|
Have you ever
noticed how unusual academics are?
From standard oddities
(like the absent-minded professor’s curious
taste in clothing or his opaque sense of humor)
to neurotic eccentricities (his social awkwardness
or unusual parenting habits) to full-scale psychopathologies
(a rigid and destructive adherence to dogma, a strange
intolerance for dissent), students sure notice!
Why are academics
so unusual, so abnormal? I think it’s because
professors, completely devoted and pious as they
are to disciplinary expertise, to their focused
and arcane area of specialization, are alienated
from the rest of intellectual life, from an authentic
and full human life. Combinatorial group theory,
or lattice gauge theory, or Chicano literature,
or medieval Chinese poetry is not the proper end
of a full human intellectual life. But too often
we professors conceive of each of them, quite blindly,
as if it were. We mistake our genuine and hard earned,
but pinched and narrow, disciplinary mastery for
wisdom. We flatter ourselves by assuming that our
own beloved discipline can do the impossible—allow
us to see beyond its necessarily limited horizons
to the broader and comprehensive concerns of the
nature of the world and our place in it. In this
way we are, I think, wounded.
Students see this
wound, our pain, and our afflicted, tremulous, yearning
for healing. Students, unlike us, understand, usually
only in an inchoate way, that the proper ends of
intellectual life are not arcane and specialized
disciplinary expertise. They yearn for something
more, for something expansive; they resist narrow
overtures from the blind and wounded.
The signal act of
defiance of a liberal arts college like Wabash is
its deliberate and systemic allowance for the possibility
of resisting this myopia. Wabash carves out a space
for those rare professors who view the cultivation
of disciplinary expertise as subservient to much
broader aims, aims that cannot be met by simple
fealty to a hodge-podge of introductory “general
education” courses in a random assemblage
of discipline-based departments, or by the incantation
of tired slogans like “critical thinking”,
the industry standards in American higher education.
Juxtaposed against the deeply muddled way in which
our “industry” understands technical
mastery, research specialization, and the concomitant
“professionalization” to be the chief
qualifications to teach college students, our quixotic,
even heroic, resistance can be seductive and inspiring,
to both faculty and students.
Eva Brann from St.
John’s College offers an instructive commentary
on the difference between genuine questions and
sham questions that serves as an opening tonic to
higher education’s confused dyspepsia. A genuine
question is one that the questioner doesn’t
know the answer to. It leaves uncertainty in its
wake and generates authentic conversation in which
none of the participants knows the answer, but all
desire it. In fact, a genuine question is nothing
more than the desire for an answer. A sham question—a
problem set, for instance—on the other hand,
is one that the questioner already knows the answer
to, and hence, cares very little about; for instance,
from a typical problem set in the calculus, “What
is the derivative of the sine function?”
And while clearly
we should be inquiring with our students by asking
genuine questions, instead we usually spend our
time asking sham questions (in mathematics, this
takes the form of pursuing scientifically intentioned
problem sets). In the absence of genuine questions—that
is, in the absence of actual inquiry—a fetish
for method invades our thinking and our teaching.
After all, when “teaching” becomes nothing
more than revealing what we already know to those
who do not yet know—that is, when teaching
becomes merely “professing”—what’s
left but method? Here is Camus, from The Fall, on
method: “When one has no character, one has
to apply a method.” Classroom management techniques,
group projects, lavish computer applications, multi-media
extravaganzas, silver bullet textbooks, service
learning schemes, pedagogical workshops and retreats,
web-assisted delivery systems, even (heaven help
us!) distance learning, become the heart of the
matter. The professor merely searches for the most
effective technique for dispensing information;
he or she becomes coordinator, facilitator, and
manager of “materials”. And eventually
the students themselves become the material, to
be shaped, cast, and manufactured by the professor.
The professor’s
ultimate ambition in all of this molding—be
he a conservative moralist, a political correct
post-modern, or a religious fundamentalist—is
to straighten his students out morally, to teach
and preach virtue. And so we see that, at least
as professors, the dogmatic right and the tolerant
left are simply obverse images of the same worn
coin. Their self-delusion about the deep-seated
desire to remain morally unchallenged is coextensive.
It is a self-delusion which itself challenges the
freedom which is the necessary backdrop for a liberal
arts education; the possibility of inquiry is simply
passed over in silence.
Of course, no one
wants to be used as materials, to be treated as
means. So students resist. We then respond with
a feverish pursuit of a better method, a renewed
and intensified zeal to profess. Students, always
smarter than we think they are, dig in their heels,
and resist even more ferociously. The possibility
of an authentic liberal education is crushed under
the weight of straightening students out, of treating
them as means, and not ends.
One way we try to
“fix” this is by cultivating an obsession
with utility, both in what we teach and in how we
teach. We see this obsession in our relentless campaign
to defend a college education on the grounds that
it guarantees both economic success and good citizenship.
The connection between love of money and love of
knowing is unclear at best.
Claims about guaranteeing
good citizenship are even more puzzling. A school
that devotes itself to authentic liberal education,
one that esteems freedom, is a radical and dangerous
institution, as it systematically incorporates into
its assumptions the possibility that eventually
those whom it educates will turn away from all of
the virtues it cherishes and embrace instead all
that is subversive and threatening, to the school
and to the state. That is, it is necessarily potentially
self-undermining as it allows for the possibility
of its own demise. Good citizenship? The state thought
Socrates was such a good citizen that it executed
him!
Ultimately this obsession
with utility in higher education is especially pernicious
in that it nullifies our claim—a claim, ironically
enough, nearly unique to the liberal arts—that
a life devoted to actual inquiry is an end in itself.
How, then, might
we respond to this malaise? One way is by carving
out a small community on the margins (as Wabash
biologist/poet Robert Petty might have said) of
the higher education landscape, devoted at least
in part to the dangerous and subversive project
of reading difficult books, asking big questions,
and not being satisfied merely with technical—and
hence, provincial—mastery. Our hope is that
you will eventually emerge from this community a
little less foolish than when you entered, and that
you just might even learn how to live well. The
radical message of dissent that Wabash announces
to the world is that it allows for such a community,
out here, in the margins.
J.D.
Philllips is chair of the Wabash College Department
of Mathematics and a member of the WM Editorial
Advisory Board.
|