Yuck! Of course students revere the guy -- he tells them things authoritatively instead of encouraging them to embrace their uncertainties about how the world works and to become thinkers in their own right. It's always easy to impress students by telling them big-picture things that seem to encompass everyting they wonder about. What's harder but more valuable is to shut up, give them access to specialized knowledge, and get them to come up with their own syntheses all by themselves.
And actually, it's not clear to me how Brooks suddenly comes to conclude that universities need more generalists. Hill doesn't seem to be about generality.
I'm willing to cut Brooks more slack than most, but this piece really pissed me off too.
Over the years I've had several colleagues like that Professor Hill (none where I currently teach, though). They're insufferable: they tend not to keep up with their field, they exploit their students' (shall we say) Freudian tendencies -- not by sleeping with them but by turning them into authority-craving groupies -- thereby doing real damage to the students, and then they use their cult following with students against those among their colleagues with enough conscience to keep these 'charismatic' tendencies in check.
It's sickening, and many who teach in liberal arts colleges, when this sort of thing is common (I've taught at three), are on guard against it. But it only takes one 'charismatic' groupie-seeker, in cahoots with alumni-donation-seeking administrators and 'national greatness'-inspiration-seeking journalists, to ruin a department or a college and turn conscientious academics into total cynics.
At Yale, you presumably wouldn't be punished for refusing this pedagogical ideal. But at many liberal arts colleges, you are. Your contribution is measured by the number of students who idolize you.
Now don't get me wrong: it's easy to find students all too eager to idolize you. You spend a lot of time with them and eventually begin to see that they've internalized you, taking on your tone of voice and your gesticulations. Then if you have a conscience you say: I've gone too far, and you push the student away. It is not healthy, you think, for them to get so fixated on a single personality. But then you think, 'Hold on. These fixated students will help get me tenure/my next promotion/clout within the college/etc.' If you have a conscience you remain firm: 'So what, it harms the kid.'
If you don't have a conscience, you become like Professor Hill.
Yuck! Of course students revere the guy -- he tells them things authoritatively instead of encouraging them to embrace their uncertainties about how the world works and to become thinkers in their own right. It's always easy to impress students by telling them big-picture things that seem to encompass everyting they wonder about. What's harder but more valuable is to shut up, give them access to specialized knowledge, and get them to come up with their own syntheses all by themselves.
And actually, it's not clear to me how Brooks suddenly comes to conclude that universities need more generalists. Hill doesn't seem to be about generality.
Posted by Bob | Link to this comment | 07-20-04 3:55 PM
I don't want to pollute the one with GWB, but maybe we could consider doing a googlebomb linking David Brooks to the phrase "miserable failure."
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 07-20-04 4:02 PM
I'm willing to cut Brooks more slack than most, but this piece really pissed me off too.
Over the years I've had several colleagues like that Professor Hill (none where I currently teach, though). They're insufferable: they tend not to keep up with their field, they exploit their students' (shall we say) Freudian tendencies -- not by sleeping with them but by turning them into authority-craving groupies -- thereby doing real damage to the students, and then they use their cult following with students against those among their colleagues with enough conscience to keep these 'charismatic' tendencies in check.
It's sickening, and many who teach in liberal arts colleges, when this sort of thing is common (I've taught at three), are on guard against it. But it only takes one 'charismatic' groupie-seeker, in cahoots with alumni-donation-seeking administrators and 'national greatness'-inspiration-seeking journalists, to ruin a department or a college and turn conscientious academics into total cynics.
At Yale, you presumably wouldn't be punished for refusing this pedagogical ideal. But at many liberal arts colleges, you are. Your contribution is measured by the number of students who idolize you.
Now don't get me wrong: it's easy to find students all too eager to idolize you. You spend a lot of time with them and eventually begin to see that they've internalized you, taking on your tone of voice and your gesticulations. Then if you have a conscience you say: I've gone too far, and you push the student away. It is not healthy, you think, for them to get so fixated on a single personality. But then you think, 'Hold on. These fixated students will help get me tenure/my next promotion/clout within the college/etc.' If you have a conscience you remain firm: 'So what, it harms the kid.'
If you don't have a conscience, you become like Professor Hill.
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 07-21-04 1:18 PM