2001, pp. 21-36 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/26320

[ Access provided at 26 Mar 2023 15:32 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 21

Hidden Intellectualism

Gerald Graff

In an arresting memoir “of a Pentecostal boyhood” that appeared in 1993 in

the Voice Literary Supplement, Michael Warner describes his improbable
journey from an upbringing in a Christian Pentecostal family and graduation
from Oral Roberts University to his current identity as a “queer atheist intel-
lectual.” It is hard to imagine a more complete break between a past and pres-
ent life than the one Warner recounts. “From the religious vantage of my
childhood and adolescence,” Warner (1993: 13) writes, “I am one of Satan’s
agents. From my current vantage, that former self was exotically supersti-
tious.” How, he wonders, could he have “got here from there”?
Yet ultimately Warner finds a “buried continuity” in his journey from
Pat Robertson to Michel Foucault. “Curiously enough,” he writes, though
“fundamentalism is almost universally regarded as the stronghold and
dungeon-keep of American anti-intellectualism, religious culture gave me a
passionate intellectual life of which universities are only a pale ivory shadow.”
For the Pentecostal faithful, Warner says, “the subdenomination you belong to
is bound for heaven; the one down the road is bound for hell. You need argu-
ments to show why” (13–14).
Furthermore, “your arguments have to be readings, ways of showing
how the church down the road misreads a key text.” Throughout his child-
hood and adolescence, Warner writes, “I remember being surrounded by tex-
tual arguments in which the stakes were not just life and death but eternal life
and death.” He recalls an especially brilliant Bible study leader who ques-
tioned the doctrine of God’s omniscience by demonstrating that the Old Tes-
tament “clearly showed God acting in stories that . . . made no sense unless

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture

Volume 1, Number 1, © 2001 Duke University Press

21
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 22

God doesn’t know the future.” Recalling the intense family debates about this
man’s biblical interpretations that took place afterward in the car ride home
and at the dinner table, Warner concludes: “Being a literary critic is nice, I
have to say, but for lip-whitening, vein-popping thrills it doesn’t compete. Not
even in the headier regions of Theory can we approximate that saturation of
life by argument” (13–14).
Warner doesn’t say whether his theological preoccupations competed
with his schoolwork or made him better at it. Yet his account has intriguing
implications for education, illustrating how the “saturation of life by argu-
ment” can occur in practices often dismissed as nonintellectual or anti-
intellectual. His essay invites us to think about students’ intellectual abilities
that go overlooked by schools because they come in unlikely packages. There
must be many buried or hidden forms of intellectualism that do not get chan-
neled into academic work but might if schools were more alert about tapping
into them.

Street Smarts and Public Argument

It’s not a new idea, of course, that students harbor intellectual resources —
“street smarts”—that go untapped by formal schooling. What is not so widely
noticed, however, is that these intellectual resources go unnoticed because
they are tied to ostensibly anti-intellectual interests. We tend to assume that
intellectual distinction can be manifested only with bookish subject matter —
that is, that it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, the
French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars, clothing fashions,
dating, sports, TV, or Bible Belt religion—and we thereby overlook the intel-
lectualism latent in supposedly philistine pursuits.
In a recent book titled Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to
the Vernacular, Thomas McLaughlin (1996) argues persuasively that “critical
theory,” contrary to both its adherents and opponents, is not confined to the
lucubrations of academic intellectuals but pervades the thinking of nonaca-
demics. McLaughlin finds versions of “vernacular theory” in such unlikely
places as Elvis fan clubs, sitcom viewers, advertising copywriters, and South-
ern Christian antipornography activists. McLaughlin’s argument suggests that
we are so used to opposing street smarts and book smarts — vernacular and
intellectual discourse — that we overlook moments when the one is a vehicle
for the other.
Taking a page from Warner and McLaughlin, then, I want to suggest
that educators need to pay more attention to the extent to which adolescent
lives are already often “steeped in argument” and “critical theory.” My own

22 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 23

working premise as a teacher is that inside every street-smart student (which

is to say, every student) there is a latent intellectual trying to break out, an
identity that it is my job somehow to tease out and help to articulate itself. Not
that this “hidden” student intellectual is a preexisting essential self that is
there waiting to be discovered. To emerge as critical theory, street smarts have
to undergo transformation. Students who become intellectuals are inventing a
new identity as much as unearthing one that was already there.
The question is how teachers can tease out the critical theory latent in
student street smarts. Some, of course, will question whether any such trans-
formation should be attempted. If street smarts are already a kind of critical
theory, what transformation do they require? Then, too, why try to turn stu-
dents into clones of academics and intellectuals? My own answer, with which
not everyone will agree, is that until street smarts can articulate themselves as
intellectual argumentation, they will have limited influence on the public
sphere, and the gulf between the worlds of students and teachers will con-
tinue to yawn. Bridging this gulf is not a matter of turning “them” into
miniversions of “us,” or of asking students to give up their language in favor
of our academic discourse. It is a matter of finding points of convergence and
translation, moments when student discourse can be translated into academic
discourse and vice versa, producing a kind of “bilingualism” on both sides of
the student-teacher divide.
I put special emphasis on argumentation as the form in which intellec-
tualism needs to learn to express itself to become effective in the public
sphere. Since argumentativeness is often viewed by schools as a form of trou-
blemaking or “acting out” rather than as apprentice intellectualism, students
themselves may not recognize the academic potential of their argumentative
talents. Then, too, the extent to which the lives of children are “saturated by
argument” varies widely for individuals and is influenced by differences of
region, ethnicity, gender, and class. Furthermore, if young lives today are “sat-
urated” by anything, it would seem to be consumption rather than argument.
Yet consumption itself generates much youthful arguing, and if some groups
are culturally more prone to argumentation than others, everyone has a stake
in learning to use argument to express and defend his or her interests.

Growing Up Anti-intellectual
I will come back to these issues later on, but first I want to talk about my per-
sonal experience of discovering my own intellectualism in unlikely places.
Warner’s account of the buried continuity between his Pentecostal past and
his academic intellectual present made me rethink the way I tend to character-

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 23

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 24

ize my own adolescence, which I have elsewhere described in print as thor-

oughly anti-intellectual. In a chapter of my last book, Beyond the Culture Wars
(1992), titled “Disliking Books at an Early Age,” I wrote of my youthful inabil-
ity to read with pleasure or comprehension and my alienation from the intel-
lectual ways of talking that school and college rewarded.
Presenting myself as a typical child of the anti-intellectual fifties, I con-
trasted my utter lack of interest in literature and history with my passionate
absorption in sports. Warner’s essay makes me see, however, that the story—
both mine and that of the fifties—is more complicated and contradictory than
I had indicated, as I would like to suggest in a brief retelling of it here. I see
now that sports provided me with something comparable to the saturation of
life by argument that Pentecostal religion gave Warner, that my preference for
sports over schoolwork was not anti-intellectualism so much as intellectualism
by other means.
Not that I was completely wrong, I think, in presenting myself as a typ-
ical teenage anti-intellectual of the 1950s. It was an era, as Richard Hofstadter
(1963) would document in his Anti-intellectualism in American Life, when
intellect was notoriously undervalued and scorned. The decade had begun
with the symbolic humiliation of the Egghead by the Man of Action in the
landslide victory of General Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson in the presi-
dential election of 1952. It would end with the emergence into stardom of the
quintessential anti-Egghead, Elvis Presley. My teachers, the closest thing to
intellectuals in sight, seemed clearly inferior in worldly prowess and physical
attractiveness to sports stars, film heroes, and pop singers. With their obscurely
high-minded concerns, teachers were such unreal figures that you did a dou-
ble take when you ran into one in the grocery store or the laundromat —
amazed to realize that they had a life outside their classrooms. I was startled
when I discovered that my seventh-grade English teacher not only played
softball at the local park but threw like a Regular Guy.
The noun intellectual was not in my vocabulary or that of my friends.
There were what would later be called nerds, who excelled at schoolwork, but
these without exception were science or mathematics whizzes, technical
geniuses rather than masters of argument or cultural analysis. In the adult
world there were the “cultured,” whom I associated with the feminized
“socialites” at the cotillions and balls that were regularly pictured in sepia
photographs in the Sunday papers. For girls, being articulate and brainy
about schoolwork was a sign of being conceited or “stuck-up,” whereas for
boys it marked one as a sissy.
My parents were literate people who provided a model of reflective-

24 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 25

ness in household talk. This was the era, however, as sociologists would point
out in books like David Reisman’s Lonely Crowd (1953), in which influence
over adolescents was passing from parents, grandparents, and school authori-
ties to the “peer group,” which meant the exploding postwar youth culture
being created by television, the automobile, advertising, and consumerism.
When in college I read The Lonely Crowd, with its account of the “other-
directed” character type that aspires not to be a heroic individual but to fit in
and be like everybody else, my immediate thought was, “That’s me!”
These attitudes were shaped by the class tensions of a rapidly chang-
ing postwar society. The Uptown neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side
where we lived till we joined the suburban exodus in 1955 (my eighteenth
year) had become a melting pot after the war. Our block was solidly middle-
class, but just one block away—doubtless concentrated there by the real estate
companies—were African Americans, Native Americans, and “hillbilly” whites
who had recently fled from postwar joblessness in the South and Appalachia.
Whereas the middle-class boys generally conformed to a “clean-cut” ideal
(“preppy,” we would now say), the working-class boys dressed and acted like
what adult authorities called “juvenile delinquents” and what my friends and
I, with a romanticizing inflection, called “hoods.”
Negotiating this class boundary was a tricky proposition. On the one
hand, it was crucial to maintain a distinction between clean-cut boys like me
and working-class hoods, which meant that it was good for me to be openly
smart in a bookish sort of way. Being Jewish already carried a presumption of
being smart that I did not completely disavow. On the other hand, I had to
establish my credentials with the hoods, whom I encountered daily on the
playing field and in the neighborhood, which meant it was not good to be too
smart. The hoods might turn on you at any moment if they sensed you were
putting on highbrow airs over them: “Who you lookin’ at, smart-ass?” So I
grew up torn between the need to prove my intelligence and the fear of a beat-
ing if I proved it too well.
This conflict, as I lived it, expressed itself in an opposition between
being tough and being verbal. For boys, only being physically tough earned
one complete legitimacy in my neighborhood and my elementary school. I
still recall endless, complicated debates in this period with my closest pal,
Teddy Gertz, over who was “the toughest guy in the school.” Being poor as a
fighter, I settled for the next best thing, which was to be inarticulate, carefully
hiding telltale marks of intellectualism such as correct grammar and precise
pronunciation. My model was Marlon Brando in The Wild One (“Ah don’
make no deals with no cowps”) and On the Waterfront (the now-canonical

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 25

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 26

“You don’ unnastan’, Cholly, I coulda been a contenduh”), and for a stretch of
several weeks I went about imitating Brando’s slurred speech. I spent the
entire evening of my first high school date talking like Brando’s Terry Mulloy
in Waterfront, giving up the act only when it became obvious that my date was
not impressed.

My Hidden Intellectualism
In one sense, then, it would be hard to imagine a childhood more thoroughly
anti-intellectual than mine. Yet in retrospect I see that I and the 1950s them-
selves were not simply hostile toward intellectualism, but divided and ambiva-
lent. Hofstadter (1963) observed that the very hostility toward intellectuals in
the fifties had been a backhanded acknowledgment of their “increasing
importance.” Intellectuals in this period were despised, Hofstadter wrote,
“because of an improvement, not a decline, in [their] fortunes” (34). When
Marilyn Monroe, who in 1954 had divorced the retired baseball hero Joe
DiMaggio, married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, the symbolic tri-
umph of Mind over Jock suggested the way the wind was blowing. Even Elvis,
according to his biographer, Peter Guralnick (1994: 327), turns out to have
supported Adlai over Ike in the presidential election of 1956. “I don’t dig
the intellectual bit,” he told reporters. “But I’m telling you, man, he knows
the most.”
Though I, too, thought I did not “dig the intellectual bit,” I was unwit-
tingly in training for it. The germs of intellectualism had already been sown in
the seemingly philistine debates about which boys were the toughest. I must
have dimly sensed at the time that in the interminable talk about toughness
that my friend Ted and I engaged in — the kind of talk the real toughs them-
selves would never have bothered with—I was already betraying an allegiance
to the egghead world. I was practicing being an intellectual before I knew that
was what I would be or wanted to be.
It was in arguing about toughness and other such concerns with my
friends, I think, that I started acquiring what Warner got by arguing theology
with his parents — the rudiments of how to make an argument, weigh differ-
ent kinds of evidence, move between particulars and generalizations, summa-
rize the views of others, and enter a conversation about ideas. Then, too,
debating toughness took me into other areas of culture, like the meaning of
masculinity and its symbols—were a “duck’s ass” haircut, pegged pants, and a
leather jacket necessary accoutrements of a tough boy? Could a boy be tough
and go out with “nice girls”? In arguing about such things I was learning rudi-
mentary semiotics, perhaps even a feeling for those deeper “meanings” in

26 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 27

texts and events that academic intellectual culture rewards us for spotting and
formulating.
Another form my unrecognized intellectualism took was my infatua-
tion with sports and sports magazines. I had become a regular reader of Sport
magazine in the late forties and Sports Illustrated when it began publishing in
1954. I was also an eager reader of the annual magazine guides to professional
baseball, football, and basketball, and the autobiographies of sports stars, like
Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to Be a Yankee and Bob Feller’s Strikeout Story. Here
was another “culture steeped in argument”: was Ted Williams a better player
than Joe DiMaggio or Stan Musial? Could the White Sox beat the Yankees?
Could a Chicago Cubs fan also root for the White Sox? This last issue
became critical in 1951, when, after suffering with the Cubs since 1946 (I have
no memory of the Cubs’ pennant-winning year of 1945), I shifted my alle-
giance to the White Sox, who won fourteen straight games in May and held
first place till fading late in the season. When I declared my change of loyalty
to the boys and men at the local package store where I hung out, they were
contemptuous and scornful. Challenged to defend myself daily during the
summer of ’51, I struggled for persuasive reasons in defense of my new faith.
To be sure, sports occasionally forced one to confront real issues like
racial injustice, as when Jackie Robinson broke through baseball’s color line
in 1947. Today one can hardly pick up the sports page or listen to sports talk
radio without being plunged into conflicts over race, gender, drugs, and eco-
nomics, making sports an extension of the larger social world rather than the
escape from it that it once seemed. But in the sports culture of the fifties, the
social stakes were relatively trivial compared to those in Warner’s Pentecostal
debates — not even the most obsessed baseball fan thinks “eternal life and
death” hang on which team one chooses to follow.
Nevertheless, I think it was through debates over sports and through
my subliterary sports reading that I first learned to form the arguments and
analyses that I would later produce as a professional academic and learned to
write the kind of sentences I am writing now. It was through reading and argu-
ing about sports that I learned what it felt like to propose a generalization,
restate and respond to a counterargument, and the other complex operations
that constitute what we call “intellectualizing,” and these skills were there to
be transferred when I eventually sought an academic career. I suspect we
underrate the role of sports in the elementary literacy training of future intel-
lectuals (not necessarily only male ones either). Mark Edmundson (1999: 55),
in an interesting recent memoir on a high school teacher who “changed my
life” from “jock” to intellectual, writes that until encountering the man’s phi-

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 27

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 28

losophy course, “I had never read all the way through a book that was written
for adults that was not concerned exclusively with football.” Edmundson con-
trasts his young jock self with the academic he began to become when he read
Nietzsche and Thoreau for his great teacher. He does not say what the foot-
ball books were like, but I imagine that without them he would not have made
the transition as readily.
That Edmundson doesn’t consider this possibility again shows how
strong is our assumption that jock culture and academic culture are mutually
exclusive. I certainly would have been incredulous if somebody had suggested
that there might be a connection between the habits of mind I was forming in
playground disputes about tough kids and sports and the intellectual work of
school. Since school defined itself as everything that supposedly debased
American popular culture was not, sports and games could only be an escape
from—and an antidote to—schooling and intellect.
It certainly never dawned on me that I found the sports world more
compelling than school because it was more intellectual than school, not less.
Yet sports were full of challenging arguments, debates, problems for analysis,
and meaningful statistical math in a way that school conspicuously was not.
Furthermore, sports arguments, debates, and analyses made you part of a
community, not just of your friends but of the national public culture.
Whereas schoolwork seemingly isolated you, you could talk sports with peo-
ple you had never met. Of course, schools can hardly be blamed for not mak-
ing intellectual culture resemble the World Series or the Super Bowl, but
schools might be learning things from the sports world about how to organize
and represent intellectual culture, how to turn the intellectual game into
arresting public spectacle.
For another thing that never dawned on me was that the real intellec-
tual world, the one that existed in the big world beyond school, was organized
very much like the competitive world of sports, with rival texts, rival interpre-
tations and evaluations of them, rival theories of why they should be read and
taught, and team competitions in which partisans or “fans” of one writer,
intellectual system, methodology, or ism contended with those of others. My
schools missed the opportunity to capitalize on the gamelike element of
drama and conflict that the intellectual world shares with the world of sports.
To be sure, school culture was filled with competition that became
more intense and invidious as you moved up the ladder. In this competition,
points were scored not by making arguments in intellectual debate, of which
there was little or none, but by a show of knowledge or ostensibly vast read-
ing or by the academic one-upmanship of putdowns and cleverness. School

28 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 29

culture has tended to reproduce these less attractive features of sports compe-
tition without the aspects that create close bonds and community.
Schooling certainly did little to encourage or channel my intellectual-
ism. History, for example, was represented to me not as a set of debates
between interpretations of the past, but as a series of contextless facts that one
crammed the night before the test and then forgot as quickly as possible after-
ward. Literature was a mass of set passages to be memorized, like the pro-
logue to The Canterbury Tales and Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Julius
Caesar. Such memory work might have been valuable had there been some
larger context of issues or problems to give it point and meaning, but there
rarely was.
In retrospect, I see now that my elementary schooling reflected an
uneasy postwar compromise between traditional and progressive theories,
theories that might have been explained to us but were not. On the one hand,
it reflected what was left of the fading nineteenth-century theory of “mental
discipline,” which held that making school as dull and hard as possible was
good for the development of the child’s character. To paraphrase Terry Eagle-
ton (1983: 29) in Literary Theory: An Introduction, making a given subject
“unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit is one of the few
problems” educational institutions have ever effectively solved. On the other
hand, after the war this archaic belief in the virtue of making school hard and
dreary was being challenged by progressive theories of “life adjustment” as
well as a resurgence of vocational education. The result was an odd curricu-
lar mixture that combined courses in which I memorized historical facts and
literary quotations with courses in home economics, typing, and driver educa-
tion. But though the old and new theories behind the mixture were opposed,
they came together in discouraging genuine intellectual engagement.
School officially stood for intellect, however, so intellect was compro-
mised and sports became the saving alternative. I failed for a long time to see
the underlying parallels between the sports and academic worlds, parallels
that might have enabled me to cross more readily from one argument culture
to the other. And insofar as academic intellectual culture is still defined by its
supposed contrast with popular culture, schools are still passing up the
chance to bridge the gap between the argument culture of adult intellectuals
and the ones students join when they grow up arguing about sports, parental
authority, dress fashions, soap operas, teen entertainment idols, weight, per-
sonal appearance, dates, and the myriad other things adolescents talk about.

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 29

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 30

Intellectualism and Conflict

To put it another way, what looks like anti-intellectualism in student culture is
often an alternative kind of intellectualism, which grows up alongside school-
ing and is usually seen as irrelevant to it. In speaking of “alternative intellectu-
alism,” I don’t mean to suggest, as some current educational theorists do, that
the student argument culture I’ve described should be seen as a repressed
rebellion against intellectual culture. On the contrary, in arguing about tough-
ness and sports as an adolescent, I was not rebelling against traditional aca-
demic practices (though I may have thought I was) but was unwittingly learn-
ing them. If my schooling repressed anything in me, it was not rebellion
against the adult world but adulthood itself.
Deborah Meier (1995: 3) writes of how “schools, in small and uncon-
scious ways, silence . . . playground intellectuals.” If I was one of Meier’s play-
ground intellectuals, I can’t say schooling silenced me—it wasn’t powerful or
well organized enough to do that. What schooling did was prevent me from
recognizing my own intellectualism. In my case, no permanent harm may have
been done, but the failure to channel the argumentative energies that students
invest in conventionally nonacademic concerns can carry high social costs.
The stakes are certainly raised when these “nonacademic concerns” come to
include drug trafficking, gang-banging, and other criminal behavior. While it
would be facile to suggest that schoolyard violence can be easily sublimated
into intellectual debate, we have no way of knowing how much aggressive
behavior might be redirected if schools were to provide curricular occasions
for debate and argument rather than try to avoid them. As Meier observes,
“fighting with ideas” would be a welcome substitute for fighting “with fists or
guns or nasty sound bites” (11).
As Meier knows, however, for many educators and parents, “fighting
with ideas” seems dangerously close enough to fighting “with fists or guns”
that it can be difficult to imagine how argumentation can be a substitute for
violence. Our tendency to see argument as a form of violence rather than an
alternative to violence helps explain why the studious avoidance of open
conflict is such a prominent feature of the American high school and often the
college and university. This avoidance of conflict is well described by Arthur G.
Powell, Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen (1985: 67) in their classic study,
The Shopping Mall High School: “Conflict is rarely the way classroom partici-
pants come to terms with one another. Most classes are relaxed and orderly,
despite the presence of so many diverse individual intentions. Agreement is
far more common than antagonism. . . . Sometimes it is because, when inter-
ests sharply diverge but power is perceived to be equal, peaceful coexistence

30 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 31

seems preferable to outright conflict. Sometimes one or another party to an

agreement has little choice in the matter: the agreement is really an imposed
diktat.” Like the antiseptic shopping mall, the school maintains an appearance
of harmony and choice that denies the realities of conflict. Though this
repression of conflict does help preserve short-term peace and quiet, it
ultimately bottles up aggressions that, when they do erupt, are more likely
to take antisocial and destructive forms than they might if they had an intel-
lectual outlet.
It is understandable if school authorities fear that encouraging stu-
dents to argue can escalate into violence, but repressing argument can lead to
violence, too. In my own case, the fascination with being tough played itself
out in amicable disputes with friends, but in different circumstances it might
have taken a more aggressively defiant and machismo form. A critic of my
work has suggested that it actually did. In a reading of my autobiographical
account in “Disliking Books at an Early Age,” Christopher Looby suggests
that in moving from a male jock culture into an academic career, I and many
other boys of my academic generation only transferred our macho impulse
from one realm to another. In my case, Looby suggests, the pedagogy of
“teaching the conflicts” and the joys of literary critical contention became a
kind of street fighting by other means (Graff and Looby 1994: 440–41).
Even if this explanation is correct, however, most of us would still pre-
fer a society in which aggression is expressed in arguments rather than bullets
or bombs. Here, as elsewhere, I agree with Meier, whose book The Power of
Their Ideas provides an account of her own work as principal of the Central
Park East schools, which sought to replace fighting with fists, guns, and nasty
sound bites with a more edifying clash of ideas. Meier (1995: 11) describes the
success of these schools, which are organized around a culture of argument,
“the clash of ideas” that, according to Meier, “will make us all more powerful.”
As Meier recognizes, kids are often good at fighting with ideas, and those who
are not have the capacity to be taught, especially, again, if teachers can recog-
nize and tap into the hidden intellectualism that lurks in ostensibly anti-
intellectual or nonacademic interests.

Teaching the Problem: Thematizing Intellectualism

But how can they do that? Kids who argue with passion about rock bands
don’t necessarily see the point of arguing about a Shakespeare sonnet, a social
or psychological theory, or the mind-body problem. Even more important,
they don’t necessarily see the point of arguing about rock bands in the intel-
lectualized ways and vocabularies in which academics and cultural journalists

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 31

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 32

argue about popular culture or anything else. This is why educational prob-
lems are not solved by junking traditional subjects in favor of courses on
sports, cars, fashions, and rap music, though it is foolish to resist introducing
such subjects if they figure to hook students who otherwise will tune out aca-
demic work entirely. Bringing contemporary youth culture into the curricu-
lum, as schools now often do, can help get students’ attention, but the value of
this tactic will be limited unless students develop an intellectual and public
voice for talking and writing about these subjects. How can this be done?
Like many academic problems, this one seems to me best addressed
by bringing the problem directly into the class itself. I have lately been mak-
ing the question of intellectualism an explicit theme of many of my own
courses and of units I have been developing in collaborations with high
school teachers. We ask students questions like the following: Would you
describe yourself as an intellectual? What would you gain or lose if you trans-
lated your street smarts into more intellectual forms of expression? Is being an
intellectual a good or bad thing? What is an intellectual anyway— should the
word be synonymous with nerd or dweeb or with being cool? These questions
lead to others about the relation between intellectualism and street smarts:
Are the two opposed, or can the one be latent in the other? What are the
students’ nonacademic interests and pursuits, and do these harbor hidden
intellectualism?
In my experience, high school and college students are intrigued by
these questions, and their responses divide in interesting ways. For some, the
suggestion that they are or might want to become intellectuals seems patently
ridiculous and bizarre, while for others it seems simply a logical outcome
of their education. Similar divisions appear in response to the question of
whether intellectualism is or is not already latent in their nonintellectual inter-
ests. As these questions are probed, the students’ ambivalence about them
tends to emerge while definitions of terms are sharpened and key distinctions
surface between intellectualism and pomposity or snobbery.
Hillel Crandus, an English teacher at Downer’s Grove South High
School in the Chicago suburbs, and I have developed a unit for his eleventh-
grade literature classes on “becoming an intellectual.” The unit takes advan-
tage of the fact that questions about hidden intellectualism are posed in many
of the most frequently taught high school literature texts, such as Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the
Rye. Furthermore, these texts often dramatize the issue of hidden intellectual-
ism by focusing reflexively on language.
Crandus and I took our point of departure from the fact that these

32 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 33

texts are widely taught as initiation stories, narratives that address the ways
adolescents become — or in Huck Finn’s and Holden Caulfield’s case, refuse
to become — initiated into the adult world. We agreed there was a problem
when initiation, the critical term that motivates the unit, remains a teacher’s
word that students are not even expected to use. Unless students at some
point learn the empowering terminology that governs the unit, the initiation
is arrested. That is, until student readers of Twain and Salinger control intel-
lectual terms like initiation, their street smarts stay at an inarticulate stage.
Our premise was that students can use such terms if they are encouraged to
do so and provided with some models, especially if the cultural power con-
ferred by intellectual discourse is made clear. Crandus and I were aware, how-
ever, that this view of the legitimacy and power of intellectual language set us
against Huck and Holden themselves (and presumably Twain and Salinger),
whose distinctively vernacular language dramatizes their rejection of the hypo-
critical and inauthentic ways of conventional society and the rigidified forms
of academic intellectualism. Indeed, in the famous “Notice” that opens Twain’s
(1995: 27) novel by threatening prosecution for anyone who attempts “to find
a moral” in the story, the author virtually warns us not to look for the sort of
“hidden meaning” that most English instruction would come to focus on.
With Holden and Huck against us, Crandus and I decided that,
though our goal was to persuade his eleventh graders that becoming an intel-
lectual might be a good thing, the best tactic would be not to try to convert
them but to spark a classroom debate on the pros and cons of intellectualism
and its forms of talk, a debate that would get them to wrestle with their con-
tradictions and ambivalences over the issue. Thus, in teaching Salinger’s
(1951) novel, Crandus started by pointing his students to the contrast between
Holden’s personal vernacular language and the intellectual language Holden
and Salinger associate with school.
In the correspondence we maintained during the unit, Crandus wrote
as follows:

I called the class’s attention to a scene near the start of the novel in which one of
Holden Caulfield’s teachers reads a school history paper that Holden has written back
to him: “The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the
northern sections of Africa. The latter, as we all know, is the largest continent in the
Eastern Hemisphere . . .” (16). Holden is embarrassed to hear the teacher read this
paper, which is written in the school language that is Holden’s idea of Intellectual-
speak, the language associated with “phonies” throughout the novel.
We then spent a bit of time comparing the prose Holden uses in his history paper,

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 33

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 34

noting how the flat, padded prose indicates Holden’s alienation and disengagement
from academic work, with the prose Holden writes the book itself in: “Game, my ass.
Some game.” Or, “I was standing way the hell up on top of Thomsen Hill, right next to
this crazy cannon that was in the Revolutionary War and all” (5).

Most of Crandus’s students readily saw that Holden’s colloquial voice is more
authentic and thoughtful than the ostensibly more intellectual voice in which
he writes the school paper. Through class discussion of this issue, they also
began to see how differences in language — here the contrast between official
school language and personal language — imply choices of the kind they may
face between different identities and views of life.
Crandus then posed the question of intellectualism: if Holden’s per-
sonal talk is more intellectually substantial than his version of school dis-
course, is there any justification for school discourse at all? Crandus wrote:

Happily for my purposes, Salinger too seems to have this issue in mind. Later in the
book, Holden runs into one of his old teachers, Mr. Antolini, who gives him the
following advice about language:
“Educated and scholarly men, if they’re brilliant and creative to begin with—
which, unfortunately, is rarely the case—tend to leave infinitely more valuable records
behind them than men do who are merely brilliant and creative. They tend to express
themselves more clearly, and they usually have a passion for following their thoughts
through to the end” (246).

Here Salinger seems to present a positive view of intellectual discourse, which

is more likely than informal discourse to leave permanent “records behind.”
Or is this advice intended to be read as just another example of the pompous
pseudodiscourse that Holden repeatedly gets from the adults in the book?
Once again, Crandus put these questions to his students, using the
contrasting styles in the novel to get them to reflect on their own language.
What is gained or lost by expressing oneself in Holden’s personal register? In
the register of the school paper? In the register of the teacher who speaks of
“educated and scholarly men”? What are the gains and losses in being able to
translate Holdenspeak into Intellectualspeak? Is it possible to blend both into
a single discourse? That is, can students talk the talk of the intellectual world
without giving up their own ways of talking and being?
Among the other texts Crandus assigns in this unit is my previously
mentioned essay, “Disliking Books at an Early Age,” in which I describe how
my youthful alienation from books finally dissolved when I encountered criti-
cal debates about books in college. Crandus asked his students to summarize

34 Pedagogy
PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 35

my account and express their own feelings about reading and intellectually
analyzing and debating what they read. Many of the students were candid in
expressing their distaste for such analysis. As one of them put it, “The only
thing that overanalyzing leads to is boredom. . . . I like to just read a book, and
not so much to analyze it.”
Another student, T. E., who expressed similar doubts about the value
of intellectual analysis, made a particularly trenchant critique of both my story
and my argument. “Does critical analysis really stir up interest in literature?”
he wrote. Maybe it did for Graff, he goes on, but will such a solution work for
others, who are perhaps more truly alienated? After all, T. E. asks, “How did
Graff even get to the point of even searching for a solution? I question his sin-
cerity in his ‘admittance’ of disliking books at an early age. . . . Not to insult
Graff, but maybe his inspiration comes from the fact that he might actually
have been a ‘closet nerd.’ . . . Please. If Graff’s ideal solution is to be ‘exposed
to critical analysis of literature,’ then every gum-chewing high school kid who
has ever been caught criticizing something by saying ‘it sucks’ could be an
English major.” Responding to T. E., I had to admit that he had found me out:
I had indeed been a closet nerd, as my retelling of my story in the present
essay suggests. I went on to say, however, that, despite T. E.’s disclaimers, his
penetrating comments suggest that he, too, might be a closet nerd. I added
that it didn’t seem so wildly implausible to me to imagine that many gum-
chewing kids who say “it sucks” may become English majors and critics —
aren’t all our sophisticated theories grounded in some gut reaction of that
kind? What is most great criticism, after all, but an elaborated way of saying,
in effect, “It sucks” or “It’s cool”?
What is most pedagogically intriguing here, however, is that in
expressing his doubts about the value of analytic close reading, T. E. pro-
duced one of the most penetrating close readings of a text of mine that I have
seen. T. E., it seems, is being seduced into becoming an intellectual in the very
process of expressing his resistance to such a role. Hence the potential of the-
matizing the problem of intellectualism in our classes. Crandus and I have
agreed that he will give a copy of the present essay to his students next year
and see how they respond to my telling of their story and mine. In effect, our
unit asked Crandus’s students to inventory whatever “hidden intellectualism”
they might find in themselves and wrestle with what they want to do with it,
that is, decide what kind of voice they wish to give it. Again, however, our
point was not to convert T. E. and his skeptical classmates into nerds and
eggheads, at least not directly. It was rather to get them to reflect on their own
contradictory feelings about becoming intellectuals and talking Intellectual-

Graff Hidden Intellectualism 35

PED 1.1-03 Graff 11/13/00 2:32 PM Page 36

speak. Our premise, which we continue to test, was that it is such reflection
more than anything the teacher may say that will induce students to discover
the hidden intellectual in themselves. “Becoming an Intellectual” is still a peda-
gogical work in progress.

Works Cited
Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Edmundson, Mark. 1999. “My First Intellectual.” Lingua Franca, March, 55–60.
Graff, Gerald. 1992. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize
American Education. New York: Norton.
Graff, Gerald, and Christopher Looby. 1994. “Gender and the Politics of Conflict Pedagogy:
A Dialogue.” American Literary History 6:434–52.
Guralnick, Peter. 1994. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Boston: Little, Brown.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-intellectualism in American Life. New York: Random House.
McLaughlin, Thomas. 1996. Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening to the Vernacular.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Meier, Deborah. 1995. The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons from a Small School in Harlem.
Boston: Beacon.
Powell, Arthur G., Eleanor Farrar, and David K. Cohen. 1985. The Shopping Mall High School:
Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Reisman, David, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. 1953. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of
the Changing American Character. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Salinger, J. D. 1951. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown.
Twain, Mark. 1995. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.
Ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford of St. Martin’s Press.
Warner, Michael. 1993. “Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood.” Voice Literary
Supplement, February, 13–14.

36 Pedagogy