Responsible Teaching

This is an interesting analysis of the situation at Harvard with the infamous president and Cornel West, though it's lengthy if you're pressed for time. I find it particularly insightful when Mr. Renehan articulates the privilage and heavy responsibilities of teaching, which I've posted here.

West . . . finds it agreeable to cultivate the image but seems impatient with the substance: the mundane mental disciplines of a liberal academic. Excellent teachers inspire with their passion for the conscientious pursuit of (true!) truth, not merely with their passion. They help students learn to come by their views wisely – that is, carefully and independently. West’s teaching style, by contrast, is a wink to students who would wholesale adopt his views. We know the truth, you and I. We’ve done with thinking – now what are we going to do?

These are the tools of regressivism and prejudice. And however “progressive” West’s intent in wielding them, his effect can only be to encourage his students’ worst intellectual tendencies – deep and perennial human tendencies that are not compatible with liberalism, and which it is the highest purpose of education to temper. A man of the left oughtn’t need to be reminded that liberalism seeks to dissect traditionalism, not to mime it. . . .

An idea, wielded by an ideologue, becomes a blunt instrument that pounds sharp and discerning intellects into dull agglomerations of prejudice. . . . The university, bizarrely, has been more effective at doing this than any fundamentalism or fad – perhaps because intellectuals, not content simply to have and adore their prejudices, seek to justify them with reason. In the worst circumstances, this process of “rationalization” (ha) can be intensely conducive to evil and totally suppressive of the basic urgings of conscience. (The Cambodian intellectuals who would later distinguish themselves with the murder of a fifth of their countrymen were educated at Western universities. In Paris.) In a world driven, finally, by ideas, poorly rationalized prejudice can become grandly realized catastrophe.

I'm easily reminded of James, who cautions that "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness" (3:1). It seems that teaching students irresponsible scholarship is more than laziness - it is an act of dishonesty. This article is an interesting examination of a person who seems to have believed the praise thrown his way - to his students' and his own detriment.