Northwestern University - Syllabus Yearbook (Evanston, IL)

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

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 30 text:

The whole purpose of education is not the acquisition of knowledge. A student should be given a chance to re- examine every value that he ' s had in his life before him. So half of education to me is de-learning rather than learning. To start fresh and start pure and then go through and look at your values, where you came from, what you have been taught and then to re-examine those in terms of some of the great comrades that you can find through literature, art, philosophy and science. Fact is nothing to a student. It ' s like walking through the woods and if a bird makes a noise then the student says, ' What ' s that? ' and you say, ' a hairy-chested back- scratcher, ' and they say ' Oh fine, ' and then keep on walking. That doesn ' t mean anything. It doesn ' t tell them about the bird, or what it ' s doing, or anything else. You have to look at it by not just giving a term — because that ' s just a symbol: it doesn ' t mean anything by itself. It ' s like a boy says ' Why is grass green? ' and you say ' Because there ' s chlorophyll in it; ' that doesn ' t mean anything to him but he gets the word ' chlorophyll ' in his mind, so it has to be explained in different terms. That ' s why I call my course Introduction to Experimental Biol- ogy: because it ' s how people actually solve problems and the difficulties they go through. The question of how much time should be devoted to teaching is to me a very difficult one — look through every department, or at least the departments I ' ve been associated with in universities. You will usually find four or five good teachers. These are the ones that should be aimed at the undergraduate level, because they are the