Liberal Education

Thinking about education with Washington and Du Bois

by

I’ve spent much of the summer not far from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the hometown of one of the great figures of American intellectual history, W.E.B. Du Bois. Born shortly after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois came into his own as another black public intellectual, Booker T. Washington, was reaching the height of his fame.  I turned to Du Bois and Washington because their debate about education seemed so relevant to contemporary discussions of liberal learning and practicality. I was led in this direction by the Princeton philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose article on Du Bois in the New York Review of Books is particularly incisive.

Washington’s fame was as a teacher, institution builder (especially at the Tuskegee Institute), fundraiser and spokesperson for the view that American blacks needed an intensely practical, vocational education. He appealed to ex-slaves and their descendants who were looking for a path out of economic impoverishment, and he appealed to whites who appreciated his decision not to promote political or cultural change.  Washington was an “accomodationist,” willing to work within the structures for legal subordination of blacks in the South as long as he was able to promote black economic advancement. His message resonated with wealthy industrialists, high-toned educators, and even presidents. He was the most famous black man in America at the end of the 19th century. At around that time, the younger Du Bois was a prodigious intellectual with a slew of degrees – bachelors diplomas from Fisk and Harvard, eventually a Ph.D. also from Harvard (he was the first black person to receive one there) with continued graduate work in Berlin. He was a classics professor and a historian who wrote sociology (highly praised by Max Weber), poetry, plays and fiction – to name just some of the genres in which he worked.

Washington recognized the American desire for material success and wanted to build progress for African Americans on their ability to be successful in the economy. Du Bois, on the other hand, emphasized political and civic equality, along with “the education of youth according to ability.” Education was at the core of the differences between these leaders. Du Bois rejected the head of Tuskegee’s anti-intellectualism. “The pushing of mere abstract knowledge into the head means little,” Washington had written. “We want more than the mere performance of mental gymnastics. Our knowledge must be harnessed to the things of real life.” Du Bois agreed, but he wanted to broaden what might count as “the things of real life” so that the pursuit of happiness wouldn’t be reduced to the pursuit of dollars.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

Du Bois was acutely aware that the “fine adjustment” between life and knowledge was especially problematic in a society of oppressive racial inequality, a society that had denied many blacks the most rudimentary education in the years after emancipation. He was committed to the ideal that education was a path to freedom, but he also acknowledged the fact that different people need different kinds of educational opportunity.

If these things are so, how foolish to ask what is the best education for one or seven or sixty million souls! Shall we teach them trades, or train them in liberal arts? Neither and both: teach the workers to work and the thinkers to think; make carpenters of carpenters, and philosophers of philosophers, and fops of fools. Nor can we pause here. We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, –nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man.

Education is for human development, human freedom, not the molding of an individual into a being who can perform a particular task. That would be slavery.

As Frederic Douglass had emphasized after he had escaped from slavery, people strive to know just as they strive for freedom. Educational institutions aim to stimulate that hunger for knowledge – not just contain it or channel it into a narrow path destined for yesterday’s job market.  Education should not teach the person to conform to a function, but should provide people with a wider horizon of choices. (That’s one of the reasons excessive student loan debt is so pernicious – it effectively reduces choices.)

The tension between Washington and Du Bois on education reminds us of issues that should be top of mind as we prepare for the academic year. Sure, we have to pay attention to what our graduates will do with their education, and we must give them the skills to translate what they learn in classrooms to their lives after graduation. But we shouldn’t reduce our understanding of “their lives after graduation” to their very first job — which should be the worst job they’ll ever have. We must recommit ourselves to ensuring that a broad, liberal education is one that is “harnessed to the things in real life,” as Washington said. By doing so, we will also achieve what Du Bois championed: the vital link between education and freedom.

cross-posed with huffingtonpost.com

 

Happy 4th of July!

by

I’ve been so impressed by the consistent links between education and freedom that run through American intellectual history. As we celebrate America’s birthday, let me share just two. The first is from Frederick Douglass, the great orator, and activist. Douglass often described the epiphany he experienced as a young slave: the realization that the path from slavery to freedom was through education. His master’s wife had been teaching him to read, and when the slaveholder discovered this, he was outraged. Nothing good will come of educating a slave, he exclaimed. The boy only needs to heed his master’s commands! Douglass overheard this. The direct pathway to freedom is education, and education is based in literacy because when you can read you have the independence to learn on your own. This “new and special revelation” was a turning point for Douglass, as he puts it, the “first anti-slavery speech” that made a difference to him.

“Very well,” thought I. “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

This is a Jeffersonian moment in Douglass’s life, and in American history, even if Jefferson himself didn’t believe that a black man like Douglass could experience such a moment. The fact that America paid tribute to liberty and equality while brutally enslaving millions outraged Douglass, and that kind of outrage helped fuel the abolitionist movement before the Civil War.

The second example comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who feared that colleges were places that encouraged too much conformity and not enough inspiration. One must, Emerson insists, be an inventor to study well. He readily admits that guidance to the best books is a great service, but this service can turn into corruption if they teach subservience to the material – if they teach dependence.

Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, — to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.

Emerson here is radicalizing the notions of university education that Jefferson developed when founding the University of Virginia. The enemy for the founding father was rote learning; the plague was to be trained for a destiny that had already been chosen for you. Emerson builds on Jefferson in calling for institutions of advanced learning to inspire, to transform through creativity.

Education as the direct pathway from slavery to freedom… Education as the awakening of creativity ….. We might say learning leads to independence. Happy 4th!

From Affordability To Transformation

by

Since I first posted a blog at the Washington Post about affordability plans at Wesleyan, there has been strong interest in our three-year option. I’m delighted and a little surprised. As I’ve said, it’s not for everybody, but the three-year possibility might make sense for many people. Here are two audio clips in which I’ve discussed what we are doing in this regard:

NPR Marketplace

WOR Radio New York

When I arrived in the office this morning, Heather Brooke asked me how I liked the Wall Street Journal piece. I didn’t know anything about it, and then was surprised to read the opening lines of an op-ed by Fay Vincent:

As the costs of attending college continue to mount, often well beyond the rate of inflation, the search is on for ways to economize. One seemingly obvious way is to reduce the number of years required to graduate. Last month, Wesleyan University, the private liberal-arts college in Middletown, Conn., did just that.

President Michael Roth announced that his institution would encourage students who wanted to complete the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree in three years rather than the customary four. These students would take some course work during the summer along with their normal load during the school year.

“I think it’s important to show that liberal arts colleges, even ones as selective as Wesleyan, are trying to do something about affordability,” he told the Associated Press. Tuition, room and board there is nearing $50,000 per year.

There are a smattering of other colleges across the nation that have three-year programs, but none with as high an academic profile. And while the Wesleyan decision has not attracted much attention or discussion, I suspect there will be more such cost-saving efforts in coming years.

Mr. Vincent was underestimating the price of institutions like Wesleyan, but I was pleased to see him encouraging experiments that will enhance affordability. At Wesleyan, we also want our experiments to intensify the educational experience so that it is more compelling than ever. A liberal arts education has long been about transformation. With Wes faculty, students, staff and alumni making contributions, we can also transform liberal learning so that it’s more relevant than ever!

First Day of Summer: The Work Continues

by

Wandering around campus on this first official day of summer, I see signs of the increased use of our facilities that we have been encouraging these last few years. The Summer Session, now in its third year, has continued to grow, and the students I’ve spoken with are enjoying the small classes and the intense focus. The double-course on filmmaking and film studies seems to be going really well, and I suspect we will be adding resources in this area in the future. Speaking of film, our summer series of free films linked to our archive will begin in a couple of weeks. This year the focus is on some of Paul Newman’s greatest roles, and the line-up (with introductions by Mark Longenecker) is impressive. The series begins on Tuesday, July 10 at 7:30 with Cool Hand Luke, and it continues each Tuesday through July.

Paul Newman - Cool Hand Luke

Heading over to the Exley science center, I am likely to bump into some of the scores of students working in labs. For many years our undergraduates have been able to participate in high-level research and get financial support in the summers for doing so. Much of this support has come from the Hughes Foundation, and we recently learned that we will have to raise our own funds to continue this work in the future. I am working closely with our science faculty and trustees to raise the funds to support mentored summer research. Research support for students is a crucial complement to our financial aid program (about which I am posting more information on the Wesleyan 2020 site).

On the left above is Claire Palmer ’14, and Lisle Winston ’14 and grad student Upasna Sharma are on the right. They were busy working in Scott Holmes’ molecular biology lab when I interrupted them. I also spoke with some students doing exciting work on protein expression and on bacteria from Death Valley and from Slovenia (I didn’t know bacteria had “zip codes”).

Olin Library

I stop in to Olin Library from time to time to pick up books that might prove useful for my own research regarding the development of liberal education in the United States. Olin in summer is an oasis of serenity, as it is (relatively speaking) throughout the school year. Wandering around the stacks, I always find more books than I came looking for. Now all I need to do is find the time to read them! When I leave campus for a break, I will continue my book project on the intellectual history of liberal education in America. The tension between learning for its own sake and learning for practical goals runs like a red thread through the history of American higher education. Rather than try to dissolve that tension, I believe we should cultivate it to generate deeper scholarship and more productive enterprises. The mistake is to think we must choose between liberal learning and an expansive pragmatism.

Summertime is here with intensity today, but the livin’ ain’t easy. The work continues in classrooms, labs, offices and studios.

 

 

 

Beyond Information Transfer: An Initiation into Lifelong Learning

by

Early May usually brings an unusually large number of press reports about higher education. Many high school seniors have just made their decisions about where they will be going to college, and those preparing to graduate from universities across the country are confronting transitions into an increasingly unwelcoming economy. Recently, there have been dozens of stories about whether those college years were worth the investment of time and money. Are American colleges and universities doing enough to prepare their graduates for the competitive world beyond the campus?

In this first week of May there were two stories that caught my eye. The first was on NPR, a media outlet usually pretty friendly to higher education. I know that many of its listeners, and almost all of its reporters, have benefited from broad educational experiences. The reporter on a recent story about liberal arts colleges, though, was wondering if we can still afford a wide-ranging, liberal education in our hyper-competitive world. Liberal arts schools, she said, “have long had a rap of being a kind of luxury, where learning is for learning’s sake, and not because understanding Aristotle will come in handy on the job one day. But economic pressures and changes in the world of higher education have now put them more on the defensive than ever.”

The reporter on the story is Tovia Smith, herself a graduate of Tufts University, a fine liberal arts school. Smith has covered or produced stories on an amazing range of topics,  from race relations to orphanages, from Clinton’s impeachment to Massachusetts prisons, “as well as regular features on cooking and movies.” I took this list from the NPR website, which also tells us that Smith taught journalism in Africa. Has learning for learning’s sake been a luxury for her, I wondered, or is it an integral part of her career and her life? She sure seems to have benefited from her Tufts education.

The second story that drew my attention was the announcement that Harvard and MIT were joining forces to offer “free online, college-level courses under a joint superbrand known as edX.” This is a great opening of access to the wealth of learning these universities possess. Both schools are among the most selective in the United States, and this venture means “Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access,’’ as Harvard president Drew Faust put it. The Cambridge powerhouses are inviting other schools to add their course materials to the platform they are developing, which will also allow researchers to study how students best learn online.

Where does this leave residential liberal arts schools? Nobody knows for sure how the availability of online courses will affect students’ interest in physically coming to a college to learn in a campus setting. Interest in attending MIT and Stanford has only grown as these universities have made course materials available online, and there is no sign that this new edX venture will reduce the desire to study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s why the analogy between higher education and the newspaper business, drawn in this morning’s New York Times by the liberally educated David Brooks, doesn’t work. Nobody rushes out to buy the Times because they experienced it online.

Why is there still such a strong desire to be part of a diverse campus community when one can access content (often for free) in one’s own way at one’s own pace? It’s because a campus community still functions as a powerful catalyst for lifelong learning – and the ability to keep learning over a lifetime has never been so essential as it is today. Liberal arts education no longer draws on the cultivated homogeneity of a country club (or of the boardroom). Today selective schools create communities in which people learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. We don’t do this to be politically correct. We do it to prepare students to become lifelong learners who can navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation.

Our campuses should maximize each undergraduate’s ability to go beyond his or her comfort zone to learn from the most unexpected sources. By contrast, in the carefully curated online communities we create, we can reduce chances of surprise encounters, we can distance ourselves from sources with which we are unfamiliar. Our social networks are virtual, gated communities. We just filter out (or “unfriend”) the points of view we don’t want to hear. Our campuses, on the other hand, should be places where diversity leads to learning as our students come to see differences among people as a deep resource for solving problems and seeking opportunities. Online education can complement this educational environment very well. But it does not replace the need for it.

It’s early May, and as we prepare to welcome the class of 2016 and congratulate the grads of 2012, we should remember that their broadly-based, reflexive education is much more than information transfer. That kind of exchange can be done very well online. Our education, our immersion in communities of learning, is an initiation into a lifetime of learning, of solving problems, of creating opportunities, of experiencing the pleasures of the arts — and of participating in the public sphere.

Lifelong learning isn’t a luxury, although it does require investment. The investment enables our graduates to engage more fully with the world around them and exercise their responsibilities as citizens, to become shapers of the economy and culture of the future rather than be just spectators – or victims.

How to Choose Your (Our) University

by

It’s that time of year again: the time when high school seniors previously anxious about whether they would get into the college of their dreams, now get to worry about choosing the college that is just right for them. In the last few weeks applicants have found out where they’ve been accepted, and now they are trying to envision where they will be most likely to thrive. Where will I learn the most, be happiest, find friends that will last a lifetime? How to choose? I thought it might be useful to re-post my thoughts on this, with a few revisions.

For many high school seniors, the month of April is decision time. Of course, for many the decision will be made on an economic basis. Which school has given the most generous financial aid package? Wesleyan is one of a small number of schools that meets the full financial need of all admitted students according to a formula developed over several years. There are some schools with larger endowments that can afford to be even more generous than Wes, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of others that are unable even to consider meeting financial need over four years of study.

After answering the question of which schools one can afford, how else does one decide where best to spend one’s college years? Of course, size matters.  Some students are looking for a large university in an urban setting where the city itself plays an important role in one’s education. New York and Boston, for example, have become increasingly popular college destinations, but not, I suspect, for the classroom experience. But if one seeks small classes and strong, personal relationships with faculty, then liberal arts schools, which pride themselves on providing rich cultural and social experiences on a residential campus, are especially compelling. You can be on a campus with a human scale and still have plenty of things to do. Wesleyan is somewhat larger than most liberal arts colleges but much smaller than the urban or land grant universities. We feel that this gives our students the opportunity to choose a broad curriculum and a variety of cultural activities on campus, while still being small enough to encourage regular, sustained relationships among faculty and students.

All the selective small liberal arts schools boast of having a faculty of scholar-teachers, of a commitment to research and interdisciplinarity, and of encouraging community and service. So what sets us apart from one another after taking into account size, location, and financial aid packages? What are students trying to see when they visit Amherst and Wesleyan, or Tufts and Middlebury?

Knowing that these schools all provide a high quality, broad and flexible curriculum with strong teaching, and that the students all have displayed great academic capacity, prospective students are trying to discern the personalities of each school. They are trying to imagine themselves on the campus, among the people they see, to get a feel for the chemistry of the place — to gauge whether they will be happy there. Hundreds of visitors will be coming to Wesleyan next week for WesFest (our annual program for admitted students). They will go to classes and athletic contests, musical performances and parties. And they will ask themselves: Would I be happy at Wesleyan?

I hope our visitors get a sense of the personality of the school that I so admire and enjoy. I hope they feel the exuberance and ambition of our students, the intelligence and care of our faculty, the playful yet demanding qualities of our community. I hope our visitors can sense our commitment to creating a diversity in which difference is embraced and not just tolerated, and to public service that is part of one’s education and approach to life.

We all know that Wesleyan is hard to get into (even more difficult this year!). But even in the group of highly selective schools, Wes is not for everybody. We aspire to be a community committed to boldness as well as to rigor, to idealism as well as to effectiveness. Whether in the sciences, arts, humanities or social sciences, our faculty and students are dedicated to explorations that invite originality as well as collaboration. The scholar-teacher model is at the heart of our curriculum. Our faculty are committed to teaching and to shaping the fields in which they work. Earlier this week, Henry Abelove gave a stirring lecture at the Center for Humanities call “What I Taught and How I Taught It.” I was Henry’s student in the mid 1970s, and members of his first-year seminar from a few years ago were also in the audience. His care for students and his dedication to the material being taught were everywhere in evidence. How proud and grateful I am to have been his student and colleague!

The commitment of our faculty says a lot about who we are, as does the camaraderie around the completion of senior theses this week. We know how to work hard, but we also know how to enjoy the work we choose to do. That’s been magically appealing to me for more than 30 years. I bet the magic will enchant many of our visitors, too.

Spring Travels, Vacation Thoughts

by

Kari and I have been on vacation this first week of Spring Break. We’ve returned to Paris, a city we both lived in when we were in our student years, and in which we have spent extended periods of time in the time since. Although this was not a Wesleyan trip, we spent a few hours at the Wesleyan-Vassar program here. It was great to meet some of the staff and talk with some students who are spending the spring semester in France. Studying in a foreign country, especially when you are immersing yourself in another language, can be such a powerful complement to a broad, liberal arts education. There are so many things you have to re-consider when you are living outside the US, not the least being your own views of home. One starts to see oneself and one’s culture through the eyes of others — usually a strong learning experience.

Our students in France are studying art history, politics, history and, of course, French literature. Some want to explore psychology, while others are attracted to geography, science studies and philosophy. All of these things are often grouped here under the rubic of “human sciences,” and recently there has been a reinvigoration of the term “humanities” in French. Kari and I went to hear the inaugural lecture of a new Humanities Institute in Paris, at the Diderot campus (Paris 7). The feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti made a strong case for a “post-anthropocentric,” integrative version of the humanities that would be as interdisciplinary as anything we have seen in the states.

We’ve spent much of the week seeing old friends, listening to music and looking at art. We heard about new trends in philosophy, and Kari was especially interested to learn about the important number of philosophers who are now investigating “the problem of the animal.” Her new book, Thinking Animals, is about to come out from Columbia University Press. We saw a wonderful exhibition on Matisse, in which the decisions the painter made when confronted with certain visual/cognitive problems were brought to the fore. This reminded me of how Tula Telfair has recently discussed her work. We also saw fantastic, disturbing exhibition at the Musée Branly, L’Invention du Sauvage. The English title for the catalogue is The Human Zoo, and the two titles together give a good idea of the subject matter: the creation and display of the colonial Other as exotic — even antihuman. This exploration of the genealogy of racialism and racism reminded me of Andy Curran’s recent book, Anatomy of Blackness. And I couldn’t help wonder what our dance faculty would think of the great exhibition on dance and the arts at the Centre Pompidou, Danser sa Vie.

It’s not as if I think only of Wesleyan when visiting Paris. I promise, nothing red and black came to mind when we saw the exhibition on Degas’ nudes!

We’ll soon be home to prepare for the rush of the second half of the semester. There will be music to hear, and exhibitions to see as the senior theses continue to unfold. And friends, new and old, to share stories of Paris with.

Why We Value Diversity

by

This week the Supreme Court voted to hear a challenge to the ability of colleges and universities to shape the racial and ethnic demographics of their student bodies. Currently, schools are allowed to use race as a factor among many others in achieving diversity for educational reasons. When the Court hears Fisher vs. the University of Texas, we may find that the justices set strict limits on how universities can consider race in their efforts to create an educational environment in which all students learn — and learn from one another.

Here at Wesleyan, we have for many years emphasized creating a diverse student body because we believe this results in a deeper educational experience. In the late 1960s President Victor Butterfield led the school away from cultivated homogeneity and toward creating a campus community in which people can learn from their differences while forming new modes of commonality. This had nothing to do with what would later be called political correctness or even identity politics. It had to do with preparing students to become lifelong learners who could navigate in and contribute to a heterogeneous world after graduation.

In our classrooms, students and teachers see the value of diversity throughout the semester. As David Kelley of IDEO and the Stanford Design School has noted time and time again, homogeneity kills creativity. The key to successful brainstorming and innovative teamwork is to have a multiplicity of perspectives. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman makes a similar point in his recent Thinking, Fast and Slow. Groups are beneficial for problem solving as long as they don’t degrade into following-the-leader; learning takes place when people bring a variety of perspectives to the issue at hand. If almost everyone is from the same background, you run the risk of substituting mere repetition for iterative cross-pollination.

At residential universities, homogeneity in the student body undermines our mission of helping students develop personal autonomy within a dynamic community. That’s why we are eager to welcome students from various parts of the United States and the rest of the world to our campuses. That’s why we ask our donors to support robust financial aid programs so as to ensure that our students come from a variety of economic backgrounds. A “dynamic community” is one in which members have to navigate difference — and racial and ethnic differences are certainly parts of the mix. All the students we admit have intellectual capacity, but we also want them to have different sorts of capacities. Their interests, modes of learning, and perspectives on the world should be sufficiently different from one another so as to promote active learning in and outside the classroom.

At Wesleyan our mission statement reminds us that we aim to prepare students “to explore the world with a variety of tools.” Diversity is an aspect of the world we expect our students to explore, turning it into an asset they can use. We expect graduates to have completed a course of study in the liberal arts that will enable them to see differences among people as a powerful tool for solving problems and seeking opportunities. We expect graduates to embrace diversity as a source of lifelong learning, personal fulfillment, and creative possibility. Selective universities want to shape a student body that maximizes each undergraduate’s ability to go beyond his or her comfort zone to draw on resources from the most familiar and the most unexpected places.

As the Supreme Court considers Fisher vs. the University of Texas, it is crucial that the justices continue to allow universities to consider race and ethnicity within a holistic admissions process that aims to create a student body that maximizes learning. University admissions programs are not the place to promote partisan visions of social justice, but they are the place to produce the most dynamic and profound learning environments. It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education.

cross-posted with Huffingtonpost

Year-End Thanks

by

Looking back on the year, I feel so grateful for the combination of caring and ambition, cooperation and intensity that marks our Wesleyan community. I think of the wonderful welcome our athletes gave the new students on move-in day, and of the stellar seasons that our men’s and women’s soccer teams had this fall. I think of the powerful theatrical experiences on campus – from the joy of musicals to the awe of classic dramas re-imagined by our students and faculty. Perusing the virtual faculty bookshelf, I admire the scholarly achievements of our professors, from studies of Frank Lloyd Wright to genealogies of racism, especially since I know well the contributions our scholar-teachers have made to the intellectual development of their students. And every day I am grateful for the contributions of the Wesleyan staff, who make all these achievements possible. The hard work of our staff, from reading admission files to planning graduation events, is the foundation of so much of what we are able to accomplish.

The Board of Trustees continues to guide the institution with affection, intelligence and generosity. Trustees, faculty, alumni, students and staff are dedicated to ensuring that our university remains at the forefront of forward-thinking liberal arts education. I am grateful for being part of this team.

I wish you all a restful break, a joyful holiday and a very happy new year.

Choosing Classes, Choosing Majors (Certificates? Minors? Clusters?)

by

Wesleyan students are busily deciding on the classes they intend to take next semester. It’s an exciting and sometimes frustrating time. Students may have heard since their first term about Don Moon’s government class on the moral basis of politics (a top choice since I was an undergrad), while others will be eager to learn about the history of architecture from Joseph Siry (whose classes have also been popular for a very long time), or from Katherine Kuenzli, (whose class on Wagner and Modernism is cross-listed in 5 depts!). If students want to take a very popular course with limited enrollments, then they may well be frustrated. But a good antidote to this is to go to Wesmaps and search for classes with free seats (just check that box). You are likely to discover some real gems — be they classes in data analysis or biology, to classes in religion or a brand new new one on the history of the European novel.

As students plan for the spring term, sophomores in particular are thinking through how they will focus their studies. Choosing a major can seem very difficult, especially if one has diverse interests. It’s crucial that students talk this through with their advisors. I remember not being able to choose among philosophy, psychology and history — and then a dean asked me why I thought I had to choose. I wound up creating a university major that combined these fields. Today, many students double major, while others add certificates (much like an interdisciplinary minor) or other points of focus. I always suggest that students worry less about how their major(s) will look to others after graduation and focus more on what they are most interested in. What is it that generates your greatest intellectual passion? Your major will let you deepen that passion and discover how it might be relevant to what you do after graduation.

Professors are busy too, of course. Not only are we grading exams and papers from the fall, but we are thinking about those spring courses and how to make them as compelling as possible. I’ve been teaching the Past on Film since the Ice Age, but next term it will be very different than in previous years — we are going discuss how photography makes a difference in our cultural and personal recollections. We’ll also be looking at several films that hadn’t made it onto the syllabus in prior years.

We professors also look forward to seeing where our intellectual passions lead us. Our journeys are informed by the engagement with the interests of our students as we continue learning together.