Conflicts over Conflicts

Abstract

It has been eighteen years, actually, since Gerald Graff first suggested that schools should teach conflicts. This pedagogical proposal, now Graff ’s calling card, made its first, rather humble appearance as the sixth of “seven propositions on teaching” included in his and Reginald Gibbons’s preface to Criticism and the University. “The university does not have a unified cultural tradition to impart but rather a set of cultural conflicts — including conflicts over what the cultural tradition is and has been thought to be,” Graff and Gibbons (1985: 12) wrote. “The organization of the university now prevents these conflicts from becoming visible and educationally functional. Professors’ lives are consequentially as much impoverished as students’.” Since then — much to Graff ’s delight, I am sure—there has been no end to the conflicts over this claim. Fast-forward to the roundtable on Graff ’s work at the 2001 Modern Language Association convention in New Orleans, in which all the writers in this symposium participated: Hours before the event, someone asked Graff what he planned to say in his public response at the end. Not knowing what we would say about him, he joked, “I guess it will be somewhere between ‘Aw, shucks’ and ‘Screw you!’ ” As it turned out, we gave him ammunition for both