Northwestern University - Syllabus Yearbook (Evanston, IL)

Page 28 text:

There is such an unwarranted, such a pathetic belief in education. Yet everyone knows that thousands leave our colleges no brighter and very little better informed than when they entered. Teaching, at the best, is merely an adjunct to learning. And most scholarship — at least in the humanities — is only explaining our explanations. Most college students are very pleasant people. Not merely are some of my best friends former students, most of my best friends are former students — though I find it disturbing when they hurl back at me, as they sometimes do, some lunatic whimsy or other that I palmed off on them forty years ago! Power used to be restricted entirely to the trustees and the administration — and most power must always be so restricted, I think. The managing of the university ' s finances, for instance, requires a great deal of highly-specialized knowledge; moreover, faculty members have, or should have, more knowledge with.n their speciality than their students have and so should have more control over the classroom. But students should be consulted and listened to, and, as far as I know, they always have been. They vote by choosing their careers and courses. A university is, as the word implies, a union of many bodies. The alumni, for example, are much more a part of the university than are the freshman students. I sometimes think that departments and courses are the greatest obstacles to learning in universities. But I can ' t see how to eliminate them. Publish or perish? Why not? Those who chant this dreary piece of alliteration as an indictment of the university are just blethering. The two things are not antithetical. A good man wants to publish. The fault is not in that but in the fact that the mediocrity who does not want to publish forces himself to grind out some dreary vacuity or pompousness and somehow gets it printed and the rest of his days inflicts it on his wretched students. Those who don ' t publish original, interesting, enlightening, amusing — or what you will — books and articles still have a place, even in colleges. The world needs ordinary people. It can ' t function without them. The world has to be arranged so that ordinary people can run it. The ordinary intelligent man knows just as much as the extraordinary man, outside the ordinary man ' s specialty, and his judgement is likely to be better.

Page 27 text:

where, supposedly, you are to improve not only your mind, but also your soul and your character through contact with other great thought and art. Man as a whole, I think we see that now, seems to have failed. There ' s nothing but hatred and pettiness and conceit on this planet. Every nation, no matter how small, is still convinced that they are somehow superior, that they have an axe to grind; and the impression one has looking at world politics today is that you look at a kindergarten full of brats. Ideal situations very often require ideal teachers and ideal students. Learning as a painless process never has existed. The young herdsman who had to fight off lions had to work hours and hours throwing spears at anything that moved in the wind. And there is too much of a desire for Nirvana; for laxity, for getting things a joyful way. Life simply does not work like that. Nothing in life can be acquired by just sitting there. Not even love. Love is something you have to work at, too. Many people make such a mess of love — they don ' t work at it. This is very danger- ous in our day. There is the flaw, still left from the past, of too much discipline, of too much authori- tarian yelling at people, and uniformity. But the other danger is just as great. And as always, the answer is a creative synthesis. Dissatisfaction of students will always be here, because particularly in teaching, the personality must come through. I could well imagine that a professor of medicine could teach a specialty of the nervous system, and be himself an unfair, unjust, un- pleasant man — Yet an excellent scholar in his field, and he may also have pedagogical skill. In the humanities, it won ' t do. Personality is just as important as what the man teaches; in teaching liter- ature, and in teaching art, that stands out so distinctly. You cannot do that as a trade. It has to be a man ' s life work, he has to love it himself, and very often you don ' t have those men — you don ' t have them all the time. So you couldn ' t have a university if you only want to have excellent teachers. But, never- theless, students will only accept excellent teachers.

Page 29 text:

Bergen Evans Professor of English The great disappointment of teaching, I think, is how rarely students come to the office to just sit and talk about the great liter- ature read and talked about in class — or lectured about. Not that it matters, really, whether students and teachers have many talks outside of class. The most important people you are going to meet in these four years are not your teachers, but your conte poraries. And the most important thing you will do is to sit and yammer and laugh and argue and boast and bellow with them. The closest I ever came to education functioning ideally was at Oxford. I had no teachers and no classes. I had a wonderful time; I sat by the fire for three years and read and read and read. 25