Chaim Potok and the fictional student's struggles

I do book reports for fun now.

I subscribe to a bookish blog called The RONA READer run by a fellow bibliophile and high school classmate. That community recently ran a 24-hour read-a-thon, and I decided to participate.

The goal, simply, was to set aside a day for reading. Or at least as much of a day as one can. It was a great experience, mostly because I realized how many times during that day I’d normally be checking my phone or scrolling Reddit. Instead, I read.

I decided to read The Promise by Chaim Potok. It’s a sequel to The Chosen, a book I read in a frenzy during the first weeks of lockdown four years ago because I had a copy on my shelf and the library was closed.

I keep an obsessive “to-read list,” and for reasons I can’t pinpoint, I knew I needed to get some Potok in my life this week. What I didn’t expect was that this would be a book centered on higher education.

I don’t think Potok intentionally wrote the book as a campus novel, but I couldn’t help noticing themes about student life and education politics jumping off the page. While the text is set in 1950, and it was written in 1969, many of the issues it tackles recur. I want to examine a few that stuck out to me in this unexpected source.

The All-Consuming College

The protagonist of both novels, Reuven, starts in middle school and the narrative follows him through his graduate education. In The Promise, he is pursuing his rabbinical ordination and needs to complete a course on the Talmud to earn it.

The other main character, Danny, already earned rabbinical ordination, but decided to pursue psychology instead. He’s pursuing a doctorate during the novel, while also doing an internship in a children’s psych ward.

What they have in common is that they think about little other than school.

Reuven never tries to explain or justify why he finds Talmudic study so fascinating. As a reader, you enjoy his enjoyment of it.

When we study student affairs in higher education, we often focus on the students for whom the system does not work. That is totally reasonable because most institutional interventions will focus on expanding access and improving outcomes for students on the margins.

A total focus on institutional shortcomings, however, can create a distorted picture of the college student’s experience. I have to always remind myself that whenever you have an education system (like a college), that system will fail to meet the needs of some students. But it’s also true that any educational system will succeed in meeting the needs of some of its students.

While many students study Talmud in the Jewish education system, by the time Reuven gets to his final course, he only has 16 classmates in a university of thousands. He does not ruminate on why he persisted when most didn’t; he’s absorbed. The system worked for him.

If we expand this to think about the complex, modern university, reform will always betray some students.

For example, I recently wrote about a curricular loophole at IU for studying Persian. There were only about 40 students in the majors I surveyed. So, about 0.1% of students are deeply invested in these programs. If you look at the small student population as evidence that the programs aren’t working, you’d miss the fact that they’re working very well for a few students. It’s easy to look through a macro lens and miss the experience of the individual student.

Student Debt (emotional version)

I mentioned already that in the book, Danny decided not to pursue the rabbinate. That was not an easy decision for him, as he was to be the heir to a Hasidic dynasty. So, instead of fulfilling his family’s expectations, he pursued a new path. This created an extra burden on that family, as his sickly brother was now forced to become the family heir. It also added stress to a father whose health was already in decline.

Danny did the right thing for himself, but he couldn’t avoid the attendant guilt. He knew his choices made life more difficult for the people he loved.

When we think about the stereotypical college student, “guilt” is not the first emotion we associate with the experience. We might ascribe “carelessness” or “whimsy” or “naiveté” before “guilt.” But this fear of burdening one’s family is what keeps many students from starting college in the first place.

Moreover, it prompts other students to drop out before they complete their degree. Perhaps they began college, knowing that it would create a burden on their family, willing to accept the pressure because they believed it was worth it. But so much of college is about delayed gratification.

If you look at a freshman course sequence, it’s rarely apparent how the investment is going to pay off. Let’s say you take a course in composition and a large lecture on biology and a seminar on Asian religion and an online Spanish class. Maybe there are very good reasons to take those courses as part of a four-year plan for graduation. But in the moment, it can be difficult for students to see how their topically discordant course load has any relation to their personal goals.

This is where the guilt begins. Not only are students confused about what they’re learning in college, they are aware of just how much their family is paying for them to do it.

It’s altogether too easy to ascribe degree incompletion to laziness or a lack of stick-to-itiveness. Oftentimes it’s a product of students trying to extend care and generosity to their family.

Danny may have continued his education, but he did it knowing that he was materially harming his family in the process. It’s important to recognize that balancing act that students are making all the time just by showing up in college.

A Critical Kind of Love

One of the central conflicts in the novel is between traditional and reformist Jewish philosophies. Both are trying to establish the future of Jewish practice. Both want it to survive and thrive. And both think that the other is a herald of its doom.

Reuven and his circle are in the reformist camp. But the question isn’t just about whether reform is right, it’s about what happens after a reform:

“Of course that’s the problem,” [Abraham] said to me once. “How can we teach others to regard the tradition critically and with love? I grew up loving it, and then learned to look at it critically. That’s everyone’s problem today. How to love and respect what you are being taught to dissect.

I think we can consider this in terms of institutional reform more generally. The second generation of a reform faces a real challenge.

For example, let’s say you think higher education is too impractical. So you reform a college to eliminate traditional courses, grades, and academic majors. Instead, you focus on hands-on apprenticeships with companies and have a direct, commercial application with every program. You eliminate things like sports and dorms and student life in order to keep tuition down. And you let students determine their own graduation plan without pre-set requirements.

For those involved, this may feel like a breath of fresh air. Out with the stodginess, inefficiency, and bloat of the past. In with the practical, the lean, and the new. The reformers want their college to be dynamic, exciting, and meaningful.

But once that reform is done, they still need to find new students and staff. This second generation of stakeholders will see the reform as outsiders, not able to feel what was felt in the moment of transition.

They’re likely to have one of two responses.

The first is reactionary. They may say that this reforming has gone too far. It’s so out of step with the rest of their educational experience that this second generation would rather just have a “normal college.” They cannot understand what’s so lovable about a college that refuses to act like a college usually acts. The reforms feel excessive, destructive, and weird.

The second response is apathy. If your reform tells me that college is a mess, then why should I waste my time going to yours either? Reform questions the validity of an institution. That is a destructive act by its nature. A reformer may hope to save an institution through a partial destruction. But an outsider might view this and conclude that a wholesale destruction would be even better.

Colleges and universities are incredibly conservative in their organizational structure. Some say that this is because of tenure or because they’re in an ivory tower, disconnected from reality. But one reason may be that colleges know once you start reforming willy nilly, it becomes very hard to justify yourself and retain the confidence of your present and future stakeholders.

Even if your reform is right, you need to find a way to make people love an institution that doubts its own foundations. That’s not an easy line to walk in religion or in higher education.

Reading Ourselves

There’s so much more in this novel that made me think about higher education. It asks about how students determine the significance of different kinds of institutional discipline. Or how students can use academic pursuit as a way to escape issues in their lives, how the college bubble can sometimes be salvific. Or whether education is about replicating ideas in a new generation or replacing ideas.

In grad school, it is common to only read the kinds of things written explicitly for your field. There are many books that are cited more often in this discipline that I could have read instead. Perhaps they would be a more efficient use of my time.

But what I remembered in this experience was that when you dig deep into any field, you see it everywhere. Trying to apply what I’m learning about higher education to a novel that’s not trying to be about higher education helps me to refine my thinking and to connect it with issues I never would have considered otherwise.

I think there’s something to using fiction as a lens for understanding this field. It’s often a peripheral consideration, but how many novels are about being a student? What can they tell us that a peer-reviewed article can’t?

I’m not really sure yet, but I enjoy trying to find out.

-Matt