In an article which appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, (“Waiting for Goffman” – by Michael Dirda -Sept. 17, 2010), I got excited, reminiscent; wondering about Goffman… as well as about myself.

Wondering how we study the human these days, I currently find myself wandering more into socio-political arenas (given these “interesting times”), than “merely” trying to describe and understand the world. But I’ve spent so many years trying to “see and study” the human in our most…basic terms: e.g., the human body – socially, developmentally, interacting, ageing, being and seeing others, and or via ourselves. (“Body Journals,” “Foundations Project,” “Language and Human Nature.” And I think I’ve “exhausted” those subjects.

Dirda “gets off” on Goffman’s magnificent prose, but also on the depth and breadth of his observations: as Goffman tried to explore the world as “an ethnographer of small entities.” As I now refer to myself as an “anthropologist of the Ordinary” – I relate very well to the title and ideas behind the first book: “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” – a most expansive framing of the worlds in which we all wander, but… exploring who we are “behind” our public persona.

Goffman was “some kind” of Sociologist-Anthropologist who wrote beautifully, and was one of the best-ever observers of various persons interacting in varying circumstances.

And he was my “big brother”. Big brother, because we were/are heavily influenced by the same teacher-person: Ray Birdwhistell (who doesn’t show up in Dirda – but he always was the primary base for Erving’s and my thinking about… most everything. Birdwhistell who Goffman met at the U. of Toronto; me, somewhat later at SUNY Buffalo – he was our primary teacher, model, incite/insight/excite: the “best observer” I ever met. Similarly for Goffman.

Birdwhistell sent us both to U. of Chicago where we fell under the thinking of various practitioners of “Symbolic Interaction” deriving from G. H. Mead, whose ideas seem now to be “creeping” back into a field which has practically been overtaken by Sociobiology and/or by Neuropsychology and other psychologies which don’t pay much attention to the interactional-social facts of our very being.

Dirda’s celebratory piece is excited by Goffman, and wonders why he has mostly “disappeared” from public view after a good, long run in Sociology, and currently in some parts of Comparative Literature.

Well: the history of ideas and academic power overtook Birdwhistell, and then myself. I’ve been trying to revive and extend Goffman and Birdwhistell’s ideas> (Plus, Birdwhistell was the best observer I’ve ever met – in many circumstances… all of human… life.)

While Goffman “enjoyed” quite great success, his teachers and little brother got “wiped out” in what I call the Chomskyan “revolution” in ideas – where the study of the human got displaced (still is) by the notion that the human being is centrally a mind/thinker, not a body in such complex interactions.

Goffman who was finally a “university professor” at Penn, was able to “rescue” Birdwhistell and got him a position there after he was “let-go” from his study of human-interaction at Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute as support for these studies just “went away” and our careers much diluted.

Via Curriculum Studies— Henry Giroux on Freire’s Lessons for Now!
Dec 1, 2010 … Lessons to Be Learned From Paulo Freire as Education Is Being Taken Over by the Mega Rich. Tuesday 23 November 2010. by: Henry A. Giroux, …

Henry Giroux has been really ranting lately, inspired by Paulo Freire’s work and thinking: especially “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” – and especially the “political” understanding of education in these times of politics bending toward money and power… and control of students’ thinking.

I mostly agree… but a good bit of Freire has disappeared in the name of politics being overtaken by economic analyses and control of the very nature of education.

Education in the Western world – perhaps most especially – is being attacked by the rich and lovers of the rich – who oppose the public schools, the teachers who tend to find solace and power in unions, life tenure, pensions, and all. Charter Schools, private schools. Blah! On public schools and on the public.

Even most liberals (Obama…so far anyway) have gone for control of teachers and teaching, supporting “No Child Left Behind” – presumably as ways to “success” for students. Do what I/we tell you, and how we tell you, and…!

Giroux’ hero – rightfully, but for at least some different reasons – has been Freire whose book has sold well over a million copies. But his ideas continue to be fragmented by the would-be powers – and his “methods” of education, particularly “dialogue” have apparently yielded to the anti-politics of Giroux invocating money – now controlling politics. “Critical pedagogy” is Giroux’s Freireian term for what is missing increasingly in the current war for our future: thinking and being.

Freire would get (especially poorer) students to study and understand the power and motivations which got them educated effectively to prolong and promote the power of the few – by not attending to the “banking” and “telling” methods which the rich and powerful imposed on most students.

“Learn what I tell you!” Never mind contexts and methods which effectively keep most students in their “proper” places: learn what I tell you – never mind the fact that I-the-teacher – am guarding the status quo by convincing you that this is “way” of the world – no questions asked. Just learn what I tell you, as efficiently as possible. It’s all politics… but the politics remain “hidden” and y’all don’t ask no questions! The world of the powerful remains “distant” and effectively hidden to the students. Increasingly efficient!

So much to agree with – especially in these times of attacks on schooling, teachers – especially as so many education systems of other countries seem much more “successful” than ours.

But much, so deep, is left-out… omitted from this particular if not exactly narrow analysis. Particularly people, persons – everyone: teachers and students – have no clear “presence” in this world. Presence: persons, thoughtful, development of the very nature of clarity over the course of the entire course, so it can enter students’ being… perhaps especially after the course is “over.”

Here I’m quoting Freire – who I invoke in my book and course: “Teaching as Dialogue.” Freire’s major way-out of the power-pinch is Dialogue. And most of the educators who Freire-ise education invoke the term: but apparently only a few of us seriously explore and apply dialogue in our teaching-being.

I want to “touch” the futures of my students – I would love to be “remembered” as “inspiring” their futures. But much about “me” – a person – much about them being and becoming who they would be. Mostly the Freireians don’t seem to be “present” – strong, memorable… characters…who “remain” some places in “their” students’ ongoing thinking.

(Can I be remembered, have power without being very “oppressive” in their thinking? Am I “good enough” to deserve having some presence in their lives? Or is this just a “different” route to power and control from the past: more than inspiring “my” students to study and develop their own personal framings of… power and control.) Whew! (If Socrates only realized that his idea of dialogue was always to know all the “answers” to his question-ing!)

So: enough to begin/continue the study of Freire, amidst the facts of his being still inspiring me, most days as I teach, and am a teacher. Growing with my memories and appreciations of his work and thinking.

But a “true” dialogue? – a lifetime pursuit… and then some.

Why do so many teachers invoke their anti-politics, even as they (don’t find themselves) don’t enrich their own teaching in the practicings of dialogue?

[Download the PDF version or read the full text below. Updated from previously published version in Organization, May 2001; vol. 8: pp. 403 - 415.]

Abstract. My vision for the future university acknowledges the facts of rapid change in the world. It attempts to conserve the idea of the university as structures and process by centering the university on a study of changes as they are redefining knowledge. As vision, it asks that faculties join in Centers for the Study of the Present Age to discuss, teach and attempt to shape the futures of Science and Technology and their ramifications. Key words. future university; new vision; re-center the university; study of present age

The vision: when I speak and think of the university, I have in mind the largest institution, the greatest number of students at all levels, professional as much as academic; graduate and postgraduate, as well as undergraduate.

The curriculum is at its maximum: some 150 subjects/disciplines in which one can garner a PhD. I have in mind, then, the largest public research universities, especially those which (also) educate their students to serve their states in the traditions of Land Grant: including agriculture and the mechanical arts.

While there are ample reasons to describe a private (research) university of fame or privilege as the descriptor of the university – say, the top of the pyramid of American universities, an Oxbridge or a Berlin – I think it important for our understanding of the present toward the future to consider the university serving the interests of the widest public or publics. In this setting, I intend to focus on the structure-processes of the institution, but particularly on how the idea of a university will intersect with, even help to define, the nature of the future.

I will therefore use the institution I know best – the University of Minnesota located in that urban cultural oasis of Minneapolis and St Paul (the Twin Cities) – as example and metaphor. I will propose a new vision in the development of a truly important University of Minnesota: The Study of the Present Age (Kierkegaard, 1940).[1]

Whether this vision might apply to privately endowed universities – we shall see. Whether more than one university will survive? – this we shall also see. Whether Minnesota is metaphor or reality? – time will tell.  We all find ourselves afloat in a sea of market-driven forces in this moment of hype and reality of an online Phoenix University and the recently globalized university where the very idea of a university is constructed as new products for whatever its markets will turn out to be. I oppose the idea that the market alone will determine the nature of the university.

This vision is simple in its statement. The present University of Minnesota will expand to include and center itself about the Study of the Present Age. A number of Centers will be created which will literally study, discuss, publish in the contexts of the most important issues of these times. Minnesota will be the place where the changing and continuing world is studied, criticized, shaped.

Primary will be the Center of the Study of Science and Technology as they are developing and changing the very ways in which we operate and think about being: new products, new ideas, even moving our ideas of reality from the world or from texts to whatever virtual will mean: media…and. Other Centers will include the Study of a Sustainable World; Life in the World’s Cities; the Changing Nature of Work; Curing and Teaching; Globalization; the Crisis in Meaning; Ageing and Sageing; Integrative Studies. There may be other suggestions.

There will be a Provost or Vice-President who leads this Center for the Study of the Present Age; and there will be an intellectual leader or coordinator as well. All the present faculty of the university will be included within it for perhaps 10–20 percent of their time; to join it at different points, and for varying lengths of time.[2]

The curriculum of the university as it exists at present – especially in the Liberal Arts and Sciences – will (thus) be preserved. The undergraduate students will be educated broadly in the Liberal Arts and Sciences. But they will also be educated to be able to join in discussions in various of the Centers for the Study of the Present Age, at a high critical and intellectual level. To enable this, I propose a pedagogical-dialogic interactive approach to critical thinking.[3]

Centering the university round the Center for the Study of the Present Age, the central and current ideas and disciplines of the university will be preserved, essentially. Otherwise the idea of a university will drift with the winds and currents of monies, politics and, possibly, religion: the worries of permeability of integrity and academic freedom so carefully pondered by Hofstadter and Metzger (1955).

Our students – or, as they now say, consumers or products – will be quite capable in the context of (what I call) an unscripted time,[4] as they will be broadly educated, with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking; able to think-out the world as it happens, and to perform within it at fairly advanced levels. Otherwise, the temptation in a time of great change is to derogate the history of the idea of the university, and to train rather than to educate students for a changing and clamoring market. The Study of the Present Age can both preserve the sense of the larger curriculum and provide for futurity and, to the extent that we develop an important University of Minnesota, it will also do much to shape that futurity.

I think that the Idea of a University in the Present Age likely will occur in an urban context, which can accommodate and attract the kinds of enterprises and businesses which these Centers will spawn; more than, say, Amherst, Madison, or Ithaca.

The moment seems ripe for the development of this vision. There is a large pool of older faculty-thinkers-wise-persons from around the world who could contribute to such an idea: many of the more creative minds have been forced to be quite narrow in their work, and would welcome the challenges of broad and critical thinking.[5] Many of them have fairly nice pensions, would require less compensation, and could contract to develop, lead, and contribute to such a global enterprise. They also would be attracted to a cultural center such as the Twin Cities. Many of them could also attract funding and followings in the context of an important University of Minnesota.

Similarly, a number of commercial enterprises would find it important to partake in these critical discussions with us. As we will attract many of the best critics, say, of biotechnology and virtual reality, so various businesses will find it most advantageous to discuss developing and changing issues in the areas of our Centers’ concentrations; more reasons to be located in an urban setting.

Early Brief Courses could be presented to entering students: An Introduction to the University; Culture and Technology; a Brief Course on America in company with entering International Students (a speciality of mine).[6]

Education would be directly, perhaps primarily, toward the students being able to enter into discussion in the various Centers at a thoughtful level. As the Centers both reflect and intersect the changing world, the criterion of students entering the conversations would be a good measure of educational quality and utility, enhancing their ability to enter the world as educated and critically thoughtful persons.

The University of Minnesota is sufficiently large to accommodate the Study of the Present Age, and is quite possibly geared for a large change as it seems to find itself at a moment of declining resources and reputation, a sense that the future is also likely to decline from a formerly great university, to a pretty good one, to…

So: the Vision!

Context and Setting: Gradual Changes Since the 1950s

As the world is enmeshed in torrents of change, the very idea of the university is also much in flux. Newman’s ‘winds from the North’ (Newman, 1976) – from industrial England of the 19^th century – invade both our thinking and the funding of the institutions which until fairly recently seemed somewhat removed from the currents of ordinary life: the Ivory Tower now overgrown with weeds, hanging vines; exposed to the elements.

But it is not only money which offers – or threatens – to alter the university. There is a much larger set of changes which challenge the very idea of a university as it has endured with some centrality and continuity of purpose from Plato’s Academy to these times. I am thus cautious about the ideas of the university which we all bring to this discussion.

Some of these changes have occurred fairly gradually, if profoundly. As example, I take it for granted that the university is primarily its faculties and curricula. But most people seem to locate the idea of the university in its organization or administration. And many of the changes of the past generation seem to remain outside our thinking as they characterize the university as most of us have actually experienced it. Which/whose idea of the university are we attempting to preserve or reinvent?

So this section will be a brief analysis of changes that have already occurred by the time most of us got to experience the university.

The very nature of work is undergoing a change – literally – as great as the Industrial Revolution and the technological developments of the 19^th century. The rising power of the sciences and engineering – more recently biology – the decline of the liberal arts, as well as the sense of the importance of a university degree in order to find mostly monetary success in the working world . . . all this has backgrounded ideas of a good, contemplative, educated life, or of the education of the good citizen (almost gone from the modern secular university). Perhaps this is driven much by the fading of the very idea of the nation-state with such vast sums of money passing across the world each day (Readings, 1996).

In the context of work and education, numbers of students who attend the university increased radically during the moment of the maturing baby boomers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Minnesota, for example, increased its student population from about 17,000 to 35,000 in just four years: 1958–62. The idea of leadership of the university was radically altered in that moment of necessity in managing such multitudes.

Federal and foundation funds increased after World War II, but especially after Sputnik in 1957, paralleling and driving the vast increases in attendance. Any community of scholars as it may have existed prior to that moment in Newman’s sense (Newman, 1953), splintered into those areas where there was external funding and those which had none. The Institute of Technology at the Minnesota literally stole the hard sciences from Science and Liberal Arts (SLA) in the late 1950s, and biology went its own ways to affiliate with medicine or agriculture. The two-culture split between sciences and humanities, noted by C.P. Snow already by 1959 (Snow, 1964), persists to this day. Faculties went their own ways. The only common interest or issue, already by 1963, was that of finding parking spaces (Kerr, 1963).

In the 1960s, the rise of grantsmanship further splintered the faculty into individuated entrepreneurs, as careerism gradually replaced vocationalism.

And, in the early 1970s, when the expanded and newly created institutions slowed down their expansions, administration consolidated its hold on the university.[7]

I think it was during this period that the structural idea of departments overtook the more conceptual notion of disciplines. Whereas disciplines developed and largely remain the outcome of particular questions, problems, or issues, departments are collectivities whose identity has become largely bureaucratic; places to house faculty whose power and importance are directly related to the size of its budget, more than to any intellectual import of its disciplined-thinking.

Whenever – perhaps especially now – that the society (government, foundations, especially corporations) wants new or other questions addressed, the department has often been found to be intransigent and closed-in. The obvious solution has been to direct research across or among multi-disciplines. But the actuality of multi or interdisciplinary work often disregards or loses the centrality of disciplined thinking, as it often directs itself to externally generated problematics. Current pressures on the idea of a university, then, seem to be largely integrative: trying to construct an administrative soul for a very loose collectivity in which department backgrounds discipline.

While much of this seems obvious and productive, there is often a loss of history and reason for differently disciplined thinking, at least some of which seems to be at the heart of the Liberal Arts. The question of the future of the university surely involves questions of the importance or integrity of disciplined thinking across a vast curriculum. As example, much of botany and zoology have literally been replaced or overtaken by microbiology, the biology of the cell; a form of chemistry which is certainly both important and yielding of monies. But many important questions about humanity and life have simply disappeared, unasked: morphology, taxonomy. Geography, physiology, philosophy seem about to fade, as well.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the very nature of administration changed in what Bruce Wilshire characterized as the moral collapse of the university when administrators began reading paper more than judging the quality of their faculties, or asking questions about knowledge and the meaning of the university (Wilshire, 1990).

During this time, there was also a democratization of the university: first, ethnic Europeans (primarily male Catholics and Jews), then (mostly white, younger) women, and not so many persons of color. While this was a wonderful and democratizing occurrence, I think that these events took notice away from the administrative and bureaucratic changes that were also occurring. One result was that there has been very little criticism of the idea of the university during this period. Another has been the training of most administrators to think of the university as effectively without much sense of purpose: to judge one’s own institution with respect to others, more than with respect to some idea of what a university ought to be and do.

Another aspect of the democratization was the vast increase in the numbers of students who came to the university, also contributing to its bureaucratization. The notion of a credential gradually began to replace the idea of an education (Kerr, 1991). A degree – any degree – replaced most deeper questions of the meaning of an education. As a result, the institution became increasingly opaque to the multitudes of students (parents and community, as well) as the faculty gradually disappeared into their productive modes.[8] The sense of isolation in universities increased markedly for students – perhaps more particularly for faculty.

Visibility and image – as in the media – overtook the harder work of personal judgment. University presidents began to look at other places a bit better – a bit worse® – to see where their institutions (and careers) were situated (Cohen and March, 1974). This set up and continues to confirm the current pyramid of universities in which reputation largely determines quality, while actual work is done for like-minded colleagues in other places. Little occurs in one’s home department or university of any institutional value. Visibility and celebrity have overtaken authority… One could go on.

Related is the rise of the knowledge society in which our Colleges of Education see information, access, and use of knowledge as keys to a good education. Teachers who might purvey wisdom have become managers and facilitators as the importance of education as a profession has dwindled. John Dewey’s School of Education at the University of Chicago was phased out recently – placing an apostrophe on an era when we might have had a dialogical interchange with a sage. This is to say that information and knowledge have overtaken education as wisdom has faded from our ideas of the course of a long life: something about the technologicalization and bureaucratization of life.

All this analysis affirms that the current wonderings about the future of knowledge and the university are set within an institution which hasn’t thought too much about questions of its meaning since at least the early 1970s. My concern is that we are asking questions about futurity within a model of the university and knowledge that has been running as much on inertia as substance for quite a while.

The Recent Past

None of this analysis of the depth of change should be understood as a downgrading of any current sense of crisis and sudden change that have been occurring within the university. To return briefly to the vision of the Present Age, it is the pace and directions of change which have moved me to suggest that the central function of the important University of Minnesota will be to study seriously the changing nature of these times.

Where to begin? . . . a crisis in meaning (Sarles, 2001). This crisis – first noted by Nietzsche well over a century ago as the rise in ‘European nihilism’ (Nietzsche, 1968) – has deepened. Television is a prime suspect in which authority has been replaced by celebrity. The pursuit of truth, and that faculty and universities can certify it as such, has weakened considerably. Techniques of revisionism such as Spin and PR are by now so common as to be cliche.  Fame and becoming a star professor is the current measure of competitive quality. A much longer story, but central to our concerns.

Here the Internet and email have opened up opportunities for us to communicate easily and rapidly. No paper necessary to communicate all across the world – to develop conferences, to arrange…whatever. The downside is that questions of truth and authority become more in flux. Truth, logic, knowledge, reality?…Whew!

The idea that the world is politics/economics (in either order) – and nothing else – also seems increasingly attractive, and awaits (new?) theories of global governance, whenever an apparently insatiable capitalism must eventually(!) overstep itself. This, too, is a developing current of postmodernism, in which most left-leaning neo-neo-Marxists are searching against, but also for, new directions. Within the context of the meaning of the university, however, the notion that all is politics/economics tends to be undermining.[9]

As I often taught the Sciences and the Humanities course at Minnesota, and as I have that on my mind: whatever ‘postmodernism’ may mean or convey, the rifts between science and humanities have deepened a good deal. I characterize the differences being between the World-as-Text and the Text-as-World. As technology continues to rise with amazing power, science is backgrounded, and the notion of narrative – that all is talk about, but any real-reality is located in texts – seems very attractive.

The rise of religious fundamentalism is related – as such thinkers are actually scholars of religious texts, which they use to determine/specify the ongoing reality: thus, the Text-as-World. None of this can be overestimated in its possible powers. The intellectual impact of this is to replace ideas of history and linear development of our being with concepts derived from prophets whose sayings may overtake all of thinking (Sarles, 1999).

The Future

It hasn’t helped that science (thus rationality, and the politics of liberalism and democracy) is increasingly seen as self-serving: scientists working for/with corporations that fund research at universities more cheaply than they could do it. Isn’t everyone for sale?[10]

Aren’t our deans all urging us to apply for grants, never mind questions of integrity? Who can judge quality, anyway? And endowed professorships seem fairly open to those who can pay the prevailing price: professorial stars; or ideologues?

Increasing senses of globality have entered our thinking and actualities.  Movements of vast sums of money each day and night have helped blur the conceptual boundaries that we have called nation-states. Bill Readings (1996) wondered poignantly if the Kantian idea of the rational university which would teach the citizen of the rational state is now passé, and its meaning adrift. Where, then, may the idea of a university locate itself?

Relations between structures of economic and social life now rise into contestation, as transnational corporations operate between and around the concepts of nationhood and law. This further destabilizes or blurs our positioning in the world.

Within the recent rise of cosmology, the sense of our being has diminished radically. After a few centuries of forms of humanism which urged us to center our being upon our lives and our experience, we find ourselves in the vast universes of sci-fi and more blurring of boundaries: in these contexts, between life and death, and the questioning of the meaning of life being determined outside of our very existence.[11]

One more arena of large change in the academy – one which has reflexes of a cycle from the late 19^th century. We can note that the amazing concentration upon money as the measure of the quality of life, the developments which drove the ‘Re-Organizing Knowledge’ conference, (where this essay was published) also led in the 19^th century to the kinds of biology, evolutionary psychology, and neurology of determinism, which are in increasing vogue right now: then they called it eugenics.

Here again, the temptation to ask questions of meaning of our lives and of the university, are obscured in the excitement of MRIs (magnetic resonance – brain – imagings) and the idea that we are close to finally solving the problem of the human. Evolutionary psychology – by any name – is very similar to the Social Darwinism which accompanied the Gilded Age and Robber Barons of the 19^th century. Much of it seems like politics in the name of science, especially if one takes seriously the political applications of eugenic theories in Hitler’s realms. As an increasing portion of our being is being seen as predetermined by our genes, the nature of our actual experience is background and unimportant, or uninteresting…or not-psychology or not-biology.

As money replaces meaning, and the game goes to the most competitive, the notion that these aspects of our being are particularly hereditary becomes first interesting, then compelling. Education is directed toward success; success determined by the opportunities and fads of each day. And the idea of a university floats…

If the experience of the early 20^th century parallels the excesses of the current love-affair with money, here at least there is some direction: some form of retrieve or return to a progressive pragmatism along the lines of thought of John Dewey et al. (Hofstadter, 1992: Chapter 7).

What this presages is an increasing concern with experience and doing, replacing the sense that how we got here is more determining than how we experience and live our lives. And we have to re-earn some of the authority which has so diminished in this era of celebrity and consumerism.

Conclusion: The Study of the Present Age

Much of this analysis of the university and the contexts in which it finds itself, our wonderings about the future of knowledge and of the idea of a university, seem to be as much in flux as one can imagine. It is primarily for this reason that my vision of the Study of the Present Age seems like a good path for solution to the future university. In this essay, I’ve taken the position that the Idea of the University remains an important one, both in developing and preserving.

I assume, believe, trust, as well, that there must remain some deep sense of integrity to the institution; that we can and must pursue the truth. I don’t mind the polemics or arguments – at least most of them. The splits between the sciences and the humanities, and the curses or cries of joy of postmodernism, rifts like those between the notions of rationality which abound in economics, psychiatry, philosophy, and law, seem to me really interesting. I try to study and discuss them.

Except: they get very little public discussion and less awareness. We have tended to retreat into our protective and protected spaces, rather than explore and confront those who are different from us, or those who disagree with us. The politics of academe are not always pretty. But I think that the differences and depths of disciplined thinking remain very important in the human condition. And I remain somewhat confident that disagreements or passings-by can be brokered, understood, sometimes reconciled; but not within the currents of isolation which presently make the university easier to administer or to compete with others.

There are, in fact, several universities within the one that is the University of Minnesota. For example, many of the disciplines promote thinking which depends on case studies and abstracts to generalities later (Law, Medicine, Anthropology, Engineering and in some ways the Humanities often use texts as cases), while others begin abstractly and come to specifics much later (maths, physics, much of biology). In this context, the notion of theory is often used as a bludgeon, a bit of politics attempting to raise the import of certain studies, persons, or claims, while the theorists often relegate the case studiers to lesser status.

It is similar with those who tend toward the analytic and reductionistic talking past their colleagues who are more holistic. In this context, there are palpable cycles whose patron saint may be likened to Humpty-Dumpty. Here, philosophy is presently seen as coming to an analytic impasse, with a call back to a renewed American Pragmatism.[12]

We have also been creating institutional distance and disparity between research and teaching, stemming from the 1960s, but continuing.  In our recent attempts to distinguish the university from (apparently) competing private and public colleges, we have been playing games with teaching, making it burden more than joy. In the Center for the Study of the Present Age, students will want to study with the best thinkers, not merely seek the easiest or most convenient credentials. Lecturing with Power Point is most often telling much more than it is teaching.

I have to think that good management can enable us to get beyond the social definitions of whose teaching, thinking, knowledge is more important, simply by virtue of their belonging to a field which is currently prestigious/hot. All of this tends toward the bureaucratic, neither attractive nor intelligible. Vast differences in pay scales represent image and visibility and the incursions of markets, and continue to erode the institution. And this has also contributed to the notion that credentials are more important than education.

Not! – at an important University of Minnesota.

The Study of the Present Age admits-commits to the idea that the world is changing very rapidly and in ways that we cannot fully understand or penetrate in any moment. The Present Age is a concept that may enable us to grasp the present, and to move it toward the futurity of its students (what parents, community, legislator, businesses really desire – they’re running scared for their childrens’ futures!). In an unscripted world, the university has to become and remain some sort of anchor.

It is necessary to be the important University of Minnesota, because we have to have (earn and assert) sufficient authority to continue to claim to be persons who profess and pursue truth. It seems OK not to know everything at once . . . if we can show that we possess and continue to pursue the wisdom(s) of this time and of all of time.

The Center for the Study of the Present Age is a concept (soon, we hope, to be a reality) that will study, monitor, critique, and interact with these times. It will engage the entire faculty in a joint enterprise and regain us the sense that we are a community of scholars: in it the distinctions between research-scholarship, teaching, and service will meld into a singular pursuit.

The university must remain open to various communities, inviting them to participate and join us on occasion. Here, I include the global community, perhaps especially those persons of wisdom from the entire world who wish to continue their pursuits in conjoint contexts.

Leadership will be paramount. A central commitment – of the President or Chancellor – is crucial because she or he will have to have sufficient nerve to take Minnesota away from the secure comforts of pyramidal location (a pretty good university – e.g., 3^rd best public research university), and to take or support us as we go our own way. Similarly, parents, students, citizens, legislators will have to swallow deeply as we all have to relocate ourselves globally, then locally. And we have to adjust to the conceptual sense that Internet, email, and virtual reality are us.

We will have to rethink our ideas of ageing, ageing faculty and the ageing of the developed world with some study of the traditions in which teacher-as-sage is the direction and path of a very good life (Peterson, 1999).

All of this will be done with the integrative sense that disciplined thinking can be done within the contexts of particular ideas, problems, and histories. It is paramount that some of us can explore, broker, and explain the nature of knowledge and the broad curriculum with and to one another.

The Study of the Present Age will preserve the idea of a university by entering the world at a level and in senses where we can do what it is important to do, as much in our own terms as possible: call it the pursuit of wisdom in changing times. We do this by studying and critiquing the world as it is occurring: carefully, well, thoughtfully, continually. We will need constructive criticism from the global community – and hope that they will join us frequently in our deliberations.

In this way, we will also be able to preserve, conserve, continue the Liberal Arts and Sciences as they pursue knowledge in their variously disciplined modes and manners. The curriculum is vast, often competitive, and whether it serves the futures of our students is at much risk in the momentariness of vogues, fads, and ready markets.

I hope that having a Center that pulls everyone together some of the time will enable us to know and to study one another, and to stop much of the splinterings and talkings-past that have characterized the bureaucratization of the university in the past few decades. Careers belong to the ephemeral world and political economies, so we have to reinvent the pursuit of character and of vocation, which will help us to be models for and inspirers of our students.

It is we, the thinkers, the teachers, those of us who attempt to be real professors who can attempt to guarantee or underwrite the sense that students’ futures can remain hopeful and doable. It is the Idea of a University in the Present Age which is the vision for this coming reality.

Notes

[1] Kierkegaard’s principal critique is of the rise of bureaucratic thought and thinking. In this context I have crafted an analysis of the University: “The Nature of the University: Bureaucratization of the Mind and of Knowledge.” (ms)

[2] The faculty will also be asked to develop their own – new or renewed – plans for their future work: one-, two-, five-, 10-year projections. Within disciplines and/or across disciplines.

[3] My own thought and work in teaching has been interactive, toward the Deweyan idea of becoming a self-thinker, an autodidact (see Sarles: “Teaching as Dialogue”).

[4]. I mean by ‘an unscripted time’ that the future looms without much certitude about potential or real vocations or careers which the university qua university can train them toward. In a world in which ‘temps’ are the leading career at present, and even some professions (e.g. medicine) are changing almost daily, it is unclear that the largely historical university can train students and retain any sense of its integrity or reason for being. Much of this discussion hinges about the perception of the pace and depth of changes which we are presently experiencing. I presume that we must educate students to be able to deal with their futurities, irrespective of the university’s particularities.

[5] I don’t mean that this envisioned university will be a mere retirement haven for ex-academics.  Rather, it will draw the very limited number of older persons whom we can think of as master teachers or sages in the contexts of other traditions in the world which have highly respectful wisdom traditions of ageing.

[6] I taught such a course for several years to incoming Foreign Fulbright Graduate students from all over the world, and propose it as a good introduction both to our own history and to global thinking (see Sarles, 1998).

[7] I note with dismay that there are very few (any?) current university presidents who have national intellectual stature.

[8] My metaphor continues to be the curriculum handbook of the University of Wisconsin Madison when our son went there in the early 1980s: 135 pages of majors and courses and not a single mention of any faculty. Not one!

[9] I usually agree with postmodernists that politics are involved in almost everything, but think that, with ongoing awareness and cultural critique, much of the politics can be overcome; cf., this essay.

[10] Personal communication, Philip Regal, a now retired ecologist at Minnesota, and a close colleague. He was at one time the lead scientist in a lawsuit directed against the FDA to require the Government to label all genetically altered foods…(Oh well!)

[11] In a recent course, I taught ‘Philosophy’ to a group of middle-school children. I observed that these arenas (stories, movies, videos, games) pervade their thinking, most of it remaining floating and uninterpreted (Minneapolis Metropolitan School).

[12] Donald Davidson, a leading analytic philosopher, made just this point in a series of lectures at the University of Minnesota in 1998: ‘The Resurrection of Truth’ pointed back to the work of Pragmatists, particularly John Dewey.

References

Cohen, M.D. and March, J.G. (1974) Leadership and Ambiguity: The American College President. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hofstadter, R. and Metzger, W. (1955) The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hofstadter, R. (1992) ‘The Current of Pragmatism’, in Hofstadter, R. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Kerr, C. (1963) The Uses of the University. New York: Harper & Row.

Kerr, C. (1991) The Great Transformation in Higher Education: 1960–1980. Albany: SUNY Press.

Kierkegaard, S. (1940) The Present Age and Two Minor Ethico-religious Treatises.

Translated by A. Dru and W. Lowrie. London: Oxford University Press.

Newman, J.H. (1953) University Sketches. Dublin: Browne & Nolan.

Newman, J.H. (1976) The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power. New York: Vintage.

Peterson, P.G. (1999) Gray Dawn: How the Coming Age Wave will Transform America – and the World. New York: Times Books.

Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sarles, H.B. (1993) Teaching as Dialogue. A Teacher’s Study. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Sarles, H.B. (1998) ‘Explaining Ourselves through Others. Cultural Visions: A Mini Course on America”, in J.A. Mestenhauser and B.J. Ellingboe Reforming the Higher Education Curriculum: Internationalizing the Campus, pp. 135–49.  Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

Sarles, H.B. (2010ms) Prediction! or Prophecy?

Sarles, H.B. (2001) Nietzsche’s Prophecy: The Crisis in Meaning. Buffalo, NY: Humanity Press.

Snow, C.P. (1964) The Two Cultures and a Second Look: An Expanded Version of the Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wilshire, B. (1990) The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation. Albany: SUNY Press.

“The 57th Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture & Dinner and 3-Day International Istitute for General Semantics Conference”
Conference Schedule (PDF)

Who are cops…the police? Mostly guys, mostly white. In the past few decades a few women, more and more “ethnic” persons: some African-American, in Minneapolis-St. Paul they reflect the recent immigrations…somewhat…as far as I know. Not too many Hmong persons, a few Latinos from various countries…

Who are we…in thinking about the police – wondering how they think about us, and what they’re “up to?” How many of us would like to be cops? Do police “like” being cops, or filled to various levels of…fear, import, wondering about each next person, in each approaching moment?

How do they get to be cops? I mean what’s inside their heads, their thinking, that we might get to understand in their terms – more than in our reactive minds?

Also important – maybe very important is the fact that they dress in “uniforms.” Uniforms seem to take individual identity and help make them all into police – cops. (Where has their “individuality” gone?)

More signs: their cars, bright flashing lights, rear seats which can be made very separate from the front ones; painted black and white (in lots of places). Quite obvious. (Except that we might forget to notice them when we’re driving a bit too fast: over the speed limit. And they can make really loud siren noises which instill us with fear and the immediate reaction to stop, and pull over.)

All this to say that the police have quite a “presence” in the world: in many/most senses they are all “alike.” Uniform…has several meanings and even more connotations. (The differences between police and the military? – has gotten a bit complicated and confusing especially in these moments driven by war, terror, fear… (Observing the RNC meeting in St. Paul last fall: the police “looked” remarkably like military – faces obscured, wearing odd/different uniforms, carrying threatening looks and clubs. Whatever it takes to “keep the peace” said the mayors!)

Sargeant Crowley and that “Uppity Professor” (from Harvard no less), “Skip” Gates. What were the exact circumstances? Never totally clear: perhaps so “obvious” to many of us, that the moment-to-moment “facts” don’t seem very important to the situation.

A white cop (likely with some ethnic background which might still be “important” – was very important a couple of generations ago – Irish Catholic? Boston, a long history of Irish Catholics bathing in money and power. But we should remember the movie, “Gangs of New York” pitching the Irish immigrants against the (then) white Protestant majority to taste those senses of their history. Tough (mostly) guys? Ethnics, culture: what sorts of culture do the police have? “White ethnicity: gone entirely or some residuals?

And an African American, in many ways “the African-American Professor” in these times when being “Black” is taking on some “new” meanings, especially as Barack Obama is our President. And Harvard: In “spite” of being at Harvard, Gates is probably the most important historian/critic of what is African-American. (I got to watch/listen to him an entire evening at the U. of Minnesota a few years back, being interviewed by colleague John Wright of the English Dept. here: two very interesting/fine minds at work in trying to understand and be critics of the American world, and “blackness” within it. And Gates is a public figure frequently on TV and elsewhere.)

African…American? Some history here. The Irish Catholic history seems to have effectively disappeared – but there might be some “cultural” habits or thinking – maybe especially about what it means to be a cop…

So who am I? Writing about all this?

An Anthropologist who tries to observe the world, all the people(s), who they are, how they world “works,” how their heads direct their thinking. What is law and legal? What do I know? How to behave and stay out of trouble! Be a good boy! Observe, think…

In some ways, I am a cop. I teach and work hard at keeping some semblance of peace in my classes (not usually much problem…but sometimes, Yes!).

I am a bureaucrat, don’t exactly wear a uniform…but I apparently “look like a Professor” – dress pretty correctly in that scene. Lots of people at the University (mine, or wherever I visit) say “Hello,” as if I …belong there. Gates looks like a professor, as well, but his professorial appearance is sometimes overwhelmed by…color!? (And is being a Professor a “good thing” in these times of money mongering and little thought about different cultures and how they are often misunderstood: e.g., Iraq!)

Some personal history (we all have “some history”) with cops. A police station just 4 doors away till I was 5 – police all very nice to us neighbors. No memory of any sense of fear. Next house, had to walk a bit to school. Remember a very nice cop who helped us cross the major street, with buses and all kinds of traffic and stores. No sense of concern or worry thru high school: careful, cautious…sure. My Buffalo home was across the Peace(!) Bridge to Canada: we learned to deal with the Provies (Provincial – very formal cops) on the Canadian side. “Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” Such memorable moments.

Stories about cops on the take: Chicago was the center (at least in my extended family). Then a trip to Mexico – where it was all “different.” Or seemed different, except they were usually so helpful to us – saw very few “bad” scenes (lived always in the “right” neighborhoods?) Concentrated on helpfulness and kindness. (Have TV and movies “changed” all these perceptions: a much more “dangerous” place than when I was growing up and growing our kids up?)

During the Civil Rights days, I was very concerned with questions of fairness, democracy – and “got involved.” Worked during Summer 1968 (as the Democratic Convention was disintegrating in Chicago – as most cities in the North, at least, were being burned to different levels of crisp) – I worked for the Justice Dept in Washington – knew a lot of cops – met with them. But the FBI – and the Community Relations Service (where I was) – had very different ideas of police “work” and cop cultures.

I was the Anthropologist: given the task of  “close” reading the notes of so-many cops who had gotten killed in confrontations with African-Americans. Fewer than 100, I recall, but not much less.

Most seem to have “brought it on themselves” – didn’t really study, understand, probe the cultural dynamics of “Black Folks” – “outside” gatherers in groups – cops apparently saw loud crowds more than individual people in groups.

Pulled their guns “early” in the moments of confrontation. (Pulling guns early – was a part of the ways in which most of the urban cops – interestingly, historically – mostly dominated in the Northern Cities by Irish-Americans. Still? – guns, at least handcuffs.).

The Community Relations Service – which did have a good number of African-American cops – had a very different notion of police presence. First say “hello,” reach-out, shake hands (and usually some reception or defusing), guns stay way behind the scenes, or may appear if nothing else works (but it usually “worked)!

From my study, I urged the police (everywhere) to hire African-American cops – have them out on the streets, try to befriend crowds. It could help if the cops knew some of the persons personally. And these “riots” (they were called)  all stopped! Literally – after the Democratic Convention, the levels of threat, anger, and all – virtually stopped, and became history. (I was asked a few years later by a S. African official how this had happened here…Same advice.)

So: cops! I’ve had long conversations with a few of my students who were (already) cops – what it’s like – the training – the moment-to-moments of dealing with all the people in the various “hoods” – (I live in dwtn Minneapolis – where there’s lot of action!) – but it’s not a “ghettoized” scene. And there just began a program of “sort” of official workers-helpers-cleaners just to keep the scene “pleasant.” A sort of community-relations work, where their uniforms act as a kind of  “official intermediate.” Very nice work.

But it’s not always “pleasant” – not always easy, or friendly. Poor people increasing (I “pass” for a nice-white guy in most current settings  – I rarely get asked for I.D. with a credit card.) But I note a fair number of dwtn cops who “hold” themselves/faces very formally; appearing to be looking for the “worst” persons, cases (4 centuries of slavery in America still rise to reek and tweek our noses and fists-wrists). “Ghettos” still exist, and seem to be becoming more-so these days. (Maybe…with Obama?)

So: cultures, color (what gets cops decorations and promotions?). In 1968, a good cop from the cop’s administration, was convinced that pulling a gun really early in the scene would…work. But it didn’t – not in that Civil Rights moment. And there were others, not cops who were frightened (of a black Harvard guy?) – because…

Because history, poverty, slavery!…continue to wander still uneasily in our collective and individual minds. Change the world: make us all equal? A cop’s wish, culture, keeping the scene cool and calm. Anger? Handcuffs work? (Most African-Americans would, I’m pretty sure, keep this situation quiet, hidden: not Skip Gates!)

In such an “interesting” time we’re in, the question of the cops…police hovers always a bit nervously…especially when we’re a bit nervous about who’s trying to get (to) us. Why? Increasing fear makes it easier to keep the world in and under control – except for  a few thoughtful (and brave) persons…

Lessons from My Teachers:

Observe, observe, try to see in every moment, context, persons, relationships…I now call myself an “Anthropologist of the Ordinary.” (My sense is that many Anthropologists are more anthropologists of the …Exotic!)

Go to the field – live there for extended periods of time – take a “vacation” and return to the field, and not what (more) I see than I had before.

Went to U. Chicago for PhD – studied with linguist, N. McQuown who was supervisor in Mayan studies. U. of C. became a kind of experiential fieldwork for my own experience examining the University (“the” University). Daughter born in Chicago. Then to Mexico.

Return home (big fieldwork to Mexico was for 2 years – with J. and 5-month-old Amy). Life is a “study” of society, politics, homes, money: rich and poor, and…and…

Return home after 2 years was amazing – arrived just before Bay of Pigs, with no sense that all this was about to occur (living in Chiapas-Mayan Highlands – no newspapers, no TV, hardly any radio,  not much knowing of the world.

Whew! Life is a “whew” – mainly from Birdwhistell.

Attend to language(s) – interactions, conversations, body movements – forms of linguistic articulation (summer in Taos paralanguage – how do we use/hear paralanguage in our own languages – tone of voice. Very interesting, complex – how do kids learn all this: how affects/shapes conversations, emotions…relationships…politics.

Study oneself; language, body – an ongoing study; contexts (how are we/I in this present moment) – from Erving Goffman (Birdwhistell’s student: “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”) – so what senses of “self” are kept private/hidden in different “public” settings?

Everything about interactions: gender (not much simpler after all these years – actually more “complicated…” – having a child, we were invited into (the depths of…) people’s houses. How we were seen: this large guy, a new mother/person, a baby with pink cheeks (very rare where we were) – of great interest to everyone. Always…politics.

Brought up in Buffalo – a multi-ethnic community at a time when anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism were generally declining: two years in a community mix of “Ladinos” and Native-American Mayans who had been living together/split for some 4 centuries. History, history. Coming back home to see ethnicity and everyone anew: (living in a “mixed” marriage…) So much about “culture,” different cultures in Chiapas (and at home). Cultures of Professors and Graduate Students in the field with us: from Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford – hints of academic politics. And more…

Maybe most informing/educational: living at home with a child who was learning both English and Spanish (and a bit of Tzotzil-Mayan). Medical issues: not much trained to note our own health: dysentery (very ”captivating”), other issues, some ongoing after 50 years. Health, eating, food: no refrigeration, no baby-food for sale (we had to cook it all “fresh” – Mexican “maids” – more sickness – charity in an essentially Catholic world (very different from Protestant America). Very few physicians, dentists. (I “lost” three teeth.)

Observe, note: keep track of all of this. Observe daughter growing, moving, talking – get to see many other kids/infants everywhere – lots of people outside in the tropics, with kids, feeding. Always quite receptive to us with Amy.

The levels of poverty in S. Mexico were unimaginable to us – hidden at home, they are aspects of our thinking always. How does money “work?” Differences between Ladinos and Indians in interactions, cultures: appearance, child-raising…culture, power…housing, villages, towns…

Lessons: observe (and observe oneself observing) – but not just in experimental or exotic situations: everywhere, everyone – always expanding, rethinking more broadly and exclusively (discovering one’s error, biases, assumptions…)

Observe in “ordinary,” exotic, tough times to help discover one’s thinking and experience-so-far…to update, broaden, deepen.

Returned home: to work at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic – examining patient-doctor interactions in clinical settings: linguistics, body-movements – how to note, record, analyse. What is psychosis? – what is…not? Healthy. Psychoanalysis.

Birdwhistell actually visited WPIC in Pittsburgh about once a month: got to watch him in interaction with Psychiatrists, patients, many others: the world’s best observer, he was. Still in my thinking: frequently…always.

Offered a Professorship by Trager at Buffalo – but I didn’t want to return “home” at that time. He’s still in my thinking: encapsulating Hall’s “The Silent Language.”

Life is/as kinds of fieldwork: how to see, in increasing depth – but finding ways to see more accurately, clearer, – rethink oneself-seeing…

It was at Buffalo where I began to study with George Trager, Ray Birdwhistell, and Henry Lee Smith. They arrived there in the fall of 1956: I was one of their first two students. As Trager was the essential co-author of “The Silent Language,” I include E.T. Hall’s work and thinking in my education (and current re-reading).

I continue to be their student, over 50 years later.

Ray Birdwhistell is probably the one whose ideas and practices continue to shape me most. He was the originator of “Kinesics,” the study of the Body-in-Interaction. He was a trained dancer, the best observer I have ever met: observer of the very wide contexts in which humans…are. He also tried to describe in symbols what he was seeing: arms, faces, always in-interaction. A challenging task. The body…and the mind – who and how we are.)

Teachings: how to see people (always including oneself…seeing, being, and body movements); how to note that “presence” of anyone entails (from his other student, Erving Goffman: “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”) the facts that we appear as we do in the company and contexts of others…and ourselves. There is much more to study: behind the scenes, in private alone and with others…Think about other bodies (other species) interacting socially; the power(s) in any/every relationship. And the study of context, in always broadening senses: how we know “when” we are, just to begin. (I wrote about this in the “Foundations Project.”) Different cultures (and subcultures).

I inhale and swallow deeply as I think about all the directions in which his continuing questions and observations continue to excite and inspire me.

Last (for now), it was his teaching – as dialogue – which I continue to explore as practice, in writing, being and thinking.

George Trager was the anthropologist-linguist who most affected my ongoing study of “languaging.” I use this term because it is – in theory directed always toward practice – it is the framing which urges one to attend to sound in all its human contexts. It began with the study of my Buffalo-talk. My dialect – which I considered to be the most “proper” English – made him giggle (still, in my head I see him) as I was taught to begin to study my own being and practice. Buffalo, all of English (today and in history) as part of the languages of the world.

The structure of language – but most broadly: more than syntax, sounds, phonetics and phonemics as the methods for entering the “minds” of speakers of all languages. The politics of all this, and how different people(s) and cultures consider themselves, their languages, and others. Paralanguage: the fact (most pursued by Trager), that the sound structure of language is hugely important in our speech and understanding. I spent a summer with him (and families) in Taos, N.M., studying the paralanguage of the Taos language, and have carried this into my own study of speech, communication, and mutual understanding. Mouths, tongues, movement of the lips, larynx, where we “place” our tongues, breathing, saliva.

You “gotta” go out, look and listen. Observation, experience…the bases of our knowledge!

Henry Smith (“Haxie”) was less the theorist, more the student of how the world actually is: an expert in American dialects – Trager’s continuous confidante – an amazingly articulate person. Pay attention…

It was the three of them who took me into the directions of culture, the silent languages. All of them resonate in my being and thinking, now some 50+ years later, still seeing and hearing (and watching them in classes, and the many informal interactions as I continue(d)to study, invoking them in my own…as my own.

They carried with them – in my memories and thinking certainly, E.T. Hall, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead, and others in the experiences of living and studying in other cultures…eventually to come back “home” – seeing and studying “the ordinary” in so many of its complexities. Why I like to call myself: an “Anthropologist of the Ordinary.”

TEACHING AS DIALOGUE:
A TEACHER’S STUDY
By Harvey B. Sarles
University Press of America: 1993
ISBN 0-8191-8897-2
REVIEW by Maarten van Schie

I’ll give you my opinion forward and frank: I think this is a good book. What I have been reading the past month has been a book about teaching. I have read a few books on teaching, and most of them are full of theories and techniques to teach effectively, with standard presentation tricks like “Say what you are going to say, say it, and then say what you have said.” These books are usually written in the manner of a college textbook, authorative and impersonal.

The book that I have read and am reviewing now writes about teaching in a very different manner. It is, first and foremost, a very personal book. Harvey B. Sarles has written about his vision on what teaching is and what a teacher does and instead of writing about teaching as a job he writes about the teacher as a human being. From this perspective he explores the role of a Teacher, which is “the person who becomes Teacher to one’s students: entering their spirits in some depth”.

I admit I was at first a little put off by the ambitious metaphors of this kind in the beginning of the book. But Harvey Sarles has in his book distilled from the concept of teaching, which may be muddled up in “The Present Age” (Kierkegaard), the purely human and social aspects. And as he puts it, Teaching is not just about transferring knowledge, it has the potential to shape minds and ideas and to inspire.

There are many things to be considered when we look at teaching from that perspective. Teaching is then not just didactive but interactive and a significantly social activity. With that in mind you may start to understand the title of the book. It is not just the teacher that is considered primarily from his being a human being in this book, but also the student. Interaction between the two, then, is in that regard on an equal level. Ideally anyway, as Sarles writes.

The first few chapters of the book explore what a Teacher is and does, conceptually. The Teacher has a lot of knowledge and experience, but does not engage the student as an empty slate, unknowing and uncritical. The student is a peer of sorts, who has right and reason to question the teacher, though the latter is put in the position of teaching, thus having a position of some authority for the student.

So how to “Teach”? There is not one way to do this, different teachers and different subjects have different teaching styles (as is mentioned in the book). Harvey Sarles does not attempt describing how to teach excellently: instead he tells the reader about his experiences and cogitations on teaching. There is a passage, for example, where he shares how he prepares for a class, and how he feels about it. I am not a teacher, but I can imagine many teachers sharing these feelings. The major part of the book is a mixture of these kinds of experiences and the thoughts they lead to. It is in fact hard to distinguish between the two, as he writes mostly with his practice as a basis. This makes the book accessible and fairly easy to read. I can well imagine the settings he describes and relate to his thoughts in these settings. Still it is not a story-book, for his practice feeds the theory he tries to present. Rather, he presents the theory through the way he sees, does and experiences the practice of teaching.

In summary, this is an inspired book about teaching as a human activity, teaching with a capital T. Harvey Sarles explains, from his personal perspective and experience, what teaching is, and what Teaching. He elaborates on practical and philosophical problems to do with teaching, such as problems of power and empowerment (Freire’s problem), the internal dialogue one might have as a teacher, the content and context of teaching, an existential perspective on teaching, teaching towards growth and judgment and evaluation. He concludes with two chapters more focused on the teacher him- or herself learning and taking in knowledge, through auto-didacy and reading. This last chapter contains by far the majority of his references: in in the writer gives the reader reading suggestions for better and worse times, and books that have inspired him. This makes the bibliography of a– refreshingly–different kind than those I usually come across, with many references to authors like Confucius, Castaneda, Freire and Orwell.

The personal style of the book makes it read much like the author is talking to you, lecturing. Lecturing in his own style however, enticing the reader to follow his ideas but think for oneself. This makes it an interesting, for me even inspiring read. As a taster, I will finish with a citation from the book:

“An inspiring…Teacher, lecturer, gets students to want to engage in the future, in their futurity. Inspirational teaching is both good enough to be judged very well—for just what it is—and simultaneously to challenge the students or audience, to want to do it…as well. It is a negotiation over the nature of critical judgment, in which the inspirational activity becomes a touchstone for what is quality. It is a demonstration of what is possible (transcendent) within the mundane and seemingly ordinary…”

My teachers of Anthropology and Linguistics at SUNYBuffalo, had been working for the U.S State Dept, in the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) during and after WWII. Their work consisted centrally of working (“fieldwork”) in the different Languages and Cultures of the world – advising and teaching State Dept personnel in exploring and understanding the other languages and cultures of the world.

Language and Culture were considered important in understanding and dealing with the world. Different peoples and nations had to be studied in their “own terms,” in order to understand and deal with them “realistically, effectively…” To be an effective statesman, one should speak the native language In these senses: other countries were different from us, but should be studied in their own  terms, toward good and effective foreign politics and policies.

As Sec’y of State to President Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles had a quite “different” picture of the United States and other countries. They were not just “different” from the U.S., but they were considered as somewhat “lesser,” in the contexts of a kind of “hierarchy” of nations. (Dulles was a deeply religious person with a deep sense of “America-First” – America was a kind of “City upon a Hill.”) His picture of America and the world has persisted well into the present.

In any case, all the Anthropologists and Linguists in the FSI were “fired,” in 1955. E.T. Hall – who authored the “Silent Language” went to be a professor at Northwestern University. His close colleague, George L. Trager, as well as Henry Lee Smith, Jr. went to Buffalo (and hired Ray Birdwhistell) – I was one of their first two students. I had been searching for my true “vocation” – and this seemed to be the way of the/my future!

They were hired by a former State Dept. administrator, who had become Dean of Arts & Sciences at Buffalo (Richard H. Heindel) and knew Trager & Smith, and their works. I “found” them through my partner and, soon after, spouse (Janis/J.) who was student and “live-in nanny” for the Heindel’s daughter. And we thought we were something of a “match.” (I was working as a mathematician, system analyst, programmer of early computers at that time, and looking to move-on; this, after a year in medical school at Buffalo.)

They seemed interesting, exciting: persons as well as subject-matters.

Back to “The Silent Language” as example and metaphor for the study of culture:

“Though the United States has spent billions of dollars on foreign aid programs, it has captured neither the affection nor the esteem of the rest of the world. In many countries today Americans are cordially disliked; in others merely tolerated…Most of our behavior does not spring from malice but from ignorance, which is as grievous a sin in international relations. It is time Americans learned how to communicate effectively with foreign nationals. Americans sent abroad to deal with other peoples should not only be taught to speak and read the language, but be thoroughly trained in the culture of the country. We don’t need more missiles and H-bombs nearly so much as we need specific knowledge of ourselves as participants in a culture.”

– Dr Edward Hall

Frontispiece to “The Silent Language” – paperback edition – 1959.

Importantly for any deeper understanding of our relation to the rest of the world in 2009, “why” we find ourselves in seemingly endless wars with the most vague reasons for being at war – Hall’s comment was totally prescient.

Our understanding of the religious and tribal/ethnic differences in both Iraq and Afghanistan (and Iran) are constructed from ideologies, not much on knowledge of their cultures, languages, thinking…all of what the Linguists and Anthropologists of the Foreign Service Institute tried to teach us.

The deepest and saddest irony of this story, is that Linguists and Anthropologists have been “absent” (literally: none! – as far as I know.) from the State Dept since my teachers were fired in 1955. Political Scientists, Economists, some others, but no Anthropologists-Linguists.

Only in the past couple of years, as the war in Iraq has stalled and stalled, has there been some attempt to talk about “culture.” But, so far, it still seems mostly like “talk” – a  couple of so-called “anthropologist-hires,” but seeming more like appearance than serious “fieldworkers” – more calculated to calm than to study the peoples and thinking of these cultures.

So much for experience, trying to get-into the “heads” of other peoples. I hope it’s time to more deeply explore the peoples of the world in this explosively global moment where the economists and political scientists whom we thought knew something/everything have created only a corroding bottom-line.

The study of language, cultures, experience, thinking of others – coming back to enable/enhance/expand our own thinking in these complicated times.

Time to get out into the world, and study the people(s)…

The usual routes for teachers trained by Colleges of Education would not be judged by Teach for America, and these new teachers – who primarily have earned very high grades in getting their college or university degrees – would offer much better teaching to our K-12 children. Or they would not – said the other editorial.

"his home for 7th grade science", flickr photo by Monkey & Tree

What’s going on here? Are our schools failing with the ordinary or usual teachers: how badly or well are they doing – for whom? Who are these new teachers: are they “qualified?” To do what? Will they be better teachers? Or is this so much hype?

Here I’m speaking from the perspective of a Professor at the University of Minnesota, where I have been selected as “Teacher of the Year” in 2001, in the College of Liberal Arts. I also teach a course in Teaching as Dialogue: a book I also wrote. Just this Spring, I’ve been involved in the recently formed “Great Teachers” program.

And during the “money bubble” times we’re currently passing-out-of, there has been a virtual redefinition of students. Like Medicine (capitalized), students and patients have all been “converted” to “Consumers.” There are really no persons in this description which has sold so well during the money-bubble. And so there aren’t really any persons doing the teaching: increasingly removed from teaching…it used to be lectures from “yellowed” ancient lecture notes. But now it is using Power Point: where everyone gets to read the same notes, as the teacher talks – the notes don’t even need to be “memorized,” and the danger is that the teachers can easily memorize themselves as they are more thinking about their research interests and reputations, even as they may seem to “be there” as teachers.

What matters the University? Well, all the teacher/professors who train teachers, got their own degrees in such places. So the nature of the Schools of Education – which seem pretty distant from the rest of the University – ought to be examined. And, so far, at least, it hasn’t much arisen in this discussion. Except that Teach for America is “by-passing” them for their new teachers. (They’ll get “certified” by a program at Hamline University during their first two years of teaching.”) This leaves the question of teacher education: by whom, learning what, toward…? – all silent.

Well…we are in complicated times, swimming in somewhat stormy waves. My analysis is quite general: about the reputation or importance of teachers in these times of success meaning big cars, houses, big money. Teachers do O.K., middle-class salaries. And for many, tenure – a guaranteed job over the long hauls; unions to represent their interests. Not the most popular profession, or very attractive to our best students in higher education: for example, at the University of Minnesota where I work. But also at all other similar places, including the Harvard’s and Yale’s.

Except, these new teachers working for Teach for America are some of our best students: A to A+ grades. They wouldn’t have ever thought to go into teaching – except in the past few years. Several of my best students have only recently worked for Americorps, and find Teach for America very attractive. This is all new ground. Here I’m talking about Liberal Arts and Science students: the cream of our graduates, from here and other first rate universities: especially the most prestigious Ivy Leagues.

Who hasn’t made it in our schools? We want everyone to “do well,” we have repeated over and over. But the drop-out rates for the poor, ethnic, recent immigrants continue to defy our understanding, while the “others” are all doing very well, and on the road to success as we have been defining it.

Except, except, the new teachers-to-be seem to want all their students to do well: and maybe they’ll be able to help make that happen. It’s not just Teach for America, but the times which are bringing our best and brightest to try to live a more inclusive existence.

In a more meaningful world – meaning more than mere success – I think many students find their teachers remaining “in their heads” over the years, available for thought, rethinking, inspiration, and the idea of a growing future. Teachers are too important in everyone’s experience, not to be important in the world!

Who am I? A deep and developing question. But I did have several teachers who helped me to formulate my thinking and directions.

Above all, Ray Birdwhistell – the originator of “Kinesics,” the study of the human body-in-interaction. He was an Anthropologist who was the best observer of people I’ve ever met – observer in the sense of seeing people in careful and detailed senses. He was trained as a “classical” dancer, and seemed to see all others as performers in life’s dances. And he didn’t only concentrate on each individual. He also/always noted how they interacted: in groups, in life’s varieties of social contexts from infants to older, the ordinary and the exceptional in every sense; richer and poorer, healthy and injured and “odd” and…; ethnic, linguistic. His ways into the world were always expanding. Life is social, interactive: the individual…?

My Teachers (click image to enlarge)

Ray was a student of the Chicago School of Symbolic Interaction – heirs of the American Pragmatist, George Herbert Mead, and the anthropologists who wandered the entire world. His work wandered from American Indians to the average family dynamics, to the sick – physically and, particularly, mentally. And he directed me to the U. of Chicago, Anthropology, where I continued my studies with linguist Norman McQuown – under whose tutelage I (and family: J, and infant daughter Amy) studied a Mayan Language (Tzotzil) and lived in Chiapas, Mexico for two years deeply immersed in both Indian and Ladino (their term) cultures during this time.

Ray was also a student in the line of thought and active fieldwork (life is fieldwork!) of Franz Boas: Margaret Mead (especially), Gregory Bateson, influenced his thought. Boas’ observation and insistence that the study of the human includes the Physical, Cultural, and Linguistic – (and his friendship with John Dewey, G.H. Mead’s buddy) – all floats in my being and work. Boas’ work on the nature of the shape of the human head/body as cultural, has yet to be fully heard. This tradition, which insists that all humans are equally part of the human condition – and that it takes continuous observation and wonderment of how we are…including oneself…to begin to understand the human condition. Many of the ideas of Human Rights developed within and from their work.

I met Ray Birdwhistell at SUNYBuffalo, where he joined linguists George Trager and Henry L. Smith, Jr. – who had previously led the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Dept. They had recently been dismissed (all the anthropologists-linguists) – from the FSI – and began the study of Anthropology and Linguistics, where I was one of their first two students. With Smith and Trager, I got deeply into questions of language and expression: how language “works,” as grammar, but also as sound – in the various contexts of culture and society.

Trager’s wide-works were more embedded in the works of some other former colleagues (e.g., “The Silent Language” – written by Edward T. Hall) which became part of my thinking on intercultural communication, “proxemics” – the spaciality of interactions, always expanding to questions about “how the world works.”)

We spent a summer with Trager in Taos, N.M. examining “paralanguage” in the Taos Indian language: i.e., how language sounds and “pitch” are bound together in speech and interaction. Some of my work (“Language and Human Nature” – resetting many issues surrounding “artificial intelligence”) flow from this thinking.

From Smith, more the involvement with one’s native language, and how to see and examine oneself speaking, observing; he was well known, as well, as an expert on American English dialects. My concern with language, expression, context sprang deeply from these connections and teachings which continue to frame much of my thinking as I approach the world of people: talk, interaction, the body, context…culture, institutions, history.

The work and thinking of my teachers at Buffalo is more expressed by others (e.g., E.T. Hall), and by Birdwhistell’s student (also sent to Chicago), Erving Goffman, whose work and thinking (“Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” etc.) elaborates much of Ray’s conceptual and intellectual orientation toward the study of the human.

Again, the two years of fieldwork in Chiapas under McQuown, taught me to observe and think (with several other co-students) about other languages/cultures. The opportunity there also provided me with two years of “hanging” around home, where I could observe daughter Amy learning language (actually two languages), and where being outside in the tropics afforded me the ongoing opportunity to see everyone and their families, etc., in the context of a fairly small community of Venustiano Carranza where both Indian and Ladino cultures and languages were spoken. Living in other cultures, speaking other languages, has been powerful in my being and thinking.

Beyond this were various teachers I had throughout my schooling: some very good and fairly memorable; a couple with whom my interactions were, frankly pretty terrible (in a year’s study in Medical School – which experience still resonates powerfully in my thinking – dissecting a cadaver remains in my thoughts.) The couple of “bad” experiences with teachers has strongly influenced how I think about and actually teach students: my book and practice, “Teaching as Dialogue.” (See the movie, “Paper Chase” to get the taste and flavor of those experiences – I try to pursue kindness and critical thought, social critique, more than directed study or lecturing!)

Resonating in my being, still, are also a couple of violin teachers from age 8 until my college days. Paramount in my thinking is Bernard Mandelkern who helped me to become a kind of “self-teacher” on the violin, whose study I continue to pursue most days in the vague hopes of being able someday (soon?) to play (perform?) J.S. Bach’s unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas.

I’ve also had “teachers” as I have been engaged in studying the world, people, institutions, ideas…two years as a mathematician-programmer at Cornell Aeronautical Lab in Buffalo, and four years in Western Psychiatric Institute in Pittsburgh doing research on the dynamics of Psychiatric Therapy.

As a critic-commentator of the (idea of) the University, Stanley Williams directed and joined with me on how to study and understand how such institutions work (from his experience as Manager of a Research group in Surgery); Phil Regal, on how to think about biology and most everything else; Mischa Penn who urged me to broaden my thinking and framing of all of knowledge; and various of my students, some of whom remain close co-thinkers, especially Jerry Timian and Glenn Radde; and members of the “Body Group” with whom I studied the body with observers, curers, athletes, musicians, etc. (especially R. Hruby).

And there are teachers of Alexander technique, tai chi, and ongoing yoga study with Nancy Boler – which I practice most days. Dan Latorre is my teacher-guide to the internet: I have much to learn.

Above all, hovers the wisdom and critique of partner Janis Sarles: my major teacher for over 50 years.

Change, Change, Change! Yes, Yes, Yes…

Change, Change, Change – Yeah, but…

In my office at the University where I teach, there is a poster which I look at frequently, but keep mostly hidden from others: “I touch the future: I teach.”

Now older, many years of experience in thought and in teaching, I am even less bashful. “I inspire the future : I teach.”

Change, yes: but towards what? How can we envision the futures of democracy, without probing where we are, how we got here; and where is there to go?

Where are we: emerging from another “gilded age,” a “money bubble” which has so altered the shape of democracy, that it might be powerful enough to shape our very ideas of change. How to see, how to study these so-fragile times?

How we got here? We have been part and partners in the great money bubble: our children, our students go to school less to learn how to think, or grapple with their futures. More they go because that is the “thing to do.” Not to think critically, but to work toward a credential as “efficiently” as possible. Then their futures will be “O.K.”

Envision the future?? It will take care of itself, as long as we do what we do? Think critically? Bah! Do what we’re “supposed” to do, and…

Change, change, change. The mentality of the gilded age has pushed us into ourselves on facebook and U-space. The world in which we reside shapes us so much more than we realize. We have – not thoughtfully – accepted the oligarchies of money and power which shape our very desires. As it is all collapsing – in “crisis” – my students hardly blink, as they hardly realize that the world is always, already changing. Democracy entails awareness.

How to study these so-fragile times? History can be very useful? How did the last “gilded ages” – of the late 19th century and the 1920s collapse? How did the “progressive age” take place? Explore Hofstadter’s “The Progressive Movement,” and Josephson’s “Robber Barons.” How did we move – forward – from the great depression?

How might we envision the future of democracy? Where may our “Next Places” be – both politically and personally? A next progressive era?

Education: said John Dewey – probably the most thoughtful of the progressive thinkers – and do-ers. The very idea of democracy must be rethought, and taught to each new generation. It is the future, their future, in which they need to think and act. Teachers need to be sufficiently thoughtful and “important” to be able to inspire their futures.

The gilded ages have been driven mostly by new technologies: ideas, products, and the new monies generated and then controlled by the very clever, and very selfish and greedy few. How to return the U.S. to “we the people” as we go from boom to…?

Explore where we are, try to foresee various possibilities, then set out visions for the futures of those students whom we inspire to become truly engaged – in these times and their times – toward education and democracy.

I wandered in the world, seeing what there was, guessing what there could be, and wondering. I smelled the new, damp green of spring as it appeared, and wished, each winter, that the days of snow and grey would give way. The wishing turned into meaning as I learned how to brood and to wish away whatever was, for what would be, and what I wished. The world had become stage; the people, actors in my creations; my real leaning toward grotesque, the unreal wanting to become my beauty.
I redid the mirrors to reflect my eyes’ vision. My third ear compared what I wanted with what there was, until reverberations could be refiltered to match. Awful! I learned to watch my doing. As the others saw me, I learned to see myself; what they wanted to see, I sought to be. At one point there was no watching left. I cracked, revealing nothing, no one. I was only what they thought. Now, no wiser; perhaps, wary. I try to see each flake of snow; see it fall, see it down to the snow banks of my life.
I become the painter of the silvering which backs the glass transparencies, now become its own mirror. Trying to locate what is, where I am; while still seeking for illusions. (An existential accounting for the experience of paradox in our lives!)

Playing the violin just now, trying to pay attention especially to intonation – playing pretty much in tune – I feel the need to express thoughts, to reconcile the fragility with the sense that it is time to move ahead. No longer needing to get up early in the morning with the idea of having to teach always and persistently wandering in my mind, I am free. Or sort of…free.

I review the course, fleetingly, with certain moments of contention and towering success (Ha!) vying with my remaining in the present. Wondering what I, what they could have done more or better, or with an energy which might translate into long-terms of growth and grandness for them…and for me. I review…and wonder.

I wander. My mind floats to the other course – Teaching as a Dialogue – which was for more advanced students, people, thinkers, wanting (would-have, should-have thought) to be teachers, themselves, to the worlds of their futures, and to the future of the world. We never reconciled, nor much discussed with much direction, the question of authority. Dialogue, thought an older student, is somehow between equals, or between all people. I tried to state, with some authority of my own, that dialogue between equals might lead somewhere, but might drown into the “Lord of the Flies” in which apparent equality degenerates/develops into tyranny. Without any sense of authority, and some accompanying sense of directedness, there isn’t much left…a nililism, a cynicism, some cunning whose cunning turns where it will, and where it can because everyone else is denying what’s happening.

Back to the fiddle, fiddling with the ideas and with Bach who wants to be played with somewhat more attention than I think I have on the day I am coming off teaching.

Michael Wesch is playing; at play with the idea that his form(s) of teaching are actually “anti-teaching.” As he studies and interviews his students, he is pondering the fact that many of them are “struggling to find meaning and significance” in their education.

While they “take” courses, and successfully “complete” them, the information or knowledge that they are given does not much penetrate their thinking. Much of the course material is not very relevant to their lives. “For many (students and teachers alike) education has become a relatively meaningless game of grades and telling rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create.”

I agree. As someone who teaches and shares Michael’s background as an Anthropologist, I also meditate on the varied situations of teaching in the modern university (U. of Minnesota). I find the teaching situation that he describes to be accurate – and unnerving. I have been trying – over my long career – to explore various modes of teaching. Teaching as Dialogue is my attempt to reach students, meaningfully for them and for me.

First, a few questions about context – when we are: about these times. A student from the unconnected 1950’s, I wonder if what is currently going on has much to do with the “times we are in.” We 50’s students were also pretty remote from the happenings of our times, just looking for how to “make it” in the world. I didn’t “wake up” intellectually until I was taking the medical school course in anatomy, dissecting the hand, and “discovered” my own hands and body – with a “wow” that has driven my ideas ever since. But – other than a few still memorable courses – school was fairly boring, and something to do to get work, have a career, vocation…success.

Our current students were born and have been raised in a money bubble. As Jane Smiley so poignantly describes in her ethnographic novel, “Moo,” education has become (merely) necessary to gain a credential. School and success have shifted from K-12 to K-16, and is something “everyone who-is-anyone” needs to do. But the actual “doing” of learning, studying, thinking is quite a distance from the experience of putting in time to gain that credential which earns the right to be successful in the world.

Very differently, the 60’s and 70’s students were much more engaged in their educations: the Vietnam war and all men up for the draft, Civil Rights, feminism – those were great (easy and rewarding) times in which to teach. Involved in the world, in their educations, teaching was exciting, engaging, resonating in the thinking and meanings of students’ lives. In the mid-80’s, as money bubble began to float higher, much of our thinking and teaching shifted. The huge changes in technology which fostered this bubble, shifted “studenting” from school into the kids’ own ongoing experiences: game boys, cell phones, video games, internet, a celebrity culture where fame and economic success virtually controls the definitions of meaning. Our minds simultaneously expanded and thinned as we expanded the locus of being to include the entire globe, and thinned the presence of our own presence; mostly plugged-in.

Universities came increasingly “under law” in this money bubble – as we experienced the ideas that “students” had become “consumers” or “customers.” This has much (re)moved the relationship between teachers and “their” students – students and “their” teachers, from one which was more personal, deep, sometimes even “sacred.” The idea that students would respect, possibly “yield” much of their being to “their” teachers in order to gain meaning, has weakened dramatically.

Heightening all of this is the formality of the syllabus. Hard to recall, but there were hardly any syllabi in the 1950’s – maybe for good reasons: we shouldn’t “map” the entire course-to-come until we meet and get to study our actual students.

But, of course, they aren’t students any longer – but customers/consumers without character or dispositions that we should study as part of our teaching. Not to mention the fact that teaching has become not only more “formal,” but with audio-visual technologies and “power point,” the “presence” of the teacher has also become less than clear. Is there “anyone” who is mindfully present in the classroom? Meaning, significance?

Wesch says that students probably get more insight, ideas when they are not in the presence of the teacher. But I question the notion that most teachers “have” presence in their classrooms, these days.

Presence: “send your body” to class, but leave your “mind” where it wills to wander. And the “presence” of the teacher – reading from notes, now reading from the screens. Where is the thinking, the character, the meaning, significance of the course material, ideas, meaning to the teacher who doesn’t necessarily have to be “engaged” with one’s students – more to entertain them; tell them more than teaching them?

So: Teaching as Dialogue.

Wesch invokes Dewey: “people learn what they do.” I agree, but need to remind us that people are also in dialogue with others, and with their own internal thinking. How to involve their thinking with the thinking of their teacher as they consider new (and old) ideas, descriptions, questions, thinkers, analysis, understandings?

Wesch “decided to get to work creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that create lifelong learners rather than savvy test takers.” How to do this? How to use the “power” of doing that students seem to be willing to “yield” to their teachers, to enable students to develop a more informed power to their own futures and meanings?

What is the nature, the possible power of any teacher to inform, question, inspire students and their futures?

As teachers, we have the great grace to be able to “touch” the future. Even more, my greatest hope is to be able to “inspire” the future. “Lifelong learning,” for Michael; for Teaching as Dialogue, to be able, be willing, be interested in examining the analyzing the world and themselves – to remain invested and involved in exploring and thinking out their “Next Places” in their long lives. To seek meaning…with a teacher who remains deeply engaged: an exemplar, someone you might trust to call up in your memory years after the course, itself, is over.

As Paulo Freire instructed us, teaching as kinds of “banking” – telling, instructing – is not sufficient to get students beyond their particular histories. He invoked the idea of dialogue – which many who teach also invoke. However, he didn’t much tell us how to conduct a dialogue, or how to become and grow as the teacher who engages in dialogue: no simple feat, and clearly a lifelong study of oneself, knowledge and ideas, of one’s teachings, of the students who arrive in class in each next era, of the kind of society we would educate toward: a democracy.

This is to state there are various “politics” to teaching which dialogue can enable us to deal with, and to try to overcome. As Dewey admonished us, we have to choose our politics early in order to frame the nature of our educational ideas and practices: and here, the ideas of an ongoing (but always “new”) democratic world help us to envision the kinds of persons we would like to inspire our students to become.

More: the politics of teaching, the objections to students-as-consumers, is to probe the idea that students are students of their teachers, as well as students of subject matter. They study us: the first day of teaching is usually remarkable, noting that most of the students are “staring” at their teacher, with a depth of penetrations…looking for…?! We teachers have the opportunity (the responsibility?) to become memorable “players” in their lives – today, maybe as much or more toward their futures.

Me – the teacher who would Teach as Dialogue – I have to be student of my students, an Anthropologist of the classroom. Not just to see them, but to probe their minds, their reactions to various questions, issues, wonderments. How to do that? Not to force dialogue as in the movie, “Paper Chase,” but to begin to state the issues of any particular course, as well as to attempt to portray who I am as a thinker-responder to students and their questions. Questions: about the course issues, about who I am that they should study, trust (trust is “big”), begin to think about how I am thinking as I raise issues, questions, and wonderments. Do I know my subject matter, how do I think about it? Why this; why-not that? Do I trust my knowing, myself?

Teaching as Dialogue is an open invitation: to discuss the ideas of any/every course of study with me – “their” teacher – now and for their future thinking having anything to do with the course, and with themselves thinking. I try not to demand any more or less that they become engaged – with the subject, themselves, me and my thinking.

It’s not “easy” to do or to be, to Teach as Dialogue. It requires love of subject and of students (and of life, and one’s possibilities of inspiring their futures). The kinds of energy – vary from day-to-day – from the beginning to the end of each course: attempts to engage/invite students to ask questions, to probe me, themselves. It/I don’t demand that all students engage in dialogue “out-loud” – I ask them to think about what they want to do concerning their papers or projects – as they both “fit” the course material, and will be good work, explorations, thoughts for them – concerning the issues of that particular course of study. No exams – I firmly agree with Michael Wesch.

Dialogue should be a beginning, an opening: not a closure or completion.

And one more point (I am a teacher, after all!): the problem of “presence” in teaching, to have my mind’s eye totally involved in the present – of students and me-as-teacher – is central to Teaching as Dialogue.

It is very tempting (and quite “easy”) in lecturing, or in engaging in any pre-cast idea of what will happen in any course, or any given day – to “memorize oneself.” I have “been there” at an early point in my career when I was a quite “successful” lecturer. But I sensed that I was “losing myself.” I was not very present in most moments of my teaching.

Teaching as Dialogue provides the potential of being present, being “awake,” being student to my own teaching. Dialogue is, intellectually, a very “fast” form – mostly because I don’t much “know” in advance where I or these student’s thinking or questioning will come from.

I enter the class with no notes, usually – perhaps a three statement outline of my major points. The rest happens as it will – as the students will (and develop their own meanings with and in response to mine). I respond, as well as I can within my own study of subjects and the students who are right there. Responding to them – as they are thinking, questioning – is not an easy task. And it requires my “presence” – and the realization and admission that this is important to my teaching, and my own growing being.

Michael Wesch and I agree that the current forms of teaching lack something, and move us both toward the idea of “anti-teaching.”

My direction-practice in teaching is to “dig-in” more deeply into the depths of my being. Not to abandon it to the currents of a vastly changing world, but to seek for meaning in the experiences and ideas of those who also sought meaning in their times and placeness. To walk with their ideas – to “hold hands” with those who sought to understand with increasing depth and breadth – that is what lies behind the idea of a teacher who seeks to teach as a dialogue. I would very much like to be capable of being somewhat of an exemplar, a teacher who students can “call up” in their thoughts as they move along on their life paths. My attempt is to inspire them to get “beyond” my subjects and thinking, and can only help that I can help to inspire them and their futures: toward meaning and significance as ongoing in their lives.

Teaching and life: a dialogue. Being and life: a dialogue.

From Knowledge to Wisdom

Nick Maxwell’s recently republished book – “From Knowledge to Wisdom” – may be reaching its time. First published a quarter century ago, it got many good reviews. But its ideas didn’t “go” much of anywhere in terms of thinking or practice; a palliative with little action; a “feel-good” approach which we could ignore until…right now – says Nick.

Nick asserts that we are heirs of earlier ideas, committed to the exploration of the universe, but without the thoughtful (moral) bases which gives philosophy and life its groundings and meanings. Philosophical knowledge has taken us far and wide, but…leaves the human condition with little more than promises of the ultimate utility of that knowledge. It contributes little to the “best hope of helping us progressively to resolve our most urgent problems of living…a more humane, a more just, a happier, a saner and more cooperative world.”

As the book takes us from several century old ideas of knowledge to the “needs” of the current era, Nick guides us through the history of thought which has dominated (philosophical) knowledge then and endures to the present moment: what is the universe, how do we study it, how do we know, what is truth? We have come far, in many senses, but now seem to be at some impasses.

He urges us to rethink where we are, how we got here, and the deep necessity to broaden our explorations toward (philosophical) wisdom, rather than being bound to particular and narrow historical ideas of what knowledge consists in.

Wisdom is the perspective that how we go about thinking and pursuing knowledge must include its effects on and implications for the human condition. In so many senses, knowledge has “overstepped” itself, and has endangered our very existence: e.g., the blights of the 20th century – holocausts, atomic bomb, GMO’s, and so much more.

As important, we have paid very little attention to the questions about what is good in life, and how our pursuits of knowledge should help enable us to make the human condition good, better, and inclusive of all persons. The Enlightenment philosophes took their ideas to be correct thence (ultimate) solutions to the socially problematic. But their ideas which dominate philosophical and scientific thought and practice to this day, are not correct.

Nick’s arguments run broad and deep: he analyses how our universities have been dominated by the quite successful attempts of the Enlightenment philosophes (Bacon-Newton-Enlightenment philosophy of knowledge) to detail and effectively confine knowledge as it was developed by the thinkers who led to that time. Then he argues that this dominating approach to knowledge is both very narrow and particular, and it does not much take into account the effects of knowledge and its “products.” It demands a particular notion of rationality, and a pervasive sense of unity in thought and practice.

And it was not only science as a central focus of knowledge, which carries this history to its work: the idea that scientific explorations would ultimately “benefit” us. From these ideas, there developed the parallel sense that the good world of science would lead to the social benefit of the social sciences. But all this remains little analyzed or criticized in the contexts of wisdom.

Here, this reviewer deeply agrees with the thesis of the book, and should point out that my reading of knowledge and wisdom seems to be very similar to Nick’s. The notion that the Social Sciences would and should lead to a “good life,” is widely assumed. But the reality has fallen far short of its assumptions and hopes, or led us on paths which are narrow.

I would point out, however, the works of [my] school of Anthropology led by Franz Boas whose students went out into the entire world – demonstrated that all human languages all are of the same order, that their cultures may differ for various histories and reasons, but that all humans are pretty much alike. This work led to the UNESCO statement on Race in 1946, and contributed much to the U.N. Human Rights Declaration of 1948. This work remains in the contexts of philosophical wisdom – certainly as Nick Maxwell embraces them. It surely helps inform my positive assessments of “From Knowledge to Wisdom,” and reading this book has been a continuing lesson in framing my own work and thought.

Nick is very “encyclopedic” in this book: he explores, then assesses and refutes each perspective – leading, of course, to the necessity for the perspective of wisdom in our thinking and work. Titles of the early chapters, pretty much in order, reveal and describe the outlines of his thinking, though his analysis is systematic and more than ample in its details.

The book sets the stage in Chapter One: “Human Suffering and the Need for a Comprehensive Intellectual Revolution.” The enduring claim to the rationality of philosophical knowledge which would “enhance the quality of human life,” is actually profoundly and damagingly irrational, unrigorous. We need to think and act in new ways…beginning right now. Rational thought – rightly constructed – will lead to wisdom, not mere knowledge in the Enlightenment senses.

Nick’s analysis goes deeply into the idea of knowledge: “sought as a means to the end of achieving that which is humanly desirable and of value…social progress, human welfare and enlightenment…the intellectual aim of acquiring objective knowledge of truth. Truth, not that which is humanly desirable must be the central intellectual concern of rational inquiry.”

But truth – the very concept of truth – depends on much a priori knowledge, and…and we go back in time to questions of what and how we know; and what is the nature of truth. All this rises to question in these times, as Nick wonders about the concepts of the a priori and how necessary it is to consider the world to be fixedly mechanistic, continuous. After much thought, he will want to rethink the very nature of the rational, and the very underpinnings of rationality.

The analysis proceeds systematically through the next four chapters, as Nick presents the critical (always!) exploration of the Philosophy of Knowledge, presents The Basic Objection to that, then the Philosophy of Wisdom, which is reframed into what he calls “Aim Oriented Rationality;” completing his critical expositions.

While I can’t claim to judge his critical expositions deeply within the contexts of the Philosophy of Science, my considerable experiences with philosophers and historians of science (and technology) are quite congenial, at least parallel, with Nick’s. Their focus is particular, narrow, and does not seem to leave much open for discussion.

In the end, the book lays out a critical exposition of a “new” sort, of “refined” ideas of rationality, and how we might go next in expanding our thinking about thinking.

Nick wonders if the kinds of change he explores – toward philosophical wisdom – might come more from the social sciences than from the Philosophers of Science. Here, I want to portray my own positions from which I have been reading/studying this book. As I deal with Boas’ ideas of anthropology: culture, language, physical anthropology – in which we have to observe all the world’s peoples – one is faced with more ancient and somewhat different senses of the history of ideas.

And my background flows also from the ideas of Pragmatists – especially Dewey and Mead – whose ideas of the human include the notion that we are in social interaction with others. The “self” emerges from a relationship with an infant’s m/other (now included under the rubric of “Attachment Theory” in developmental psychology). The very concept of who and what we are, changes considerably, and will continue to embrace a philosophy of wisdom.

As Dewey and Mead attempted to “get beyond or around” dualism, we no longer deal with ideas from the past several centuries. Instead we are taken back to the Greeks whose ideas continue to dominate ours in many senses.

Here, I wonder – in considering —Protagoras, that man is the measure, what is the nature of the “measurer.” In examining the human body, beginning with one’s/my own – I find that much has been neglected. The body, which is totally “obvious” in Dewey’s lament, continues to be dominated by the Homunculus theory, recently encapsulated by the new ability to envision the “workings” of the brain.

So the battles between Heraclitus vs. Parmenides, Pythagoras, Plato, resituated somewhat in Aristotle’s still dominating ideas, resonate loudly in rethinking the human: the one who (whose body) is capable of observing “objectively” No small task: how do we do that?

Faces – above all – the fact that we live and move “out-of-balance” complicates our bodily being, and asks how to wonder how we are, become, live both is and as change and permanence. Here we have taken the ideas of Descartes – flowing from Plato, especially – to captivate the dualisms of mind and body as being an “accurate” depiction of the human. To examine the world, it seems primary to examine the measurer – and to ask which is us…then which is the world.

Thus, my viewing of wisdom – possibly less the philosophy of wisdom – than expanding the practice of observing oneself observing, calls for us to devote increasing thought to the nature of the human. Where are we, how did we get here, how do we “move forward” in this global moment in inclusive manners?

Less, in my thinking, as an homage to our forebears; more to pursue the thinking which has led us here – toward being able to transcend our own thinking. We must walk with more than idolize the thinkers and prophets of all of time and places. Toward wisdom. The challenge: how to help create a good and meaningful life and attempt to include all persons now and toward the future?

These are some of lessons, confirmations, rethinkings which “From Knowledge to Wisdom” has inspired in my life and work.

Toward wisdom as we live and experience ourselves and the world. Thank you Nick Maxwell.

My roundtable will be: “Radical Pedagogy.”

I’ll talk about Teaching as Dialogue, attempting to put some flesh and experience on Paulo Freire’s hope that teaching can become a dialogue.

The questions: what is dialogue, how to practice this with actual students/people, how to become and be such a teacher who can inspire the students to
seek meaning in their own futures, to learn from the dialogue and move on. These are all complicated practices, needing constant study of the students who are actually present, and the need to maintain one’s own “presence” with them, so that the teacher is not talking from “memory,” but is “right there” to respond to the actual students in the ongoing dialogues.

The politics of dialogue are also complex. Students – after all is said and done – are students of the course, and they are students of “their teacher.” The problems of having “sufficient power” to inspire the future, to help them create meaning for themselves – revolves about portraying/living as one who is thoughtful, moral, loving of subject, of students, and seeking meaning in the teacher’s own life and work.

Dangers include the temptations of the power yielded by students, to tell them how to think and be – to have ready “answers” to all questions – or to overstep one’s power and move from questioning to interrogation modes. So, the study of oneself – and of one’s students – are ongoing tasks. It is helpful, probably vital for teaching as dialogue, to have a couple of good, critical friends who will help keep the teacher grounded.

[Video about the strike, interviewed me and a student after class, from KARE 11 News]

About 1/3 of our secretaries, technical workers, and some others have gone on-strike at the University of Minnesota – seeking higher, more reasonable wages. The administration continues to resist…

I’m a (tenured) Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Given that the secretaries are my co-workers, friends, supports, I (and a number of others – professors and graduate instructors – this all began on the first day of classes this year) have decided to teach our classes nearby, but off-campus. My location is a couple of blocks from the original University classroom site: University Baptist Church in Minneapolis.

This course is “Issues in Cultural Pluralism” and has over 40 students, mostly juniors and seniors; almost all of whom seem pleased to be off-campus (a few dropped the course, for whatever reasons). The church room is quite informal, and helps us to engage in the kind of active dialogues which enrich my teaching style.

With a few comments about the strike – especially noting that the strikers are mostly women – an aspect of the primary questions of Cultural Pluralism: who are we, who “makes” it in America, who doesn’t do so well; history, why, when did women become “citizens?” – answer 1920, with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we have been actively discussing the course subjects.

The course is “framed” by an argument between Aristotle in his “Politics” and Thomas Jefferson in the “Declaration of Independence.” Aristotle claimed that “some men are destined by nature to be kings, and others to be slaves.” - the historical justification for monarchy. Jefferson stated that “all men are created equal” – democracy, not monarchy, for the first time in history. I remind the students that America is framed in slavery – the 13 to 15th Amendments “ended” it the first time; then “Separate-but-Equal” in 1896 until 1954 and Brown vs. the Board of Education, and now the huge numbers of African-American (mostly young males) incarcerated by drug “possession” – What and why? – we ask.

So: ideas from history, who gets/deserves what and why, monarchy vs. democracy…to the Constitution: “We the people…” and its evolution to include most everyone until the complications of today. But Amerindian people, African-Americans, Latinos…some others still are excluded, profiled, etc. We are in a “money-bubble,” a new “Gilded Age.” How to see the present, to locate ourselves, to work toward continuing democracy in a most changing world. Immigration and its history; eugenics, Hitler, many of the ideas were developed right here!

The movement of classes off-campus has been resisted – scolded, even – with the claim that we are not doing our proper jobs. I respond that the U. of Minnesota has been a “Land-Grant” University, and ask if we are abandoning that idea and moving toward whatever buys prestige and big bucks, credentials more than critical thought and ideas. I hope that students in this course learn much, especially toward critical thought of how and where we are…and where they will take us in their futures.

I quote the lovely phase embossed high up on the central meeting ground of campus: Northrup Auditorium – and wonder why it is not included in our current “strategic plan” for the University:

University of Minnesota

Founded in the Faith that We are Ennobled by Understanding

Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning and the Search for Truth

Devoted to the Instruction of Youth and the Welfare of the State