A New Life by Bernard Malamud Read Free Book Online Page B

me about the liberal arts, that they were—”
    “Our main function, as I always tell everyone we employ here, is to satisfy the needs of the professional schools on the campus with respect to written communication. In science and technology men must be taught to communicate with the strictest accuracy, therefore we teach more composition than anything else in this department. Our literature offerings aren’t very diversified or extensive but they’re adequate to our purpose.”
    “I was hoping to teach a lit course,” Levin said, “—that is, if it were possible.”
    Professor Fairchild seemed not to have heard.
    “There’s talk, now that the new dean is on campus—his name is unfortunate, Seagram—that we may in the future be called on for something more than we’re presently offering in the way of literature, perhaps even to produce English majors, but I’ve heard that false alarm several times in recent years and it hasn’t come to a hill of beans. I don’t put much stock in it, not because I don’t want it to come to pass—I do—but because I know intimately and practically the needs of this community. Ours is a land economy based on forestry—the Douglas fir and ponderosa pine for the most part; and agriculture—grains, grasses, flowers and some fruit. Our fishing industry is important too. We need foresters, farmers, engineers, agronomists, fish-and-game people, and every sort of extension agent. We need them—let’s be frank—more than we need English majors. You can’t fell a tree, run a four-lane highway over a mountain, or build a dam with poetry.”
    He chuckled to himself, drawing on his cigarette holder. Levin bent to tighten a shoelace but the smoke blew in another direction.
    “Certainly I’m for English majors—I was one myself—but there are other colleges in the state that do a good job of training them better than we can presently, with our orientation and limited resources. My own point of view is that we
ought to take pride in doing well a task that has to be done, though I’m frank to confess there are one or two in the department who don’t see it quite my way, but that’s their problem.”
    He dipped the cigarette into an ash tray and left it smoking. The halo in his hair had faded, a trick of some passing cloud. As if conscious of that he ran a lacking hand through his hair.
    “What was I saying? Well, I’ve made my point.”
    Levin nodded.
    The old man picked up a ball-point pen and ticked off something he had written on a pink pad. He nearsightedly scanned the paper.
    “Oh, yes.” He turned to Levin. “Now I hope it won’t unsettle you if I offer you a word of advice or two as a young man about to embark on his first college teaching venture. A word now may prevent future misunderstanding.”
    “Of course—”
    “This department won’t ask much of you in the way of research and the publication of small papers on matters of varying degrees of useless information—that’s the headache of the big universities, to what effect I haven’t been able to determine—but we do ask you to teach conscientiously and well. Get to know The Elements and give your students plenty of wholesome, snappy drill. You know,” he said, “I’ve often wondered what we can expect of our American college graduates when so many of them don’t even know the rules of syntax of their own language.”
    Levin agreed.
    The professor scanned his pad and leaned back in his chair. “There are two kinds of people I deplore in the teaching profession. One is the misfit who sneaks in to escape his inadequacy elsewhere and who ought to be booted out—and isn’t very often; and the other is the aggressive pest whose one purpose is to upset other people’s applecarts, and the more apples, the better. We’ve had both types here, to our sorrow, and what’s worse, sometimes in one and the same person.”

    The old man spoke sadly. “Leo Duffy comes to mind, a man no longer with us. Did