The Wabash Commentary

“Cultures and Traditions has been responsible for most of my intellectual growth,” reported one student in the “Summary of Student Interviews on All-College Courses [ACC].” “That happens when you are forced to consider viewpoints different from your own. A lot of people get boxed in their major. But C&T forces you out of your comfort zone.”

Out of your comfort zone. No man’s land. The world of answers that are questioned, questions with no answers – the precise world, that is, that C&T tries to cultivate.

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht is famous for forming his epic theater around the idea of estrangement, which he saw as the prerequisite for any real thinking. One must become a stranger to the world to even think about the world. Evil is the obvious, the self-evident, the things one takes for granted – the familiar. Good is the questionable, the unsettling, the things that keep one up at night – the strange. And only when something is strange, so strange that it disrupts your day-to-day comfort, can it be rightly examined. The near, the intimate, the comforting – these are far better as lullabies than as stimuli. Give a nursery rhyme to a child; give a Greek tragedy to a man.

Any professor with half a care for modern methodology will see here a close relation to the case for “critical distance” in scholarship. It is rather odd, then, that what most professors (perhaps wrongly) praise as good methodology is exactly what they complain of when it comes to teaching C&T: that the material is too unknown, too distant, too strange. They are, to use the recent phrase, “uncomfortable with being uncomfortable.” They are, to use Brechtian phrasing, uncomfortable with learning.

Think they aren’t? Consider the following lines from Dean Phillips, which he wrote on Feb. 13 to a good friend of The Commentary: “From another angle the foundation of the course is the faculty who teach it as much as the content or number of semesters taught . The fact is, we will have fewer faculty and the kind of passion and excitement that leads to changed student lives needs to be present in the teaching of all courses. The student and faculty data show that that is not the case with C&T. Even if we were not reducing faculty size we would have to change the glaring fact that the variability of student experience is high.”

Now the breakdown:  The excellence of the course depends on its faculty. The faculty no longer have “passion and excitement” to teach the course.  This is more of an issue than the reduced faculty size.

Again and again we’ve heard that C&T must go because of a faculty shortage - never that, as all students suspect, it must go because a disheartening majority of our professors think it cumbersome.  What if professors start thinking the responsibility of giving Chapel Talks cumbersome, or open-door policies, or responding to student emails?

Enough. This article isn’t intended to slap any wrists, although some such measure might be just what is needed. After all, it does seem shaming that the College asks students to become uncomfortable – and not only asks, but promises them that in so doing they will become better – while it nods understandingly at and even compensates professors who complain of discomfort. It is a real question whether such professors even belong at a liberal arts college – but not the question of this article.

Rather than curse complaints of discomfort, I would like to trace the effects of discomfort, as they reveal, I believe, the principal problems with C&T. Nothing will get professors to buck up other than a certain amount of professional shame, a command from on high, a ‘Just deal with it, because C&T is good, and you’re better off for teaching it.’ But in this time of re-evaluation, a look at why C&T doesn’t hit the mark at which it aims is precisely the look that we must take. And so, looking in that direction…

A tension exists within C&T. The course is largely arranged in geographic modules, which suggests that its purpose is to teach students something about cultures – and, likewise, that the responsibility of the professor is to give the student certain facts about a society: whether it pitied its poor or not, whether it valued its women or not, whether it allowed for freedom of conscience or not. The list is endless, but it is a list, meaning that its tasks can be checked off. And that process of ‘checking off’ is left to the professor – yet the course in theory does not expect its professors to know anything about the cultures that it define its modules. It does not ask for experts – at least, not explicitly. It will become very clear soon that the course betrays itself, testifying that it does not need experts while simultaneously promoting a type of approach that encourages expertise.

But any first-semester sophomore knows that describing C&T as a course about the world is selling it short:  The course purports to be, after all, more than an almanac. That it is best when it transcends its almanac tendencies is obvious when one considers what makes for a ‘great C&T discussion.’ It is rare, if ever, that a student walks away from C&T with that very mystical feeling of awe and confusion, that feeling that accompanies real learning, when fifty minutes were spent on pinpointing what the Athenian courtroom thought of adultery. No doubt knowing when and how Athens put the scarlet letter on its licentious few is very interesting, even worthwhile – but it is not the fountain from which the life of C&T springs.

That fountain is the world of the unknown, the world of answers that are questioned, questions with no answers. No man’s land – literally. It is not, when studying the Athenians, the land of classicists; it is not, when studying ancient China, the land of Professor Blix; and it is not, when studying African-America, the land of the Malcolm X Institute of Black Studies. C&T at its best is of no discipline; it is extra-disciplinary, über-disciplinary, above and beyond any discipline. And for precisely this reason are complaints leveled against C&T for forcing one out of one’s comfort zone – out of one’s scholarly field, that is – entirely invalid. Or, if not invalid, then uninteresting. C&T forces everyone out of the comfort zone – except, I suppose, the real humanist, the Renaissance man, the man who has foregone specialization in favor of standing back from it all, of keeping an observer’s distance: the man whose home is no man’s land.

To return, then, to the two seemingly opposing forces in C&T. The module system suggests that the course should concentrate on teaching things about the world – little facts about big cultures. But the beauty of C&T comes when discussion transcends any specific society, when it gets, albeit often very haphazardly, at the ideas above cultures, at ideas that cannot be categorized into any discipline – ideas like beauty and justice, but also ideas like guilt, redemption, duty, and death. We might further dichotomize things by saying that one part of C&T is about answers, the other part about questions – and it is this second part that is the heart of the course. Just one day at the heart of the course, and students can suffer the rest of the semester while still saying that C&T is one of the most worthwhile classes at the College – and not be lying to themselves.

Unfortunately “one day” is very often exactly how it turns out – a single day that gets at the most important things, at the ideas above cultures. The rest are too easily spent in a tedious back-and-forth of plot summary and surface wonder at the eccentricities of far away lands. And why? The obvious answer is that this former activity, the intellectual wandering of no man’s land, is difficult. It’s hard to get there – but it would be one thing if the students and professor realized its difficulty and, admitting it, settled on talking about the easier things, the little cultural facts. That, though, is not how it works. Students yearn to get at these big ideas, convinced that discussing them is the essence of a liberal arts education – absolutely convinced, and absolutely burning with the passionate yearning of youth. It is this desire to talk about the big ideas that led students in the “Summary Report” to praise the Odyssey and biblical readings while dismissing the second semester texts as “mundane.”

Students are interested in questions – not in answers. They are, to phrase things differently, interested in the heart of C&T, not the means by which the heart is sometimes reached – not, that is, in little cultural facts. And when the means are mistaken for the end, the end is never reached. Classroom discussion all too infrequently asks unanswerable questions, and the fault lies with the professor.

We’ll say, though, that the professor’s misdeed is unintentional, that the professor is an innocent malefactor. His fault is, to return to where all this started, that he feels uncomfortable and doesn’t like it.  So used to seeing things from the perspective of his discipline, he instinctively clutches out at whatever discipline he might find to aid him in charting the waters of C&T. He is Peter sinking at sea – but instead of trusting the voice that says, “Ask questions,” he grasps at the boat, the habit of which is to give answers.

We might have said that he clutches at the lifeboat that is the pre-class faculty meeting, the hour of “teacher prep” in which the professor who knows most about the text at hand leads an overview of its context and main ideas. The suggestion of such a meeting is that professors should learn from the expert, and then, taking this expertise into the classroom, become mini-experts amongst their students. And this is why professors commonly think teaching C&T is so hard, and why they are in turn laughed at by their students –  they imagine they’ve to become experts, when all that is necessary to teach C&T well is to ask good questions. Rephrased:  All that is necessary to teach C&T well is to have the ability of a liberal arts student. It is a sad fact that many C&T courses could be better taught by a bright student sensitive to the ideas that motivate mankind than a bright professor knowledgeable of certain cultural practices. 

But the point is real:  We don’t need professors to teach C&T; we need Renaissance men, men at home in the world of question marks.  There was once a happy time when the two were one, or so we’re told. It was the time when teaching C&T was the occupation of the elite, when invitations were handed to faculty whose soul was weighed and found good. And one can bet that those invitations did not go only to the smartest faculty, or to the eldest:  Pedantry, the bad habit of experts, is the bad friend of age.

What C&T takes is neither experience nor intellect, but a desire to be uncomfortable, and a dogged determination to get there. That professors feel so uncomfortable teaching the course is because they’ve mistaken the goal of the course, thinking they’ve to have knowledge to teach it when all they really have to have is curiosity. This mistake is reinforced not only by the weekly “teacher prep” meetiéngs, but also by the specialist lectures both students and faculty are made to hear. And not that the lectures must be misleading, but that they often are, filling up the fifty minutes with expertise instead of with the charge that reading the upcoming books is the most important thing in the world, and that every man in his right mind should want to do nothing else.  Professor Hudson gave the best C&T lecture last year by simply talking of Shakespeare with the crazed passion of a man talking about the love of his life. It was more the gleam in his eye than any word he said that gave The Tempest its magic. He was Prospero on stage, and the lectures would be well served if more professors followed his cue.

It takes curiosity, a desire to be uncomfortable, a dogged determination. Three things that hang not one bit upon one’s academic background – three things that any Wabash professor worth the name should have. Being “uncomfortable” in C&T is not a valid excuse for not wanting to teach it, although it may be a good reason to rethink one’s profession. Being uncomfortable in C&T is exactly the point, a point only reached when expertise is exiled from the classroom.