Politics and Prose: Teaching Capitalism in a Composition Class During the Global Banking Collapse

Politics and ProseTeaching Capitalism in a Composition Class During the Global Banking Collapse T.K. Dalton (bio) St. Francis College is across the river from New York's financial district, just two subway stops from Wall Street. Manhattan cabbies reputed to never leave the borough will readily ferry a hedge fund manager across the bridge to a million-dollar home just blocks from the college's single building on Remsen Street. I never saw a cab on that connecting road, but swarms often formed en route to the A train. This traffic pattern remains a rarity in my own, humbler neighborhood; long before I arrived, prowling blocks for passengers became commonplace in Brooklyn Heights. I mention these markers of class because St. Francis actively markets itself as a Catholic college serving "working-class students." This characterization, made during the first five minutes of my job interview, immediately revived memories of my own experience as a first-year college student. Though I grew up in a modestly middle-class family, I attended high school in a town with a decidedly higher socioeconomic class, and I entered college acutely aware of class difference and anxious but maddeningly unable to be articulate on this unspeakably important topic. During that year, I balanced the intense pleasures of the classroom—the short story and avant-garde film, the morpheme and quantum physics—with two activities combining economics and writing. One activity was the struggling student literary magazine; the other was a student-run campaign to ban campus merchandise made in sweatshops. The campaign exposed me to antiglobalization arguments. Politics has been a part of my writing life ever since. Though I was hired too quickly at St. Francis College to make the point, I had planned to express my belief in the rich relationship between the essay's focus on the interior and the necessary knowledge of the world beyond oneself demonstrated by the leaders of the anti-sweatshop campaign. Any complex, controversial, contemporary topic (certainly any political and economic movement) taught in a composition classroom should include this type of balance. Political movements, a term that for me includes deregulation and bailouts as well as boycotts and street protests, must be understood by the affected individuals. In the case of underprepared undergraduate students, instructors must help them articulate an understanding using interior methods. This essay will discuss writing in that context. Precisely because of its introductory nature, a composition course offers instructors an early opportunity to establish, [End Page 19] nurture, or develop the student's awareness of the external world and her reactions to it. Put plainly, composition is an education in expression, but also in civics. To teach composition properly involves juggling two key, conflicting tensions: neutrality and non-expertise. As the global banking system trembled, each of these principles showed its drawbacks. However, because of them, I can claim that my students left the class more aware of global capitalism. This happened because they learned the unit's central idea: evidence comes from without and argument comes from within. Click for larger view View full resolution Library of Congress Prints and Photographs; LC-DIG-GGBAIN-01405 The fall of 2008 was my first semester teaching college composition in New York City. I organized the course conventionally, evaluating students on participation, attendance, and five essays. Two essays early in the term responded to short readings from an anthology. Two essays late in the term responded to works of fiction. Sandwiched between these essay pairs, I assigned students a series of challenging readings and a variety of writing assignments on a complex topic, global capitalism. I attempted to present balanced arguments with minimal interpretation, pairing cheerleaders like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (the first chapter of The World is Flat) with critics like Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis (The Take). I strove for historical comparisons with economic historian Robert Heilbroner (an excerpt from The Worldly Philosophers) and journalism pioneer Edward R. Murrow (Harvest of Shame.) With particular pleasure I included a captivating, provocative, and freely available animated history of money by Canadian artist and activist Paul Grignon (Money as Debt). Printing the syllabus in the first week of September, I never...

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