Tom Kennedy's Blog

He was a friend of mine 

His former students, one after another, repeated those words—“He was a friend of mine”—at the memorial service a few Saturdays ago for Gordon Carper, historian and faculty leader at Berry from 1975 until his retirement in the early years of this century. They thanked his wife, Joyce, and his two sons Noel and Todd, for sharing Gordon with them and they thanked Gordon for sharing his life with them and for sharing Joyce, and his two sons (and later his grandchildren) with them. The crowd for the memorial was large and appreciative, appreciative of the four former students who spoke of their professor and the many more who came to pay their respects, appreciative not only of a professor and his family who could change lives, but appreciative as well of students whose lives could be changed by a professor. Appreciative of good teachers and good students, for you can’t have one without the other. We were honoring Gordon Carper, to be sure. But we were also honoring teachers, teachers whose lives made a big difference for at least some of their students, and their students. 

I do not know whether this is true of all faculty under 40 years of age, but my guess is that for almost everyone of us over 40 we became college teachers—and I suspect it was the teaching that came first and the scholarship we happily discovered later—because of some Gordon Carper in our lives. What we do now we do because at some point we came to realize what a Gordon Carper had done for us. Exactly what a Gordon Carper (or, in my case, a Bill Kuykendall) did to change us varies. For some of us, it was simply that someone we respected and admired exhibited a passion and intellectual seriousness that we could tell was not just acting or entertaining. We were drawn to the light in their eyes. For others of us, it may have been a really smart person taking our thoughts or our expressions of our thoughts seriously, taking us seriously.  

Professor William (Bill) Henry Frazier Kuykendall took me seriously enough to give me a D in a class in Old Testament Archaeology (as I recall, my only class in which my older brother was also enrolled, and that goes some way towards explaining my D, I would argue!) Kuykendall knew I was capable of doing A work and he knew that I knew I was capable of doing A work. He also knew that I would not be completely demoralized by a D. So he gave me the D I deserved—well, that he thought I deserved; surely I did at least C work—and we both got on with our lives. I took additional courses with him. I got some A’s. We talked a lot. He was a friend of mine. 

I worry that we are fast losing or, perhaps, have already lost even the possibility of faculty like Gordon Carper and Bill Kuykendall, and of faculty changing the lives of students. We place a lot of demands upon our faculty. We expect them to be not only excellent teachers, but also productive scholars and active in service on multiple committees. We want them to be good citizens, too, and good family members if they have families. Any friendship is hard work and time consuming. And a friendship between a faculty member and a student, as Aristotle recognized, is almost impossible. 

For Aristotle, friendship requires an equality that rarely characterizes the student-faculty relationship. The Gordon Carpers and the Bill Kuykendalls of the teaching profession realize this, of course, and thus act to elevate the student. Sometimes it is simply a matter of encouraging or enabling a student to transcend the mundane. Often it is helping a student move from the assumption that a college education is mostly about vocational preparation and credentialing to a conviction that an engagement with this event or text or idea or work is worthy of our attention—worthy of our love. Our Gordon Carpers and Bill Kuykendalls knew that in most instances we, their students, would not soon understand an event or artifact as well as they, but we could become their equals in love and respect for that which we studied. They made us better lovers, which is probably not why our parents sent us to the colleges we went to. And not why the parents of our students send their children to Berry. 

Usually I am pretty skeptical about the claims some colleagues frequently make about Berry’s unique education of head, heart and hands. We may agree, more or less, on what an education of the head looks like, but what some mean by “education of the heart” strikes me as either silly or dangerous or mostly just empty talk. Until I remember what Bill Kuykendall taught me. Until I hear testimonies like those I heard about Gordon Carper. An Education of the Heart by Educators of the Heart. 

We—society, the economy, parents, the academy, private liberal arts colleges with aspirations, etc.—haven’t made it easy for a faculty member to be an Educator of the Heart, not as easy as it once was, I think. But, though perhaps fewer in number, educators of the heart still exist, as do ready students. I am privileged to know a few.  

Thomas D. Kennedy 

All This Useless Beauty 

Roosevelt Cabin on our main campus is a log cabin, to be sure, but a log cabin with a very noticeable difference—its windows. The original windows are large for the cabin, and on the upper level alongside two smaller square windows is a half-trapezoid (or sawed-off right triangle) window. http://berry.edu/vtour/detail_main.asp?lid=43#/vtour/images/roosevelt_cabin/5.jpg 

Why the unusual windows (whatever their proper names)?  The story is that Martha Berry wanted the students who saw the cabin to realize that log cabins could be log cabins and yet be made better, that is, more beautiful. That even the most humble dwelling can be adorned and is worthy of adornment. More than function matters. Beauty matters, too. And so you can add windows to let in more light, windows you don’t really need, windows whose shape and style catches the eye. Windows you could live without but without which your life would be smaller and poorer. Useless beauty, because we are made for beauty. 

One of the joys of being at Berry is the wealth of cultural events on offer. (I am not here referring to the plethora of movie showings.) Our music faculty, in addition to their own recitals and the performances of the ensembles they direct, arrange an superb concert series of visiting performers. The same is true of our theatre and art programs. Or, take poetry. As a member of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, we have visiting poets on campus for a reading two or three times a semester. The audiences for these readings are almost entirely students, listening to an older man or woman reading poetry and talking about their craft or the context of their poems. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of the poetry. It is pleasant and enjoyable, but is it good? Often, I wish I were surer. And sometimes I find the poet more than a little self-indulgent in his performance (not unlike me in my classroom, I suspect). Nevertheless, what a splendid thing to say to students, “It is worth your time to make some space in your life to engage this beauty, and to hear an expert in a craft perform and talk about his or her craft.” It may be a poet or a cellist or a potter—someone committed to creating and offering to others something of beauty and excellence, though of little real utility. It is worth the student’s while to stop and attend to this excellence, to this beauty, even though there is nothing he or she can do with it. “Enjoy this window,” we say, “your life will be better for it.”  All this beauty, this useless beauty. 

Of the arguments for the benefits of a liberal arts education many, if not most, appeal to the usefulness of a liberal arts education, a usefulness perhaps not at first apparent. For example, it is reasonable to think that society needs nimble thinkers, individuals who can deftly connect the unconnected and negotiate difficult and disparate straits. A liberal arts education is an education that encourages and develops in students those intellectual dispositions and skills, that prepares them for meeting and thinking through what is new and different to them. I find those arguments, well, useful. But an equally good argument of an education in the liberal arts is that not everything of value is useful, that there are things that matter, that are important, and not because of the use to which they can be put. An education in the liberal arts is, at least in part, an education in such things. “Here is something you should know, though there is not much you can do with this piece of knowledge.” “Here is something you should pay attention to because of its beauty.” “Here is how nature works.” “Here is what these people did.” “Here is what Messiaen or Turner or Kinnell created.” All this beauty, this useless beauty. 

With several warm sunny days in a row now, spring is teasing us. A cup of joe outside in the Kilpatrick Commons, the fountain bubbling over stones—not a bad use of one’s time on a day like this. Not bad at all.  

tdk  

Tipping Points Quiz 

(a) Pulling into a parking space I notice on the ground, two empty spaces away from me, the detritus from a recent visit to Wendy’s, deposited beside where a car had been parked. The owner of the car, no doubt with insufficient space in the car for garbage, left the two cups on the ground. Why not, they do it with cigarette butts? There was no garbage bin visible, though there was one just inside the door to the building he or she had entered, 30 feet and 30 seconds away. How close would the bin have to be before the driver would make the effort to place the cups in the bin? In sight of the parking space? 20 feet away? 10 feet away? What is the tipping point? 

As I pulled in to park, I noticed a student worker going about her tasks, perhaps 25 feet from the garbage. She passed by the garbage as she drove in, though perhaps she did not notice it. She may have been so focused upon her work, or upon the cell-phone call she was engaged with as she worked, that she did not notice the trash. Or she may have noticed, but it was not her job, not part of the work for which she was being paid. Or perhaps she would have cleaned up that small piece of campus if the garbage had been only 15 feet away, or maybe 10 feet away, rather than 25. How do we teach others to notice and, having noticed, to act, even when it is not part of one’s role as a student or a student worker. Is there a tipping point for students (and faculty and staff) for taking action and ownership of the Berry commons? 10 feet? 15? 

(b) Parking is always a problem on college campuses, even at Berry. Here, though, the parking is as frequently an issue of bicycle as automobile parking—a rather pleasant problem. This semester a problem is our grand south entrance to Evans Hall. (See http://www.berry.edu/vtour/detail_main.asp?lid=26#/vtour/images/evans_hall/1.jpg) Students, perhaps running almost late for class, ride up and, dutifully, lock their bikes to one of the handrails on the steps. (This morning five of the six rails were occupied.) Or they park on the sidewalk to the left and right of the steps, often effectively blocking the sidewalk for walking. A bike rack with open spaces stands less than thirty yards away. How close, how convenient, would the bike rack have to be before riders would use the bike rack rather than require others to dodge their vehicles as they enter and leave the building? 20-25 yards? 20-25 feet? 

(c) Don’t get me started on smokers and cigarette butts and mindfulness of others. 

(d) Tonight I will attend a concert (of course, with cultural events credit!). Before the concert a student will greet the audience and respectfully ask all in the audience to turn off their cell-phones and close their books and computers and give the performers the respect they deserve. Most students (perhaps unlike faculty and administrators?) will silence their phones, but they will not turn them off. Most students—what, 80%?—sitting directly next to me or in front of me or behind me will either text during the concert or will check their phones for texts. The concert will last fifty-five minutes to an hour, at most. What is the tipping point below which the audience would turn off their phones, or at least not text or check their phones for messages? A forty-minute concert? Thirty minutes? Fifteen? 

Quiz questions: 

1. Is this one problem or three? (Or two?) By virtue of what can we consider this one or more “problems”? What norm is violated or neglected? What is the source of this norm? How important is this norm? 

2. Is this just more evidence for the tragedy of the commons, no matter how disturbing I may find this conclusion? 

3. Do I need to get a life? 

tdk 

Oh, mercy, mercy me 

The opening words of C.S. Lewis’ sermon, “Learning in War Time” remain striking still these seventy-one years later: 

A University is a society for the pursuit of learning. As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or military service, why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns? 

Lewis, of course, was speaking to Oxford University students as German tanks rumbled loudly into Poland. Why bother with learning under such conditions? What is the point of even an Oxford education when civilization is under threat? 

To be human, Lewis in effect answers, is to care about beauty and goodness, to make and enjoy culture.  Culture cannot be escaped. There will be a culture of death and destruction or, possibly, a culture of life and beauty and goodness in the midst of evil-doing and death-dealing. There will be some culture; that is inevitable. Lewis, thus, calls on his students to continue the good work of culture preservation, transmission, and creation even as the future of Europe is imperiled. No matter what happens, there must be monuments to beauty, truth, and goodness. 

I thought of Lewis’ address upon discovering the website spearheaded by another Brit, Sir Richard Branson, this summer: http://www.carbonwarroom.com 

On the homepage we read: 

Our global industrial and energy systems are built on carbon-based technologies and unsustainable resource demands that threaten to destroy our society and our planet. Massive loss of wealth, expanding poverty and suffering, disastrous climate change, water scarcity, and deforestation are the end results of this broken system.  

This business-as-usual system represents the greatest threat to the security and prosperity of humanity – a threat that transcends race, ethnicity, national borders, and ideology. 

This is our Great War. 

Systems do not change themselves – the same stale, business-as-usual thinking that has driven us to our current state of emergency will continue to endanger our safety, our livelihoods, and our planet. We need new thinking, new leadership, and innovation to create a post-carbon economy. Our goal is not to undo industry, but to remake it into a force for sustainable wealth generation.  

If there is hype here, there is not only hype. We have made a major mess of things, and we are ignoring the mess we’ve made, hoping it will just go away. But it won’t. We need new ideas. We need to change: we, as individuals; we, as institutions. 

How bad are things? How bad do things have to be to get our attention? Here’s the opening of Subhankar Banerjee’s “Could This Be a Crime?” on his new website http://www.climatestorytellers.org 

Imagine you live in New York City, and one fine morning you awake to the realization that 90 percent of all the buildings that were more than five stories tall have been destroyed. You will hardly have the words to talk about this devastation, but I’m sure you will walk around the rubble to make sense of it all.

Something similar has happened in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I currently live. Between 2001 and 2005, aerial surveys were conducted over 6.4 million acres of the state. Some 816,000 affected acres were mapped and it was found that during this short period Ips confusus, a tiny bark beetle, had killed 54.5 million of New Mexico’s state tree, the piñon. In many areas of northern New Mexico, including Santa Fe, Los Alamos, Española, and Taos, 90 percent of mature piñons are now dead.                 

Berry College’s President Stephen Briggs is one of 674 American college and university presidents who have signed the President’s Climate Commitment. http://www.presidentsclimatecommitment.org Among other things, signers promise that within two years of signing their institutions will develop an action plan for becoming “climate neutral,” a plan which will include: “Actions to make climate neutrality and sustainability a part of the curriculum and other educational experience for all students.” 

Exactly what that means for the Evans School and for Berry College has yet to be determined, though it is a conversation now overdue. We are appropriately concerned about politicizing the curriculum. Still, the threat to our planet and its peoples is our great war. No more than Lewis’ Oxford students need we choose to abandon the exploration, preservation, transmission, and creation of culture. But neither can we ignore the study of the appropriate care for our creation and of what it means for us to live responsibly and well where we are. That study belongs to no single discipline. And that study can’t wait. 

tdk 

June has been a month of great lamentation over the current lack of appreciation for the humanities. New York Times columnist David Brooks rang the theme in his June 7 column, “History for Dollars” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08brooks.html and that theme was sounded as well in Martha Nussbaum’s recent Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: 2010) which I’ve just read. 

Studying the humanities—and Brooks and Nussbaum use the term broadly and inclusive of the arts—is essential for human flourishing, Brooks argues. The ability to read and write well remain highly valued both inside and outside the workplace. The humanities equip one to understand and appeal to emotions, a desirable skill in a capitalist society, and provide one with analogy-making information and skill, a tool immensely helpful for those who are trying to write, speak and think clearly and precisely. In short, as numerous pundits and futurists (think Thomas L Friedman in The World is Flat and Daniel H. Pink in A Whole New Mind) have recently argued, a genuine liberal education provides the intellectual breadth and the cognitive and emotive skills critical for prospering in the twenty-first century.  

But Brooks recognizes that prospering is not enough; we need more than just a job that pays well and that we find worthwhile. Reflective humans must confront what he calls “The Big Shaggy”: “The observant person goes through life asking: Where did that come from? Why did he or she act that way? The answers are hard to come by because the behavior emanates from somewhere deep inside The Big Shaggy.” An education in the humanities enables one to engage and befriend The Big Shaggy, to explore the perennial puzzles of human life and action, an engagement without which a life cannot be lived well.

Martha Nussbaum focuses not on how the humanities make us as individuals better off, but on our lives together. We value democracy and democracy depends upon the humanities, she argues, and she is alarmed:

Radical changes are occurring in what democratic societies teach the young, and these changes have not been well thought through. Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracy alive. If this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. The future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance. (2)

Nussbaum’s Not for Profit covers much of the same ground she covered in her decade old Cultivating Humanity, though here she addresses not just college and university education but elementary, middle and high school education as well. (The book’s acknowledgments also contain one of the most egregious and embarrassing mistakes in recent publishing history, at least by my lights.) What the humanities give us, Nussbaum argues, are critical thinking skills. In the humanities one learns to identify mere assertions parading as arguments and to engage and evaluate real arguments. Critical thinking, of course, is not the sole property of philosophy, but Nussbaum does applaud those institutions that require all students to take two courses in philosophy because of the importance of critical thinking and the special expertise of philosophers in practicing and teaching critical thinking.

Education in the humanities and the arts provides one, as well, with the abilities to think as a “citizen of the world.” When we listen to the daily economic news we are reminded of how our economic wellbeing is tied to the condition of the euro as well as the economies of Asia. The Gulf Oil Spill may affect U.S. citizens most dramatically, but it does not affect only us, and the same is certainly true for CO2 emissions in China. This is not to suggest that we ought not, first, be U.S. citizens; it is to say that a good U.S. citizen is aware of his or her place in the world, of his or her connectedness to the citizens of other nations. And this requires the sort of understanding of others that humanities studies provide. Finally, democracy requires the ability of citizens “to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person,” an imagination proffered by foreign language study, literature, history, and religious studies. 

Let us assume that the humanities are in such fine fettle as Brooks and Nussbaum believe, and that an education in the humanities and the arts, wherever one studies, is like that here in the Evans School at Berry College, that is to say, the humanities really aim to do what Brooks and Nussbaum say they do (and let’s assume for the moment that we have some agreed upon way of telling whether or not the humanities and the arts do aim at and achieve these purposes). Is this enough, as Brooks and Nussbaum maintain?

Put differently, Brooks and Nussbaum fault students and their parents and national leaders, including President Obama, for caring too much about jobs, or profit, and “national economic progress.” Other things matter more, and we should care more about these other things. But why think any and all education in the humanities and the arts has the transformative affect upon the cares and loves of students (and their parents) for which Nussbaum calls? Why think such study can deliver one from caring too much about profit and too little about the condition of one’s own soul or the wellbeing of one’s neighbor? Let’s say that Nussbaum is on the money in her concluding diagnosis:

            “If the real clash of civilizations is, as I believe, a clash within the individual soul, as greed and narcissism contend against respect and love, all modern societies are rapidly losing the battle, as they feed the forces that lead to violence and dehumanization and fail to feed the forces that lead to cultures of equality and respect. If we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they do not make money. They only do what is much more precious than that, make a world worth living in, people who are able to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and empathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate.” (143)

Can an education in the humanities carry this weight? Should the load be placed on the humanities? Why should we think an education in humanities and the arts is both necessary and sufficient, rather than necessary but not sufficient, in the soul correction we require? If the sickness is greed and narcissism, why think an education in the humanities an adequate (and appropriate) cure? And, if a liberal education is not the cure, then what is?

Fevered questions? Perhaps so, but it has been a hot, dry June.

tdk

For faculty, the real event marking the end of the semester is not graduation, and is not when one has turned in the last grades for the term.  For me at any rate, the semester is not over until I’ve reviewed the student evaluations for my courses and spent the next three or four hours, if not the next three or four days, coming to terms with them.

Student evaluations are terribly important, especially at a school like Berry where we prize excellent teaching. Marginal instructors, no matter how impressive their scholarly or artistic accomplishments, are not tenured here. Student evaluations, although not the only (and not the best) means for assessing faculty classroom performance nevertheless are critical tools for telling us what is going well and what is not going well in the classroom. They matter a lot to administrators. They matter a lot to faculty.

Student course evaluations matter a lot to us even though one would be hard-pressed to present a good argument for why they matter so much. Why? Because although students are very well-positioned to reflect upon what they liked or didn’t like about an instructor or a course (or various activities and components of the course) that is only one small indicator of the success of a course. Perhaps liking an instructor or liking the course and some or all of its components is a necessary condition for the success of a course (though I don’t know why anyone should think even that); it certainly is not a sufficient condition. A well-liked course at the end of a semester might very easily have been a failure in doing what the course ought to have done. And students, especially students new to a discipline, are rarely in a position to determine what a course ought to have done or whether, in fact, the course may have achieved its appropriate aims.

Take my discipline, philosophy. Students rarely enter their first philosophy class with any real understanding of what a philosophy course should be and do. (Indeed, philosophers themselves may not agree on this, may agree more on what a philosophy class shouldn’t aim at than what it should.) The goals of the course, like philosophy itself, are likely to be abstractly formulated; for example, “Students will learn to think philosophically,” and the clearest evidence for whether that goal has been accomplished may well be the responses of students on the course evaluation. Have students learned to value philosophical reflection and have students learned to think philosophically? Why think this is something about which students themselves would be insightful the last week of the semester with the stress of final exams coming up?

Often, despite my rather fervent desire for effusive praise and expressions of affection on the evaluations I am distressed with the results and not because the praise is not fulsome (though, alas, rarely is it sufficiently so). Rather, although the course fared well in the evaluations, I know the course deserved less. Alright, more accurately: often, despite a number of pretty positive comments from students about my course, I am disappointed that the evaluations are as positive as they are. I know the course was just not that successful. I didn’t inspire students to achieve what they should have achieved in philosophical argument. I failed to capture their imaginations and hearts about why the material matters and how much it matters. And so on. I’m glad my students liked me and enjoyed the class, but they should have valued neither quite so much. Still, of all the disappointments evoked by student evaluations, I have become quite adept at dealing with this disappointment. Sorrow and sadness are fleeting.

This was Berry’s first semester with online evaluations and for my course, at any rate, I think the online approach was no less successful than the in-class evaluation. I had a high response rate—almost 80%. That confirmed what I already knew: these students were a pretty responsible bunch. Some faculty worried that, in general, faculty evaluations would be lower online than with our former in-class hand-written evaluations.  They suspected that discontented students would be more likely to log-on and let loose than the students who were more or less satisfied with the course. It appears that I did have one very irate student though, interestingly, that is much more apparent from the discursive comments than from the numerical scores. (My evaluations suggest that grades aren’t the only inflated scores in the contemporary academy.)

What did I learn from my course evaluations? My course was a “writing intensive” course, significantly aimed at improving student writing at the same time students mastered the content of the course, and most disappointing to me is that no students even noted my rather painstaking process of commenting on their many papers. (Well, there was one well-deserved criticism that it took me way too long to return a course paper.) So I don’t really know whether students found my feedback on what they wrote or how they wrote helpful. It certainly appears not to have been life-changing!

Nor was the course clearly as successful at conveying to students the nature and value of philosophical reflection upon environmental issues as I had hoped. We needed to spend more time—and I think this is especially true given the makeup of this particular class—thinking about what philosophy can and can’t do. We needed to do more and better reflection upon types of questions which empirical observation and subjective introspection can’t help with. I wasn’t as successful as I should have been in helping students recognize what they didn’t know.

There were other things I learned from the evaluations, too, of course. It’s time to hang up my references in class to classic rock n roll, no matter how entertaining I find them (And, for the record, it’s not “‘70s folk music!”). Most troubling—and here’s how I’ll spend my summer vacation—my perceptions of my interactions with my students are radically different from how more than one student perceives my interactions. By and large, I liked these students—I can’t think of any I disliked—and that is not always the case. And I had thought by the end of the semester that I had developed a pretty good rapport with them. But it seems I was mistaken. I don’t know whether it’s a cultural thing and that, say, Southern students can’t help but blanch at anything that appears less than sweet (and the sort of rigorous questioning and reflection that I think characterizes good philosophy is not always sweet), or whether it is a generational thing and even the slightest challenge to an individual of this generation is upsetting. Or, maybe it’s a “me” thing and either I’m just not as nice as I think I am or, even if I am as nice as I think I am, students can’t tell that I’m that nice. What I do know is that there are students who seem to think I should share in Socrates’s fate. Wasn’t it Lycon who called Socrates a “pompous ass?”

Alas, “Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” Errr, strike that last line.

And, now, at last, “It’s summertime.”

tdk