1 Remarks of Paula Marantz Cohen, PhD, Distinguished Professor of English and Dean, Pennoni Honors College Drexel University Convocation, Oct. 7, 2014 President Fry, Provost Herbert, Drexel administrators, Board of Trustees, staff, guests, and, of course, faculty and students: Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today at the beginning of this new academic year. I’ve experienced many of these new beginnings at Drexel, and they always give me a sense of excitement and possibility. This one, especially. For I am addressing you today as a long-­‐time faculty member who has just taken on a new role at the university, as Dean of the Pennoni Honors College. It may seem ironic that I am talking to you about teaching at this point of transition into administration. But it also makes sense. Taking on a new role allows me see my teaching career more clearly, and to recognize its importance in shaping who I am and what I value. I also see my position as Dean as less a shift in direction and more an extension of my work as a teacher and scholar. It reflects years of getting to know this institution from the most essential and foundational of perspectives. A university, after all, is built on its teachers and researchers. I came to Drexel 32 years ago when this institution was very different from what it is today. It had only recently ceased to be an Institute of Technology under its then-­‐
president William W. Hagerty. President Hagerty-­‐-­‐whose portrait in the library gives some idea of his formidable personality-­‐-­‐ had decided that Drexel should be a more well-­‐rounded institution, though one still tilted strongly toward engineering and technology. As an English professor coming from undergraduate and graduate institutions devoted to the liberal arts, I was at first confused by Drexel’s culture. My field of expertise was the 19th-­‐century English novel, but no one seemed to care much about novels when I arrived here. Drexel's ten-­‐week term made it difficult to teach long books, and students during my early years did not put novel-­‐reading high on their list of priorities. A lot has changed since then. Drexel has evolved into a comprehensive university under our last president, Constantine Papadakis, and this evolution has continued under our current president, John Fry. We now have an English major with exceptionally engaged students, alongside other programs that were marginal or non-­‐existent when I first came. We still have 10-­‐week terms, but I have found ways 2 to teach long books within that time frame—a course on Bleak House, Charles Dickens’s longest novel, last fall, for example, and another course on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book not only long but notoriously difficult, this past spring. I’ve taught these books to students who assured me they enjoyed reading them. But even as this university has changed in ways that please me, I look back to my early years at Drexel with gratitude. For it was during that period that I learned to teach—or rather, I learned the craft of teaching. The art of teaching is another matter, and it is the nature of an art to never be completely mastered. It was also during this early period that I came to appreciate and admire Drexel students. I say "Drexel students,” because I think there is such a thing-­‐-­‐a consistent type that persists from then until now. My students these days are certainly more culturally savvy and diverse than they once were, but their fundamental character has remained unchanged. By character I am referring to qualities that have a moral as well as an intellectual aspect in the way the great 19th century novelist, George Eliot, taught me to understand this: a state of being, as she wrote, “in which we endeavor to see what we are capable of [in the highest sense].” Although I have had students over the years who were unmotivated or disengaged, these have been the exceptions. Most Drexel students can be characterized by the following constellation of qualities: curiosity, tenacity, a desire to problem solve, a fundamental integrity and fairness, and a willingness to suspend judgment until all the facts are in. These, as I said, are moral qualities as well as intellectual ones. Perhaps most college students, no matter where they go to school, have many of these qualities-­‐-­‐anyone who is 18 to 23 years old is bound to be more open to life than people who are older and more established in a routine. But Drexel students, in choosing to attend a co-­‐op school in an urban setting, and in having the resilience, maturity, and skills to weather the ten-­‐week term, have these qualities, I think, in greater abundance. So-­‐-­‐ teaching Drexel students has been a challenging and enriching experience for me on many levels, and, for this reason, I’ve taken time to think about what I’ve learned. I’d like to share some of my conclusions with you: Teaching, as I understand it, can take three forms. I am generalizing here, of course—teaching takes many forms, and with the help of advancing technology is bound to take many more. Still, I think one can group the many forms of teaching under three categories. Those of you at the vanguard of pedagogical theory and practice, please be indulgent of my simplifying for the purpose of my argument here. The first kind of teaching involves a large group, which is to say, a lecture class. Lectures can be exciting both to teach and to attend, and they have the advantage of 3 being able to be easily transmitted online. They can also incorporate a degree of interactivity, though of a prescribed and non-­‐individualized kind. In the ideal lecture, the hall or space where it is received becomes electric: a performance is underway-­‐-­‐at its best, an Academy-­‐Award-­‐level one. The second kind of teaching involves a smaller group and happens ideally around a seminar table, though it can also work in a conventional classroom and online, in one-­‐on-­‐one conference, or in a laboratory. This is the so-­‐called Socratic-­‐dialogue class-­‐-­‐-­‐where the professor leads the students, or, as the case may be, a singular student, to a given end through questions and discussion. The route to learning in this way may make diversionary stops, but it is nonetheless directed and goal-­‐
oriented. It makes students contribute to the process, but the control, the road map, lies with the teacher. The third and, to my mind, highest form of teaching may not be teaching at all—
which constitutes its paradoxical nature. It also requires a relatively small group, but its dynamic is different from the Socratic classroom. I call this kind of class the sublime conversation. The word sublime has a long history. It was used first by the Greek philosopher Longinus to refer to something lofty and elevated, achieved through language. It was then elaborated in the 18th century to refer to a startling esthetic experience that could awe and even terrify in its grandeur. The Romantic poets and philosophers of the early 19th century often connected the sublime to the uplifting influence of nature. The term has gone through subsequent shifts and turns in modernist and postmodernist philosophy —but the general sense is of something awesome that temporarily takes us out of our routine and isolation and connects us to a dazzlingly larger sense of life. My notion of a sublime conversation in a classroom draws loosely on many of these ideas. It refers to a rhetorical engagement that is of the most elevated, inspired, and organic kind. In this sort of class, ideas flow freely and seemingly spontaneously, as learning takes a new form and moves to a higher level. The teacher is there, nominally directing the conversation, but really having faded from view, or having become one of many voices, as everyone participates in the acquisition of knowledge. The feeling in such a class is buoyant, exhilarating in a way, hard to explain after the fact. For me, as a teacher, the sublime-­‐conversation class, while being the most delightful, is also the most rare. It can only happen when a class is a certain size, when the subject-­‐matter lends itself to the free play of mind, as Henry James put it, and when the students themselves are in the mood to engage with each other with generosity and intellectual vigor. One sour individual, one ill-­‐timed phone call, one lazy or bullshitting response, and the conversation can be derailed. As I said, these sorts of classes are rare-­‐-­‐during my own undergraduate career I had 4 only one course that generated them —and not on a regular basis. As a teacher, I feel lucky to have a few class sessions a year that fall into this category. But if such classes are rare, the experience itself need not be. At Drexel these days, I see students, faculty and staff experiencing them outside the classroom all the time. I feel I engage in them on a regular basis. These conversations have been crucial to invigorating my teaching, research, and writing. How does one get such conversations to happen? One of the most noteworthy aspects of Drexel as it has evolved under President Fry has been the development of the campus —by which I mean not just the impressive buildings that have been erected, but the spaces within and outside these buildings where people can congregate. This design plan has been more important to the university’s pedagogical mission than is generally acknowledged. For these spaces function like multiple agoras -­‐-­‐the term used for the meeting place in the Greek city-­‐state where citizens came together to air their views and which was conducive to the “atmosphere of genius” that the theologian John Henry Newman believed existed in Athens during this period. In the many new and revitalized spaces at Drexel today, we can encounter each other “serendipitously,” as President Fry has put it. We never know who will pass by, sit down, share a snack or a meal, and engage with us in conversation. Let me take a moment to address this last point-­‐-­‐ the relationship of food to conversation. I can’t tell you how few places there used to be to eat on the Drexel campus. Now there are many—and this has greatly increased the likelihood that a sublime conversation will happen. The novelist and critic Virginia Woolf explained how this seemingly trivial idea is not trivial at all in her famous essay, A Room of One's Own. Early in the essay, she describes a meal taken at Oxbridge, her fictional amalgam of the great British universities, Oxford and Cambridge. After chronicling each course of the meal in delectable detail, she concludes: "thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, the profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich, yellow flame of rational intercourse." The rich yellow flame of rational intercourse—this is Woolf’s way of referring to a sublime conversation as it occurred over a meal at Oxbridge. For another example of what I am talking about, we can reach further back in time to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century essayist, novelist, and compiler of the first major English Dictionary. 5 Dr. Johnson, considered the most educated man of his age, was known to meet his friends for dinner on a regular basis and spend hours in animated, wide-­‐ranging talk. John Boswell, his friend and biographer, wrote The Life of Johnson trying to re-­‐
create these sublime conversations. That book is worth reading for many reasons, not least among them, that it gives us something to aspire to when we meet with friends at Zavinos. I often tell high school students when they ask me how to assess the quality of a university that they should visit the cafeteria, the student center, the area restaurants and coffee shops, and the faculty dining hall-­‐-­‐ and eavesdrop. What sorts of conversations are going on? How animated and engaged are the students and the professors? I am proud to say that Drexel excels in this regard. The conversations across this campus are, I can attest—having both taken part in them and eavesdropped on them—impressive in their range and liveliness. If, for example, you go at noon to the faculty club on the 6th floor of MacAlister Hall, you will invariably find a group of engineering professors-­‐-­‐ and occasionally some interlopers from other disciplines -­‐-­‐ seated at the center table, talking animatedly about subjects, from science to art to politics. Such sites are where the intellectual life of the university is on display, and the conversations that happen in these places can lead to new insights and discoveries. But I want to put practical ends aside as I conclude this talk by returning to where I began and speaking about conversations in the humanities classroom. Although other disciplines certainly engage in sublime conversations, the humanities are where they most readily happen on the undergraduate level. But this is also where the results of such conversations are hardest to quantify—which is one of the reasons why these disciplines are facing a crisis right now. In a straitened economy with large numbers of students suffering under the burden of college debt, many people are questioning the purpose of studying history, literature, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines. It’s not easy to assess the value of these fields. You can’t weigh and measure a sublime conversation, and trying to do so can shut it down. So here’s my rationale, my apologia, for the humanities—and for why even those of you majoring in technical or more practically-­‐oriented fields should try to take courses in these disciplines while you are at Drexel. The fact is that reading great books and studying the great works and ideas of culture spur a kind of thinking and, with it, a kind of conversation, that make our lives more interesting. 6 Indeed, if you were to ask me what the humanities are for—and beyond that, what a university education is for-­‐-­‐ I would have to say: to make life more interesting. This may seem silly on first hearing. Is it worth paying so much money and devoting so much time to making life more interesting? The answer, I believe, is yes. For if life becomes more interesting to you, you become more curious, more questioning of the world around you. In the process, you become more interesting to other people-­‐-­‐they want to talk to you, to get your ‘take’ on things-­‐-­‐ and so your circle of acquaintances broadens and deepens. One reason you go to a university—especially a university like Drexel-­‐-­‐ is to train in a field so as to get a job and make a living. But that is only one part of why you go. The other part can’t be so simply expressed. For to be educated is not to be trained in any given area or achieve a high earning power or a delineated outcome. It is to look in wonder at the world around you in all its vastness and possibility. It is to be awed by the fact that you are alive, have the chance to share that life with others, and gain the resources to make it a source of meaning and fulfillment. This university is especially good at helping students move toward this profound if ineffable goal, while also giving them the skills to succeed more practically in the world. Drexel students, staff, and faculty surprise and delight me every day, and I look forward to many more sublime conversations with them in the years ahead.-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐
Thank you.