Chris Fauske
By Chris Fauske
Interim Dean
School of Arts and Sciences
It is largely unnecessary to point out that this edition of ASpect is different from anything that has gone before, and so I won’t dwell on that observation. But I will say that I hope you are enjoying the new format.
Much of the current issue deals with questions of teaching and learning. Indeed, almost all issues of ASpect have dealt with this, regardless of what the broader themes might have been. This seems appropriate. Surely the main concern of faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences should be teaching and learning?
I’m teaching again this semester after a long—too long—absence from the classroom. I’m teaching English composition, a course I have always loved, both as a student and as a teacher. As always, I’ve asked the students to read a single work of non-fiction and have based the assignments around this book. Coincidentally, just before the semester started I picked up a much-discussed work by Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. By and large, the reviews in this country were far less thoughtful than those in Europe, but Sam Anderson does do a fine job of capturing both the spirit and the tone of Bayard’s book in his review, “French Twist: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read Proves its Own Point” in New York magazine. [I have just noticed, by the way, that the French title is itself a question, Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus? I'm curious why the English-langauge versions of the book have universally dropped the interrogative. 'Though this rather supports Bayard's point, I suppose, and, coincidentally, mine below about Hunger / Sult. The English version, even assuming an otherwise perfect translation [itself an impossibility] in dropping the question mark means I cannot ever “read” Bayard’s book.]
For isn’t one of the great truths, great but unspoken, of our profession that we are all the time called to comment upon—to teach even!—material with which we have, at best, passing familiarity? Material which, ironically, we then expect our students to discourse upon with some authority at some stage of the semester, a discourse which we then in all seriousness assume to judge.
And there is nothing wrong with this.
Bayard is correct when he observes that it really isn’t whether we’ve read a book or not that determines our ability to talk about it, but, rather, our ability to understand its contexts and its social implications. That, in fact, if I am talking about Hunger, Knut Hamsun’s best known work in English, in this country I am going to have a very different conversation from the one I would have in Norway, where Sult comes now wrapped in a complicated political-nationalist-social layering that makes it impossible, even allowing for the language in which it is read, for the book to be talked about in one place as it is in another. What, then, does it mean to have read Hunger / Sult?
And in a course limited by the calendar and by the various learning outcomes of the syllabus, do our students realistically have time to read a book well enough to get to know it before at least beginning the process of using its content in the course? Of course not.
Then, too, there is the truth that “the difference between a great work of art and a minor one is that great art seems the greater each time one renews the acquaintance. Familiarity with it is on one level impossible, which is why one can know Hamlet or Lear by heart and still be surprised by every new performance.”1 Wilson’s observation means, of course, that a book worth reading has never been read. It awaits a re-reading. Just as is the case with any work of art. I seldom return home to England any more, but when I do go, it is all I can do to refrain from immediately heading to the National Gallery to look once more at Claude Lorraine’s “Landscape with Narcissus and Echo.” It is never the same painting twice. And how often does John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” surprise the listener who has heard it countless times before?
What, then, are we to do?
Well, I still think it is a good idea to instill in our students a sense of the value of reading (or of painting or of playing / composing), but that is too simplistic a solution, too easy an outcome, and one that allows us to be prescriptive in our requirements. It’s not just the content—especially the content?—that matters. It is the ability to extrapolate, to extemporize, and to elaborate. To know, in other words, audience, purpose, and intentions. Underpinning all this, it seems to me, are the matters of identity, of ethics, and of responsibility.
And how will we know if we have succeeded, for ourselves and for our students? It will be precisely because that sense of wonder that once moved us when we were young has returned, this time to stay, this time to let us see that “a truly great novel is a tale to the simple, a parable to the wise, and a direct revelation of reality to a man who has made it part of his being” as James Murray, England’s second great lexicographer put it.2
What is true of a great novel is true of anything worth knowing and doing, and revelation is not so humble a goal as to be unworthy of our best endeavors.
FOOTNOTES
1 A. N. Wilson, A Watch in the Night New York: Norton, 1996. 122.
2 Qtd. in Robertson Davies, Reading and Writing. Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah P., 1993. 27.
12 responses so far ↓
1 Jim Gubbins // Nov 6, 2008 at 10:23 pm
Is anyone there? If so, here’s a question: if we want our students to be curious, to wonder, to love books, to want to return to complex works, aren’t we then wanting to form our students emotions and desires? Aren’t we in the business of building character, that is, something more than cold skills, abilities, knowledge? If each of us were to explain what we want our students to get from our teaching, from education, I suspect most of us would unavoidably fall into using terms related to feeling, emotions, desires–that whole realm of sentiment, affect, whatever you call it. If we aren’t talking about that, deliberately making that a goal of our cooperative effort, then why aren’t we? Is something missing? Is something broken?
2 cfauske // Nov 10, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Hi Jim: I’m out here. I don’t think we can, or should, try to form our students’ emotions and desires. We can build character and inspire curiosity, . by demonstrating that art, literature, music, philosophy, etc. can validate, strengthen, re-shape, re-vitalize emotions and desires. And in so doing, if we get it right, our students will become possessed of the tools that make self-reflection and self-criticism possible. Which is why the title for my piece draws on Søren Kierkegaard’s questions and answer: “What then is education? I had thought it was the curriculum the individual ran through in order to catch up with himself; and anyone who does not want to go through this curriculum will be little helped by being born into the most enlightened age.”
3 William Cornwell // Nov 12, 2008 at 1:32 am
It seems unavoidable for us as educators to want to engage with and shape our students’ values, both ethical and intellectual. Indeed, the College’s policy on academic integrity is explicit about certain values that our students are supposed to honor, and the mission statement of the state college system mentions students’ ethical development.
Of course, educators don’t want to indoctrinate students to uncritically accept all of our values, but certain values related to personal integrity and responsible citizenship are uncontroversially good, and society expects us to inculcate them in our students. We also should help our students acquire values and skills associated with critical thinking (e.g., openmindedness, curiosity, honesty, and self-criticism) so that throughout their lives they can explore what more specific political and ethical values they can adopt as reflective persons. After all, we’re not trying to create finished persons upon graduation but rather persons who always will be in the process of becoming better educated and more responsible citizens.
4 Perry Glasser // Dec 25, 2008 at 11:49 am
People who want to shape character and values in youth should become parents or lead religious congregations. Studying systems of moral behavior in such disciplines as Philosophy or Comparative Religion is not the same as endorsing and enforcing approved behaviors to “build character.” Character or ethics were never learned in classrooms; Socrates’ pupils were taught to pose questions and think—not what to think or how to behave.
This practice got Socrates executed, and I’ll suggest we should seek to emulate him. Hemlock all around, friends.
Socrates’ pupils at least showed up of their own free will. Make no mistake: our students attend our public college under duress. The duress is economic. More expensive educations are out of reach; they believe failure to acquire a degree means exclusion from middle-class life.
We are charged by the Commonwealth to define higher education for a clientele that believes it has no choice but to attend; we have a duty to do so without recourse to matters of character because Salem State College is a public institution. We are not a private school endorsing a philosophy; we are not a church-based school. We do not require students to attend chapel. When we invoke prayer at Convocation and Graduation, the prayers are non-sectarian.
Salem State is a civic organization, and though we are a civic organization, we do not require students to sign loyalty oaths or start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance. We do not fly American flags in each classroom. We do not require labor in service to the institution. We do not—yet—require service or labor to the greater community.
The only virtue we teach, like Socrates, is the spirit of open inquiry.
We may individually believe that patriotism, prayer or public service are signs of good character, but to require these behaviors of our students under the guise of “character building” for adults diminishes them. I also makes professors members of the Thought Police. We are not civic parents; we are not priests of a non-sectarian religion.
How shall we assess moral progress beyond tallying hours in approved activities? That’s a practice akin to equating years spent in a penitentiary to moral reformation. Who would like to argue that a sentence of ten years for embezzlement will produce a citizen twice as moral as a sentence of five? Will a student who does twenty hours of public service be a better citizen than one who does ten?
Worse, who shall approve the activities? Shall we endorse “faith-based” initiatives? Which faiths? Shall we maintain that a student in the National Guard is a better citizen than one who embraces pacifism? Whose agendas shall we adopt?
We can and perhaps should recommend, urge, persuade, advocate, counsel, and advise moral behaviors, but once we “require” behaviors for a student body already attending our college under duress, we are engaged in blackmail and involuntary servitude.
Can we hope students choose to perform service? Yes. Can we require it? No.
Let’s teach students to create their own values, not emulate ours. Let’s educate, not indoctrinate.
5 Chris Fauske // Dec 26, 2008 at 9:27 am
What I would have said, Perry, had I been as eloquent.
6 William Cornwell // Jan 9, 2009 at 3:11 am
Perry, I think that the disagreement on this board between the two of us is more apparent than real. You are worried about political indoctrination in the classroom–so am I. You don’t want to require patriotic or religious behavior in students–neither do I.
Yet, for better or for worse, every institution has to have some explicit or implicit values. No institution can survive without some sense of shared goals, expectations, and so forth. (If nothing is shared among some group of people, you do not have an institution–indeed, you don’t even have a group.) Some of the values of our college are explicitly outlined in the college’s code for academic integrity. Anyone who plagiarizes a paper has violated fundamental values of the college, and any professor who would ignore or condone such behavior would be committing professional malpractice. Other values (such as good citizenship) are part of the college’s mission statement, although we could argue about what constitutes good citizenship. And when professors enforce deadlines and require civil behavior in the classroom, they are, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not, implicitly pushing certain values on their students. (The fact that these values may be uncontroversial is irrelevant.)
Valuing truth over falsehood, open-mindedness and self-reflection over close-mindedness and intellectual laziness, compassion over hatred–as a professor I don’t see a problem with trying to pass on these values to the next generation. In fact, I wonder why taxpayers would fund an institution of higher education that was indifferent as to whether its students had picked up certain minimal values that are a precondition for a citizenry in a self-governing, democratic society. Higher education never was supposed to be value-neutral vocational training; indeed, “value-neutral” education is a myth, as even vocational training has its own set of embedded economic values and presuppositions. (As an aside, many business schools are rightly under fire for not having helped their graduates cultivate a moral compass that would have prevented the sorts of problems we saw a few years ago with Enron, Worldcom, et al. and now are seeing with the meltdown on Wall Street; in addition, nursing students had better learn some very specific values related to medical care.)
I agree that we must tread carefully here. Requiring academic honesty is one thing; requiring adherence to a set of political principles is something else. But even in the realm of politics we draw some bright lines. If neo-Nazi students spray-painted swastikas around campus, faculty members and administrators would not stand by out of the fear that denouncing this vandalism would unjustly impose our own values on students. And if you were to point out that we could condemn such behavior because of its illegality and its violation of college policies, I would observe (a) that our motivating values would be respect for the law and for college policies and (b) that the law and college policies were in this case founded upon deeper moral values that are worth cultivating in our students.
7 Timothy Eddy // Feb 26, 2009 at 11:49 pm
From the original: “If neo-Nazi students spray-painted swastikas around campus, faculty members and administrators would not stand by out of the fear that denouncing this vandalism would unjustly impose our own values on students.”
I’m not convinced that the final part of the statement is true. Isn’t that exactly what happened in Nazi Germany?.. or at least something akin to it in terms of its effect (as in failing to realize the significance of the threat)?
Do we have reason to believe that North Americans in the year 2009 are in some way “superior” (other than technologically) to the Germans of the WWII era? I’m certainly not a Nazi apologist, but I would like to hear a concise and rational response to the question. Social context always has been an important factor in the outward behaviors that we demonstrate as members of our species. This is true for our primate relatives (for better or for worse), and will likely be true of our progeny, and our students, as well.
I think this goes to the heart of “What is education.” I hope our students have the opportunity, at all fronts, to learn that the reality of their lives, and the ideology of their minds can on occasion be at odds with one another, and the one who succeeds at becoming educated is the one who can distinguish the two, even if such distinctions can bring about some internal turmoil.
8 Chris Fauske // Feb 27, 2009 at 11:32 am
I am on record as agreeing with Perry’s comments, but I also agree with William. I imagine that he and I would have very different approaches to what we expect and / or encourage when it comes to how students demonstrate their engagement with learning; but that’s the whole point: what would our students learn if they were exposed only to one modality?
When an undergraduate at UNH, I saw the movie The White Rose [Die Weiße Rose] when it first came out. It is a staggering film and worth watching regularly. At the time, the Cold War was limping toward its conclusion and, as so often happens, rhetoric was being ratcheted up as people had less and less to argue about. One Soviet dissident had just managed to publish an open letter to the west and he asked this: “The question is not whose side are you on. It is whose side would you be on in our situation?”
Even in my youthful exuberance and in the midst of being one of the most involved people on and off campus in various political / social causes I knew then, and know now, whose side I would have wanted to be on.
Whose side would I be on if I had to do something? That’s harder, much harder.
Hannah Arendt’s observation about the banality of evil is not a banal observation.
And that is why education–a liberal education–matters.
9 Timothy Eddy // Feb 28, 2009 at 10:30 pm
“And that is why education–a liberal education–matters.”
I agree wholeheartedly, and I also agree with Perry on some of his points and with William on others, but not with all of the points of both. In fact any reader of this should be worried about my views if I supported all of the views of either one or the other (or all of both).
This is exactly why no opinions or interpretations, even (in fact, especially) dissenting opinions, should be ignored, and also why I agree with Chris that a liberal education matters. In fact, I think the future of our species depends on it.
10 Hope Benne // Mar 3, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I wanted to bring some historical perspectives to this discussion. It’s about whether we North Americans are better than Germans were during the Nazi era.
Many world historians would refuse to compare peoples or cultures rating one as better than the other. It is true that in the 1800′s and early 1900′s, a virulent social Darwinism justified Northern Europeans at the top of a racial rating scheme based on skin color, head size, and Darwinian “science” of that era.
We North Americans are no better or worse than Nazis as human beings nor is our culture superior to theirs. Their cultural response to the problems they had reflected many variables such as the Darwinian thinking of their times, the hierarchal, authoritarian-oriented, / obedience structure of their culture, racism, and poor leadership.
Our American cultural responses to our problems reflect who we are as a people. Social structures, institutions, and historical legacies are crucial in determining our responses to major threats.
World historians are wary of European “exceptionalism” and American “exceptionalism.” Exceptionalism means separate and superior to. I’ll give an example. Europeans controlled 85% of the world in 1900, they said they did this because they were superior people with superior cultures, but the truth is they did so because they tragically gave native Americans diseases, they massacred, slaughtered, stole land, stole silver and gold, sold opium, hauled slaves from Africa, beat slaves on plantations, sold sugar, tobacco, and cotton at a profit, and enacted protectionist legislation to protect their industries.
Likewise we Americans said we would “start the world anew” and we were a “city upon a Hill” but we’ve betrayed our own best values time and again.
I agree with William, there are certain universal values which all human groups have recognized: compassion, kindness, and reciprocity. Our great world religions reflect these universal values. If we, in the liberal arts, don’t teach the next generations that these values are the foundation of a decent culture, we aren’t doing our job.
We, in the Peace Institute and student peace club go further. Supporting the UN initiative in the year 2000 for a decade of a culture of peace, our goal is to establish a culture of peace at Salem State. We work on defining what this culture would be like. I’m sure if Germany had had a culture of peace in 1938, the Nazis never could have taken over that entire society, it would have been unthinkable.
11 William Cornwell // Mar 5, 2009 at 8:30 pm
To pick up one thread of this complex conversation: Although there’s an inherent danger of hubris and unwarranted self-congratulation in comparing different cultures or even the same culture at different times, I do believe in the possibility (but not inevitability) of human progress. If American society were no better today than that of Nazi Germany, I’d weep and probably try to emigrate. Indeed, constructive criticism of the moral failings of one’s own culture only is intelligible if there can be moral advances–otherwise, what’s the point of trying to do anything to improve society? Martin Luther King, Jr. is a giant among men precisely because he helped catalyze an enduring elevation in American culture, whose partial fruition we see today with an African-American President. When comparing the current state of race in America with the state of affairs only 50 years ago when many African-Americans were deprived of the right to vote, how could we not see that as moral progress? Of course, as our culture advances in some fronts, it can backslide in others. Nonetheless, the moral improvement of a culture is partly a function of the health of the humanities in that culture, which is one reason why the humanities should be a bedrock of a college education and why a college education should never be reduced to vocational training (although preparing students for gainful employment is obviously one important objective for colleges).
12 Hope Benne // Mar 7, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Yes, I’m so glad you mentioned moral progress. I know of many examples we can point to: women’s right to vote, ever-increasing and ever-widening democracy throughout the world with initiative, referendum and recall and 18-year-old right to vote in some nations, universal public education, creation of the UN in San Francisco in 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2003, the processes of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in many countries, abolition of the death penalty in 73 countries, civil rights, civil unions, and marriages for gays and lesbians, ever-increasing civil rights accorded to discriminated-against groups, legal abolition of slavery (although there are still an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide today), and the 60-year old interdisciplinary field of peace studies and conflict resolution.
We can really take heart from this impressive record and delight in talking about it so together we’ll strive to maintain and advance it.
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