Being a Presence for Students

Front matter

Teaching as a Lived Defense of Liberal Education

JEFF FRANK

TEACHING AS A LIVED DEFENSE OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

Contents

Acknowledgments v Member Institution Acknowledgments vii

Prologue: John William’s Lived Defense of Liberal Education ı

This chapter offers a brief description of Miller as a teacher and makes the case for why we should care about what Miller has to say about teaching a liberal education.

Prologue

JOHN WILLIAM MILLER’S LIVED DEFENSE OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

In the winter of 2017, after learning 1 got tenure at St. Lawrence University, l also learned that Stanley Bates, my undergraduate mentor at Middlebury College, had died. The process of getting tenure made me more reflective than normal about why teaching at a liberal arts college mattered, but the death of Bates forced me to consider what it meant to be a devoted educator with an urgency | wasn’t prepared for. 1 wouldn't be living the life 1 was if I had not met Professor Bates my first semester in college. He had a profound impact on me, helping me become the person 1 am now. | had never pressed myself to explain his impact, but as a way of expressing my gratitude for what Bates did for me, | felt as if I needed to move beyond vague appreciation and do something more significant.

How is it that a professor can impact a student in the ways Stanley Bates impacted me? | don’t find myself drawing on things he said on a regular basis, but 1 often recall sitting in his office and feeling like 1 was in the presence of something important. | draw on that feeling regularly. Though this was never made explicit, he clearly communicated that there was something serious in me | could get in touch with, and that there was something serious in the books and ideas we were studying together that would emerge if 1 dedicated myself to them. Being in his presence taught me that the deep desire 1 brought to college, the desire to find something meaningful to devote myself to, could kindle into something more as l took myself and my studies more seriously.

1 credit this moral seriousness, in part, as the heart of teaching at a liberal arts college. 1 teach because | believe that a liberal education can be transformative. A young person full of longing and confusion can read a book or engage in a discussion or write a paper and this can then empower them with the confidence it takes to undertake risky and difficult work in the future. As 1 wrote my tenure documents, | was filled with a spirit of gratitude that 1 got to take part in this process. | was grateful that I was joined with professors like Bates in the work of helping young people move from confusion and a desire for a self they only have an intimation of to empowerment and a sense of agency, without ever explicitly telling them who they should be or what they should think. The liberal arts professor who acts with moral seriousness doesn’t want a student to become something already existing—a liberal, a conservative, fit for a profession. What a professor wants for a student is for them to understand, through the seriousness they experience at college, that their calling is often far more difficult than that. Oftentimes the options we are presented with are not good enough, and we have to envision or create alternatives. Our education gives us the morale to take on that difficult work.

To put the point another way, a liberal education is an education in skepticism and commitment. A liberal education causes a student to ask questions and to see the flaws in even the most wellargued or earnestly held position. But this education is not merely critical. Students graduating from liberal arts colleges also desire a life of commitment. An effective liberal education allows a student to combine deep skepticism with an appreciation for the good in its many forms and a willingness to commit to conserving what is good and create conditions for flourishing. | feel that I learned this lesson from my education at Middlebury, but 1 cannot point to any single course or event that taught me this lesson directly. Rather, and on reflection, it was something about feeling the living presence of liberal education through its trustees that educated me.

It may be a strange way of putting it, but 1 saw Bates as a representative of a world that 1 thought was good and worthy of my aspiration.’ There were other professors like this as well. Dan Brayton taught and lived in a way that immediately demonstrated the good of being liberally educated. Like many professors at liberal arts colleges, when | was in Brayton’s office, 1 was listened to and cared about in a way that 1 never experienced in my life up to that point. Though | saw the limitations of my thinking quite clearly, 1 also felt capable of an expansiveness of thought while sitting there in the presence of someone who experienced that expansiveness and wanted me to as well. When | think about my own work as a professor, 1 see how important it is that I try to be fully present when | am with my students in the classroom or during office hours. 1am coming to think that the best defense of liberal education that we can offer is a lived one. Through our teaching and our very presence with students, we can enact and embody the ideals of rigorous questioning and skepticism combined with a devotion to those things we care deeply about.

When liberal education is under attack, as it is now, it is very tempting to move away from this type of lived defense and on to something that is better described as defensiveness. By defensiveness 1 mean moving away from thinking about the unique goods internal to liberal education and offering external justifications. There are good strategic reasons to highlight the instrumental outcomes of a liberal arts education,’ just as it is good to show the ways that a liberal education can prepare young people for democractic citizenship. But as important as these defenses tend to be, they also seem to fall flat when we need them most: when we are standing in a front of a group of college students. Though the external defense may convince a student and their parents to

JOHN WILLIAM MILLER’S LIVED DEFENSE OF LIBERAL EDUCATION choose a liberal arts college, it is how they experience the presence of liberal education that will ultimately convince them of its good.

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It would’ve been much easier if Bates had written his philosophy of education or if he was what critics of liberal education claim professors are: partisans who tell students what to think. Neither were true. But he did something else. He empowered me to take up the work of developing a philosophy of teaching at a liberal arts college. I feel the best way 1 can show my gratitude for what | learned at Middlebury, and the teaching | get to do now at St. Lawrence, is to create ways of defending the liberal arts internally, helping professors at liberal arts colleges communicate, through their presence in the classroom and with students, that liberal education matters. In this book, | turn to John William Miller (1895-1978), a longtime philosophy professor at Williams College (1924-1960), to create this philosophy of teaching at a liberal arts institution, and l want to take a moment to explain this choice.

When you read about Miller, one thing becomes immediately apparent: he was a presence at Williams.‘ Importantly, he was not a teacher who tried to be popular with students or who was looking to win converts through charismatic pedagogy. His commitment to the importance of philosophy struck a chord with his students; he didn’t need pedagogical tricks to convince them of the importance of liberal education. He lived its importance. But Miller published very little during his life, and we owe it to his students that his work has found its way into print. At the end of his life, students began the process of publishing his work with W. W. Norton & Company, and eventually five books and an anthology were published. This strikes me as one of the most moving testaments to Miller’s importance. His students thought there was something so significant about what he taught through his presence in the classroom that they wanted to find some way of replicating this and sharing it with those who didn’t have the experience of studying with him.

In addition to the volumes of Miller's work that have been published with the help of his students, several studies of Miller’s work highlight the significance of his philosophy and make the strong case for why we should take his philosophy seriously today.° l find value in Miller’s philosophy and the published commentary on it, but l aim to do something different in this small book. When 1 think about Miller 1 think about teaching, and my hope—when l began studying Miller—was that something in his unpublished writings housed at Williams College would give me the language to talk about teaching at a liberal arts college.’

Happily, 1 found that there is a lot that we can learn about teaching at a liberal arts college from studying Miller. In particular, Miller focuses on two elements of teaching and liberal education that tend to be ignored: presence and morale. For Miller, liberal education is less about a curriculum and more about a way of being with students. A teacher must take seriously his or her presence in the classroom and they must also see their purpose as helping build a student’s morale. What is striking about this way of thinking about liberal education is that it doesn’t look outside of the classroom for a justification of this form of educating. Rather, liberal education, in Miller’s view, is defended each day by the way it is lived and enacted in the classroom.

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Though Miller will be at the heart of this book in many ways, 1 don’t see this book as a scholarly study of him.’ Rather, I take Miller as exemplary of someone who sees himself as a trustee of liberal education. | turn to Miller both because of his status as a teacher and because he is able to articulate a lived defense of liberal education in a way that | have not yet experienced in my reading life.° I note this because | want readers to have in mind their versions of professors like Bates and Brayton as they read. Though | was fortunate enough to attend a small liberal arts college and to teach at one now, and though the exemplary professors | turn to are

JOHN WILLIAM MILLER’S LIVED DEFENSE OF LIBERAL EDUCATION white men, | don’t mean for my account to be exclusionary. It is important to stress this point. As 1 hope will be clear as the book progresses, | don’t believe liberal education is reliant on a closed canon, and | think trustees of liberal education are made up of a wide range of people from a variety of social, economic, sexual, and political backgrounds. 1 speak from my lived experience, but what is yours? Even if you did not attend, or do not teach at, a liberal arts college, you may have experienced liberal education or provide a liberal education to students. More, as you read, | ask that you envision the professors who freed you to experience personal transformation because of their teaching and their presence. Having their work in mind will help you engage with the process of developing your own lived defense of liberal education.

The book is organized as follows. The next chapter will offer a discussion of central ideas from Miller’s philosophy of teaching and liberal education: morale and presence. With this background in place, Miller’s previously unpublished 1943 notes “Reflections on the Liberal Education” will be presented in full. The chapter following these notes will be an extended commentary. As with the rest of the book, the goal of this extended commentary is not primarily meant to be a contribution to scholarship on Miller or even the extensive and always growing literature on liberal education. Rather, it is meant to help readers think about teaching at institutions committed to liberal education and how we can offer our students a lived defense of liberal education. The concluding chapter presents ways a professor can think about how to develop presence and morale in their own classroom. It won't offer “tips and tricks,” but it will give professors an opportunity to consider how they might improve their practice.

The tone of this book is meant to be invitational, and it won’t assume a background in Miller, the literature on liberal education, or a background in philosophy and education. Instead, the goal is to help those of us who care about liberal education find ways to think about how we might support it more fully. For those of us who are teachers at liberal arts colleges or in programs committed to liberal education, 1 hope this book helps us become more present with our students, so that we might more fully live the ways we value liberal education.

JOHN WILLIAM MILLER’S LIVED DEFENSE OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

Chapter One

In 1952, John William Miller delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address during Hobart College’s commencement. This lecture, “The Scholar as Man of the World,” offers an excellent statement of his philosophy of education. It covers a lot of ground, and in this chapter 1 focus on one of the stated aims of the lecture: exploring the importance of morale for college students. Toward the middle of his talk, Miller makes this point very directly, stating: “For it is a grievous thing to see the young student depart [college] without those convictions on which his morale depends.”

It is worth considering why, of all the things Miller could bring to Hobart from his experience as a professor at Williams College, he chose morale. Instead of rehashing platitudes about liberal education—congratulating Phi Beta Kappans for their hard work, for being campus leaders, for being models of the well-rounded individual—Miller’s speech eschewed the superficial and raised the philosophical and educational significance of the state of morale at liberal arts colleges." In asking these deeper questions about morale, Miller was reanimating a concern addressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1837, one hundred and fifteen years earlier, Emerson delivered the most famous Phi Beta Kappa address, “The American Scholar.”” In that speech to Harvard students, Emerson lamented the state of higher education in America. Still bound to European models and imitative in nature, Emerson hoped to free young Americans from this past, empowering them to be thinkers, unafraid of where their thought might take them. Emerson hoped to inspire thinkers who would be active: transforming work into vocation and living into an art. The American scholar would be no bookworm; they would use thought to transform this country into the ideals expressed in its founding documents. Miller was a great admirer of Emerson, and it makes sense that he would use the occasion to build off of key ideas from “The American Scholar.”

Emerson wanted his audience of students to see that old ways of thinking would not fit the here-and-now conditions of their present experience, and he urged them to risk creating something new. The risk is real, because breaking with tradition threatens to leave us with no foundation at all. lf we turn our back on models that are not yet broken for the promise of possibility, who is to say that what we come up with will not be worse than what we have now? Miller, drawing on Emerson, was reminding his audience that the well-worn clichés we repeat at liberal arts institutions could become deadening. Instead of giving us the strength and courage it will take to face the future, we take refuge in the known. This is problematic, for Miller, because it cuts us off from the necessity of self-criticism. Instead of offering an honest reckoning with the world and our place in it, we can hide within the emptiness of a form. We retreat into the title—l am a Phi Beta Kappa, l am the graduate of a liberal arts institution—but we don’t take the risk of thought that these titles are meant to signify. A student needs to have the courage to take the risk of thinking, and Miller’s address is about testing whether or not liberal education is capable of generating this type of morale in students. By morale, I see Miller getting at the idea that liberal education should empower students to balance self-criticism and commitment. We need to risk breaking with the old through the exercise of self-criticism but must also trust that this self-criticism will not leave us completely adrift. Rather, self-criticism is the foundation for mature commitment and engagement with a world of value.

We can see this point more clearly when we appreciate that Miller wrote his dissertation under the direction of William Ernest Hocking, a philosopher who wrote insightfully about morale in American society. Hocking contrasts superficial morale with mature morale in a 1941 essay that offers a key to understanding Miller’s thinking.* Superficial morale can be understood as the type of morale favored by dictators. This type of morale is unthinking; using fear and magical thinking, the dictator stirs up energy and maintains it with threats, intimidation, and lies. This type of morale often disappears when subjected to honest criticism, hence the dictator’s need to keep people from exercising thought. By contrast, mature morale is self-chosen and survives when it is subjected to self-criticism. Though the proponents of superficial morale correctly appreciate that commitment and passion are dispelled when people are allowed to think and question their values, mature morale is built on a different understanding of the type of education needed to maintain morale. Mature morale is cultivated by freely taking on commitments and sticking with them when faced with external and internal challenges. It is a loyalty that embraces self-criticism and the effort needed to sustain value. Here is how Hocking describes it:

If there is anything free about the human being, it is to be found here, in this deed of gift. It is the surplus push put behind performance to give it a certain “go,” so that not every accident or obstacle will bring a halt; it is an original drive, not a borrowed or imitative spurt, arising from one’s own conviction and good will.”

We are free to put forward our best effort as a “deed of gift.” Though superficial morale is often coerced by external rewards or threats, mature morale is built on conviction and good will. This was the morale that Miller hoped to see in graduates of institutions committed to liberal education. Once the promise of rewards is gone—no Phi Beta Kappa to achieve, for example—will graduates practice the freedom of giving their best effort based on their convictions and good will? Or, will they fall prey to forms of superficial morale and the lack of self-criticism that comes with it? What Miller advocates is the difficult balance between conviction and criticism.”

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Miller’s thinking on morale remains important. We live in a time when there is a risk that even our best students will lose motivation when they leave behind the scaffolding of credentials that college offers. We also live in a time when cynicism and hopelessness is palpable. The individual feels small in the face of climate change, income inequality, and antidemocratic movements across the globe. On top of this, we’ve taken on the role of promoting critical thinkers exceedingly well, and this can leave students demoralized. They may have come into college with a set of political and religious beliefs that offer and sustain meaning and purpose, but by graduation they may be left with more questions than convictions. The balance between conviction and criticism is off, and students are unable to activate a mature sense of morale. This is a problem that we should all be concerned with, as Miller was when he addressed Hobart graduates.

Before further considering Miller’s approach to morale and its development, it is worthwhile to pause and consider that some professors may find the very idea of developing student morale overstepping the academic mission of a college. A professor listening to Miller’s address may hope for more of a focus on what the liberal arts, as an academic curriculum, can do for the intellectual lives of students. Though some readers may share this belief, that liberal education should stick to academic matters only, it is hard for me to share this narrow academic focus given what | experienced at a liberal arts college and what | know about why these schools were founded.” Even when a liberal arts college wasn’t explicitly founded on religious grounds, these colleges were deeply concerned with educating the young to become people of character. And, as many of these schools grew away from their religious foundations, the goal of character development remained important.?° As such, it seems central that liberal education remains connected to the mission of cultivating a student’s character, without becoming dogmatic or moralistic. In a note written toward the end of his life, Miller spoke to this point in the following way: “Philosophy does no one a service. It furthers no purposes. Its business is morale. It is not morals. 1 was no moralist.”” Miller is no moralist; he doesn’t have any predetermined end he is pointing students toward, be it a career, a viewpoint, or a political belief. Rather, allowing students to really struggle with a text, an idea, or a belief that they feel is unshakeable can activate their morale, giving them a new sense of power. Though criticism can feel merely destructive, it can also help students discover their power to make sense of the world for themselves.

Here, again, 1 am reminded of Emerson’s thinking in “The American Scholar.” When colleges idolize books and positions developed by leading thinkers, inscribing the names of authors into the sides of libraries as if they were meant to be worshipped, they keep students from appreciating that all of these books were written by men and women who were once young people themselves. Emerson wants to remind professors and students of this fact.” Instead of training young people to read the “right” books or hold the “right” ideas, college can educate young people to feel the sense of morale one needs to take ownership of one’s own thinking and writing. Miller is getting at this point in the brief passage quoted above. The purpose of philosophical study is not to lead students to a predetermined end but to empower them to be mindful of how beliefs are formed and held. It is not about teaching morals; it is about showing students what it means to balance self-criticism and conviction so that one can experience a sense of morale. For Miller, like Emerson, college is not about getting students to think a certain way, conforming to a predetermined position. Rather, education does no one a service: it invites them to determine what is worth devotion, and learn what it means to care for what one finds, on reflection, to be worthy of one’s care.”

Where Miller and Emerson part company is Miller’s focus on what he calls “local control.” Emerson’s strength lies in provoking readers to shake off traditional ways of thinking that don’t have the power to generate mature morale. But this strength can often turn into a weakness, when a reader of Emerson becomes critical of anything but an ideal of perfection that one never experiences in daily living. Though Emerson categorized his philosophy as one that is in touch with the ordinary,” his faith that exercising self-criticism through the practice of nonconformity would naturally bring us into concert with others who are willing to practice nonconformity seems unrealistic. Emerson’s world is one notable for its lack of strife.” According to Emerson, once we turn our backs on conformity we open ourselves up to a sustaining connection with the divine that ensures us that we are connected to all others, because they too share that connection to the divine, no matter how dimly they apprehend the connection. In Emerson, the person who practices self-criticism and nonconformity will find their community.

What is particularly troubling about this aspect of Emerson’s thinking is that it neglects the importance of conserving the world of ordinary, actually existing objects. When we are divinely assured of our values and the cooperation of a community to sustain those values, we may lose the morale necessary to actually maintain those values. Because Miller doesn’t share Emerson’s divine assurance policy, he argues the necessity of taking responsibility for being stewards of what we value in our daily lives, knowing full well that this may put us at odds with others.” Instead of finding a community committed to what we care about when we practice nonconformity, our convictions can lead us to conflicts in the local contexts of our everyday life.

Miller calls us back to the things of this world. Instead of giving students visions of the divine, the ahistorical, and the ideal, Miller calls them back to the contingent and the mundane. Here is how he puts it in his Hobart address:

We control only local situations, and not the universe as a whole... . Existential knowledge, born of restraint, furnishes the sole avenue to such actual, if limited, power as we possess, or can come to possess.”

Existential knowledge is a key term Miller uses several times in his address, and what he means by it is the type of knowledge that a student earns by making the attempt to balance criticism and stewardship in the local context of their daily living. When a college student makes an argument about something that is disconnected from their experience of the world, they don’t feel the same restraint they would if they were arguing about, for example, issues that exist on their campus. For example, if the student wrote a paper about systemic racism, they may learn a good deal from the experience, but they might not experience existential knowledge. Existential knowledge is more likely to arise if they wrote about the ways their campus exhibits systemic racism in its policies and practices. When we practice criticism of something near to us, ina spirt of maintaining what is good about the practice while excising what doesn’t stand up to critical inquiry, we are positioned to feel the limited power we possess or can come to possess.

The work of thinking in a college classroom can become so divorced from local situations and actual restraints that students leaving the bubbles of their college campuses may be unprepared for a world that doesn’t respond to their thought with the same interest they experienced as undergraduates. When this occurs, students can quickly become demoralized, doubting the efficacy of their college educations, and, by extension, the practical power of thought itself. Miller sees this as a real threat, one made worse by what he sees as excesses of progressive education. For Miller, constraint and conflict are inevitable; contra some strains of progressive education, a student cannot simply follow their interests and passions and find a welcoming community. A learner needs to experience the restraint of local conditions and to feel counter interests and counter passions in order to develop a sense of morale. Importantly, Miller makes it very clear that the Emersonian drive, followed by many progressive educators, from individual interest to welcoming community, is deeply flawed. We are limited in our powers, in large part, because conflict is a reality. Instead of feeling as if our power is unlimited, we should seek to test the limits of our power in local situations. Instead of arguing the merits of a position abstractly and to a receptive audience, something that seems increasingly encouraged as the possibilities for nonembodied discussion flower online,” it is imperative that students take the risk of demonstrating the good of that same position to a fellow student or a family member who may not, at least initially, see its good. This is experiencing existential education. The student would feel the success or failure of their current power to critically sustain values in the here and now of our shared world.

The important thing is trading a world free from conflict for a world of constraint. It is only when we stand behind our values in the face of opposition that we learn about our commitment to those values. If we readily give in to opposition, if we cannot draw on a deep well of morale to assert the good of what we value, we learn something very important. Unless we are willing to live our values, to act on their behalf, it is hard to say that we actually hold the value we assert. 1 don’t want to give the impression that holding a value is necessarily adversarial. But it does involve a commitment that is often limiting. We cannot value everything, because to value something means to devote time, a terribly limited resource, to promoting and practicing what we value. Miller makes the point this way: “To act is to see oneself as limited, and as a trustee of value.”?? When 1 act, say, by assigning one book and not another, one assignment and not another, | am limiting myself. But though I’ve limited myself to teaching one book, 1 am also holding the book up as something of value. By teaching it, l act as a trustee of its value.

To return to a point made earlier, 1 think we often mistake critical thinking as the sole goal of a liberal education. There is no doubt that we must learn how to be critical thinkers, but critical thinking should not destroy the possibility of being a trustee of value. For example, an education in critical thinking can help me see the flaws in something | value very deeply. But seeing the flaw in something should not be an excuse for discarding it in the hopes that | will find something beyond reproach. Rather, a liberal education can show us what it might mean to devote ourselves to imperfect things. Even though 1 may understand the ways that, for example, a composer may be, all things considered, a better composer than the one | love, this gives me no reason to not love them and devote myself to their music to the relative neglect of the other composer. Learning how to balance criticism and devotion is an important art that should be cultivated through liberal education. More controversially, we should also help a student see the flaws of a political party without sending the message that they cannot commit to that party. And, just like the composer example above, we can see that a preference or commitment to one party should not imply that the other is evil, stupid, or not worthy of the devotion that other people show it. Obviously, there are some ideas and positions that are indeed evil and unreasonable and should be called such on college campuses and in civil discourse, but there are far more things that are worthy of our respect and devotion. The trick is helping a student find those things that they can commit to even while acknowledging their imperfections and limitations.