On Civility in education

Words have effects (therefore they exist).

As anybody that has taught discovers, one's words also have many unexpected effects. (One can fail to notice this if students are only allowed to speak in multiple choice exams.) Words take on a life of their own and they are interpreted in frameworks and from perspectives that a teacher does not fully control. Often teacher and student alike is not fully aware of all the presuppositions and commitments one brings to a conversation. Each year I re-discover these facts when I read five hundred year old texts (from the history of philosophy) together with my students line by line (at first) asking them what the author means to convey. Sometimes we get baffled because we do not fully understand the technical terms that are taken for granted (eminent causation is not part of the contemporary philosophical vocabulary); sometimes we halt over cultural references we find confusing (my students know almost nothing about the details of the complex history of, say, Christianity -- and, I too, am often out of my depth -- ); but most of the times we tie ourselves in knots because we tacitly impose meaning(s) on the text as we read and interpret it. So, as we discuss just what we take the text to mean (so well before we evaluate if it is true), my students and I also learn a lot about our own views and divergent expectations. I sometimes joke that I teach my students how hard it is to read; in addition to bureaucratic and curricular 'learning output' expectations, I try to put them on the path of self-knowledge, in part, by having them practice in the art of giving and taking of arguments in a context where we cannot take for granted that we can establish the truth (the author is not around to ask). I'd like to fool myself that through the practice of close reading and discussion, I help prepare them for a life as responsible citizens in complex societies.

Sometimes students try to cut this process short by reading the translator's explanatory footnotes, which they take to be authoritative.  These footnotes are written by my peers, who do the best they can in juggling the demands of accessibility, readability, faithfulness to the text, and the demands of scholarship; their notes are informative, but, nevertheless, represent their commitments. I am not against using scholarship (or learning as such), but I explicitly try to encourage my students to treat the footnotes as another bit of evidence and not as a means to stop grappling with the text and their own commitments (etc.). Last semester a student repeatedly recited translators's footnotes to the assigned text to the class. I could tell that my admonishments about this particular footnoters's fallacies where not going anywhere; I asked my course assistant to hand me my other copy of the book; I opened the window to the class-room, and said something like, 'on your approach, we can just dispense with the text, and read an authoritative summary,' and then to my own astonishment, dropped the book out of the window into the pouring rain (onto an empty street). 

I don't recommend throwing books out of the window; it's expensive (the book was never found again), and it can be taken as an aggressive act of vandalism even in a context where they are familiar with your expectations. Even so, I don't regret dropping the book out of the window because I got lucky: nobody got hit and it seems that most of the students got the message that I cared about their participation, and that there was something at stake in the class. (I don't pretend my approach is objective; the readings and their order steer them into certain larger narratives.) Undoubtedly some students decided that I was theatrical and full of hot air; maybe one or two found the whole scene threatening ('first books, what's next?')

To the best of my knowledge my Ghent undergraduates encounter me without their knowledge of my blog-personality (unlike the MA/PhD students). Much to my pleasant surprise and unlike my students in Leiden a decade ago, they seem unfamiliar with my participation as Judas in the footnotes to the biography of the (rather famous) Dutch Novelist Arnon Grunberg. I prefer it that way because I don't want my students to think I stand for a particular perspective or position; this way my students are not tempted to shape their comments to their perceptions of what I take to be true or the 'required answers.' (This is not to deny that my students may view me as 'typical Dutch,' or  'American,' or 'Jewish'--all three identities are not empty, narrative shells in Flanders.)

By contrast, I have several colleagues that I admire, who teach their philosophies to their students (as the truth--of course, many students are not receptive) and that have a public presence as Ghent philosophers. I am proud to be part of a department that has members with a history of public philosophy, even public activism. These colleagues inspire and provoke their students; they also contribute to the public weal. As it happens some of them have been in the forefront of efforts of removing (Catholic) religiously inspired legislation from the books (abortion, euthanasia, school choice, etc.). They successfully adopted reason and satire as means to battle what they took to be illiberal political role of the Catholic Church. These colleagues also have become the face, fairly or not, of the intellectual wing that successfully tries to curtail the influence of Islam in Flanders (this is a vote-winner). These colleagues, who tend to remain civil at all times, sometimes turn illiberal themselves; and I have  worried to what degree this has made the whole department seem unwelcoming to religious students, in general, and Islamic or Jewish students, in particular, of which we have very few relative to their numbers in the Flemish population. (I have been told that traditionally religious students go to Leuven.) Rather than try to police speech, I prefer that we take steps to make the department a place where many more perspectives on political society are investigated and debated (and becomes known for that).

But it is not, in fact, easy to be an academic and a public philosopher. The university is increasingly demanding about frequency of publishing and obtaining grants, both of which require considerable specialization and focus. (Luckily, in Ghent because we have few administrators they prefer to keep us busy this way rather than filling out forms all the time.) With jobs scarce, young researchers need to choose between activism and hyper-specialization (see this piece by Ingrid Robeyns on how existential this issue can become). Risk-averse universities like it this way because public activism can threaten some of its own cozy arrangements with industry (e.g., sponsored research) and public opinion and, thereby, political decisions about funding (etc.). Every blog I post undermines my 'productivity,' and it is not impossible that one day, for good reasons or no reason at all, some administrator will decide that I fall short of the research expectation and will point at these blog-posts. To reduce the scope of activism favors the status-quo in the short-run, but it also reduces the possibilities of the local experiments in living that ultimately nurture the trials and errors that fuel liberal democracies (and capitalism). Professor-activists can be a nuisance, but they can also enrich the communities that sustain them.

Many of our students's parents also prefer that we focus on handing out degrees that give their children entry to the secure "productive" careers protected by state privilege (in banking, bureaucracy, medicine, etc.). On this paternal perspective, the university is a "safe harbor," -- rather than an inquisitive ship that explores stormy seas to an uncertain destination --, where students are "respected" by protecting them from possible harms that come from exposure to dissonant views and life's experiences that diverge from theirs. Teachers can, indeed, qua teachers harm their students in many, many ways, but the greatest harm comes not from a low, unfair grade or from exposing them to illiberal views, but from deadening their souls by presenting the world that they will inherit as necessary and inevitable, as a right answer to be mastered (for a grade, for the degree, for the next step on the ladder).

I sometimes fantasize that some spirited soul picked up my annotated copy of Machiavelli's Prince of the pavement, dried the pages, and reads his words. Perhaps, she is mulling them today...