Famous professors: From what I can tell, sometimes the hype is legit, sometimes not so much. One of my best professors here was a grad student at the time (Hi, Eric Schliesser!), yet, to be fair, many of the big-shots are great teachers. Some, however, are not, and are quite happy with themselves, and this inner joy makes it impossible for them to listen to new ideas, or to [hear] anything they themselves are not saying.--Phoebe Maltz, April 13, 2005.
Two days ago, after I closed discussion on my final lecture in Ghent (on Swift's A Modest Proposal), my undergraduate students in my survey course on early modern political philosophy startled me with an applause. I was so surprised and embarrassed that I looked down and never discerned who the ring-leader(s) was/were, and I only regained full consciousness when the last student had left the class-room.
When I was a PhD student at Chicago several important professors in the department expressed reservations about my academic future. At one point, while I was ABD, I got so discouraged that I needed a break from Hyde Park and I took an informal leave back to my home town, Amsterdam (don't cry for me), for an extended period. (My generous supervisor, Dan Garber (recall), never lost faith and pulled me through.) My main aim was to see if I would recover the joy of researching and writing philosophy. (In those days I still wholly conflated writing a dissertation and writing philosophy.) Away from peer pressure and the monastic life-style on the Midway, I walked my dog in an unfamiliar park, read Hume's History, and reflected on my grim job prospects (recall here and here); I decided that I would only stay with professional philosophy if I could fully embrace the life of a professional philosophy instructor.
I already knew that I liked being the teacher on the stage provided by the class-room (I had taught sections of Intro to International Relations before I went to graduate school), but at Chicago I had grown suspicious of teachers that teach to the crowd. By this I mean those professors who basically convey complex information and knowledge in an efficient and pleasing way (with slick presentations), but who don't...ahh...teach philosophizing. They reminded me of the (undoubtedly virtuous and mildly promising) lawyer-politician I had decided not to become, and that I dreaded I might still be if I would fail at professional philosophy. With hindsight I can see I had fallen under the spell of Ian Mueller (see Stephen Menn's recollection, pp. 216-9 and my own).
I forget which wise soul told me to reflect on the teaching methods of all the teachers that inspired me and to look for what is common in them and use that as my, as it were, exemplar. Over time, I decided that each of them enlarged features of their personality, intellectual and psychological, and used those features to engage with students and, simultaneously, deploy that connection to engage with the material together. At this level of abstraction this included professors who tried hard to convey their hard-won magnificent ideas about the universe (or the texts we were reading) as well the more cautious midwifing-professors (like Ian) who made it difficult to discern their own first order views during class discussion. The problem with this general insight is that it provides little concrete guidance and that to implement it, it presupposes considerable self-knowledge (and luck).
Even so over the years with the help and coaching of senior colleagues and frank students (especially in my first job at Wesleyan), I have evolved a teaching voice that is a mixture of theatricality, confrontation (sometimes playful sometimes earnest or both at once), and attempts at shared discovery, including a willingness to go down garden paths that end in (local) frustration. I have come to think that I am better at teaching methods and skills than content (although I often wonder if I may be deluded about this), so over the years I gave up on giving exams. Even reading my students' papers is an ongoing, painful exercise in discovering the limitations of my teaching skills.
Judging by more than a decade of teaching evaluations, there is always a sub-set of students that cannot abide me (that is, they clearly do not like my in-class persona), and also find my classes a waste of time. At an intellectual level I accept that one can't be the best teacher for everybody at the same time, although I still stubbornly feel that the true art of philosophical class-room teaching involves mentoring different kinds of souls simultaneously.
While there are few joys associated with aging one ameliorating one is encountering the mature reflections of former students (recall). I feel vindicated when away from the official class-room, with appropriate distance, they can praise me (or express gratitude) for facilitating their art in their experiment in living. And so, yes, part of me worries that my students' applause means that I have also started to teach to the crowd, but I have to admit that I am pleased this is my final memory of teaching on the Blandijnberg....until, of course, I receive their final papers.
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