Northwestern University - Syllabus Yearbook (Evanston, IL)

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about yourself as it is in giving you a chance to learn about the world. College education should always be couched in terms of constant interplay between the self and the latest data, and allow you to interact as much as possible at your own speed and in your own way to find what you like and what you don ' t like. I find it difficult to know whether there is inherent pleasure in intellectuality for people who are not professionally committed to pursuing the life of a scholar. This is the kind of ego- centrism all college professors have — because we enjoy college everybody else must. I don ' t think that what one has accomplished by the graduate level is measureable. Presum- ably somebody coming out of college will be more sure of himself, more knowledgeable about himself and have a sense of values. Un- dergraduate education contributes to this. It has a lot to do with being away from home, having independence from the kind of petty requirements that characterize the high school. It ' s the stimulation of being in an atmosphere where so many students are going through the same kind of process. It ' s in an atmosphere that should value the kind of intellectucal playfulness which involves thinking for think- ing ' s own sake, thinking for the hell of it — the exchange of ideas, the exchange of feelings and the exchange of values that should go on in a non-punitive atmosphere. I respect students who are intellectually playful, who take ideas that I think one way about and think something different. How gen- eral this is among faculty members, I don ' t know. I have been shocked by some stories that I don ' t know are true or not, where intellec- tual playfulness has been penalized almost vindictively. I ' m surprised to see it at all. The general atmosphere of the whole university is perhaps too businesslike to support intellectual playfulness as the most prominent ideal. I find a kind of Norman Vincent Peale Power of Positive Thinking here — that Northwestern ' s really great. There is a freezing up attitude and a Shut up and like it atmosphere. There ' s a sense at this university that so many of the faculty are opting out of responsibility for the quality and type of edu- cation that the kids are getting. What I ' d like to see this college doing is relaxing, playing, and thinking. The three can go together: too many students find that they don ' t. I think it ' s because of grades, I think it ' s everything. There ' s a God-awful number of requirements in the school. It ' s doing it right. The number of people coming into this office and talking to me about — well, you know, — I looked on there and it said this and I looked over there at the catalogue and it said some- thing else and what ' s going to happen to me if I don ' t interpret it right — a constant stream of little hurdles not even involving grades — bureaucratic hassles. I get a kind of feeling of anomie among the students and the faculty against some power up there that doesn ' t understand, that doesn ' t care, that is somewhat unresponsive. I really don ' t know how to put my finger on it any closer than that except the number of times I ' ve heard teachers laughing with students at the bureaucratic foibles that they ' re both facing. There ' s no sense that if it ' s stupid, we ' ll get it changed.

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Robert Church Professor of Eduction and History One of the reasons I became a teacher is the fact that I like doing historical research. I really enjoy the process of ordering disparate materials, taking a bunch of notecards, old journals, reading through them, and trying to say something that ' s interesting and provocative about them. It ' s a fascinating process that I love to do. Historys always afforded me that opportunity. But I ' ve carried it one step fur- ther in becoming a professor of education because I find that I am much less bound by disciplinary limits on teaching styles: I am much freer to be my own man. I ' m not sure that I can define an ideal teaching model for myself. The man who so influenced me in my junior year would sort of point at you with his eyes and his finger. He ' d ask, What is the answer to that? and you ' d answer or you ' d look stupid. He had classes and discussions worked out so that he always ended where he wanted to be with his conclusions. In a sense he was saying his piece, and it was clearly more stimulating than a lecture. I ' m really caught at the moment with the non-directive method which philosophically I don ' t believe in — I ' m not a Carl Rogers fan. I like to think of myself as tough-minded and yet I find that the non-directive approach proves to work best in awakening students to the possibility of what could be done with the material before them and how they can relate what they ' re doing in history to what they ' re doing in the real world. I haven ' t found the proper balance. I can really see no way of using a large lecture course except for obtaining factural information and for interpretation. In a sense, a lecture is a book that hasn ' t been written yet, and presumably lectures ought to be better than books — more advanced. But I don ' t see any real way to magically engage two hundred students in a give and take, or any kind of effective branching process where they can advance at their own pace, or think about things the way they want to. In a large lecture class, there ' s no way to get somebody ' s reac- tions to what you ' re saying. Teaching time does not need to dwell on the conveyance of information. This is where I think television, video tapes, or something like that could be used. It really doesn ' t make sense to take the time to give the same set of lectures every year. That time could be spent in taping the notes and maybe revising the tape every year to keep up with new information. The extra time could be spent in small groups. I ' m very much attracted to the idea of college as a time of opting out of pressures and of getting ahead in the world. I see college as a time to stretch your mind and try on a series of intellectual styles and personal styles without getting hurt — without losing the chance of promotion to this or that career. You get the chance to try different ways of thought and of experiencing either directly or through books different styles. In a sense I see college as just as important in giving you a chance to learn

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The first idea of education is that I think an educator or a teacher should com- municate knowledge and get minds going, to make people think about something; but I ' m not prepared to say that you should put so much emphasis on making people think that you forget to teach them the kind of data that they need to think about. I feel that a lot of the descendents of John Dewey, in education, for instance, have been so concerned about getting people to think, and have not been, in my view, inter- ested enough in the unpleasant discipline of having to learn something. If you want to think with me about the Soviet Union or Western Europe, you ' ve got to know certain basic data. If you don ' t know that certain basic data, you ' re either taking my word for it, you ' re playing around with policies, situations, comments, where as an educated person, you can be dangerous, because you may be an opinion leader, and you don ' t know what you ' re talking about, because you don ' t have the stuff back there. The teacher ' s obligation is to com- municate that data which seems to be rele- vant to whatever he ' s teaching; and he damn well make the student learn it. And also, and this is just as important, but it comes after knowledge of the data, to ask the student to think about this; to challenge au- thority, to challenge the book, to challenge anybody, after he knows what the arguments are, what the books are about, and so forth. But there is the analysis problem, and the data-learning problem. A second thing that seems important to me in terms of one ' s goal as a teacher is the kind of research you do that gives you the authority to say something. I think that one of the advantages of being at a univer- sity like Northwestern or Yale or Harvard is that there is a value placed on research; you ought to have a knowledge in some areas that no one else has. This you will communicate; this will help you with propo- sition number one, as a teacher. A person who does not do research, for example many teachers in second rate colleges in this country, are told to teach twelve, fifteen hours a week, rehashing other people ' s work. Such a person, in my view, has a ter- rible handicap — he ' s never felt what he ' s talking about. To me, having spent several summers doing nothing but working on writing things up or going to the computer center, or going to Canada and talking with the people there who my work is about. This adds a dimension which is absolutely impossible to get by just reading other people ' s work. I think a university is abso- lutely correct in demanding involvement in research. The third element is kind of a moral element as a teacher. A teacher makes less money than a businessman or a lawyer, or so forth, but he gets certain non- monetary rewards. These non-monetary rewards are involved in what might be put in a sense of making somebody better. And, it seems to me, that you have a little bit of the role that the minister or the priest or the rabbi has, conveying your interest in the subject, and even making and dealing with, other elements in a person ' s life. I think there is an obligation for those of us who enter this profession to concern ourselves with this question of the charac- ter, what Elliot at Harvard uses to call the individual moral personality, the question of making a better person, if you can, and not letting someone else sink because of dope, or booze, or something else. I think that a teacher ' s obligation is to be his brother ' s keeper not in a sense that he is God, and the student is inferior, but as a di- alogue based upon functional specialization. The teacher has certain skills, the student has certain skills. For example, if I go to a party, you will probably dance better than I, and the female popula- tion will probably be more impressed with your skills. In my view, a student, even in a large class, who takes an initiative at all to know the professor, can allow him to be a professor in this tripartheid sense that I ' ve mentioned. It seems to me that a great many students complain when they ' re ignored by their professors, but this is due