Student evaluations of professors are now commonplace—even routine and predictable. But students in one Seton Hall University class recently took things a few steps further.
They found Professor Jorge López-Cortina to be so annoying that they actually voted, by a 3-to-1 margin, that he should be killed!
Of course, they didn’t really expect the school to implement their recommendation. And López-Cortina was actually pleased by their decision. It signaled to him that he had managed to engage them in the classics, Plato’s Apology to be specific.
The Apology (or “defense”) is Socrates’ statement before the Athenian jury that will decide whether he will live or die. As most readers know, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens by his incessant challenging of prevailing ideas.
Socrates was given the death penalty, but history has been on Socrates’ side. Killed for his freedom of expression, Socrates became a hero who has inspired thinkers for over two thousand years.
López-Cortina’s students may not have known that. In fact, like most students today, they don’t read much, and the last thing most of them wanted to do was to study Plato. They were ready to adopt the professor’s interpretation of the Apology without much discussion and to accept Socrates as an important figure without really thinking about him.
To present the Apology, the professor had to engage his students. He became Socrates.
He asked his students questions. When they gave answers, he responded by asking more questions. If they asked him a question, he responded with a question. He never gave answers, and that process (sometimes known as a Socratic dialogue)—which the students found quite annoying—went on for several days.
To conclude the discussion, the class had to vote on whether Socrates should be executed or not. In other words, the class became the Athenian jury. And when the votes were counted, it turned out that 75 percent of the students voted to “execute” Socrates (in this case, the professor). Their vote for the death penalty was substantially more than the Athenians’, who favored it by a comparatively balanced 280 to 220.
Like it or not, those students had become involved. They had begun to understand what Socrates’ challenge was all about. Later in the course, they shifted to a more positive view of Socrates (and of López-Cortina), but only after having fully understood the Athenians’ view and having reflected on their own learning process and their initial resistance to it.
This bold teaching method stunned the faculty members who listened to Lopez-Cortina describe his class at the annual meeting of the Association of Core Texts and Courses (ACTC). But his method exemplifies the effort some instructors go to when they are introducing the classics—and many such teachers can be found at ACTC.
ACTC is composed of faculty who teach core curricula—courses that introduce students to a range of great works of literature and philosophy. Sometimes these are freshman courses, sometimes capstone courses, sometimes electives and sometimes required, and they can even constitute a full four-year curriculum, as at St. John’s College. This year’s meeting was held in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with participants from 150 colleges and universities.
The task of engaging today’s students, who often have short attention spans, multiple distractions, and poor preparation, requires a constant search for effective means of instruction. At a previous ACTC meeting, I noted that some instructors use modern works to help students understand ancient ones (for example, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God can help women students appreciate the Odyssey). And modern movies can awaken students to the content of older novels (such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility).
Other pedagogical approaches turned up this year.
Elza Tiner teaches classical Latin at Lynchburg College in Virginia, where students are expected to absorb ancient Roman culture as well as learn the language. But Tiner is herself a medievalist, and thus somewhat new to teaching ancient Latin. She found that modern textbooks often adapt excerpts from classics into easier Latin or even write simplistic new articles, eschewing historical documents altogether. She wanted to give her students more of a challenge, and more fully engage them, by getting them to link their Latin learning with historical sources.
So Tiner required her students to become researchers. She told them to choose a topic, such as Aeneas or Romulus and Remus, and find primary sources of information. Yes, they could use Google, and the sources they found would undoubtedly exceed their translation abilities. But the experience would immerse them in Roman culture and acquaint them with the language’s challenges. Part of the students’ project was to write a summary, in Latin, of the source material they found.
The project was a success—especially for the first-year Latin students. “The beginners were out to prove that they could be researchers, find Latin texts, and read the original authors,” says Tiner.
López-Cortina and Tiner were just two out of the 310 people attending the meeting—ACTC’s biggest so far.
López-Cortina was pleased to attend a conference “where there was so much discussion on what to teach at the college level, and how to teach it.” He contrasted his experience with more typical academic meetings “where nothing is said that can be interesting to anyone outside of graduate school.”
As always, there was a range of sessions—77 in all—covering such topics as the precursors to Darwin, Christian humanism, and the literary side of the Enlightenment. And even though the subject matter is “core texts”—which to some mean “Great Books”—many of the texts are modern and not Western. Indeed, ACTC has encouraged the inclusion of world classics in core-text programs.
Personally, I didn’t like all the sessions I attended. The introduction of contemporary themes such as environmentalism seems to stretch the core-text concept. I was disappointed that one professor uses Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” as a core text. Jefferson’s random thoughts, which include negative racial comments, don’t seem to reflect the goals of teaching great works. The choice diminishes Jefferson and makes students uncomfortable by focusing on racial divisions, when the value of great writing is in helping us understand what is common to everyone.
There were some other lightweight texts in the program, too, and regrettably, the great political economy thinkers of the past, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, were mostly missing. In spite of their familiarity with the “traditional” works, ACTC members, like most members of humanities departments, seem to be economically liberal. Thus the great economic works of the Scottish Enlightenment, which underlie the modern understanding of markets and trade, don’t get the attention they deserve.
Even so, the focus on reading the classics is much to be admired. ACTC is growing, but no one knows for sure if core programs are expanding or declining nationwide. I sensed that they have stabilized, although one panel, “Departmental Resistance to Core Texts,” illustrates the institutional problem many programs face. I didn’t attend that session, but I know from my interview with Stephen Zelnick, one of ACTC’s founders, that core curricula are always at risk. Zelnick said that many faculty think that requirements to teach core curricula “violate their right to academic freedom, by which they mean the right to teach whatever they want and in ways that serve their own political commitments or research agendas.”
Add to that the increasing specialization that prevents many faculty members from knowing a large number of texts, and of course many are unwilling to teach them. And today’s emphasis on multiculturalism leads many faculty to reject the Western canon altogether.
Even so, if I had to bet, I would bet on the comeback of core programs, because they offer a way to engage the marginal student and because instructors who venture to teach them find the experience exhilarating. I was impressed that more major universities (Columbia this year, Yale next) are at least partial sponsors of ACTC meetings. These are good times for ACTC; at some point, that fact should translate into growth for the core programs themselves.