Edited because of pri­vacy issues.

Accord­ing to one of my stu­dents, in a paper he wrote meant to talk about the dif­fer­ent approaches to his­tory in Max­ine Hong Kingston’s China Men and Island, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, China has his­tor­i­cally been infused with a “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” and that is why so many “Chi­nese Amer­i­cans believe in racial inequal­ity.” I wish I could quote the entire two sen­tences for you; they are truly pre­cious. It’s not just the poor qual­ity of this writ­ing per se that gets to me, though, it’s that phrases like “racial ide­ol­ogy of male mas­culin­ity” appear all over the essays I have been get­ting from far too many of the stu­dents in the lit­er­a­ture class I have been teach­ing – as if the stu­dents were choos­ing one word from col­umn A, two from col­umn B, etc. in order to come up with a sen­tence that sounds so intel­lec­tu­ally pro­found that I won’t notice it doesn’t really mean any­thing. It is depress­ing and debil­i­tat­ing when the papers handed in by my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents are, in many ways, bet­ter writ­ten than the ones handed in by the stu­dents in an advanced lit­er­a­ture class.