On Being Impractical - Walls, Ticket-takers and Kings

Among all of the crises we face each day, the crisis in and about the Humanities is surely way down on the list. In an absolute sense, if there was a crisis in the Humanities, it’s one where no lives are lost, no financial empires fall and no moral fibre is weakened. Yet, in our lives, jobs have been lost, people have been changed, potentials haven’t been realized and the future has been affected. There seems, then, to be a disconnect between all that comes under the word “Humanities” and our lives.

The problem is that, as Americans, we think we believe in the practical; we say “It’s good if it is practical”. We think we believe this but we don’t, of course.

For example, there is nothing practical when Americans spend $166 billion a year on alcohol, $157 billion on smoking, $110 billion on illicit drugs, $107 billion on overeating and $40 billion on gambling. These astonishing figures not only include the actual cost of the addiction but also the cost of treatment.

These are hardly “practical” values. Their effect is momentary pleasure and, ultimately, pain.

So, we argue that we see no value in engaging in the arts or the humanities. When school budgets are cut in America, the art and music classes go first. Others quickly follow.

The idea that anything connected with the Humanities must have practical value – and if it doesn’t we invent it – can be shown from an experience I had when I was in college, I was required to take either art or music appreciation. When I asked my advisor why these two courses – I was an English major and he was a Physics teacher – I was informed quite abruptly that those sorts of courses were “good for you” and would “improve your life.” I learned, of course, that this was simply claptrap.

Strangely, we don’t make the same arguments about science courses. I assume that only hard-core math or physics teachers would ever say that a course in Calculus is “good for you” or that a course in Physics at the Atomic Level will “improve your life”!

I want to suggest, then, that for the purposes of these remarks we abandon the idea that the humanities have any "practical" value and, instead, concentrate on the clear values – even if they are impractical -- that they do provide.

What values, then, DO the Humanities give us? (Parenthetically, the idea that they give us values is itself problematic. “Giving us value” implies that we can measure those values. We can perform such measurements in the sciences. If a scientist invents a new compound, one of the first results is to estimate what and how much value will be returned on the investment. This, I believe, is impossible in the humanities and when it is done, it returns false data. How, for example, could I possibly numerically measure how or whether a Shakespearean play might have meaning to one of my students?)

Without trying to measure the impact or value of the humanities we can – and many have – suggest broad ways that the arts and humanities can be important in our lives. Because they offer these insights, they should be regarded as significant and, thus, worthy of support.

My closest friend – Professor Wendel White – recently sent me a document written in 1964 which was the result of a national study of the role of the humanities. I think he sent it to me knowing how desperately I have been struggling with this speech and because the conclusions in the document were current and important when we founded the College. I would like to believe that these ideas can still be found at Stockton and can be seen in the curricula, in our assumptions about students, in the mission of the College and even in the design of the early buildings. More, perhaps, on this later.

The document concludes with the following observations:

1.  America needs a national ideal for which to strive; the Humanities can provide it.
2.  Our democracy demands wisdom from its citizens; the humanities can offer it.
3.  While we believe that we are a nation of materialists, the humanities consistently tell us we are not.
4.  World leadership cannot merely be about superior force, vast wealth or dominating technologies; it must be about leadership based on elements of the spirit.
5.  Americans have enormous amounts of leisure time and the humanities can make this time more significant.

These are all laudable and critical goals. Even though they were written 50 years ago, I have no trouble agreeing and supporting them.

But, the Humanities are only secondarily about democracy, the nation and the world. For me, the Humanities are about us – individual humans trying to understand who we are, what we are capable of and why we are here. These, too, are laudable and critical goals.

I want to spend the rest of our time together telling you about how I personally see the critical importance of the Humanities and giving you examples of my experiences teaching them for 40 years.

First of all, and I don’t want to be blasphemous here, but teaching is a kind of religion to me and it has one commandment – strive to find out what it means to be human. I devoutly believe that humans and, therefore, human life have meaning. It is my task to convince students of this and to help them pull the meaning from literary life and, by extension, expose the meaning of their lives as well. We don’t, therefore, read just for meaning; we read for us.

You and I – the “us” I just mentioned – live – at Stockton-- in a physical and intellectual environment steeped in Humanistic values. They are terribly practical here and, I submit, essential to a meaningful life. I cannot imagine Stockton without them. Let me see if I can explain.

You may have noticed, if you have been here long, that the college is constructed out of metal panels and that those panels can be changed at any time. Every wall throughout the older buildings can be taken down and raised again in a different configuration. While this made the original construction easier, it also made it possible – unlike traditional buildings where walls cannot be moved – for the building to match human needs. If we decided that we needed smaller classrooms, we could partition off a larger room into smaller rooms. Simple. Human needs should change buildings.

Those who created the College (I among them) were also convinced that privilege was a detriment to learning; inequalities caused class resentments and we can’t learn if we feel suppressed and unheard. Perhaps you haven’t noticed but there are no faculty parking lots, no faculty dining rooms or faculty lounges. Students routinely call me by my first name; Doctor and Professor are seldom heard. When I was an undergraduate, I saw the President twice in four years and I wouldn’t have thought about trying to meet with him. Our President can be seen everywhere on campus and will chat with you if his advice is needed.

Perhaps the most important of these Humanistic values here at Stockton is choice. Stockton students have an enormous range of choices compared to other institutions. You can choose classes, can choose which days of the week to be on campus, can choose preceptors, where to eat, where to park and even what to wear. When I was an undergraduate, all men wore sports coats and ties, women wore dresses, I had almost no choices of classes, when I would be on campus, where I would park or where I would eat.

The choices you have here may not seem important but let me assure you that they are. Choice was a fundamental value when we founded the College; our early documents are full of discussions about the need for choice and how having choices will better prepare you for your lives when you leave the College.

My point is that values that center on the human CAN BE practical, are democratic and allow us all to learn about ourselves in powerful ways
I want to close with some comments about a short story and a tragedy; both illustrate powerfully “what it means to be human”.

One of my favorite texts is a short story by Bernard Malamud called Idiots First. In this story a father (Mendel) has a retarded son (Isaac) and he is desperately trying to find someone who will take care of his son after his death. You see, he has been visited by Death (Ginzburg) and was told that he has just a few hours to live. Mendel visits three friends – a pawnbroker, a rich man and a rabbi – begging each to take his son and care for him. All refuse.

Finally, Mendel decides to send his son by train to California to his brother who will, indeed, care for Isaac. The problem is: will he get him on the train before Death appears? After much frustration they arrive at the train station but Death is there – as a ticket-taker -- blocking their way. The train is close by and ready to leave but Death will not let Mendel and Isaac pass. I quote Malamud:

Mendel, in a burst of rage, grabs Death and says: You dog you.” Mendel lunged at Ginzsburg’s throat and began to choke. “You Bastard, don’t you understand what it means human?

Ginzburg is unrelenting but at the moment of Mendel’s death, Malamud writes: Clinging to Ginsburg in his last agony, Mendel saw reflected in the ticket collector’s eyes the depth of his terror. But he saw that Ginsburg, staring at himself in Mendel’s eyes, saw mirrored in them the extent of his own awful wrath. He beheld a shimmering, starry, blinding light that produced darkness.

Death understands at that moment what it means to be human and the awful power being human has to accept and forgive and also to resist. This is what the humanities offer us – the most profound insights into what it means to be human.

The tragedy I want to mention is Shakespeare’s King Lear -- a play with which I have wrestled for 40 years because it seems to me that this play – as difficult and as terrifying as it is – also offers some final, profound insights into what it means to be human.

Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of King Lear sometime between 1603 and 1606. It is one of his last plays and is, arguably, his greatest work. The plot is fairly simple. Lear, at the beginning, is old and to prevent civil strife among his daughters after his death, offers to divide the kingdom for each daughter on the basis of how much they love him. The eldest two of his daughters declare their love; the youngest cannot and so is banished.

Lear, who has arranged to spend long periods of time with each daughter, is rejected by both and is driven from safety into the wilderness. There he has periods of madness blaming his two daughters for his fate. Eventually, in the depths of insanity, he is rescued by the invasion of his youngest daughter coming to save him. His sanity returns but in the final terrifying scene his youngest daughter dies just before he does.

All tragic heroes – either by their own arrogance or by others’ power – abandon family, responsibility and culture. They reject being connected in favor of the isolation of their pride.

If the play was a comedy, Lear would start being isolated and disconnected and end up integrated into a large community. But, of course, the play isn’t a comedy. Lear must experience isolation, loss, disconnection as a King so he can learn the value of the Human. Ironically, being a Human is exactly what he has forgotten and, yet, what he thinks he has an abundance of. The early Lear insists that he is gracious, generous, tolerant – all human traits – but, in fact, he is petty, rash and ignorant of his situation. It is that humanness that he must learn.

He also utterly rejects failure and error. It is, he asserts again and again, his daughters’ ingratitude (they are, by the way, Shakespeare’s finest harpies) that is the cause of his fall. His errors, misjudgments and blindness to the Truth cause him to falter but he maintains his innocence about such failures until almost the end.

In addition, he cannot imagine that he might be wrong because to do so would, he believes, destroy himself. He is safe in the present and demands that it continue without change. As he is abandoned by his daughters, he – more importantly, abandons Self and, finally, abandons Reason – the one trait that signifies our humanness.

Lear’s fall is not the result of being too human but of being too little human. As King he has forgotten that rule long before the play opens. If he is to come to an understanding of his condition, he must loose himself to gain himself. As all good LITT majors know: you’ve got to go down to go up.

The terror for the tragic hero – and, by extension, for us -- is explained by Lear’s experiences. We are afraid that we will loose ourselves in trying to preserve ourselves. Lear, in the middle of the play, begins to understand this though he cannot bring himself to accept it. What if, in fighting the Human , we become inhuman?

The fact is we need other humans, we need to recognize that in this society where error and failure are considered almost sinful, accepting them aids us in becoming more human. We also need not to be afraid – as we certainly are these days – of what we don’t know, of what we can’t understand, of what we haven’t experienced. We need to see that fear will keep us from becoming the humans we need to be. This is what I try to teach, this is what literature teaches and it is what the Humanities teach.

Lear does not understand what it means to be human. He rejects the human as inadequate, inappropriate, faltering, error-prone and ridiculous. But finally he sees being human as transcendent, powerful, absolutely capable and, ultimately, loving.

Ah, there it is! At the center of being human when we are least deserving of that word, the possibility of love is offered. Being human is to love and to be worthy of love. How simple and how profound.

[These remarks were delivered at the 2010 Graduation Ceremony of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey on December 19, 2010]

Advising is Teaching II

My response to Ken's item #6:

As Ken notes, in the early days of the college precepting was considered teaching and there was some workload credit given for it. It was supposed to be more significant than the kind of advising we now do. Yet, while there may have been considerable opportunity for providing the student with a unique experience, one wonders, again, whether this was felt by all students equally. The freshman would have gained a great deal more from the precepting experience than the transfer student. But, perhaps we should say, that was the benefit of coming to Stockton straight away and not stopping at a community college for two years. Perhaps this needs further articulation, as we endeavor to make it clear to the transfer student what they need to accomplish at Stockton – and it needs to be part of a strong Transfer Seminar program.

Isn’t it interesting that we have a freshman seminar and a freshman year experience, but really do not have the same thing for transfer students. What is the reason for this? – It is about retention and engaging students immediately so that they don’t leave and go to another institution. And these things work well. We don’t worry about transfer students so much, because they will be taking the fastest route through the college and it is unlikely that they will leave us. No worry – no services!

But it is nonetheless true that, from the perspective of inculcating values, it is perhaps more important to reach the transfer student than the freshman. The latter has a longer period in which to imbibe the spirit of the college; he or she has a greater opportunity to experiment; heck, he or she gets his or her own freshman seminar! By the time they reach their junior year, we hope that they have experienced our G courses, and that they have been taught to question and articulate their own ideas. Meanwhile, the transfer student is experiencing a much more traditional education – a continuation in many respects of the approaches he or she was encumbered with in high school. Listen and repeat, listen and repeat; know facts, don’t think about interpretations. We only get the transfer students at Stockton for two to three years – perhaps we should spend more energy trying to help them to more quickly learn what we think college should be all about.

But I digress. An extreme understatement, since I am supposed to be talking about Precepting. So let’s find our way back, if we can –

It seems to me that precepting is more important than we give it credit for being. We have shrunk it down to advising for the major, and we assume that all students understand what these majors are and how they should achieve success in them. We have created a Banner system that allows students to go through their careers advising themselves, more or less. Where precepting used to be compensated, there is now no support for faculty who do the job well. We talk about advising being teaching – but the bottom line is that we pay for teaching while we don’t pay for advising. What do we expect?

Even if we now advise, where we might have precepted before – and we might want to consider the Wilsonian and Princetonian origin of the latter term and therefore its potential elitism – we should be endeavoring to build an advising system that is course and workload based. I only have the haziest notion of how this might be accomplished at the moment, but I think we need to tie it more firmly into the curriculum. Since the majority of our students are transfers and since they are more program based than the four-year students (and given that the four-year students will have received a mentoring through the freshman seminar system), we should perhaps privilege the transfers in our thinking and tie to each major an advising course that begins in the second year and is linked to the capstone courses (e.g. the thesis). I worry that we may lose some interdisciplinarity here, but if we get a robust Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies, located in the office of advising, we could perhaps revive the whole advising process at the college.

That’s my second plug in one night for this new/old Stockton degree.

The Chosen Ones

This is the response to Ken's item # 5

If the founders of the college intended to provide students with choice once they got to Stockton, it is still must be recognized as a characteristic of the institution. Many freshmen come to the college without having chosen a major and they choose only after having taken many different courses, including a few in General Studies. The flexibility of the curriculum is one of its strongest features and makes it unique in the academy.

Where this is not less true, however, and where it may well not have been such a feature of the college is with regard to transfer students. These students, at least those who have the Associates degree, have had two years already to decide what they will major in. By the time they arrive at Stockton they have decided and they take the fastest route through the college they can find. This must have been the case for transfer students in the early years as well. Such choice, then, has been a privilege shared by those who come to the college soon after the completion of their high school careers. Ironically the complexity of the curriculum, which almost requires experimentation for the freshman, has the potential to be a straight-jacket for the transfer student.

There may be some difference between now and what occurred during the college's early days, however, with regard to fact that where choice exists it is most likely that decisions will not occur in conjunction with the advising or precepting process. Indeed, advising is most frequently something that occurs primarily after choices have been made, and the advisor is now someone who understands the intricacies of a particular major, rather than someone who provides guidance about the college and beyond. The student is more likely to decide on a major based upon success – and, somewhat relatedly, based upon the course that he or she liked and the teacher who inspired them.

There is no doubt that the college has become more discipline oriented. Where choice exists it is between majors, even if there are interdisciplinary routes into each one and a multiplicity of offerings for students to savor beyond the major that they decide upon. I would suggest that one reason for this is found in the decline of the LIBA -- the Liberal Arts -- degree. This started out as a major that allowed students to determine what their degree should look like. Through a precepting process they would begin to determine the courses they needed to take to achieve their objectives. In some instances, a student attempted to work in an area where there was no major being offered at the college; in others, the student fashioned a degree from a wide array of disciplinary and interdisciplinary offerings that they felt they could justify to the faculty as worthy of a degree. This was choice taken to its highest level.

The trouble was that it died -- to all intents and purposes. It became a cadillac (rolls royce, even) degree that very few Stockton students were considered able to accomplish -- an un-Stocktonian notion if ever there was one. If only three or four people per year were taking this path to the BA then it could hardly be said to exist as a Stockton degree.

Fortunately, I believe we are close to returning to our roots and establishing a degree that will accomplish what the LIBA did in the early years. We have been working hard to establish a BAIS degree -- a Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies. This will return choice and flexibility to the curriculum; it will allow those who are not meeting the requirements of a particular major to create something different; it will allow those who have left and been stuck a few credits from a degree to return and achieve what they couldn't accomplish years ago; it will cater to the non-traditional student thereby allowing many new groups of people to experience the wonders of a Stockton education.

Simply put, education is not about catering to the chosen ones; each individual should have choice, and each student should feel that he or she is able to choose their own route to the goal he or she is striving to reach. That should be Stockton's mission -- to provide that opportunity for the people of Southern New Jersey.

Planned Serendipity

This is my response to Ken's point number 4 - regarding offices.

The issue of scattered offices has been much talked about because of the “decanting” that is about to occur as we open the new Campus Center. With the new building housing departments that were previously spread out over the main spine there will be considerable space opening up. As such, the immediate question is how should this be filled and on the basis of what set of principles. Should we make it convenient for students and have all school offices together? Should we make each school coherent so that faculty members are clustered around their school office – with each school having its own wing? Or should we do things in a more haphazard fashion, more in line with how they were organized in the past?

Each of these plans has been considered, and certainly the first two have been rejected in part because they don’t fit with the college’s historical use of space. What represents convenience from the perspective of the student is something that is hard to determine, so the idea of using this as an organizing principle is perhaps of limited utility. One-stop shopping was strong in the 1990s, and this idea largely shapes the thinking behind the Campus Center, but using it throughout the college (i.e., beyond the Center) might be going to unnecessary extremes – unnecessary because students gather information on the computer and do much of the work they need to do on-line. Having all the school offices together might only lead to considerable congestion and frustration as everyone would be “living” and working on top of each other.

Making each school a coherent space with its own wing has numerous problems, one of which is that it goes against the founding ethos described by Ken in his piece. We do lose something when we divide into silos based upon disciplines or a cluster thereof. Stockton through its curriculum and through its interaction of people from different academic locales is a place where serendipity exists more, I believe, than elsewhere. This has been my experience at any rate.

But the original planners did not believe things would be simply haphazard – they thought that there would be possibilities for development in accordance with changing pedagogical needs, or changes occurring in the curriculum. There are reasons to put PSYC labs together, just as there are reasons to put art studios next to each other, and music practice rooms in the same area. So, as the decanting occurs, there will be some organization of the space that allows the space to be used in ways that are functional to different programs or schools. However, there will be limits to this, and the limits will be determined as much as anything by the power of property. Faculty are spread all over the main building; they are comfortable where they are (in most instances); they will not be willing to give up their spaces at the command of an administration that wants to rationalize the use of its space.

Once bureaucracies get established they don’t disappear; once space gets claimed, the manner in which it has been parceled out will be hard to change. This is a good thing.

Sofa So Good

This is my response to Ken's Point number 3 -- regarding chairs.

So we don’t have chairs. Is this a big deal? Yes and no! Yes, because it really is a good thing that we don’t have multiple chairs of departments who have the ability to parcel out resources and give differential pay to people. I remember one situation I faced at another institution where the chair of the department determined what pay one received when one was hired. I learned, much to my consternation and resentment (at the time), that I was hired at a salary lower than someone hired after me with fewer qualifications. It didn’t make me feel good about the place, and if that becomes the mode of operation throughout an institution it is not a recipe for creating good feeling! So it is a big deal that we haven’t created this kind of college with strong departments and autonomous chairs.

But wait! Such situations prevail largely at the big universities where there are departments (e.g., of history, language, and literature) that are sizeable indeed. Each one of the departments might be roughly a third as large as a school at Stockton. So one might suggest that our schools with their deans are comparable to departments with chairs elsewhere.

So a number of points come to mind. If we moved from coordinators to chairs, it might only mean a change in nomenclature – one that makes us more comprehensible to outsiders – rather something more significant. Having a chair or six of seven people would mean that the person was still someone with limited power. Not much to worry about there – a pretty pathetic fiefdom even on its best day! Each program would still probably rotate their chairs in the same way that they rotate coordinators. The latter are elected and so one could have someone securing support and maintaining this position, but one doesn’t because the rewards are not great. This probably wouldn’t change with chairs being created.

Also, we are a union shop. Salaries are pretty much decided by external forces and all kinds of procedures are put in place that even a dean sometimes has less power and possibly less prestige than a chair of a large university department. This wouldn’t change with the advent of chairs – whether or not someone brought a Napoleon complex or some other megalomaniacal inclination to the position.

All that said, I think keeping coordinators is a good thing, because it does speak to the uniqueness of the college. We are made up of schools and these schools do bring into connection different programs, which if they were called departments headed by chairs might be more inclined to become increasingly discipline centered. I think for many years as a member of the history program I would have gone along with such a move and would have wanted to create a very strong history department; but now I think some strength to that program results from it being nestled in a school of arts and humanities, and that its members teach general studies, and so forth. There is a liberation in this for members of the program, one that gives them an institutional endorsement of difference and innovation that other historians do not experience at other universities.

A Modal Construction

Here is my response to Ken's Number 2.

Modular was forward looking back in 1971, and it was, as Ken notes, ahead of its time. It was flexible. I like this approach and it appeals to my own Quaker sensibility, which I think tends to highlight the beauty in function, rather than simply the beauty in appearance. It also gestures to a postmodern sensibility, one that allows for multiple entry points all of equal importance. There are many ways through college and each student should find his or her own way, the construction seems to say; this is a different sensibility from that at many colleges, where students find themselves consigned to different buildings, each with its own overbearing entry point. "You shall not pass, until you know the code – you need to learn the language of education before we will include you," the entry points seem to whisper. [I am reminded of a character in James Baldwin’s Go Tell it On the Mountain, who, standing outside the New York Public Library, is somewhat intimidated by it as it is so alien to his experience.] Stockton, architecturally speaking has said – you are welcome here, whichever way you choose to come to us, whatever experience you bring – we will take you where we find you, and we will take you to new places.

And the main building has served Stockton very well. It has been an anchor, one that has frequently changed within as new needs have arisen. With some of the newer buildings nestled around the edges – Big Blue (or the Blauhaus, as I call it), West Quad, and the Arts & Science Building (a Michael Graves design of some note) – the main building(s) has dominated the college and helped influenced how we have developed.

In this regard, the newest building (the Campus Cener) has been a considerable departure. Running almost the length of the old spine and almost doubling the square footage available to us, this building promises to be transformative. Philosophically it speaks a different language – it has an entrance and it will provide different kinds of narratives for the students immediately. But do not despair, my Quaker brethren! The transformation will be there in terms of the availability of space on the campus, I believe, but it may not alter our overall sensibility. The fact is that we may all be more sophisticated now than we were in 1971; we can read and use buildings against the grain. Moreover, colleges are now as much nestled in the mind as they are in the infrastructure. The beauty of the building will be significant, but entry-ways to the college will still be there in abundance – mainly found on the computer screen. Lastly, the old spine will serve us well again – and will continue to do so in the future. It will still provide us ways of creating new spaces in accordance with changing pedagogical needs, and we will continue to adjust into the future as new buildings come on line – just as happened when West Quad and Arts and Sciences were built.

The Grass is Greener on the Other Side

Here is the first of my responses to Ken's Ten Things we all should know...

The original conception of the college was a fine one indeed. It would have been wonderful to have the college planted with native plants and grasses found in the Pine Barrens. Had this been done from the outset then I believe a different aesthetic could have been established and might even have been award winning.

I would strongly encourage the college now experiment in this area, committing itself to making a gradual shift over to this plan, maybe making a commitment to converting a certain amount of square footage of the grounds to these alternative plantings over a period of years.

The reason that this should be a gradual process, I think, is that we are competing with other colleges who, like ourselves, cater to people who have a certain aesthetic. This is how a college should look – lots of lawns on which gentlefolk might have wonderful tea parties! But challenging this aesthetic, and announcing that we are going on an alternate route, could work to our advantage. We could get national attention for the college if we made a grand announcement that by a certain date we would have removed grass from the college (except on the athletic fields). If we lead, others may follow, and we could even have this named the Stockton, or South Jersey, aesthetic.

Of course, how we would handle golf courses (at the newly acquired Seaview Hotel) in such a case (even though the athletic exception was in place) would be an open question!

A final point: it would be worth actually determining how much of the campus is devoted to green lawns, and how we compare with other colleges in this regard. Looking around the campus I am struck by the fact that we have less terrain devoted to grass than many of the colleges with which I am familiar. If this impression actually reflects reality, it would be worth considering whether or not this is a result of the original vision being put in place and perhaps having an impact on what we did over the years.