Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Ford Forum on July 25, 2024. With edits to match MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission.
It is the fatal habit of college professors to seek out and try to exploit “teachable moments,” occasions when events that grip the attention of our students can be made educational and edifying. Having been on college campuses for fifty years, I have experienced my share of those moments, first as a student and then as a teacher.
Needless to say, we seem to be in the midst of one such—seemingly interminable—moment, precipitated by the horrific events of—heaven help us if we forget—October 7, 2023.
The first response on my campus was to try to put that day into an historical and geopolitical context, focusing on the history of Jews and Muslims in the Middle East and on the alignment of forces around an ambitious regional hegemon—Iran—and other powers seeking to prevent its dominance—the Sunni states and Israel, among others. Later, my colleagues in communications sought to provide students with the tools to become more sophisticated as consumers of news and information. Finally, I brought together a diverse group of alumni with Middle east experience and connections to share how their liberal education helps them think and talk about such fraught and contentious issues.
From the faculty point of view, all these events, held in the fall, were successful. What we needed to hear and to learn is that some students regarded them all as pro-Israel, a fact brought home to me when one student loudly declared in a spring event that if we faculty didn’t agree with his point of view, he and his followers—they can, unfortunately, be described in no other way—had nothing more to learn from us.
I’m not going to give up attempting to teach, but my agenda is changing a bit. Without further ado, here’s what I’ll be “teaching” about now. The list isn’t exhaustive, and I’m not exactly single-minded or narrowly focused. Every class on Aristotle or John Locke isn’t going to be about current events.
- I have introduced “the Jewish question” in classes where it’s appropriate. Welcome to the syllabus, Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” and Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. The latter, written by a leader of the Prussian Jewish community in the late 18th century, regarded by Immanuel Kant as a philosopher of the first rank, affords me the opportunity to give students a glimpse of Jews as an “otherized” and oppressed minority seeking emancipation, i.e., something other than the “genocidal settler colonialists” everyone is chanting about from the barricades. At the end of his work, Mendelssohn worries about fanaticism from the dominant Christian majority, but also from atheists: “Zeal is frightful when it takes possession of an avowed atheist, when innocence falls into the hands of a tyrant who fears all things but no God.” Amen, brother Moses, amen.
- I’ve had students look at classic arguments for toleration, raising the question of whether reason is sufficiently powerful and influential on its own to sustain them. Locke, Mendelssohn, and Max Weber, among others, raise legitimate doubts about this. I can’t say that current events tell a different story.
- The conduct of the war in Gaza certainly opens questions about just war theory, both jus ad bellum—the right to go to war—and jus in bello—the conduct of the war. An evenhanded treatment requires that we look at the deportment of both sides. And, as a conversation with an alumna—a law professor and USAF reserve JAG officer—reminded me, these issues can be addressed both in terms of positive law—international conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice—and natural law—from St. Thomas to Suarez, Grotius, and Vattel. My slogan is “fewer slogans, more study and conversation.”
- I’ve had occasions recently to talk to my students about freedom of speech and the First Amendment. These FAQs from FIRE provide an excellent point of departure, especially with their focus on neutral time, place and manner restrictions and their emphasis on the distinction between public and private universities. All of this is news to the students with whom I speak, so I’ll keep saying it to anyone who’ll listen and even to some who won’t.
- But it’s possible to focus too narrowly on First Amendment and freedom of speech issues, as the otherwise excellent David French does. The university is a particular kind of institution that exists not just as a public forum to permit and facilitate free speech but also, and above all, to engage in education and research. We can discuss and need to discuss the distinction between freedom of speech and academic freedom and to reflect seriously on the purpose of higher education.
- One of the challenges in conducting this latter discussion comes from the growth on campus of faculty who describe themselves as scholar-activists. For them, the distance between the study or the classroom and the street or the barricades is vanishingly small. I am tempted to regard this self-description as a contradiction in terms. “Scholar,” after all, is derived from the Greek word “schole,” which means leisure. The relationship between politics and genuine leisure—by which I don’t mean staring at a screen—is worth talking about.
- My scholar-activist colleagues might defend themselves by criticizing “the neo-liberal university,” an enterprise devoted to the service of “late capitalism.” O.K., let’s talk. Yes, we all teach for money, which makes us all in the strict sense of the term sophists. To what degree do our interests—personal, political, and/or economic—distort our research, scholarship, and teaching? Are we capable of actually forming a collegium, or are we just working in a Hobbesian state of nature where we should be grateful that most of us have an ideological aversion to gun ownership?
- And, lest you think that it’s only the Marxist long march through the institutions that has brought us to this pass, I give you Robert Nisbet’s The Degradation of Academic Dogma, written more than fifty years ago, where he argues that the post-World War II marriage of the university and government-sponsored research created a class of academic entrepreneurs who sought power and influence at the expense of teaching and scholarship. Power, Thomas Hobbes reminds us, comes in a variety of forms. My scientist colleagues might really like those NSF or DoD grants. Others of us might have to settle for the adulation of students or the number of social media followers we have. Let’s get to work on knowing ourselves, as Socrates called us to do.
- I’ll end with Socrates, who learned a thing or two from Aristophanes, who lampooned him in The Clouds. One lesson he learned is that those who wish to study and to teach have to pay careful attention to the impact of these enterprises on the society and polity in which they’re embedded. I’m very grateful for the vast wealth and pluralism of a country that has enabled me to lead a life I love for these fifty years. I owe that country something. Part of my debt can be paid by trying to educate students to become thoughtful and responsible citizens. Even if they don’t seem to be listening closely at the moment, I have to keep seizing those teachable moments.
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