Michael A. Winkelman
Review: Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm by Gayle Greene (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023)
What’s Shaking on Campus?
In a crowded field of non-fiction lamentations and manifestoes about higher education, Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm by Gayle Greene stands out (author website: gaylegreene.org). Though cogent and flowing, it is a bit quirky in good ways; really it amounts to a mash-up of two complementary main arguments, detailed below. It also may be considered to be the author’s apologia or de facto intellectual memoir of her decades as a teacher and scholar in California, the golden state. (Part of the book explores the ups and downs of the U.C. system during her lifetime.) Now an emerita professor, Greene was born in 1943. She grew up in NorCal and went to the University of California, Berkeley, for her undergraduate degree. After grad school at Columbia, she taught for forty years, 1974-2014, at Scripps, the women’s college that’s part of the Claremont Consortium in SoCal. (Claremont is modelled on Oxbridge universities.) She came of age, she relates, at the right time: professorships were plentiful and education at all levels enjoyed broad support—the America of her youth paid high school teachers more than it paid most National Football League players, something now the stuff of Key & Peele satire (see page 40).
Greene’s first argument concerns the contemporary tyranny of metrics, and her book delivers a forceful critique of this misleading quantitative assessment mania now taking over Education at all levels. This reviewer reads widely about this and on related issues related to schools and their myriad dysfunctional discontents, but the deconstruction of technobureaucracy and audit culture presented here is exceptionally lucid and compelling. Synthesizing the findings and theses of a number of researchers, Greene offers a granular, emphatic view of the negative effects of (virtual) red tape; soulless, standardized ‘student learning outcomes’ and check-mark objectives; buzzy, faddish jargon; and misleading ‘data driven’ praxes imposed by educrats, administrators, and outside stakeholders without professional knowledge such as pols, culture warriors, über-wealthy tech bros, and other plutocrats.
The second big accomplishment is her thick description of an undergraduate literature seminar. (Some episodes in the most mordant academic satires or the sharpest campus novels hit the mark in this regard as well.) She talks us through a semester of Shakespeare with élan and éclat. We hear the students’ and the teacher’s words and private musings, good and bad. Classes are lively, interesting, sometimes engaging, sometimes awkward; there are tangents, grumblings, in-class performances, smart debates about the playtexts, uneven papers, triggers, and moments of insight. Along with pen portraits of the class—from the show-off theater major to an extended parsing of how the Bard used the word “bounty” and which of his characters were slutty—we get Greene’s wise reflections on how seminars work, or don’t. On top of all that, she provides an energetic, rousing defence of such Socratic discussion as part of a bona fide liberal arts education, both for individual intellectual growth and as a key way to practice and learn democratic engagement. Clearly students who made the effort learned a great deal, not just about Shakespeare per se, in her classroom. (Reflections from several alumnae are sprinkled throughout too, reinforcing her hypotheses.)
Chapter 5, “The Play’s the Thing: Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” it might also be mentioned, delves deeply into the importance of all kinds of play, from children’s imaginative playworlds (at least in the good old days before ubiquitous technological intrusions) to drama to its evolutionary role for intelligent social animals to the kinds of grownup intellectual play ideally afforded in the classroom.
Some qualms or quibbles: as Greene acknowledges, Scripps (the most beautiful college campus this side of Oxford I’d say), epitomizes privilege. At present, tuition plus room and board is about $88,000 per year (though many students receive financial aid). The young adults in her classes, no matter which of the highly selective Claremont colleges they’re enrolled at, are among the most well trained anywhere, though even they don’t get classical allusions anymore nor show the grit of previous generations. It’s a world away from the crumbling, circumscribed, underfunded schools most attend. I also found the book somehow a bit light when it came to interpreting Shakespeare himself, though this might have something to do with the focus on undergraduate experience rather than scholarship. Also of note, the sample given is a composite class, and it doesn’t quite have the aesthetic unity of quality fiction, vis-à-vis character arcs or group dynamics, nor the fly-on-the-wall quality of a reporter’s transcripts of conversations.
Overall, this book was truly thought-provoking, worth reading slowly, a generous contribution to the Republic of Letters, howsoever murky said Republic’s future may be…
(Full disclosure: I went to graduate school in Claremont to study Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, and there I studied Latin at Scripps, where I believe I very briefly met G.G. once or twice.)
As someone or other once exclaimed, “Play on!”