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March 21, 2007

In Praise of Literalism
By Bob Connor - The Teagle Foundation

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After I wrote the blog entry “Kids Die,” a friend wrote me that he agreed that speaking of higher education as a “life or death” matter was a useful metaphor, “in the way we speak of ‘the life of the mind.’”

I don’t think so. I don’t think it is a metaphor, at least not all the time, and when it is a metaphor, I don’t think it’s a useful one. Better to be a literalist. Before you dismiss my conversion to literalism try this thought experiment:

At Christmas a friend gave Professor Jones a spherical piece of clear quartz, teasing him that while historians might see clearly into the past, they needed a “crystal ball” to see into the future. Professor Jones soon decided to get the object out of his house and put it in his office. He left it on his desk and all but forgot about it until one day, while correcting exams, his eyes drifted over to it, and he fell into a day dream, of sorts. Looking into the sphere, he thought he saw a student of his, now middle aged, clad in a fine grey suit, putting papers from a broad and impressive desk, into a fine leather brief case. Professor Jones felt it was a scene set several decades in the future, and that this person was a student whom he would teach next semester. But he couldn’t tell which student. All he knew was that this student would become Secretary of Defense and would make a recommendation to the President about going to war. Professor Jones then saw another scene, which he felt confident was taking place at exactly that same moment in the future. He could see his grand daughter signing some document as she enlisted in the Marines; she was saying how much she wanted to serve her country. At that point Professor Jones broke out of his reverie, and turned back to the examination papers, shaking his head as if he could in this way escape from this fantasy, though in fact he could never quite out it aside.

The question: Will Professor Jones teach any differently next semester? And if so, how?

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It was good to hear from you, especially with such a provocative thought experiment. I saw your message before I left the office last night and thought about it on the train. It also was in my mind during an hour long conversation with my son last night, who, in his second year of graduate school, is discouraged with the postmodern focus of his peers and many faculty, where -- to him, at least -- it seems that there is almost no room for questioning current premises and none for the big questions. But, as for a reaction to your planned posting, first of all I would answer the question at its end by saying that if Prof. Jones is representative of the vast majority of our colleagues he will probably not teach any differently the next semester, or he won't do so for long. Of course, there are exceptions. Most of us who probably would teach differently might respond by fairly predictable comments on politics, which is the extra-disciplinary area (apart from TIAA-CREF) where we feel most comfortable holding forth. Very few faculty would actually do something as dramatic as redesign a syllabus or adjust specific class meetings to enfold the life or death side of liberal learning. Second, I certainly see your point about the literalness with which "life or death" ought to be taken. (I tried to find your posting on "Kids Die," by the way, but I didn't succeed.) In any case, how can there be any question about the fact that education, including higher education, helps to create people who make decisions and non-decisions that lead to life or to death. Better, deeper education, better, deeper decisions. But -- and I say this as someone who has always been excessively cautious about the use and interpretation of metaphor -- I do think that "life or death" is also a metaphor. What I like to consider the real guts of liberal education, anyway, is about thinking, feeling, and meaning, so that without its benefits we're not fully alive, and we're not as well prepared as we should be to live in the face of death and die having faced life. I have a pretty clear sense that that's metaphorical. Third, and therefore, I wonder whether it ought to be not "life or death" but "life and death." Surely the humanities and the biological sciences teach us that everything we do is conditioned by this conjoined pair. From my point of view, with "and" we ineluctably get both literalness and metaphoricalness (is that a word?) from the phrase. I admire you for bringing such important issues to the attention of our higher education community. You deserve a lot of credit for doing something that nobody else is willing to do.
March 21, 2007 – David Spadafora - Newberry Library
I would like to think that the most important lesson of any education is intellectual humility. Students would be encouraged to think expansively and to develop confidence in their capacity to entertain complex and competing ideas simultaneously. But their confidence should be tempered by a commensurate appreciation of the limits of their imaginations and analytical abilities. Initiators of wars engage in acts of incalculable hubris; they assume that they and other individuals can predict and control the course of events. Reason, in other words, should be the antidote to reckless action; education should empower students to know when to act and—when not—to act.
March 21, 2007 – Fitz Brundage - Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
I agree with Fitz Brundage about the value of intellectual humility and its relationship to public policy in general and the initiation of war in particular. However, taking Bob Connor’s suggestion that we read literally, I note that the former student in the gray suit is not necessarily initiating war; (s)he is providing advice about going to war, and under circumstances that neither we nor Professor Jones can discern. If “intellectual hubris,” along with its handmaiden the arrogance of power, has trumped humility and reason too often over the past half-century of American foreign policy, we also know that American decisions to go to war have at other moments brought an end to slavery and helped to destroy one of the most murderous regimes in human history. Our students need to learn the balance between intellectual humility and the potential for human agency. If reason is the antidote to reckless action, then what part of education spurs our graduates “to know when to act”? The answer perhaps lies in another aspect of education: the ability to formulate questions (itself depending on intellectual humility) and synthesize the information generated by those questions. Perhaps Professor Jones is already teaching the value of intellectual humility and uncertainty. And perhaps the examination papers he is grading require students to synthesize information from a diversity of sources that they have learned how to read critically. My inclination would then be to hope that he stays the course. But then again, that would imply a level of certainty on his part that would offer a poor role model for the sort of education that Fitz Brundage wisely prescribes. We need to maintain our own intellectual humility, and constantly question our own assumptions, including those regarding the virtues of various ways our granddaughters might wish to serve their country.
March 21, 2007 – Jim Grossman - Vice President for Research & Education, The Newberry Library
Fitz Brundage and Jim Grossman both raise critical points about Bob Connor's thought experiment. If liberal education can inform future decision-making, we surely would want these future decisions to be made with a measure of humility and a measure of self-confidence. Perhaps there is a class dimension to this problem. Some of us teach future Defense Secretaries, some of us teach future marines, and some of us teach both groups of students. It seems to me that the future Defense Secretaries must be taught some intellectual humility to match the self-confidence they already bring to the table (which is vivid in the exams they write), while the future marines must be taught some intellectual self-confidence to match the humility that they already bring to the table (which is often especially vivid in their exams if they are women). Deference to authority may be more dangerous than the arrogant power it enables, not least in decisions about what it means to "serve our country." Humility is a cardinal virtue, but most of us (presumably including Professor Jones) celebrate the exams in which students who started out thinking their task was to mimic us learn that they can mobilize evidence to challenge our interpretations. That's when we know we've taught them well and, we can hope, done our small part to help empower them to breach the hierarchies that allocate future roles.
March 21, 2007 – Robin Einhorn - Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley
If it’s possible to peer into the crystal ball in reverse, for a view of the past, let me suggest a scene from a generation ago, and this one involving a student who would indeed one day become a secretary of defense. Donald Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton in 1954, with a major in politics. A year behind him came Ralph Nader (public and international affairs) and Gary Nash (history), both members of the class of ’55. I don’t know if they knew each other at the time or if they took some of the same classes (maybe Eric Goldman’s modern US history course, which seemed to be quite an eye-opener for Nash?), but I do know that they went in very different directions over the course of their respective careers. I also know they eventually took very different views of the decision to go to war in Iraq, on which Rumsfeld did indeed provide the kind of advice that helped influence the outcome. I doubt that Princeton in the ‘50s was a hotbed of intellectual humility, but I do wonder what a professor who perhaps taught all three of these young men at the time would think about the way he (and in those days it would certainly have been a “he”) influenced the way they turned out. It’s possible he could be appalled by one, impressed by another, and perplexed by the third. It’s also possible that he could simply see all three as success stories in their own ways, students who learned enough to keep learning, who worked hard enough to know that work helps make things work out. I haven’t (yet) had any former students who have become as prominent as either of those cold-war Princetonians, but I’ve seen enough alums to have decided not to take much credit (or blame) for what they’ve done or who they’ve become. And “become” is the important word there. The students I teach have me for one course, maybe two, out of the forty or so courses they take as undergraduates, and they take those courses in four, maybe five, years fairly early in life, after which I assume (and hope) they keep learning and working – just as Rumsfeld, Nader, and Nash did. In the comparatively short time I have them in class, I can offer them some perspective on the past and present, I can challenge them if they engage in facile thinking and lazy speaking, and I can tempt them with the hint that there’s a lot more fascinating stuff to learn – but then I have to wish them well for the future, whatever it turns out to be. Intellectual humility, indeed. On the other hand, whenever I’m in a social setting where people are complaining about some form of widespread ignorance – Why can’t we get Americans to read more/think more/know more/care more about some issue or other? – I do enjoy a moment of modest intellectual pride. I do that for a living, I tell them, and it beats doing just about anything else.
March 22, 2007 – Gregory Nobles - Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program, Georgia Tech
In Praise of Literalism Hi, Bob et al: It happens that I have passionate convictions about this vision in the spherical crystal, though they are perhaps in some sense peripheral. My most passionate conviction regarding the present state of higher education (and education generally) is that it has become or is becoming overwhelmingly utilitarian and instrumentalist -- in the sense that we are abandoning the traditions of liberal arts & sciences education to chase after the will o the wisp of "practicality." I know this is a hoary cliche, but the trend is accelerating, even at our best institutions. For instance, Chapel Hill has instituted a curriculum in "entrepreneurship," whatever that means -- I don't mean to be unfair to it because I have no idea what the core substance is. But my prejudice is that kids all -- even the best and brightest -- are being induced to divert their attention from classical studies -- languages, literature, history -- to this sort of thing. What it suggests to me is that one day in the not so distant future they will wake up freeling cheated one bright morning and wishing they hadn't wasted their early education on instrumentalist hogwash (eg, "international relations"???) From this premise, I infer that on the point raised by the sagacious Dr. Connor, it would be a mistake for Prof. Jones to deviate from his heuristic convictions (assuming them to be sufficiently serious and classical) in order to try to anticipate (and thus head off) some Rumsfeld or W in the making. It seems patent to me, indeed, that what is missing in our Leaders today (less so in our warriors, indeed far less so) are the signs that they once studied history seriously and that the said study immunized them against the narrow horizons and superficialities so evident in the way they "do" policy. Knowing history and foreign cultures is no guarantee against folly, but it may raise the percentatges a bit. Recommended reading on this pt: Zbig Brzezinski's "Second Chance." I don't regard it as accidental that Zbig comes of a learned Polish heritage and has forgotten more history than the entire Bush cabinet ever knew. It is no accident that he and Jessica Matthews (president of the Carnegie Endowment, & far from incidentally the daughter of Barbara Tuchman) alone among the weighty voices in Washington said, early and often, what was wrong with the optional invasion of Iraq. Apologies for my wandering thoughts but it is late in the day. All best, Ed.
March 26, 2007 – Ed Yoder - Writer, professor of journalism & humaities emeritus, Washington & Lee U.
On literalism and death If I understand the thread of the argument (starting with the "Kids Die" post) -- and I'm not sure that I do -- it's that we should approach education the same way that doctors approach treatments for a fatal disease. We should do so, because the way that we educate could -- literally -- have an effect that amounts to life or death, either for our students, or for the people that they might directly or indirectly affect. An interesting idea, but one that leads to intractable solutions. First, it should be pointed out that in educating students we're not trying to eradicate fatal diseases; students are not piles of negatives to be conquered, but bundles of limitless potential -- in both negative and positive ways. Many of us have had the experience of "teaching" truly great students. I don't know about you, but my experience is that I don't do much teaching; I expose them, and they learn on their own. Often it doesn't seem to matter much what I do. This is fundamentally different from prescribing antibiotics (or whatever the analogous medical procedure is). Next, there's the very real problem of measuring outcomes when it comes to education. I don't mean standardized testing, and I certainly don't want to invoke the current President's education "program." I mean outcomes like the ones measured in Bob's "thought experiment." How do you measure a student's a) level of professional /personal success, b) ability to do something with that success, and c) capabilities in a moment of crisis, 30 years after their undergraduate education? How do you educate in anticipation of such a moment? Too hard to track, too hard to measure, too many other things we could be worrying about. Finally, the issue of intellectual and personal humility. I don't know how to teach this. I don't know how to teach most of the most important things that we are generally assumed to be responsible for: integrity, character, honesty, inquisitiveness, open-mindedness. It seems to me that the best I can do is to try to teach my subject matter (Classics) which happens to provide myriad examples of the qualities listed above, and try (with inevitable failure) to exemplify the personal qualities that I want my students to "learn." Again, I don't have "prescriptions" that will eradicate the negative qualities in my students, and allow these "healthy" ones to predominate. A matter of life or death? Perhaps. But I don't see how we'll know. And I don't see how we'll measure the outcomes precisely enought to determine equally precise ways to modify our procedures. Call me a sceptic.
March 30, 2007 – Kirk Ormand - Oberlin College
worrying about students' souls I would like to second Kirk Ormand’s skepticism about the care of souls. Teachers who care passionately about their students’ souls are inclined to be inquisitors, eager to root out heresies. These are the folks who teach students to read great works of literature in order to expose their corrupt ideological assumptions. My favorite author is Homer, and I’m thankful that my Homer professor at the University of Michigan had no interest in my soul. I never felt the slightest pressure to appreciate the Homeric epics; no pressure to derive truths about life from Iliad and Odyssey; no pressure to discover the relevance of the poems to my own life. Only the pressure to get through sixty lines of Greek every day, but that was all I needed. Robert Hellenga, Knox College
April 1, 2007 – Robert Hellenga - Knox College
Like Kirk Ormand, I have doubts about the proposition that we have a duty to care for our students’ souls, but my skepticism does not lead me to reject that duty altogether. ... Teaching students to reason morally is hard, but not any harder than teaching them to read Greek. At some level, in fact, these may be the same activity. It’s hard to avoid moral reasoning if you teach Classics. As Kirk notes, our texts and the way we read them invite discussion of qualities like integrity, honesty, inquisitiveness, and the like. We can't ignore or avoid moral questions, and the only things we have to ask ourselves are first, how intentional we will be in addressing them with our students, and second, how we will go about avoiding that slippery slope from moral reasoning to moralizing. If Professor Jones has already thought about these questions, he won’t teach very differently next semester. He may find that he pays more attention than usual to the quality of his students’ moral reasoning. He may also find himself being especially careful to remember the intellectual and personal humility that Kirk rightly advocates. An aspect of that humility, I suspect, will be recognition that he can do very little to influence the exact shape of future moral choices students make.
April 6, 2007 – Lee T. Pearcy - The Episcopal Academy
I think the ambition of college-level teachers to make the kind of difference desired in students' education and future lives is a noble ideal but ill-conceived. I think that the future person is formed in all kinds of ways by the time she or he gets to first year in a university. There CAN be transformations of the type desired, and teachers CAN make a difference in students' future lives at that level, but these are exceptional moments…I think students arrive in college and university already equipped to have humility, or not. For the battle you want to fight must be largely over by the time you get to college. To pick up on one of the points made. Look at that egregious pair Nader and Rumsfeld—in the end they aren't quite so different as one at first as your respondents may have supposed. For Rummie it was going after Saddam and Iraq, for Ralph, a messianic certitude that led to the debacle of 2000. Thanks a lot, Ralph. Thanks a lot, Princeton. So why don't you shift from the horizontal field to the vertical? Condescend, condescend, condescend. Try these cystic fibrosis ideas out on high school and junior high and elementary school teachers. See what THEY think of this stuff. Here's another way to figure it. Try to think about whole plants, rooted in soil, like cyclamen for example, and quit obsessively focusing on the cut flowers of American education, which is what college students these days are: cut flowers, already fully formed and blasted, ready to be pollinated, for example, but when you come down to it, already the Rose of Sharon, or the New England Skunk Cabbage, depending on the night soil of whatever family they spring from. It is naive to think that Princeton could have made any difference in Rummy or Ralph, and that was 50 + years ago.
April 6, 2007 – James Tatum - Dartmouth College
Given the uncountable contingencies between the moment of Prof. Jones's vision and its future enactment, it would be unlikely that changing how he teaches his course could, in itself, change the choices his students make after they graduate. And yet, and yet. There is the other possibility. I'm sure you've had the experience that I've had, when an alum comes to you many years after she / he has graduated and tells you what an impression your course made. Sometimes said alum might even quote back a comment you made, however long ago, that she / he has held on to as a kind of talisman. Such encounters are simultaneously heartwarming and humbling, because they make you realize that your teaching may in fact have changed someone's life.
April 6, 2007 – Andrew Szegedy-Maszak - Wesleyan University
I think education is, literally, life and death, yes I do. But I think I share some of the historians' takes. Having also read “Kids Die,” I don't know how the faculty's passionate commitment necessarily translates into that difference between life and death. In medicine, too, the patient's commitment (to taking the course of drugs prescribed, say) will also influence the outcome. In other words, what all this leaves out is the patient, or the student. My experience is that education can indeed be transformative and that faculty can make or break that. But it is also the case that there are students who refuse to be educated, who are in school to play a sport, hook up, party, or get a job…. I make sure to note, when I teach Greek art and archaeology, of all the places where art and literature talk about what really happens in war: slaughter, destruction, rape, slavery. I DWELL on it. I am about to teach the Kleophrades Painter's great hydria with the sack of Troy, in fact. I hope it will have an impact.…
April 6, 2007 – Carla M. Antonaccio - Duke University
My response, as a Greek tragedy type, is that if education is always potentially a matter of life and death, literally, so is every human action. And we don't know whether good deeds will ultimately have good consequences, either. If I am especially kind to somebody, that may simply fuel the anger that makes him murder somebody who is rude to him years later. This is not an argument for trivializing liberal arts education—having people think carefully and with nuance is better than having them not think—but I don't find the thought experiment helpful.
April 6, 2007 – Ruth Scodel - University of Michigan
…In the spring of 1970, I sat under a tree on the almost-deserted Princeton campus (the Cambodia strike was on and people were heading off in all directions) reading Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, and took away from that reading (and of course am now convinced this is a false memory and it's in something else he wrote) the line that the business of education is the liquidation of ignorance. There's an Augustinian pessimism about that view of course, and I take Kirk Ormand's point that you certainly can and should also look at each student as a bundle of possibilities; but there are few for whom the liquidation of ignorance is not a great benefit and some to many for whom it is the best thing we can do. But the 1970 undergraduate and the 2007 provost have some things in common on this. Where I find myself facing the issue now is in the myriad moments when something else is pressed as more important that one more day of classes.…I think we do need to demonstrate better than we have to the many observers, stakeholders, and well-wishers (the approximate Greek for that is eumenides, I think) who surround us that what goes on in our classrooms, libraries, and laboratories is really important.…The urgency that I feel is the need to tell that story better, and to have the facts to back me up when I tell it.
April 6, 2007 – James O'Donnell - Georgetown University
Classics et al. Though the crystal ball metaphor doesn’t work very well for me, I think that having such metaphors or prompts to encourage us to think about the long-range impact of our teaching is essential. One needs constantly to remind oneself that most students will within not many years forget most of the specifics that they and we work on so hard—the twists and turns of the Greek verb, the fingering for a tough section in Beethoven, the interpretation of a particular passage in Horace or Aeschylus. What matters is what will remain after such specifics have been forgotten, and anything that reminds or encourages us to think about what those long-range residuals will be is emphatically to the point. I agree that to hope to shape these long-range outcomes in any very specific ways is neither wise nor useful. For myself, I prefer to think of various “habits of mind” that I think one can encourage regardless of what one is teaching, among them the following: --a delight in learning and exploring new ideas; --the rigor, clarity, and discipline to think complex matters through and to put one’s conclusions into words; --recognition that many, perhaps most, important decisions involve dealing with “gray areas, not with absolutes, and the ability to make decisions under these circumstances; --the willingness both to listen and to lead; --the capacity to change and to grow; --a sense of humor, especially about oneself. To encourage and inspire and facilitate the development of such habits is surely beyond the capacity of any one teacher, but the more that those of us who teach can think in such long-range terms and share such long-range goals, the more chance there is that together we can exert a real impact on our students. If a crystal ball helps some of us in that direction, bravo; if it doesn’t, each of us needs to find of the metaphor or prompt that works for us. David Porter, Williams College ddodger@skidmore.edu
April 11, 2007 – David Porter - Williams College

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