J.D.
Phillips
Thanks. I know, just what you wanted—another Cultures and Traditions (C&T)
open meeting. But
this one will be a little different—hopefully the first in a line of
similarly different meetings—if in no other way, then at least
structurally. The format is that I am going to read a few pages; this
will take about 40 minutes. Then for the balance of our 75 minutes, we
can have a conversation, if there’s any interest. But before I give my
“alternate vision for C&T” I should explain
why I’m doing it, and why I think this format is necessary.
First, the format. I remember 14 years ago as a
freshly minted Ph.D., and very green assistant professor, feeling
bemused, and even a bit chafed, at how hard it was to find the space to
make an argument that went even modestly against the grain in the
academy, that challenged professorial pieties and traditions. “My god,”
I marveled, “if you can’t be intellectually iconoclastic in the
academy, then where the hell can you be?” But I’m no longer bemused by
it, and I owe this hard won insight mostly to Noam Chomsky. I first saw
“Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” at a little theatre
in Berkeley in 1993, after a particularly unsettling faculty meeting
earlier that same day (and let me tell you, Berkeley was a great place
to see this movie; the weekday matinee I saw sold out!). And Chomsky’s
explanation of why he doesn’t do talk show interviews on programs like
Nightline was a revelation to me. I’d assumed that it was because the
suits who run the media simply didn't want him to appear on their
shows. It turns out, though, that they’d
routinely begged him to appear, but he turned them down on the grounds,
so obvious to me now—and familiar, too—that to make an argument that
challenges “that which is established” takes more time—more
intellectual space—than the mere sound bite opportunities available to
guests on a Nightline or a 20/20. And so shows like this reveal the
media’s hegemony in that they allow only for sound bites, and not
arguments that challenge. It is the tyranny of the majority. Faculty
discourse—here, and in fact, at most colleges—is often like this. And
while the intent is rarely malicious, I think that the effect can often
be pernicious. And nearly invisible, too. Just think about how the
usual faculty meeting goes. Or the typical C&T open meeting. 75
minutes and 30-ish people, all of whom want to talk. This allows for,
on average, 2 minutes of “air time” for each person. This is, of
course, not enough time to make an argument, especially a complex
argument that challenges. And so the format privileges those who are on
board—more or less—with the course; it’s design makes it comfortable to
push for this or that minor change or other such mild tinkering (and to
shout down, occasionally even shame, more iconoclastic approaches). But
I think that it is salutary for a community to entertain dissenting
voices from time to time. So thanks again for your collegiality in
listening to this.
So that’s the format. Now, onto the why; why am I
doing this? I want to be clear that I’m not here to persuade or try to
change anyone’s mind. A real diversity of informed opinions is healthy;
I think we should respect these differences, not try to fix or convert
those who disagree with us. My only goal, then, is to give form to
ideas that might be inchoate to some of you. Let me flesh this out. All
of us were trained in graduate school in the techniques of an academic
discipline. Or, here is the contra-positive, if you prefer: none of us
was trained, in graduate school at least, in the trans-disciplinary
techniques that ought to obtain in core courses like C&T. We learn
this when we’re young professors, and even then, only if we’re lucky
enough to end up at a place, like Wabash, with a core course tradition
and a core of gray-beards who help newcomers learn the ropes. And even
then, the best one can hope for is that core courses like C&T will
occupy a place on the margins—hopefully a safe place, but still solidly
on the margins—of our professional lives. When a typical assistant
professor at Wabash comes up for tenure after six years of teaching
here, it’s unlikely that he or she will have taught C&T more than a
handful of times. Let me make this explicit. In his or her first six
years at the College, he or she will teach 36 courses. It would be
unusual if more than 2 or 3 of these 36 were C&T. And of course,
our professional activities outside of the classroom are geared almost
exclusively toward cultivating ever-greater disciplinary
expertise—e.g., traditional (hard-core) research, course revisions,
etc. And this is all—or at least mostly—as it should be, by the way;
more on this later. My point is that even for the junior professor most
involved with C&T, this involvement is all but peripheral to his or
her professional activities. Even our reward structure here at Wabash
doesn’t support thinking seriously about C&T. At all. Think about
it this way: if you have n hours
in a given calendar year to devote to
professional activities beyond the confines of the classes you teach in
your department, do you think the College will give you a larger raise
at the end of the year if you spend those n hours thinking about
C&T or if you spend them publishing a few research papers in your
discipline? This is, of course, a no-brainer. But the remarkable thing
is that, somehow, C&T survives! I’ll have more to say about this
later, but for now I note two things:
(1) No one can know everything, though each of us
wants to. Thus, we cultivate the discipline to try, at least, to know
something—again the discipline. Get it? We narrow our focus, contra our
desires, in the hopes of learning something—hell, anything—in a deep,
but necessarily narrow way. But again, we are not satisfied; we want
more. Our expansive desire here is nothing less than a desire for
wholeness. The rather astonishing fact that C&T exists at all, in
spite of the messy constellation of pressures that should crush it, is
a clear expression of this desire.
(2) Just to underscore an earlier point: most folks
haven’t spent as much time thinking about C&T as they’ve spent
thinking about courses in their disciplines. If you’re one of those
rare old birds who has devoted a great deal of time to thinking
seriously about C&T, and if your conclusions about what the course
should look like are different than mine, great. Seriously, great. As
before, I’m all for diversity. But if you haven’t had an opportunity
yet in your career to devote much time to thinking about C&T, then
maybe my remarks here will help to give form to ideas that are still
inchoate to you.
So finally, then, we come to my alternate vision for
the course. The bad news is that, after all this build up, I don’t
think I can do real justice to my understanding of what the course
ought to look like in a short meeting like this. It would take a lot
longer than 40 minutes. So instead, I’ll just give a Reader’s Digest
outline of five of the guiding principles I’d use to pick books (or
paintings or essays, and so on) for the course, followed by a few
remarks about each one. I should also say that I will focus my remarks
on those points about which we might disagree, and not dwell on the
many more points of widespread agreement. All of this, in the higher
service of my awkward
attempt to enact the dialectic. I’m hoping for a conversation; I’m not
giving a comprehensive argument.
Okay, then, here we go. Each of the following five
ought to be inversely proportional to our desire to include a given
book on the C&T syllabus (and of course, there is considerable
overlap between these five):
(1) The extent to
which reading it and talking about it with students presume expertise
in a discipline, e.g., critical theory, hermeneutics, cultural
anthropology, chemistry, whatever.
Before I comment on this principle, I want to urge
you not to read anything more into it than is there. I’m not arguing
against the disciplines or the departmental system that we use to
organize our academic lives. My own research program in mathematics is
strong and active and is so intoxicating—in fact, consuming—to me that
I often neglect other parts of my life in favor of my own disciplinary
research. My life would be unspeakably poorer without all of this. But,
need I state the obvious? A vital, vibrant, intellectual life ought not
be restricted simply to cultivating disciplinary expertise.
A student must take 34 courses to graduate from
Wabash. Of these, 31 will be taught in traditional academic
departments. And one of the remaining three—freshman tutorial—often is
also. That leaves two courses in which students might go beyond this or
that discipline; two courses—C&T. But, alas, I don’t think we allow
this to happen as well as we might. It would take, again, more time
than I have here to do this theme real justice, and moreover, I’m not
comfortable dwelling too long on what I think is wrong with the course,
so just a few quick points, here. Think about how the course is
organized. We have weekly staff meetings in which an expert with
disciplinary authority instructs us on how to teach the material at
hand. Modules are designed mostly by folks with the “right”
disciplinary expertise. The modules themselves are usually designed
with an eye toward covering “enough” of the “right” material, according
to the standards of this or that discipline. We worry about balancing
the readings between and among the disciplines. In fact, some folks
even think C&T is owned by disciplines (religion and history, I
think). By this design, then, most us are necessarily dilettantes when
we teach the course, again by design. If the point is to teach, say,
the Odyssey, as informed by the expertise and standards of, say,
classics, then the classics department ought to teach this, not the
rest of us. To turn, say, a biologist, loose on a C&T class devoted
to a discipline-informed reading of the Odyssey is to either profoundly
insult classics as a discipline (it’s so easy even a biologist can
learn it in 15 minutes on a sleepy Tuesday morning!), or it is to set
the biologist up for failure (expertise in another discipline is an
impossibly high standard; to pretend otherwise is to be a dilettante).
Let me draw, then, the obvious conclusion: if the point is to teach the
material of this or that discipline, then let us agree to have the
disciplinary experts teach it.
So what would that leave us in C&T? To some, in
our discipline-dominated line of work, teaching anything beyond the
horizon of this or that discipline is not even conceivable. And, in a
way, that’s my point. I’m speaking against the hegemony that renders
this inconceivable; we ought not feel obliged to be cowed by it. So how
exactly would we teach beyond the confines of this or that discipline?
Well, for one thing, we would read the books, and not simply try to
explain them away. I do realize how easy it would be to breezily tar me
as flying the “great books, New Criticism” banner, of urging us
to turn away from New Historicism. But to do so would betray real
confusion in that (1) these are both disciplined based literary
theories (and, I think, false turns; but commenting further on this
would take us too far afield), and I’m arguing against the disciplines
encroaching on C&T, and (2) I don’t think that the books we read in
C&T have to be the standard “great books of the West.” I’ll have
more to say about this, later.
On to number two (remember, each of these five ought
to be inversely proportional to our desire to include a given book on
the C&T syllabus):
(2) The extent to
which we think we have it figured out, for instance, (from a C&T
document dated 4 December, 2003) the extent to which we think we know
its appropriate "uses and misuses", etc.
Insofar as we know the answer, there is no inquiry.
Let me make this clear with an example from my own discipline.
Mathematicians pursue proof. But when we teach mathematics, we do not
pursue proof. Nor, generally, do we direct our students toward the
pursuit of proof. As mathematics teachers, our energies are directed
elsewhere, toward what a friend of mine calls the assertive pursuit of
scientifically intentioned problem sets. Eva Brann, who visited Wabash
last fall, describes this activity as the asking and answering of sham
questions. Of course, a genuine question is one that the questioner
doesn’t know the answer to; in fact, a genuine question is nothing more
than the desire for an answer. It leaves erotic uncertainty in its wake
and generates genuine conversation in which none of the participants
knows the answer, but all desire it. 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; you don’t desire to
know what you already know. For instance, from a typical problem set in
the calculus, “What is the derivative of the sine function?” And
this—namely using problem sets (sham questions) to condition—is what
mathematicians do when we teach, even (actually, especially) in very
sophisticated classes at the graduate level. And so it is with all
disciplines, more or less. There is no getting around this in a
discipline setting.
One of the promises, then, of a trans-disciplinary
course like C&T, is the opportunity for genuine inquiry. In these
courses we are freed from the disciplinary demands of problem sets and
covering material. [As an aside I note that the best—the most
authentic—sorts of questions, here, are interpretive questions as
opposed to questions of fact or evaluation. But a full explanation of
this might best be left for the conversation period, to follow.] One of
the reasons we don’t teach like this very often is that it’s difficult.
The expert professing is an easy role to play. But mustering the
humility to stand naked, if you will, before your students and
genuinely inquire with them—to say to them, “like you, I don’t know,
but I want to know”—is not easy (in fact, it might not even be possible
for some) in our line of work, trained as we are to be disciplinary
authorities and to profess our expertise. Mostly, it takes courage, and
maybe this is one of the chief moral exemplars we can offer our
students. But more on this later.
On the other hand, we’re older and wiser than our
students. We’ve read more. We know our way around ideas. So with
humility and courage, then, we can inquire with our students.
Ultimately, though, learning is a mystery. To say much more than this
is simply to pose. Still, in my experience, this mystery unfolds best
in a setting of shared inquiry, not one of simple profession. Let me
put this another way. We should always treat our students as ends,
never merely as means. And simply covering “material” is to treat
students as means. It is, in fact, to treat students themselves as
material, to be shaped, molded, and manufactured in our image. And just
so with a certain understanding of teaching social ethics. If our goal
isn’t to know the world, but rather, to change it, then we understand
students as mere means, and not as ends. Genuine inquiry, especially as
it ought to unfold in core courses like C&T, is a good
fortification against this kind of chicanery. I also note that it’s a
tonic to the popular misconception that college tuition is just another
commercial transaction, that students are buying something. They’re
not, of course. They’re paying something like a membership fee to
participate in—and to sustain—a unique kind of community, a community
of inquiry. C&T ought to be the signal representative of our
community in this regard, an unflinching, clear-eyed, rebuff to the
view of education as product, student as consumer, faculty as labor,
and administration as management.
Okay, on to number three (remember, each of these
five ought to be inversely proportional to our desire to include a
given book on the C&T syllabus):
(3) The extent to
which we want it to straighten out our students ethically.
I’ve already argued against treating students as
means, especially in core courses like C&T. And it’s hard to
straighten out students ethically in a college course without treating
them as means, means to the “higher end” of some kind of social
transformation, so I won’t rehash that argument here. But I will point
out that I think this is closely related to something that I think we
already do with C&T, namely, treat it is a curricular dumping
ground for all of the stuff that we want to cram in to a Wabash
education but can’t find legitimate places for elsewhere in the
curriculum. Need a diversity module? Stick it in C&T. Need more
female voices? C&T. And so on. I don’t think that I have to work
very hard to show that this risks ghetto-izing some of these voices. If
we think it’s important enough to be in the curriculum, then, let’s
find real space for it, not just dump into C&T.
But I want to argue something more. It’s a subtle
distinction, but I think it’s crucial. “What it would be good for
students to know” is not coextensive with “what we should teach at a
liberal arts college.” And “what we should teach at a liberal arts
college” is not coextensive with “what we should teach in C&T.” For
instance, I think it would be good for students to learn how to change
their own spark plugs, to live healthily (quit smoking, don’t drink too
much, exercise, take care of their knees, etc.), and to be able to
identify all
the species of birds in Indiana. But I don’t think any of these things
should necessarily be part of a liberal arts curriculum. On the other
hand, I think that students at a liberal arts college ought to have a
real laboratory science experience, and they probably ought to study
grammar and logic, too. But I don’t think that C&T is the right
place for these activities to unfold. I think we often miss this
distinction. Well, my point is clear; you can decide what you think of
it.
Finally with regard to this point, I’ll say, perhaps
a bit cryptically, that you have to know the good, before you can do
(or teach) the good.
On to number four (remember, each of these five
ought to be inversely proportional to our desire to include a given
book on the C&T syllabus):
(4) The extent to
which we prize it because it flatters us about our desire both to
divine the future and to know how our students ought to behave in that
divined future, e.g., that it will prepare students for (from the 4
December document) "a rapidly changing" and "globalized" world.
Let me be direct. It’s self-delusional to think that
we know what the future will hold. And it’s a special kind of reckless
imperiousness to blithely bet a young person’s education against our
confidence in our ability to divine the future. Here’s a whimsical
thought: a deep commitment to immersion learning, which is always about
the here and now, as well as the past, is a fine, Zen-like rebuff to
this kind of folly. Attend to the moment, bring yourself into a more
unimpeded relationship with the complicated nature of things, and the
future will take care of itself. Immersion learning, then, is an
integral part of a liberal arts education (an essential compliment to
core courses like C&T).
I’ve spoken in a number of different venues recently
about the central role immersion experiences might play in liberal
education, so I’ll skip over that argument here and conclude with this:
I take as one of the main goals of our remarkable immersion learning
programs, the opportunity to provide the sorts of rich experiences that
liberal learning—especially as it unfolds in core courses like
C&T—can meaningfully illuminate and reflect on. Or put it another
way: these experiences are central to a Wabash education if what we’re
up to in the classroom is to have any real depth. And this is the best
preparation for the future, rapidly changing or not, and globalized as
it may or may not be.
Okay, on to number five (remember, each of these
five ought to be inversely proportional to our desire to include a
given book on the C&T syllabus):
(5) The extent to
which we value it as merely a product of this or that culture (or
tradition), e.g., (from the 4 December document) as "cultural products
of the groups under study."
In one way, this is the most radical of my
guidelines. C&T is, after all, about cultures (and traditions). But
this, it seems to me, is deeply problematic. First, disentangling
cultural investigations from the techniques endemic to the appropriate
discipline, or suit of disciplines—in this case, cultural studies,
anthropology, etc.—seems to me to be profoundly vexed, at best. Second,
the question of which cultures to privilege by investigating them, is
satisfactorily resolvable only in a disciplinary setting (and there
only grudgingly, namely, by ruling it out of bounds). But beyond the
horizon of this or that discipline, this question is not resolvable in
any way other than by the assertive exercise of power or by simple
caprice (and these are, by the way, arguably difficult to distinguish).
If we’re interested in studying the culture of this or that group—if
it’s an end—then by what criteria do we choose, say, China over Persia?
West Africa over North Africa? The Hebrews over the Hindus? This
question is not trivial, by the way. It matters. It maters, for
instance, to our Persian students, to our Hindu students. This
question, in fact, is more appropriate to the sort of
trans-disciplinary inquiry that ought to unfold in C&T than is the
study itself of this or that privileged culture. Best leave that to the
experts—those in the appropriate discipline, where deep and narrow
focus on particular cultures unfolds naturally.
I note that I’ve often heard the focus of
C&T—namely cultures and traditions—praised simply by dint of the
fact that it’s part of our own institutional traditions. I just want to
point out the obvious here: the claim that it is traditional (which may
or may not be true, by the way) doesn’t constitute a persuasive
argument that it ought not be changed. After all, we like to scold our
students for clinging so earnestly to their traditions here at Wabash.
It would be, well, ironic, don’t ya think, if we squandered an
opportunity to consider changing C&T on the grounds that we ought
to earnestly cling to our traditions, too.
I also want to point out a potential pitfall unique
to cultural studies that is particularly acute when in the hands of the
dilettante. And that is the self-assertive desire to think that our own
cultural vantage point allows us to see clearly the culturally limited
vantage point that we imagine vexed, or entirely escaped, authors from
other cultures. There inevitably follows, then, cloy attempts to defang
these authors. I won’t dwell on this—we can talk about it in the
conversation period, if it comes up—but let me comment on it, thusly:
there is no surer way to make an fool of yourself than to effect a
culturally condescending attitude toward, say, Plato. This is always an
especially fun irony; hubris is a Greek word.
On a related note, I might say a brief word about
our own culture, the culture of the community of Wabash College
professors. In a word, and as before, we’re not monolithic. I would
hope that we don’t unanimously agree about much of anything, at least
not about the important things. This kind of intellectual diversity is
essential; better, it’s unavoidable. So in a course like C&T, that
draws on—at least, in principle—the entire faculty it strikes me as
wise to shy away from prescription as much as possible. Put it this
way: the more prescriptive we make the course, the more difficult we
make it for some of our colleagues to teach the course. We college
professors are a willful, stubborn lot. We vote with our feet. So built
into the course should be a space for dissenting voices. So sure, have
guidelines and some structure. But shy away from prescription as much
as possible; it would be a real gesture of inclusiveness and
collegiality.
I’d like to end, then, with a response to Greg
Huebner’s proposal to eliminate the minor and to muscle up the major.
My response, I hope, will underscore the prominent role that C&T
might play in a liberal education here at Wabash in a way that
compliments the centrality in that education that the significant depth
of our majors assumes. I agree with Professor Huebner that, in some
ways, the minor at Wabash has lost its way. But the “gen ed” part of
our curriculum, I think, is too incoherent even to be characterized as
lost. It has become, I think, absurd. But this is good, in a way,
because it presents us with an opportunity. Let me explain my vision
for this, in the spirit of the rest of my remarks, about inquiry that
transcends the bounds of discipline. One caveat: as Socrates knew,
genuine demonstration is always negative. So again, this is not a
comprehensive argument, just a sketch.
Okay, so here we go. A genuine liberal arts
education ought to carve out a place for those students and professors
whose intellectual appetites are broader than technical disciplinary
mastery. Like many colleges and universities, we’ve responded to these
appetites with the so-called “gen-ed” requirement; that is, students
take a random assemblage of entry-level courses from a variety of
different academic departments. To some, though, this random assemblage
model is ultimately unsatisfying. After all, if the desire for a vital
and integrated intellectual life cannot be satisfied via the
acquisition of expertise in this or that discipline, then why should a
random assemblage of entry-level courses in a few of these disciplines
be any more satisfying? In other words, perhaps the problem is not
simply a matter of choosing the right mix of a few disciplines, so much
as it is the categorical reliance on the disciplinary model itself. As
a tonic, then, to this random assemblage model of general education,
one might consider inquiry that does not issue from the techniques of a
discipline; one might consider a broad and liberal, trans-disciplinary
inquiry, if you will. And as before, while most college courses ought
to be discipline-based, it seems to me that Wabash would be a good
place to let students and professors explore and experiment with a few
courses that aren't tied to a discipline. So my response to Professor
Huebner is, “if we scuttle the minor, instead of replacing it with more
courses in the major, let’s replace it with a few genuine liberal arts
courses, i.e., a few trans-disciplinary courses.”
Of course, C&T is a natural place for this sort
of activity to unfold. But there are others, too. There follows, then,
an example of how a typical, discipline-based service course might be
reconceived as a broader, trans-disciplinary course. And this also will
shed light, I aver, on how C&T, too, can transcend the bounds of
discipline.
(Adapted from a document D. Neidorf
and I submitted to Wabash’s Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.)
A traditional service course like “Physics for The Non-Science Student”
might undertake to familiarize students with standard models of
explanation and analysis in physics, basic classifications of elements
and compounds, an introduction to laboratory techniques, and perhaps
even attempt also to sustain their interest with vignettes about the
influence of physics on everyday life. In a course like this one, hard
work and ingenuity will have been devoted to asking how to make some
basic aspects of physics available to the general student population.
And yet this work is often comparatively uninformed by hard questioning
about the importance of the material at hand to a liberal and
integrated education. A course like this typically fails to offer the
selective depth necessary for a substantial intellectual experience of
the way physical science works, and for the subsequent reflection
afforded by that experience—and such reflection is the sine qua none of
the liberally educated mind.
By “experience of the way physical science works,” I
mean student discovery of, and opportunity for, substantial spoken and
written reflection on, questions like the nature of measurement, the
relationship between theory and experiment, the ways in which
interpretation can inform or distort empirical observation, the reasons
for (and the problematic nature of) the assumption that the formal laws
and material relevant to an explanation in natural science is
quantifiable, and experience with a theory that explains observable
phenomena and yet turns out to be wrong. In other words, I assume that
an integrated, liberal education develops certain intellectual arts—in
this case, physics—for the purpose of empowering reflection, the import
of which extends beyond the boundaries of the discipline at hand. In
the ideal case the student educated in this way has access to the kind
of foundational judgments that are typically assumed out of hand, and
thus rendered invisible, in the normal course of disciplinary work.
Such a student will be able, should he or she so
choose, to think more meaningfully about some of the broader questions
that science imposes on a modern life—questions like how to weigh the
relative merits of scientific and religious accounts of human
motivation. An education that in this way empowers a student to bring
different intellectual arts to bear on the wholeness of life may be
said to be “coherent.” Its coherence is rooted not in some totalizing
metaphysical or educational scheme, but rather in the unity of lived
experience, as before.
There is no reason that a physics professor might
not carefully craft a physics course that provides the kind of
experience that I am describing. Not infrequently courses are crafted
along these lines, courses aiming to impart not physics or literature
or economics, but rather abstract matter like “methods” or “ways of
knowing.” But several factors make this more difficult, less effective,
and most importantly, less engaging than provision of a similar
experience in a non-disciplinary setting. (1) Uncovering the
assumptions and foundations of a discipline through practical hands-on
experience will take considerable time devoted to selected topics, and
the course will of necessity fail to provide the breadth of coverage
that departments typically and reasonably expect of a basic level
course. Students interested in medicine or engineering, as well as
physics, still need the standard introductory material as well. (2)
Further, such educational work is not the province of physics per se,
and hence not every physicist is qualified or inclined to do it. Each
discipline (and range of expert authority) exists within a horizon of
presuppositions, while it is the work of an integrated, liberal
education to bring those horizons to light and into relation with one
another. The use of physics in this sort of work is far more likely to
be effectively implemented if other perspectives and concerns are
present in the classroom to press these issues. (3) Finally, the
potential to reveal intellectual coherence in interdisciplinary courses
is lost if the broader question, for example, of the relative character
of analysis of laws and forces over and against narrative modes of
identifying meaning in human life cannot be pursued in a substantive
way when it quite naturally arises in the classroom conversation. Many
important questions are likely, if pursued, to lead beyond the confines
of a discipline, indeed beyond the confines of any discipline, and it
is a great loss if the work of the class cannot follow it there.
Everything, in both its totality and in its minutia, is potentially
enchanting, and worthy of inquiry, to the liberally educated mind
(think of Annie Dillard and her near rapturous encounters with the
ordinary, and how thus, it becomes sacred). The presence of appropriate
material within the class curriculum, or at least familiarity by both
the professor and the students with common material from elsewhere in
the program, for instance C&T, supports the ability of the
educational experience to model and cultivate the flexibility with
disciplinary connections that can aspire to coherence of thought.
I say “aspire” to coherence of thought because, of
course, the complete attainment of such coherent insight is beyond most
of us. The presence of such aspiration in our curriculum makes many
folks nervous—it raises obvious difficulties associated with
assessment, and it might sound, to some, like an excuse for superficial
scholarship. And indeed, these are potential dangers. The craft of
putting together such a course, or even a program, requires not the
abandonment of rigor and detail, but rather their subordination to
higher ends—the calibration and selection of that rigor and detail so
as to empower an ever-greater cultivation of a coherent, liberal, and
integrated education. There is no department and no discipline that
confers expertise in such calibration.
There is no reason, of course, that the perspectives
and the expansive questions raised by the juxtaposition of physics
with, say religious studies or literature, might not be present in the
mind, and the classroom, of a physics professor. But this requires the
ability and the intellectual appetite to investigate, to learn, and
then to learn to bracket, or to question, the foundations of each
discipline. It requires, in other words, commitment to the practice of
a liberal education in addition to an individual’s specialty. If we at
Wabash are serious about the liberal arts, we ought to support this
commitment, if even in modest ways.
Let me close by saying the obvious: I think that our
two C&T courses ought to occupy a place of signal prominence in our
curriculum, and that they ought to be radically different in most
important ways from the rest of the College's offerings. Thanks to the
Steering Committee for your hard work on behalf of all of us. I think
it's some of the most significant work at the College.
.