ISI Faculty Resource Center

My students learn from Thucydides that Athens was most moderate when under the guiding hand of Pericles. He restrained their pleonexia while lifting them up when things went badly. But the strong leader died and failed to prepare Athens for his successor. Athens became less moderate as time goes on, and they saw their empire threatened even more. The Sicilian expedition ended in disaster, and the perennial anxieties of the Athenians that a single loss would knock out the supports of the Athenian empire came to fruition.

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Every fall I give the freshmen my "tough love" speech. I talk to them about my dream. A dream of a Christian school. A holy place, a temple for dissemination of knowledge about our Creator and His creation. Where teachers do not have to act like prison guards during exams. Where students understand that more sweat in training means less blood in battle. Where they come to learn to think in order to serve better their neighbors. Where the promise of a promotion, a higher grade, or a shinier sticker is not a necessary incentive for working hard. Where everyone is willing to go an extra mile not for public recognition but for the glory of God.

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There is no defense of the liberal arts without an adequate epistemology. What is the epistemology provided by the cultured defenders of non-servile arts?

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I don’t like Frank Lloyd Wright. There. I said it. My reasons are not just aesthetic (i.e., this brings to mind this, and this invokes this, or this), but also theoretical. Specifically, this belongs to this, and takes us down a road going away from this, which is where we should seriously think about dropping anchor, hitching our horses, or parking our bicycles.

The problem with publically expressing this dislike is that I live and teach in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright is revered. Being considered a native son (the good kind, not this) and being famous is enough to elicit this uncritical reverence. I suspect few of my students know much about FLW, but their parents have told them he’s a fellow Sconnie, and this seems to be enough.

Few college professors teach on their home turf. We are a wondering tribe, rarely plying our trade in a place of our choosing (e.g., only one of my 40 or so colleagues is from WI). Consequently, we have little connection with the intuitions and sundry traditions our students carry. What might seem to us as traditions worthy of critique (at the very least) are often sacrosanct to our students (e.g., I don’t dare publically state my opinion that he overstayed his welcome and was never that good in any case).

What obligations do we have, if any, to the traditions our students bring to the classroom? Shall we be like Socrates and try to unteach everything they have learned from their parents? Shall we make efforts to understand, learn, and/or adopt local traditions or shall we unteach them? Do we have to pretend to like Frank Lloyd Wright?

The readings for June 17 ("Thinking about Technology and Teaching") and June 19 ("Teaching the Millennial Generation") got me thinking about the proper role of technology in the classroom. Of course, many questions regarding teaching style refer further back to the fundamental goals of any given course. In the past I have asked myself: What will my students get out of this? What do I want them to learn? And how can I best facilitate that process?

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Just as teachers are slothful, students are bored. (a follow-up from part 1, the slothful teacher)

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I've recently been reading David Bentley Hart monumental Atheist Delusions. The work is the sort of rare achievement that takes up residence in the mind after one has read the book. From the title of the work, one might deduce that Bentley's book is a critique of the at best third-rate works by Dawkins and Hitchens. But it is more. Bentley's accomplishment is the decimation of the Enlightenment Myth concerning the advent and development of Christianity, concerning faith and reason, and concerning the Enlightenment itself. It is an Enlightenment chauvinism (and a paradigmatic instance of chronological snobbery) that the "Enlightenment" was the age of reason--an age preceded by the dark age of faith.

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In teaching philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas, or even alluding to current events as examples of the power of ideas in action, professors are often expected by administrators and faculty colleagues to walk on eggshells when it comes to the subject of radical Islam. At my home university in Israel, a politically correct silence with respect to the evils of radical Islam prevails throughout the campus. I had hoped for an atmosphere of free discussion of this critical issue in the U.S., but have found, to my disappointment, that the same silence appears to prevail on U.S. university campuses as well.

Considering the centrality of radical Islam in motivating terrorism in the world today, it is a crime to remain silent and leave it immune to critical analysis--or, even worse, to broach the subject in a spirit of moral relativism. Does anyone have a viable strategy for raising this issue in lecture and engage students in a frank discussion of it, without losing one's job?

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According to one desert monk, contemporary professors are slothful.

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On April 23rd, 2009, Dr. Caroline Winterer, Professor of History at Stanford University, delivered a presentation at Christopher Newport University entitled "George Washington, the American Revolution, and the Classical Ideal." To judge from audience reaction, the most memorable moment occurred when Dr. Winterer urged her audience to put on their "classical goggles" when viewing late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American architecture in order to understand its purpose. In the case of George Washington’s Mt. Vernon Mansion House, for example, she reminded us that, despite being considered quintessentially American in style, it abounds inside and out with classical elements such as triangular pediments, Greek key patterns, Ionic pilasters, etc. Even without the benefit of a formal classical education, Washington had a basic knowledge of antiquity, which he drew upon to cultivate parallels between himself and such Roman heroes as Cincinnatus, Fabius, and Cato the Younger.

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