A professor is walking across campus one afternoon when he spots a
student coming the other way. “Excuse me, young man,” the professor
says, “am I walking north or south?” “You’re walking north, professor,”
the student replies. “In that case,” the professor says, “I must have
eaten lunch already.”
This is not a joke anyone would think to make up these days. The
absentminded professor, that kindly old figure, is long gone. A new
image has taken his place, one that bespeaks not only our culture’s
hostility to the mind, but also its desperate confusion about the nature
of love.
Look at recent movies about academics, and a remarkably consistent pattern emerges. In
The Squid and the Whale (2005),
Jeff Daniels plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps
with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In
One True Thing (1998),
William Hurt plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps
with his students, neglects his wife, and bullies his children. In
Wonder Boys (2000),
Michael Douglas plays an English professor and failed writer who sleeps
with his students, has just been left by his third wife, and can’t
commit to the child he’s conceived in an adulterous affair with his
chancellor. Daniels’s character is vain, selfish, resentful, and
immature. Hurt’s is vain, selfish, pompous, and self-pitying. Douglas’s
is vain, selfish, resentful, and self-pitying. Hurt’s character drinks.
Douglas’s drinks, smokes pot, and takes pills. All three men measure
themselves against successful writers (two of them, in Douglas’s case;
his own wife, in Daniels’s) whose presence diminishes them further. In
We Don’t Live Here Anymore (2004),
Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause divide the central role: both are English
professors, and both neglect and cheat on their wives, but Krause plays
the arrogant, priapic writer who seduces his students, Ruffalo the
passive, self-pitying failure.
A Love Song For Bobby Long (2004)
divides the stereotype a different way, with John Travolta as the
washed-up, alcoholic English professor, Gabriel Macht as the blocked,
alcoholic writer.
Not that these figures always teach English. Kevin Spacey plays a philosophy professor—broken, bitter, dissolute—in
The Life of David Gale (2003). Steve Carell plays a self-loathing, suicidal Proust scholar in
Little Miss Sunshine (2006).
Both characters fall for graduate students, with disastrous results.
And while the stereotype has gained a new prominence of late, its roots
go back at least a few decades. Many of its elements are in place in
Oleanna (1994), in
Surviving Desire (1991), and, with John Mahoney’s burnt-out communications professor, in
Moonstruck (1987). In fact, all of its elements are in place in
Terms of Endearment (1983),
where Jeff Daniels took his first turn playing a feckless, philandering
English professor. And of course, almost two decades before that, there
was
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
What’s going on here? If the image of the absent-minded professor
stood for benevolent unworldliness, what is the meaning of the new
academic stereotype? Why are so many of these failed professors also
failed writers? Why is professional futility so often connected with
sexual impropriety? (In both
Terms of Endearment and
We Don’t Live Here Anymore,
“going to the library” becomes a euphemism for “going to sleep with a
student.”) Why are these professors all men, and why are all the ones
who are married such miserable husbands?
The answers can be found in the way these movies typically unfold. Consider
One True Thing,
in which these questions are most fully and intelligently played out.
As the movie opens, Hurt’s George Gulden comes across as a monumental
figure. Seen through the eyes of his daughter, Ellen, from whose
perspective the story unfolds, George embodies the highest intellectual
and ethical standards: brilliant, passionate, demanding, a gifted critic
and beloved teacher, a dispenser of anecdotes and aphorisms that
suggest a near converse with the gods. Ellen, an ambitious young
journalist, has worshiped him since she was a little girl—emulating him,
yearning for his hard-won approval, and disdaining her less-educated
mother, Kate, as trivial and weak. Kate belongs to a group of local
wives who devote themselves to performing acts that seem utterly
inconsequential and who, as if to advertise their own insignificance,
call themselves the “Minnies.” But when George summons Ellen home to
care for her dying mother—or, as it turns out, to care for him in his
wife’s stead—his daughter gradually comes to see her parents for what
they really are. George is a novelist manqué who recycles his stories,
plagiarizes his witticisms, and drinks away his sorrows in secret (he no
longer even has the starch to chase graduate students). His wife is
really the strong one. While George and his kind dream their petty
dreams of glory, the Minnies hold the community together. One day, Kate
forces Ellen on an excruciating drive during which Kate and another
woman sing silly songs at the top of their lungs. Afterward, Kate
explains to Ellen that the woman has been living as a virtual shut-in
since her husband left her, so the Minnies have been taking turns
getting her out of the house. Ellen learns that just as the Minnies have
held the community together, her mother has held the family
together—held it together, it turns out, until her death. The “one true
thing,” Ellen realizes, is not intellect or ambition, as she’d been
taught to believe, but love.
The lesson is typical in these films and points to the meaning of the
new academic stereotype. The alcoholic, embittered, writer-manqué
English professor who neglects his family and seduces his students is a
figure of creative sterility, and he is creatively sterile because he
loves only himself. Hence his vanity, pomposity, and selfishness; his
self-pity, passivity, and resentment. Hence his ambition and failure.
And thence his lechery, for sleeping with his students is a sign not of
virility but of impotence: he can only hit the easy targets; he feeds on
his students’ vitality; he can’t succeed in growing up. Other symbolic
emasculations abound. John Travolta stumbles around in a bathrobe.
Michael Douglas stumbles around in a pink one. Steve Carell’s character
is gay. But most importantly, nearly all of them are set against a much
stronger woman, usually a wife, whose power lies precisely in her
ability to love: to sacrifice, to empathize, to connect. By the end of
the movie, in the typical case, the academic, too, has learned to love
and, having been humbled as thoroughly as Rochester in
Jane Eyre, is equally ready for redemptive female ministration.
There are several things to note about all this. First, while the new
stereotype is akin to the political/journalistic image of the academy
as a bastion of effete, liberal, eggheaded snobs, its emphasis is
different. The liberalism, which in the news media is central, is
generally absent (we almost never learn anything about movie professors’
political beliefs), while the effeteness is central. Elitism and
intellectualism are downplayed, the first usually manifesting as
personal arrogance rather than as a wider cultural attitude, the second
invariably expressed in the movie shorthand of quoting famous authors.
Second, the new stereotype is not confined to film. Most of the dozen
movies I’ve been considering were adapted from novels, short stories, or
plays. Other partial examples include Saul Bellow’s
Herzog, Philip Roth’s Kepesh books, and Wallace Stegner’s last novel,
Crossing to Safety. Zadie Smith’s
On Beauty is
a full example, as are many other works from the burgeoning genre of
campus fiction. Richard Powers shows how reflexive the image has become
with his glance in
The Gold Bug Variations at the heroine’s
“fully clothed grope with her thesis instructor, momentarily aroused for
the first time since his tenure, when the two of them compared the
relative merits of
Volpone and
As You Like It.”
Indeed, the new stereotype has its roots in literary examples that go
back well over a century, most conspicuously to Casaubon in
Middlemarch and to Mr. Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse,
both pompous, aging narcissists, the former creatively and sexually
sterile but married to a passionate young beauty, the latter, though he
has written many books and fathered eight children, sustained only by
regular fertilizations by his wife’s maternal fecundity. One should also
mention
Hedda Gabler’s George Tesman and
Uncle Vanya’s
Serebryakoff, another pair of ponderous failures misallied to beautiful
young women. But the sex of the authors of the two novels I just
mentioned points to perhaps the most significant fact about the new
academic stereotype and the narrative paradigm in which it is typically
situated, which is that they are a way of articulating the superiority
of female values to male ones: of love, community, and self-sacrifice to
ambition, success, and fame.
So why are academics regarded as the most appropriate instrument for
this lesson? Yes, there are any number of movies in which a high-powered
lawyer or executive or even artist (male or female) learns that family
and friendship are more important than money and success, but these
figures are allowed to become rich and successful first, before
discovering what really matters (and are allowed to hold on to their
wealth and fame afterward). Only for academics is ambition as such
reprehensible. Only for them is it self-defeating, even on its own
terms. The explanation lies in another remarkable fact about the new
stereotype (though it was also part of the old one): the representative
academic is always a professor of humanities. The ones who aren’t
English professors are professors of history or philosophy or art
history or French. And this goes as much for the novels and plays I’ve
mentioned as for the films. It seems that in the popular imagination,
“professor” means “humanities professor.” Of course, there are plenty of
science professors in movies and books, but they are understood as
scientists, not professors. Social scientists are quoted liberally in
the press, but generally under the rubric of “scholar” or “expert.”
Stereotypes arise from the partitioning of complex realities—academics
play multiple roles—into mutually isolated simplifications. Say the
word
professor, and the popular mind, now as in the old days,
conjures up the image of a quotation-spouting bookworm. And it is that
figure who has become an object lesson in the vanity of ambition.
In the popular imagination, humanities professors don’t have anything to be ambitious
about.
No one really knows what they do, and to the extent that people do
know, they don’t think it’s worth doing—which is why, when the subject
of humanistic study is exposed to public view, it is often ridiculed as
trivial, arcane, or pointless. Other received ideas come into play here:
“those who can’t do, teach”; the critic as eunuch or parasite; the
ineffective intellectual; tenure as a system for enshrining mediocrity.
It may be simply because academics don’t pursue wealth, power, or, to
any real extent, fame that they are vulnerable to such accusations. In
our culture, the willingness to settle for something less than these
Luciferian goals is itself seen as emasculating. Academics are
ambitious, but in a weak, pathetic way. This may also explain why they
are uniquely open to the charge of passionlessness. No one expects a
lawyer to be passionate about the law: he’s doing it for the money. No
one expects a plumber to be passionate about pipes: he’s doing it to
support his family. But a professor’s only excuse for doing something so
trivial and accepting such paltry rewards for it is his love for the
subject. If that’s gone, what remains? Nothing but baseless vanity and
feeble ambition. Professors, in the popular imagination, are absurd
little men puffing themselves up about nothing. It’s no wonder they need
to be taught a lesson.
Still none of this explains why the new academic stereotype has
emerged just now. The first possibility is that today’s academics are
portrayed as pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures because that’s what
they are. In terms of some of the longer-lasting elements of the
professorial image, this is no doubt true. Pedantry and elitism are
inherent temptations in the academic enterprise, and Max Weber remarked
nearly a century ago that, for professors, vanity is a sort of
occupational disease. Precisely because they don’t possess the kind of
wealth that accrues to doctors and lawyers or the status wealth confers,
academics are more apt to parade their intellectual superiority than
members of other elite professions. But professors have neither a
monopoly on nor a disproportionate share of quiet desperation or the
self-destructive gestures that attend it. Male professors are not
less-devoted or less-faithful husbands, on average, than other men—in
fact, relative to wealthier ones, they are probably more so. (That there
are now a substantial number of female academics is a circumstance the
popular imagination has yet to discover.)
The second possibility is that the current writers of screenplays and
novels have a special animus against professors, especially English
professors. Given the rumor that screenwriters are often former English
majors or English graduate students and that novelists tend to have
creative-writing appointments that put them in regular contact with
English professors, that they sometimes
are English professors,
and that in any case they have particular reason, given the relation
between artist and critic, to be suspicious of English professors, there
may be something to this hypothesis.
But there are larger reasons for the rise of the new academic
stereotype—reasons that are rooted in some of the changes that have come
to American society and to the academy’s place within it over the last
six decades, and especially over the last three or four. Americans’
traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have
intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites
have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means
of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more
demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The
existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual
hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling
that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same
time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy
more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their
children. With the
U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions
frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in
creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but
everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the
gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated.
The huge expansion of the college population in the decades after
World War II also created a new professoriate. If academics once tended
to be gentle, unworldly souls (or even if they were just seen that way),
that’s because they could afford to be. Advancement within the
profession depended to a great extent on a relatively small, informal,
old-boy network. Modest pay meant that many academics came from the
social elite and could rely on private incomes. But with the postwar
boom in higher education, academia became a viable career for vast
numbers of people from beyond the establishment: the bright, striving
sons of the great unwashed. Later, with concerns about fair labor
practices that followed the rights revolution, the whole system of
hiring and promotion became formalized and regularized. Still more
recently, the contraction of the college-age population and the
casualization of academic labor—the move from permanent faculty
positions to adjuncts, postdocs, and instructors—have created the job
crunch of the last two decades. The old-boy network has given way to an
unceasing scramble for position, and the kindly
luftmensch has
been displaced by the careerist parvenu. In today’s graduate programs,
the watchword is professionalization; no one talks much about the life
of the mind anymore. Of course, the old gentility rested on exclusion,
and the new rat race is meritocracy in motion; but images aren’t
necessarily fair. The new academic stereotype, with its emphasis on
moral failure and the frustrations of petty ambition, registers this
generational change.
But the one respect in which the new academic stereotype departs most
radically from current reality—yet in so doing most fully reflects
what’s been happening in American culture of late and most clearly
reveals the current state of the American psyche—has to do with sex. As
we’ve seen, one of the things nearly all professors in movies and novels
have in common is that they sleep with their students. This is true
even when the professor in question doesn’t otherwise conform to the new
stereotype. In fact, lust is almost the only emotion that movie
professors ever express toward their students. In the rare scenes in
which these teachers actually teach, the point is to exhibit the
classroom or office hour as a locus of sexual tension. The popular mind
can’t seem to imagine what other kind of relationship, let alone what
other kind of intimacy, a professor and student could share. And it
certainly can’t imagine what other sort of gratification a person could
derive from teaching in a university.
Why has this idea of universities as dens of vice, where creepy
middle-aged men lie in wait for nubile young women, arisen in the last
few decades? First, coeducation. Coed colleges have existed since the
early 19th century, and large numbers of public universities, in
particular, have been coed since late in that century. But the great
wave of coeducation at the nation’s elite private schools, which take
the lead in forming the public image of university life, did not hit
until the late 1960s. At the same time, women were becoming an
increasingly visible presence at schools that had already been coed.
Another upheaval was under way by then, as well: the sexual revolution.
Suddenly, professors had access to large numbers of young women, and
just as suddenly, young women were asserting their sexuality with new
freedom and boldness. People drew the inevitable conclusion. Since then,
American culture has only become increasingly sexualized—which means,
for the most part, that youth has become increasingly sexualized by the
culture. Not coincidentally, concern about the sexual exploitation of
children has reached the dimension of a moral panic. In the figure of
the movie professor, Americans can vicariously enjoy the thought of
close proximity to all that firm young flesh while simultaneously
condemning the desire to enjoy it—the old Puritan dodge.
The situation is heightened and made ironic by two other recent
developments. The famously overprotective parenting style of the
baby-boom generation has put pressure on universities to revert to
acting
in loco parentis, forcing them to take on the
paternalistic role the boomers rejected during their own college years.
Professors are the surrogate parents that parents hand their children
over to, and the raising and casting out of the specter of the sexually
predatory academic may be a way of purging the anxiety that transaction
evokes. But long before the baby boomers’ offspring started to reach
college, the feminist campaign against sexual harassment—most effective
in academia, the institution most responsive to feminist concerns—had
turned universities into the most anxiously self-patrolled workplace in
American society, especially when it comes to relations between
professors and undergraduates. This is not to suggest that sexual
contact between college students and professors, welcome or unwelcome,
never takes place, but the belief that it is the norm is a product of
fantasy, not fact.
Still, there is a reality behind the
new, sexualized academic stereotype, only it is not what the larger
society thinks. Nor is it one that society is equipped to understand.
The relationship between professors and students can indeed be intensely
intimate, as our culture nervously suspects, but its intimacy, when it
occurs, is an intimacy of the mind. I would even go so far as to say
that in many cases it is an intimacy of the soul. And so the
professor-student relationship, at its best, raises two problems for the
American imagination: it begins in the intellect, that suspect faculty,
and it involves a form of love that is neither erotic nor familial, the
only two forms our culture understands. Eros in the true sense is at
the heart of the pedagogical relationship, but the professor isn’t the
one who falls in love.
Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning
desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and
presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor
ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking
about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind
are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in
the soul. Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual
attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will
exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great
majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not
only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object,
from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a
fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit. The professor
becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the
semester—the studying, the speaking in class, the writing—are
consecrated. The alert student understands this. In talking to one of my
teaching assistants about these matters, I asked her if she’d ever had a
crush on an instructor when she was in college. Yes, she said, a young
graduate student. “And did you want to have sex with him?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I wanted to have
brain sex with him.”
I’m not saying anything new here. All of this was known to Socrates, the greatest of teachers, and laid out in the
Symposium,
Plato’s dramatization of his mentor’s erotic pedagogy. We are all
“pregnant in soul,” Socrates tells his companions, and we are drawn to
beautiful souls because they make us teem with thoughts that beg to be
brought into the world. The imagery seems contradictory: are we pregnant
already, or does the proximity of beautiful souls make us so? Both: the
true teacher helps us discover things we already knew, only we didn’t
know we knew them. The imagery is also deliberately sexual. The
Symposium,
in which the brightest wits of Athens spend the night drinking,
discoursing on love, and lying on couches two by two, is charged with
sexual tension. But Socrates wants to teach his companions that the
beauty of souls is greater than the beauty of bodies.
And just as he finishes educing this idea, in walks Alcibiades, the
most beautiful young man in the city. Alcibiades was the brilliant bad
boy of late fifth-century B.C. Athenian politics, a cross between Jack
Kennedy and Jimmy Dean, and Socrates must have known that he was the
most interesting student he would ever meet, because Socrates’ love for
him was legendary. But it wasn’t the kind his beloved imagined, and
Alcibiades complains about how the older man, after bewitching him with
divine conversation, would refuse to touch him. The sexy young student
had fallen, to his amazement, for the ugly old teacher. At last,
Alcibiades tells us, he contrived to get Socrates alone—let’s call this
office hours—only to discover that all his teacher wanted to do was
engage in more conversation. The “eros of souls,” in Alan Bloom’s
Platonic phrase—“brain sex,” in plainer language—is not only higher than
the eros of bodies, it is more satisfying.
Can there be a culture less equipped than ours to receive these
ideas? Sex is the god we worship most fervently; to deny that it is the
greatest of pleasures is to commit cultural blasphemy. In any case, how
can you have an eros of souls if you don’t have souls? Our inability to
understand intimacy that is neither sexual nor familial is linked to the
impoverishment of our spiritual vocabulary. Religion still speaks of
the soul, but to the popular mind, at least, it means something remote
from our earthly self. What it should mean is the self, the heart and
mind, or the heart-mind, as it develops through experience. That’s what
Keats meant when he called the world a “vale of soul-making.” And
because we’re unequipped to understand the soul in this sense, we’re
unequipped to understand Socrates’ belief that the soul’s offspring are
greater than the body’s: that ideas are more valuable than children.
Another blasphemy. If there’s one god our culture worships as piously
as sex, it’s children. But sex and children, sexual intimacy and
familial intimacy, have something in common—beyond the fact that one
leads to the other: both belong to us as creatures of nature, not as
creators in culture. After Rousseau and Darwin and Freud, and with
evolutionary psychology preaching the new moral gospel, we’ve become
convinced that our natural self is our truest one. To be natural, we
believe, is to be healthy and free. Culture is confinement and
deformation. But the Greeks thought otherwise. To them, our highest good
is not what we share with the animals, but what we don’t share with
them, not the nature we’re born with, but the culture we make from
it—make, indeed, against it.
That is why, for the Greeks, the teacher’s relationship with the
child was regarded as more valuable and more intimate than the parents’.
Your parents bring you into nature, but your teacher brings you into
culture. Natural transmission is easy; any animal can do it. Cultural
transmission is hard; it takes a teacher. But Socrates also inaugurated a
new idea about what teaching means. His students had already been
educated into their culture by the time they got to him. He wanted to
educate them out of it, teach them to question its values. His teaching
wasn’t cultural, it was counter-cultural. The Athenians understood
Socrates very well when they convicted him of corrupting their youth,
and if today’s parents are worried about trusting their children to
professors, this countercultural possibility is really what they should
be worried about. Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive
activity—all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural
messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training
to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation).
But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The
teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of
soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that
quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace,
we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole
world and loses his mortal soul?
This is the kind of sex professors are having with their students
behind closed doors: brain sex. And this is why we put up with the
mediocre pay and the cultural contempt, not to mention the myriad
indignities of graduate school and the tenure process. I know perfectly
well that not every professor or every student feels this way or acts
this way, nor does every university make it possible for them to do so.
There are hacks and prima donnas at the front of many classrooms,
slackers and zombies in the seats. And it doesn’t matter who’s in either
position if the instructor is teaching four classes at three different
campuses or if there are 500 people in the lecture hall. But there are
far more true teachers and far more true students at all levels of the
university system than those at its top echelons like to believe. In
fact, kids who have had fewer educational advantages before they get to
college are often more eager to learn and more ready to have their
deepest convictions overturned than their more fortunate peers. And it
is often away from the elite schools—where a single-minded focus on
research plus a talent for bureaucratic maneuvering are the necessary
tickets to success—that true teaching most flourishes.
What attracts professors to students, then, is not their bodies but
their souls. Young people are still curious about ideas, still believe
in them—in their importance, their redemptive power. Socrates says in
the
Symposium that the hardest thing about being ignorant is
that you’re content with yourself, but for many kids when they get to
college, this is not yet true. They recognize themselves as incomplete,
and they recognize, if only intuitively, that completion comes through
eros. So they seek out professors with whom to have relationships, and
we seek them out in turn. Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It
is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between
teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer
together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even
the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book
and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the
teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have
for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the
briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will
all meet again.
The truth is that these possibilities are not quite as alien to
American culture as I’ve been making out. Along with the new stereotype
that’s dominated the portrayal of academics in film and fiction in
recent years has come, far less frequently, a different image of what a
college teacher can be and mean, exactly along the lines I’ve been
tracing. It is there in Julia Roberts’s character in
Mona Lisa Smile, in the blind professor who teaches Cameron Diaz’s character to love poetry in
In Her Shoes, and most obviously, in
Tuesdays with Morrie, that gargantuan cultural phenomenon. Robin Williams offered a scholastic version in
Dead Poets Society. But we seem to need to keep the idea, or at least the person who embodies it, at a safe distance. Both
Mona Lisa Smile and
Dead Poets Society take
place in the 1950s and at single-sex schools. Cameron Diaz’s mentor and
Morrie Schwartz are retired and dying. The Socratic relationship is so
profoundly disturbing to our culture that it must be defused before it
can be approached. Yet many thousands of kids go off to college every
year hoping, at least dimly, to experience it. It has become a kind of
suppressed cultural memory, a haunting imaginative possibility. In our
sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become
the love that dares not speak its name.
Correct: you definitely don’t
want to tell him that. If you want to get your message across and have
that friendship restored, then… don’t hold your breath. He’s probably
still spooked (and feeling awkward), so don’t expect any immediate return to BFF-ville.
it
is better to avoid writing long messages. This is because you may not
be able to create a good message if you try making it too long.
