Ryan Boyd is a poet and critic living in Los Angeles, where he is on the faculty of the University of Southern California’s Writing Program.
His work has appeared in such places as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Protean, Public Books, and FIELD. Born and raised in Virginia, Boyd has a BA from the College of William & Mary and a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Below are recent contributions
Infrastructure doesn’t sound especially sexy. You probably wouldn’t bring it up at a party. By virtue of its ubiquity, it fades into the background of daily life—all those roads, buildings, servers, pumps, pipes, ports, wires, satellites, computers, stacks, tunnels, channels, and so on become the substrate of quotidian existence, life as it is experienced by people. It seems inert, inorganic, immovable, just kind of there, all the time, everywhere yet nowhere. The human world can’t function without it. It’s like a second biosphere, enfolding and enabling all we do.
Over the past half decade, a renewed struggle between labor and capital has roiled the United States. That struggle, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic and involved companies from Starbucks and Amazon to UPS, GM, and Trader Joe’s, has now expanded to include academic workers. Contra the myth of ivory-tower quietism, university campuses are a lively battlefield. Graduate-student unions have won landslide victories at Chicago, Yale, and USC.
Wolf year, illness at the door,
our streets scabbed with police.
Gray jubilee, everyone in,
the party set to begin—
we agree to pretend
the dead didn’t lose
or the monied win.
Everywhere, cities sick
with envy unlock their doors
as, with all the time in the world,
the ground shudders and splits.
Someone somewhere opens a gift.
RB: I love how you frame this as a question of resources. And as you point out, writing classes are fundamental. We teach pretty much everyone who comes through the door of a university or a college, and yet within the political economy of the university system, we are often considered the least important relative to things like science labs, the business school, or the engineering program.
JW: If institutions were dedicated to things like reducing student attrition and increasing mental health and well-being, they would put a ton of resources into common first-year courses. But they do the opposite. That there is so much good writing instruction—and I have witnessed it, both at the institutions where I have worked and elsewhere—is a miracle. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves that the dedication of an individual instructor to make bad conditions work means that the system doesn’t need fixing.
Getting graded is a near-universal American experience. If you attended school in the US during the past century, from elementary levels to college, public or private, you probably experienced some version of the A to F grade scale and/or the GPA system. You were scored, labeled, sorted, ranked, and tracked a great deal; there is a good chance it affected the rest of your life. And it all seems natural and inevitable, just the way “we” or “they” have to organize schools at the K–12 and postsecondary levels. How else do you measure and mark learning?
This vision entails a university organized around the long-term needs and desires of the many, primarily those who labor in the classroom (students and teachers), and staff whose work supports teaching. It would be a small-d democratic institution, devoted to, and materially supportive of, learning and scholarship, instead of fundraising from corporate donors and football boosters. This university might never have fully existed, but, perhaps, it could.
In January’s tank
Winter lettuce opens
Its grotesque electric purple,
Flukes and frills
Like baby auroras
Touching the sleet to beads,
Scentless, nobody’s food.
Against the quartz
Of wind it spins,
All itself alone
By a neighbor’s doorstep.
If, in mixed company, you say you think that attending a public college shouldn’t cost a student anything, opposition frequently takes the form of a weary pragmatism. Most people don’t want to seem antidemocratic or heartless — it being an American custom to extol the benefits of education — so they fall back on sentiment then skepticism: Sure, that’s a noble idea that I’d ordinarily support — but how can we afford it? In other words, if you believe in free college, you’re a good-hearted utopian with an unworkably expensive plan. Forget it. Sign up for some loans if you want a degree.
In the beginning of every class there is The Word. The instructor descends from the mount, the congregation assembles, and all gather around that carefully curated, almost mystical collection of policies, practices, guidelines, texts, and aspirations called a syllabus.
For a topic about which American society seems to have a conversation quite frequently (particularly when celebrities are involved), “depression” is bewildering territory. Where does it come from, and why would evolution preserve something so disabling and agonizing as a feature of the species? Can it be driven off? What kind of documentation of it can be made? Is it possible to narrate and interpret, or does it defeat exegesis? What do you say to someone in its grip?
For a while it has been difficult to be optimistic about American higher education, beyond the fortunes of a shrinking circle of “elite” schools. Just ask historian and professor Kevin Gannon, who introduces Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by claiming (and I mean this is literally the first sentence) that “it has never been more difficult to teach in higher education than in our current moment.” And, thanks to “strangulation” by neoliberal austerity budgets, things are wretched for students, too: “It has also never been more difficult to learn in higher education than in our current moment.” Nonetheless the former group is still expected to be intellectually “transformative”; the latter, transformed by and grateful for their collegiate experience.
It is worth considering why we have institutions of higher education in the first place. Why does anyone go to college? What do you do while you’re there? How does it alter your life’s trajectory? This is not a new topic, and the questions it conjures do not have perfect answers. But we cannot avoid them, given the giant role that higher education plays in America’s economy, politics, and cultural imagination. Not everyone goes to college, it is true. But pretty much everyone has opinions about college.
How do teachers learn to teach well? At the K–12 level, teachers can generally be expected to receive at least some training in pedagogy, whether in an undergraduate or graduate education school or via professional-development programs. It is understood within the profession that, say, an AP US History instructor needs more than just subject knowledge — they need to be able to make this content come alive for new learners. Teaching, in other words, is not the mere frictionless transmission of information; it is a discipline unto itself, one you have to deliberately practice.