Editor's Note
This is one in a series of posts on the common readings in Stanford’s 1980s “Western Culture” course. You can see all posts in the series here: Readings in Western Culture.
You can lead a student to knowledge but you can’t make them think.
Case in point: as a freshman at Stanford, I refused to read Marx and Engels. Indeed, I refused to attend the lecture introducing Marx for my track of the Western Culture program. I’d have to dig up my syllabus again to double check, but I believe the expert lecturer whose talk I disdained to hear was none other than Sidney Hook.
Why not read Marx? Because Marx meant Communism, and Communism was anti-American. It was a dangerous, pernicious idea or set of ideas, and I felt that it was not necessary for me to read those ideas to pass judgment on them. In fact, it seemed to me that reading those ideas might put me under the influence of the pernicious and subtle Communist propaganda that, rumor had it, was rampant in universities, a ready snare to entrap unwary youth in a tangle of lies.
Descartes, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud – I had no problem reading these authors, who had written “great works” of Western Culture, and whose apparent challenges to received authority struck me as liberating. Nietzsche, with his contempt for Christian servility and docility, his condemnation of that sheepish religion of resentment whose real agenda was to curb and control the great courageous ferociously independent intellectual and spiritual lone wolves of the world – I was happy enough to read him.
Scout and Clio, mere moments before Scout experienced an epistemic shock
I had been warned against Nietzsche and his secular brethren by parents and pastors alike; Nietzsche as epitomized in the (never contextualized) epigraph “God is dead” was a favorite target of preachers railing against the hostility of “the world” to the truths of “the Spirit.” But since Fundamentalist Christianity was, I began to see, a prison house from which I needed to escape, I was grateful for Nietzsche’s Thor-hammer harangues against the Christian faith and Christian ethics rooted in resentment of the weak against the strong. And of course, like every other disaffected misfit adolescent who has ever read Nietzsche, I saw myself as one of the strong.
But the great saga of America in her existential struggle against the (godless!) forces of Communism, America as a beacon of freedom throughout the twentieth century, America as the last refuge of those who sought to preserve liberty and resist the tyranny of Communist totalitarianism – I did not believe I needed freeing from those ideas, nor even that I needed to examine those ideas very closely.
Perhaps I had learned my lesson from reading Aristotle and Lucretius and Luther and Galileo (all on our syllabus) – for me, the readings on the Western Culture syllabus were not ideational expressions from particular moments of the past that needed to be contextualized and understood as situated in and conveying the sensibilities of a certain time and place and culture. Rather, they were all present-tense arguments, live debates, living propositions. I was looking for truth – for a truth sturdy enough and heavy enough and deep enough to be my anchor in rough seas. Fundamentalist patriarchal misogynist homophobic anti-intellectual Christianity was no anchor, but a millstone – that much I knew. What I didn’t understand was the extent to which my very apparatus of knowing was shaped – warped – by the very anti-intellectualism I could readily reject when I encountered it in propositional form.
So, yes, a reactionary anti-intellectualism prevented me from seriously – or even superficially – engaging in the writings of Marx, not because I thought he was anti-Christian (that would have been fine with me!), but because I just knewhe and his ideas were fundamentally anti-American.
That reactionary anti-intellectualism was something that was never quite visible to me – can you see the place from which you’re seeing? So I could probably characterize my decades-long and very circuitous path to my current life as a scholar and teacher as a pilgrimage to rid myself of this burden that I could not see but somehow knew I was carrying, though I could not have identified or named the source of my restless discontent with both the world I saw and the narrowness of my own vantage point.
I had no perspective on my own perspective until well into my PhD program, when Dan Wickberg began to name and challenge my anti-intellectualism. I have not compared notes with him on this, but I’m quite certain that he recognized my illiberal habits of mind long before he decided to see if he could help me overcome them. Whether he sought to help me out of that cul de sac for my own sake, because he cared about my intellectual development, or for his own sake, because he simply could notwith this bull-headed student, is perhaps beside the point – though my surmise is that it was probably some combination of both. In any case, Wickberg challenged me — sometimes subtly and quietly and sometimes directly and, well, loudly – to set aside defensiveness and resentment and fear and contempt for viewpoints that (I feared) were somehow pernicious or imperiling.
That’s a tough and potentially dangerous thing for a professor to do, a tough judgment call to make – to say to oneself, I am going to help (or compel) this student to call into question the very assumptions by which they make sense of their world. Honestly, it’s not something I’m comfortable doing – but I am not walking through the world as a 6-foot-something booming-voiced white dude with a PhD from Yale who singlehandedly gooses the collective IQ of any room they walk into. That ain’t me. I’m an accidental academic. I’m a stray seminarian. I’m a prophet with no home country in which to be dishonored. The thought of directly (or even indirectly) challenging a student to examine and interrogate their own epistemic axioms and either refine them or set them aside makes me nervous.
At the same time, looking back on my recent education, I wish my professor had challenged me sooner and more sharply. See, a good twenty-five years or so after I refused to read Karl Marx, as I was trying to figure out what courses to take, Wickberg suggested to me that I might be interested in his graduate seminar on the history of liberal thought. I said no thanks; I didn’t want to spend a whole semester reading what liberals think.
Now, I was just an MA student at the time, and I was not his student. Instead of sharply challenging my foolish contempt for “liberals” and “liberal thought,” he simply pointed out that the class wasn’t about “liberals” as people currently used the term in political debates, but about a deeper, broader intellectual tradition that includes both political “liberals” and conservatives.
No thanks, I said. That doesn’t sound interesting to me.
This was, hands down and without a doubt, the single dumbest decision I ever made in grad school. I wish my prof, who wasn’t yet myprof, had pushed back a little harder here. On the other hand, if he had lowered the boom on my parochial prejudices, maybe I would have startled and fled, and then he wouldn’t have been my prof, and the more serious challenges to my habits of thought would never have come. But, great God almighty, I wish I had taken that seminar in the history of liberal thought!
I’m not teaching grad students this semester, but I am teaching some students who have expressed or demonstrated a real worry about the ideas they are encountering in the college classroom. I have students from fundamentalist backgrounds who want to contend for providential explanatory schemes in history. I have students from working-class backgrounds who have expressed the idea that the highest and most sophisticated forms of human expression come from an explicitly white Western cultural heritage and are qualitatively superior to works from other cultures or traditions. I have students who are concerned that history as I teach it comes across dishonoring or disrespecting their heritage. All these are topics that have come up in class discussion so far, and we’re just two weeks into the semester.
What is my obligation to these students in whom I see so much of my younger (and not so younger!) self? How do I teach them? What do I teach them? Am I there to deliver “content”? Am I there to model particular habits of mind and train them in those habits? Both? And am I even capable of teaching them lessons that I have only recently learned and still have not really mastered?
If I were a 6-foot-something white dude with a PhD from Yale who has every reason to believe that his ideas always deserve to be heard and taken seriously, maybe I wouldn’t be so meta. But I also wouldn’t be myself. And, flawed though I am, I am confident that I am just the professor my students need – partly because I have been where they are, and partly because, at a later point in my doctoral education, my own professor refused to accept my pre-emptive dismissal of ideas I hadn’t adequately examined.
Lord have mercy, but that was a thankless task. I am so grateful someone tried it anyhow.
9 Thoughts on this Post
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This post raises some interesting questions, but to pick up on a side point there’s a bit of an irony in your having refused back then to read Marx and Engels b.c you thought they were anti-American — namely that it was Freud, more than Marx I think, who had negative feelings about the U.S. At least Freud, if I recall correctly, once called the U.S. “a mistake.” That the U.S. proved, for a time, to be such fertile territory for psychoanalysis was, in that light, also ironic.
But on the main point, I think challenging your students’ assumptions etc w/o alienating them probably does require a delicate balancing act.
Thanks Louis. I am pretty sure there is more than a little bit of irony all the way through this post, but yes, the fact that I’d be more worried about a Marxian critique than a Freudian one is pretty amusing. And Freud’s work was the last of the 15 texts on the common reading list, so that’s what I’ll be posting on next / last in this series, which I have dragged out for far longer than an academic year. But I’ve been busy.
With anything related to students’ ideas / beliefs / concerns, I take the gentlest approach that I can. I try to bury the pill in the wad of dog food whenever possible. But even that presupposes some judgment on my part, some sense that I have diagnosed precisely what remedy is warranted for my students’ intellectual / moral improvement. And I’m a little cautious in that regard. I don’t know the tensile strength of someone’s soul, and I don’t know that it’s any of my business to try to “improve” any of my students. I’m supposed to educate — to lead them out into wisdom and knowledge. But I don’t think that should involve too much prying or prodding.
I guess the biggest irony — and this is the irony of liberalism, no? — is that my prof recognized that simply tolerating my closed-mindedness would not result in my learning to become more tolerant or more open-minded or less dismissive of world views that were alien to my own experience. Instead, helping me arrive at “tolerance,” broadly construed, required a sort of intolerance from my prof, a refusal to leave me as I was and where I was. Reshaping not just a student’s ideas but their very apparatus of thought is a pretty big project, though, and a very delicate one, as you note. What if you break somebody when you don’t mean to? How do you make that right? These worries make me tread lightly, oh so lightly, with my own students.
Maybe I’m letting them down. I hope not.
My experience from a different field and perspective, for whatever it’s worth, is that you don’t have to know the tensile strength of anyone’s soul. Offer it. If they aren’t ready they won’t pick it up. If they are, if they trust you, if there is something inside then that’s the least curious, then they will engage. Maybe with resistance at first. That’s normally the initial reaction. But it’s the engagement that’s the key. Of course you pay attention. Don’t force. But DW. could only push you because you allowed yourself to be there to be pushed. And god do we need more of what you got and what you can offer. Can’t waot to read what you have to say about Freud.
Thanks Renae; this is wise.
I just realized that writing about Freud is going to require re-reading Freud. I daresay I will find him much less, uh, liberating than I did the first time around.
Even if you had decided to hear a lecture by Sidney Hook on Marxism it is unlikely you would have heard anything “unamerican” anyway. Despite giving (in his early years!) a prescient interpretation of Marxian thought (and, some say, making a unique contribution to Marxian Pragmatism), he became a rabid anti-communist in the 1940s (?). I assume you wouldn’t have been listening to him in the 1930s!
Yes, this is one of the many ironies of the post. Sidney Hook was anything but an apologist for communism; but I didn’t know that. I would have been listening in the 1980s, when he was swinging from his heels at student protestors who wanted to refashion the Western Civ requirement at Stanford. Believe me, I am listening to him plenty in the archives. But it would have been nice to say that I heard him lecture in person, on any subject.
A few v. quick thoughts re Freud:
(1) writing a post on Freud *in this particular series of posts* would not *necessarily* require re-reading Freud;
(2) in a relative’s basement some time ago, I found an old paperback that is v. on point for the mid-20th cent. American reception of Freud: Freud and the 20th Century, ed. B. Nelson (Meridian Books, 1957). Short-ish essays by a bunch of big names, e.g. Niebuhr. The book didn’t really grab me (the physical rattiness of the copy didn’t help), so I don’t know if any of the essays are all that interesting frankly, plus may not be all that easy to get your hands on a copy (either from the library or at a reasonable price), but thought I’d mention it anyway.
(3) In addition to the huge lit. on Freud in general, there are a couple of good bks out there spec. on Freud’s social/political thought, which is imo probably the weakest part of his overall work. But again, just thought would mention…
Louis, you are more right than you know. Not only would it not be necessary to read Freud for this series, it was not really necessary to read Freud for the Western Culture course. I was unusual in being one of those students who did all the reading (except for Marx). Someone on Twitter asked me if I had managed to pass the class without reading Marx. Of course! It’s pretty hard to fail a class at Stanford (though I came close once!). More generally, the amount of reading assigned to undergraduates has probably declined significantly in the past thirty years, but I would be willing to bet that the amount of reading undergraduates actually do hasn’t changed nearly as much. Plenty of students at elite and not-so-elite universities have always gotten through doing minimal reading or no reading at all. Students who believe that a college education is the route to knowledge and wisdom they would not get elsewhere tend to do the reading.
This is an important point to keep in mind in general when looking at the history of the curriculum. It’s pretty easy to see the history of what has been assigned; the history of what ideas students actually engaged with is harder to capture.
Points well taken. I was a reasonably serious student as an undergrad but not an esp efficient one. Did all the reading in the small seminar-style classes (where there was nowhere to hide) but in the large lecture courses one (if I can use the third person for myself) sometimes had to be more selective. And it was easy to fall behind. Forty years after graduating, I can still recall sitting down at lunch or dinner and lamenting “I’m so behind (i.e. in the reading) !” In those days no history prof, say, would have dreamed of giving quizzes to make sure students were keeping up. And not all lecture courses had discussion ‘sections’; some did, some didn’t, and attendance anyway could be spotty. This is just one person’s experience from a long time ago — I don’t claim that it generalizes beyond that.