Have the Humility to Learn
Reflections on Teaching at Stanford University
Many years ago, I taught a multicultural introduction to the humanities at Stanford. The course, required of all first-year students, was widely criticized and eventually eliminated, but most critics on both the left and the right failed to understand why the course was so unpopular with students.
Cultures, Ideas, and Values developed partially in response to student protestors who chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!" In place of the previous Western Civilization course that had been required of all undergraduates, faculty created a program with multiple tracks (I taught in the philosophy track) that featured not only some of the classic “great books” of the Western canon, but also works by women, people of color, and non-European civilizations.
The first-year students in the course read classic texts from multiple traditions, like Homer’s Odyssey and the Bhagavad Gita, the sayings of Confucius and the New Testament, St. Augustine’s Confessions and Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Sappho and Beauvoir. There were lectures that contextualized the readings, explained some of the trickier points, and suggested issues to think about. Each student was also assigned to a small seminar group, in which graduate students (like me) led discussions on the readings. Students wrote brief weekly reaction papers to help them keep up with the readings, as well as longer essays to allow them to go into greater depth. They got detailed feedback on the longer essays, and also had the option of meeting with the instructors one-on-one in office hours.
Sounds like a great course, doesn’t it? It was! It was a spectacular opportunity to learn. And the students at Stanford utterly despised it. After a few years, the course was eliminated.
There was plenty of discussion about why the course didn’t seem to be working. The most vocal critics were almost always people who were not directly involved with the course, and the problems they diagnosed usually had to do with failures in the content or teaching of the course. In my opinion, they all missed the mark. Any course can be taught better. But as the description above suggests, the basic structure of this course was almost idiot-proof. How bad could a course like the one I described be?
So if the fundamental problem was not the course content, structure, or teaching, what was it?
The students who get into schools like Stanford have generally been the best at everything in their young lives. They are valedictorians and salutatorians. They are concert violinists at age 16 or Olympic class athletes. They are articulate, at least in a glib way. And they have learned to seem “cool” while doing it. I am told that the unofficial motto of Balliol College at Oxford is “effortless superiority,” which also sums up the aspiration I found among students at Stanford.
Imagine one of these students in their first discussion session as an undergraduate:
- Instructor: “So are you persuaded by Plato’s argument in the Republic that the wisest and most educated should rule society?”
- First-year Student: “No, because truth is relative, so who is to say who is wise?”
- Instructor: “Ah, but if you say that truth is relative, is the truth of that statement itself relative?”
- First-year Student: “Uhhh — but Plato isn’t, like, relevant and stuff.”
- Instructor: “You students here are being trained to be the future lawyers, physicians, senators, scientists, and other experts who will run society. How is your claim to power based on your education different from that of Plato’s philosopher kings and queens?”
- First-year Student: “Uhmm…”
The student is experiencing what the people of Athens experienced at the hands of Socrates. Socrates buttonholed people who were confident about their knowledge and intelligence, and punctured that confidence by asking simple questions like What do you mean? How do you know that? What would you say about this counterexample? Of course, the Athenians put Socrates to death for doing this, so can we imagine that undergraduates are any more happy with this treatment?
It only gets worse when the student gets his or her first graded essay back. Not all students can get an A on any one assignment, or an A would cease to mean anything. (And I teach in philosophy, one of the few disciplines that is holding the line against grade inflation.) Many freshmen end up getting an A- or even (God forbid!) a B+ for the first time in their lives. In the words of one student, “But…I always get an A!”
Honestly, some of those Bs were pretty generous. I still remember the very first essay I graded as a teaching assistant: it included the phrase, “One of the basic tenements of Confucianism is….” Another student asked me hopefully, “When you circle a word and write ‘word choice’ beside it, do you mean good word choice?” And I will never forget the sign in the student-run coffee house on campus that read, “In lieu of our best efforts, the espresso machine is broken.” (Yes, I am sure that was not clever irony.)
There were two ways students reacted to discovering their own fallibility. Some rose to the challenge: “Ouch. Well, time for the humility required for genuine learning.” Unfortunately, many went for a second option: “I am a great student! The tutors my parents paid for always told me so! My college professors are the problem.”
Based upon their particular preferences, these students would pick a rationalization for why the problem was something other than their own unwillingness to be challenged. “This course has a liberal bias” or “this course has a conservative bias.” “Too much non-Western philosophy” or “why not more non-Western philosophy?” “The teachers don’t give us a chance to think for ourselves” or “the teachers don’t give us any guidance for writing our essays.” “Too much literature” or “too much philosophy” or “too much history” or too little of any of those things.
In fairness, it is difficult for a course like Cultures, Ideas, and Values to flourish at any research university. Institutions like Stanford reward faculty for being narrow specialists who focus on their research. In contrast, broad humanities courses require polymaths who are willing to teach topics way outside their areas of specialization.
In addition, my experience was that senior faculty were happy to give a one-off lecture for the program, and offer their opinions about why the program wasn’t popular, but were less enthusiastic about actually getting involved in the nuts-and-bolts of running the program. The philosophy track I taught in was supervised by an adjunct faculty member from the School of Education: an aging hippie who gave the final lecture of the course wearing a clown outfit. (No, I’m not making this up.)
I am advised that Cultures, Ideas, and Values was eventually replaced by Thinking Matters. Students can complete this requirement with a diverse variety of courses, including “The Spirit of Democracy,” “Understanding China through Film,” and “Our Genome.” These seem like interesting and challenging courses, but the vision of a common humanities curriculum has been abandoned.
This is unfortunate, because there is a lot to be said for the educational value of giving students the common language afforded by a shared curriculum. The advocates of “Great Books” programs of the early 20th century were not wrong about the value of reading, discussing, and writing about “the best that has been thought and said.” But we live in a world that is increasingly multicultural. So any responsible common curriculum should include works from a variety of traditions.
Is it possible to successfully teach a genuinely multicultural introduction to the humanities? I know that it is, because I have seen it done. I taught for several years at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, which has a very successful two-semester multicultural introduction to Philosophy and Political Thought. Yale-NUS has succeeded in doing what Stanford’s Cultures, Ideas, and Values failed to do. One reason for the success of this course is that Yale-NUS is a liberal arts college, with faculty who are enthusiastically committed to undergraduate teaching on topics outside their areas of research specialization. I was continually inspired and amazed by how creatively, energetically, and effectively my colleagues at Yale-NUS worked to make their multicultural introduction to philosophy a success.
Another part of the reason for the success of Philosophy and Political Thought is the students. Yale-NUS faces its own issues, but a student body committed to experiencing a “tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority” is not one of them. I want to stress that I’m not picking on Stanford University or Stanford students. I got a great education there, working with scholars from the departments of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and East Asian Languages, who are among the best in the world. And I did have the honor of teaching many wonderful students at Stanford, students genuinely excited about learning. Furthermore, the details above are based on my experience of more than thirty years ago, so things may be quite different at Stanford now.
But there is a timeless lesson here that is not limited to that course, not limited to Stanford or any other elite institution, and not even limited to learning in school. (Sorry for burying my lede in the final paragraph.) The moral is that whoever you are and wherever you are in your career, there will come times when you realize that your understanding is not as deep as you realized, or that you need to develop a new skill set. Confucius said, “To learn and to continually work at it — is this not a joy?” He was right about the potential for learning to be an endless source of joy, but that joy is only possible when you also have the honesty and humility needed to learn. If you find yourself saying, “I am a great salesperson; my clients are the problem,” or “I am a great employee; my boss is the problem,” or “I am a great attorney, the judge is the problem” — you may be in need of the humility to learn.
If you’d like to try teaching a multicultural introduction to philosophy, here is a link to a directory with my teaching materials for Philosophy and Political Thought, including syllabi, handouts, supplemental materials, and my PowerPoint lectures. For some of my lectures, videos are available on Youtube.