Mark C. Carnes Quotes

• “Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age; but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “Senior faculty nowadays similarly squirm when former 'dunderheads' return to campus to lecture on their prizewinning screenplay or to cut the ribbon for a building funded by their entrepreneurial acumen. How did such dullards metamorphose into geniuses?”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “Students relished times when Reacting games careened into absurdity, such as when a young woman, as a Ming scholar, delivered a persuasive speech on why women should not speak in public, or when a disciple of Gandhi denounced modernity while referring to notes on his iPad.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “Reacting students also indicated that they would be less likely to take future Reacting-type courses. The explanation, the researchers learned, was that Reacting students had worked much harder than their peers in regular seminars.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “The central argument is not that higher education is all wrong, but that it is only half right. Our predominant pedagogical system — rational, hierarchical, individualistic, and well-ordered — often ignores aspects of the self relating to emotion, mischievous subversion, social engagement, and creative disorder.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “If classes were 'sorta boring,' was it because of the student or the teacher?”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “That same year [2001], young anthropology professor Cathy Small went undercover as "Rebekah Nathan, undergraduate student" and lived in a first-year form at Northern Arizona University. She was repeating the study of anthropologist Michael Moffatt, who in 1977 had attempted to pass himself off as an undergraduate at Rutgers. Like him, she found virtually no evidence that students derived intellectual benefit from classes. They skipped more frequently than she had expected: in the one large course for which she had solid data, barely half came to class on any given day. The students in her dorm, moreover, almost never discussed academic issues — in class or outside of it. Small's 'most sobering' insight was 'how little intellectual life' mattered to students.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “Senior scholars, insulated by tenure, pawn undergraduate instruction onto overburdened adjuncts and unprepared grad students. Beleaguered instructors ward off student resentment by offering fluff courses, assigning little work, and bestowing As with glad-handed largesse. This 'non-aggression' pact enables students to enjoy the social aspects of college without the inconvenience of doing much academic work, and it allows professors to focus on research (or carpentry or yoga) unencumbered by pestering students.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “From time to time,' Turner explained, most people seek to discard their customary clothing and status markers and 'don the liberating masks of a liminal masquerade.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “Who can say when subversive play will subvert its own rules? Sometimes a jester's wit might cut too close to the bone and the king would lop off his head. The uncertainty — that straddling of the boundaries of real and unreal — is a source of the peculiar emotional power of subversive play.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “Instantly Nate realized that he couldn't prepare for class as in the past, 'where I could tune in for a minute, say something smart, earn my credit for the day and tune out.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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• “I'm a great test-taker," she explained. "I'm great at guessing what teachers are going to ask, and I can store dates and names like it's nobody's business. It was never a question of how much I knew, but how many correct answers I got. If I had thought about it, I would have realized that I had forgotten most of what I 'learned' three months or a semester later. But I never thought about my education. Why would I? I wasn't going to be tested on it.”

  Mark C. Carnes

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