The President’s Lecture Series was established to give Princeton University’s faculty an opportunity to learn about the work of their colleagues in other disciplines and to share their research with the University community. On April 9, 2013, Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion and author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship, delivered a lecture, “Modern Politics in the Shadow of Augustine,” that’s worth watching.

Other lectures to watch:

• Alexander Nehamas, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature: “Because It Was He, Because It Was I” The Good of Friendship. RealPlayer:  56K, 350K  | Windows Media Player: 56K, 350K
• Claudia Johnson, the Murray Professor of English Literature: “Jane Austen and War.” WebMedia Streaming Video: RealPlayer: 56K, 350K | Windows Media Player: 56K, 350K
• Anthony Appiah, the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values: “The Ethics of Identity.” WebMedia Streaming Video: RealPlayer: 56K, 300K | Windows Media Player: 56K, 300K

Louise Cowan, age 96, is a professor emeritus at the University of Dallas and a co-founder of The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. In February Dr. Cowan gave a lecture at her namesake’s Cowan Center for Education, “The Year of the Teacher Inaugural Event.” Excerpt:

Resources

• Louise Cowan, The Necessity of the Classics (The Intercollegiate Review)
• Louise Cowan, Jerusalem’s Claim on Us (The Intercollegiate Review)

Jack Miles, a professor of English and Religious Studies with the University of California-Irving and author of GOD: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, wrote an essay in which he addresses three differences between an academic and an intellectual:

1. An academic has and wants an audience disproportionately made up of teachers and students, while an intellectual has and wants teachers and students in his audience only in proportion to their place in the general educated public.
2. An academic is a specialist who has disciplined his curiosity to operate largely within a designated area, while an intellectual is a generalist who deliberately does otherwise.
3. An academic is concerned with substance and suspicious of style, while an intellectual is suspicious of any substance that purports to transcend or defy style.

Here is an excerpt regarding the second point:

It is not that, as an intellectual, one can or should seek to subordinate everybody else’s knowledge to one’s own grand purposes. Even G. W. F. Hegel arrived too late to do that, and no one has tried since. What is called for, paradoxically, is less a store of knowledge than a “store” of ignorance. By forcing oneself to go where one is oneself the blinking beginner rather than the seasoned expert, one learns to turn one’s own narrow intellectual sophistication into a broadened version of itself. A generalist is someone with a keener-than-average awareness of how much there is to be ignorant about. In this way, generalization as a style of writing is decidedly different from mere simplification or popularization. If a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, a generalist is unapologetically someone who knows less and less about more and more. Both forms of knowledge are genuine and legitimate. Someone who acquires a great deal of knowledge about one field grows in knowledge, but so does someone who acquires a little knowledge about many fields. Knowing more and more about less and less tends to breed confidence. Knowing less and less about more and more tends to breed humility. Popularization, which certainly has its place, conveys the specialist’s confidence but also his or her isolation. Generalization conveys the generalist’s diffidence but also his or her connectedness and openness to further connections. Something like this, to repeat, is the core difference between the academic and the intellectual in action on the page.

Read the entire essay: “Three Differences Between an Academic and an Intellectual: What Happens to the Liberal Arts When They Are Kicked Off Campus?” (Cross Currents).

In his Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov offers this exercise for students:

Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:

1.  The reader should belong to a book club.
2.  The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3.  The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4.  The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5.  The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6.  The reader should be a budding author.
7.  The reader should have imagination.
8.  The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10.  The reader should have some artistic sense.

The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.

On the value and need of re-reading:

Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

– Vladimir Nabokov on What Makes a Good Reader (Brain Pickings)

Mike Peters, president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, delivered a TEDx talk on liberal education in the digital age.

I am a proud graduate of St. John’s College. Here is an excerpt from an essay by Christopher Nelson, president of the Annapolis campus:

In Plato’s Meno, Socrates turns Meno’s opening question from whether and how virtue can be taught to what this thing is that Meno is talking about: What is virtue? This is the kind of question we used to ask our parents or teachers when we were children but may have stopped asking when we became satisfied with the answer from a trusted authority figure—or stopped asking when we simply ceased to wonder at the world. It is these simple questions that Socrates asks as he tries to understand the nature of a thing, its being, its essence. And it is the answers his interlocutors give that founder upon further examination. They try one answer and are led to see the weakness of it, and so they try a second and a third time until they appear to be stumped and wish to go on and understand what they missed—or until they give up the argument in anger or frustration with Socrates. What appears to be an annoying mind game to one is an awakening to another—to the inquiring student or reader who has now become disturbed by a contradiction exposed about an unexamined but deeply held opinion. We then see that we must come to grips with Socrates and his questions for our own sake, for the sake of those convictions we hold dear. Will they stand up to challenge? Do we really know who we are, understand what we believe, and comprehend what makes our lives worth living?

How well does any human being—teacher or student—understand what it means to be human in its many aspects? We are political, social, and solitary beings, all at the same time. As human beings we think, weigh evidence, and judge. We reflect upon the world about us; we wish to understand it, sometimes in order to make our way in it fruitfully, and sometimes just simply in awe of the majesty of existence, the grandeur, beauty, and mystery of the universe. We have bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. We love, act, and are moved. What are we made of? What moves us and why? We have skills we use to make a living and provide for loved ones. We are members of civic, social, and religious communities and citizens of a great country. What are our duties and responsibilities toward these and others? How well do we understand our powers and limitations? How well do we comprehend the interconnectedness of things and our relationships with fellow beings so that we may make our lives richer—for ourselves and for others, too?

Before students fix upon a specialty for study or a vocation to pursue, they ought to be asked to spend a little time getting to know themselves and the world about them.

Liberal arts colleges have found many ways to help students do this. At St. John’s College, we have constructed a program of study that is designed to help our students cultivate the arts of reason and understanding and abilities in analysis, argument, and interpretation. We hope this program will enrich their imagination and nurture freedom of thought; freedom from the tyrannies of unexamined opinions, current fashions, and inherited prejudices; and freedom to make intelligent choices concerning the ends and means of both public and private life. We pursue this freedom together with our students through thoughtful conversation about great works from the Western tradition, shaped by a commitment to radical inquiry. We nourish the capacity to wonder, which stimulates such questions. Our approach is guided by a love of wisdom that transcends the acquisition of information and even of knowledge narrowly conceived.

We want our students to be well versed in the textual tradition of reason that illuminates the chief features of modern life, including democracy, technology, and the literary and musical traditions of the West. We want them to have basic literacy in three kinds of texts: verbal, mathematical, and musical. We expect them to develop skill in logical, coherent, and correct expression. And we want them to engage in a direct study of the natural world. Though often guided by texts, they develop skills of observation, dissection, measurement, and experimentation. In asking this of them, we reject at a deep level the popular distinction between the humanities and the sciences. We want our students to be able to weigh and judge the claims of science—rather than simply deferring to them as authoritative, or rejecting them as alien.

We want our students to develop the intellectual virtues of courage in inquiry, caution in forming opinions, candor about their ignorance, open attentiveness to the words of their colleagues, industry in preparation, and meticulousness in verbal translation and mathematical demonstration. We want them to be prepared to face any occasion for new learning that comes their way. We also want them to develop a life-long commitment to pondering the question of how to live well. And finally, we want them to have the experience of living in a community of learning. We expect that the moral virtues we require of them in their life on campus—consideration for their colleagues and decent and respectful dealings with others—will prove transferable to their lives as citizens of this or any country, transferable to their places of work and worship, to their lives as friends and neighbors and members of families.

We expect a lot of our students, and we imagine that our students would not be here if they did not wish to be held to high expectations.

But beneath everything I have said about what we intend at St. John’s is our shared conviction that learning is an activity fired by the desire to know, a desire to make one’s education one’s own. Michel de Montaigne, puts it this way in his essay “On the Education of Children”: “Truth and reason are common to everyone, and no more belong to the man who first spoke them than to the man who says them later . . . The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterwards they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.”

If students are meant to be the bees that plunder flowers to make something that they can call our own, there had better be flowers that make this possible. The flowers are not hard to recognize; they are the great works of literary, artistic, and musical imagination. Among them are mathematical, scientific, political, religious, poetic, and philosophical books that have survived the test of time because they are timeless. They form the foundation for the thoughts and discoveries that follow; they are often deeply beautiful; they speak to the great human questions that help us understand both the world about us and the world within us.

If learning materials are considered as food for digestion, students should have a banquet set before them, the opportunity to taste each morsel before deciding to accept or reject it, and the time to digest what they have taken in. To make it their own requires an environment in which their teachers exercise restraint in pressing their authority, like the mechanic in my opening story. They need to allow students the freedom to chew on their own questions and form tentative conclusions that they may later reflect upon and disgorge as ill considered.

The reward for learning attributable to a desire to know—simply for its own sake—is something I want to call “happiness.” This is not a fulfillment that comes to an end in the gratification of a desire, but an activity, an active engagement in an ongoing project that best defines what it means to be human. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, would define this happiness as “an activity in accordance with virtue.” And so, we return to that Socratic question: Just what is virtue? We wonder whether human virtue lies somehow coterminous with this strange path toward knowledge—that we human beings first must recognize our ignorance, that it will be a great struggle to attain deep understanding, and that we can better pursue this search in the company of others, fellow students, with whom we can at least share those peaks of desire and excitement that accompany the search for truth.

– “I Got It! The Wipers Are Working” (Liberal Education)

Alan Jacobs:

I taught my first collegiate class in 1982, and when you’ve been around the pedagogical block as many times as I have — well, first of all, you tend to get a little dizzy, but second, there’s little that makes you anxious. The rhythms of one semester resemble those of any other; being a college professor is not a job for those who crave novelty of incident.

But there is one moment each semester when my pulse accelerates a bit and I feel anxiety creeping around the edges of my mind: it’s when I order the books for the following semester. As a Christian, I should be prayerful all the time, but it’s when I see those book order forms that prayerfulness (at least about my teaching) really kicks in. I believe that these are the most momentous decisions I make as a teacher: the questions about how I run my class sessions and what writing projects I assign are relatively minor in comparison. It’s what my students read that has the deepest and most lasting effect on their lives.

* * *

I sit at my desk with the book order forms before me and sometimes feel that I’m throwing bombs into crowds. Depending on the class, I may be ordering for fifteen people or thirty, and in my mind’s eye they sit there in front of me. I realize, then, how few of them I’m likely to know at all, and even those I do know I won’t know well, not well enough to know how they’ll respond to what I’m putting before them, what I’m pressing them to read, what I’m forcing them to think about and talk about and reckon with.

I am aware that few of these students are as fragile as their elders (especially their parents) fear. By and large, they handle challenging ideas with aplomb — and even at times, I must admit, with surprising indifference. Franz Kafka once wrote to a friend that “A book must be the axe to the frozen sea inside us,” but in the average reader that ice is quite thick and not easily broken through. But you can’t tell by looking at people how thick or thin their inner ice is; and people vary in their vulnerability to any given axe. One reader can be unmoved by a book that devastates her neighbor.

When I assign books, I’m making decisions about a group, a crowd, a median or mean. But reading is done by individuals. And that’s why I pray for wisdom.

– On Assigning Books (The American Conservative)

Brian Phillips, Head of Upper School at Covenant Classical School (Concord, NC), has written three blog posts that deserve attention from educators. Some quotations are highlighted below.

Culture-Makers or Culture Warriors?
Among Christians who care about the arts, there are many who cling to the works of a few figures, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, and Flannery O’Connor, who have forged a compelling religious vision in the midst of a secular age.  But the danger in celebrating these Christian artists is that we isolate them from their cultural context, from the influences that shaped their art.  There is a large body of believers who have essentially given up on contemporary culture; they may admire a few writers here or there, but they do not really believe that Western culture can produce anything that might inform and deepen their own faith.  One might almost say that these individuals have given in to despair about our time.  For me, the most depressing trend of all is the extent to which Christians have belittled or ignored the imagination and succumbed to politicized and ideological thinking.
– Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

Culture-Makers or Culture Warriors? (Part Two)
Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.  We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past…can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.
– Hans Urs von Balthasar

Culture-Makers or Culture Warriors? (Part Three)
Conservatives have, by and large, focused their energies on political action and the theoretical work necessary to undertake action.  The indirection of art, with its lack of moralizing and categorizing, strikes the pragmatic mind as being unedifying, and thus inessential.  Insofar as the great artists and writers of the past are admired, it is for their support of some idea, rather than for the complex, many-sided vision of their art.

* * *

For Christians, the idea that contemplation and prayer ought to precede action should be second nature.  How many of us have become unwitting disciples of Marx, who said that ‘up till now it has been enough to understand the world; it is for us to change it’?  Marx’s preference for revolutionary action over the classical-Christian belief in the primacy of contemplative understanding of transcendent order lies at the heart of modern ideology.
– Gregory Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

The graphic below originally appeared on Online PhD. Click on the image and then click once more to enlarge.

Scott Buchanan:

Have you yet recognized that you are and always have been your own teacher? Amidst all the noise and furor about education in this country at present, I have yet to hear this question raised. But it is basic. Liberal education has as its end the free mind, and the free mind must be its own teacher. Intellectual freedom begins when one says with Socrates that he knows that he knows nothing, and then goes on to add: I know what it is that I don’t know. My question then is: Do you know what you don’t know and therefore what you should know? If your answer is affirmative and humble, then you are your own teacher, you are making your own assignment, and you will be your own best critic.

— “The Last Don Rag”