The Student-Hero

The average college-aged student is already very similar to the hero in a heroic journey. She arrives on campus as a stranger in a strange land, something of an orphan. She is insecure, skeptical, conflicted, and
confused, just like Odysseus, Luke Skywalker, Dorothy, Alice, and Harry Potter at the beginning of their journeys. In less fantastical settings we could also cite Michael Corleone in The Godfather or Will Hunting in Good Will Hunting, himself a college student. If we are successful in translating the metaphor, we will help the student-hero go through something other than a typical journey or adventure: she will do more than triumph over evil, learn a moral lesson, experience an emotional catharsis, or rediscover her former self. If we offer the student a true heroic journey, she will transform herself into someone of a different nature, more mature, wiser, and able to adapt to other worlds. The measure of this transformation will be her readiness to assume adult responsibilities, especially a leadership role (heroes often become kings or queens). By the end of it all she becomes, as it were, a different animal, a butterfly from a chrysalis.

The Call to Action and Crossing the First Threshold

How do we help this transformation along, as faculty, as administrators, as an institution? We would begin with a “Call to Action,” a challenge that expands the student-hero’s horizons and asks him to do much more than he currently thinks himself capable of doing. Such is the call that Athena, the original “Mentor,” gives the diffident Telemachus, whose father Odysseus is gone from home and whose mother’s suitors are besieging his house. It is a call that demands a public performance, making difficult decisions, traveling to strange places, and confronting one’s foes:

Take my advice, call the Achaean heroes in assembly tomorrow — lay your case before them, and call heaven to bear you witness. Bid the suitors take themselves off, each to his own place, and if your mother’s mind is set on marrying again, let her go back to her father, who will find her a husband and provide her with all the marriage gifts that so dear a daughter may expect. As for yourself, let me prevail upon you to take the best ship you can get, with a crew of twenty men, and go in quest of your father who has so long been missing. Some one may tell you something, or (and people often hear things in this way) some heaven-sent message [kleos] may direct you. — Homer’s Odyssey (1.272–283). Translation by Samuel Butler and revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy.

That the student-hero should feel reluctant to undertake such a momentous task is only natural; he will no doubt think of others who have failed and wonder if he has what it takes. In Star Wars Luke Skywalker’s call to action is an appeal to deliver the stolen plans of the Death Star to the rebel alliance and become a Jedi Knight in the process. Lacking in confidence, he initially insists that he cannot because he is a just a farmer and not a hero like his father. In Good Will Hunting Will resists psychological counseling because, being too confident in his intelligence, he insists no counselor could tell him anything new about himself. Nevertheless, both are eventually brought around.

One way both to call our students to action and to bring them around to the challenge might be to assign a “Common Text” about a heroic journey before students even arrive on campus. This would give them a formal understanding of the main structures of their prospective educational experience, and it would help them understand the benefits of structuring it in this way.

Once the student has accepted the challenge, she would undergo the so-called “Crossing of the First Threshold,” a point of no return that we might call “following the White Rabbit down the hole.” In such a situation, the student-hero must become resigned to the fact that her world is going to be drastically different from hereon out. Her focus must be on completing the journey and not on finding ways to short-circuit it by picking easy classes or casting about in the hive of social media. The faculty and administration must be focused on introducing the student to a world that is far more wondrous, complex, and stressful than the one the student has abandoned. This introduction could be achieved by a series of freshmen courses designed to expand the student’s awareness of the world and the complex problems that adults try to solve. It might even be advisable for the administration to make it more difficult, or even impossible, for students to withdraw from classes, since the temptation to do so becomes greater as a course becomes more challenging. It is not a true heroic threshold if the student knows she can easily “return home” at any moment. The fear and frustration of being trapped in an alien land forces the hero to assume responsibility and figure out what really matters to her, just as Dorothy learns the true meaning of home on her quest to see the Wizard of Oz.

Clarifying Trials: Monsters and Alien Cultures

After student-hero crosses the First Threshold, we would want to give him a series of trials. These trials are crucial at the beginning of the journey (say, in the student’s first year), but they should continue throughout. They should be hard, disorienting, and push the student to his limits (Dorothy almost dies in the tornado that hits her Kansas home. Luke loses his hand in his first confrontation with Darth Vader). Accordingly, the trials may accomplish several of our goals for the student: to hone his skills in reading, writing, and mathematics; to give him greater knowledge of his talents and weaknesses; or to help him understand his destiny and life goals. Ultimately, we would want him to figure out what he likes and doesn’t like, what he’s capable of, and what possible quests he might go on, either inside the university or outside. The administration and faculty should also make it readily apparent what kinds of paths previous students have followed. They should make it clear what kinds of paths are currently available to students with certain talents and training. By participating in this process, the student will be reenacting some of the same clarifying trials that Luke himself goes through. In Star Wars: A New Hope Luke rushes to save his aunt and uncle from an attack of Stormtroopers, but comes to realize that his attempt was futile and could have been deadly (students, too, must learn what battles are winnable). He consequently resolves to become a Jedi Knight and to fight evil on a larger front. Later, in The Empire Strikes Back, Luke skillfully duels the apparition of Darth Vader, only to learn that his own fear and aggression caused the apparition to materialize. This trial is described by his mentor Yoda as Luke’s “failure in the cave.” Yet this failure serves as a lesson for Luke to control his emotions in the face of evil. When Luke later duels the real Darth Vader, he learns that Vader is his father, a revelation that complicates Luke’s journey but also gives him a deeper sense of what he is capable of becoming, for good and for evil.

We might also require students to navigate foreign or adult environments, as heroes often do. Odysseus in many clever ways adapts himself to the hostile cave of the Cyclops and to the seductive palace of the witch Circe. His son, Telemachus, undergoes his own heroic journey by participating in adult conversation with two great heroes of the Trojan War, Menelaus and the aged Nestor. Telemachus’ example can help us clarify the purpose of study-abroad programs. It is not so much for the student to learn things on these programs (though this is certainly a key component), but to absorb and adapt to an unfamiliar environment. More than simply taking classes, going on bus-tours, or visiting museums, student-heroes must learn to speak the language, navigate the modes of travel, and maybe even live with, eat with, and collaborate with the “natives.” In an extreme case the student may even “go native” for a time. Whatever the degree of adaptation, the student-hero is never “along for the ride,” passively responding to what is served to her. Her major choices are all to be integrated into the larger narrative of the quest; so, for a student hoping to open her own restaurant one day a semester in France might entail achieving fluency and learning to cook French food by living with a Parisian family.

In addition to alien societies, the hero also faces wondrous monsters that he must kill or avoid, e.g., the Sphinx, the Sirens, Sauron, Lord Voldemorte, the Queen of Hearts, the Wicked Witch of the West. Sometimes the hero may simply tame the monster. Luke discovers that his mortal enemy, Darth Vader, may be redeemed to the good side of the Force with patience and compassion. Often the encounter with a monster highlights or hones the hero’s traits, whether strength, speed, resourcefulness, skill with a weapon, or some ethical virtue. Thinking of student trials as slaying monsters could be very helpful. Rather than focus on grades or even a future job — both of which might be consequences of the trials — students could see themselves as tackling “monsters” like injustice, poverty, malice, ignorance, ugliness, and sorrow, each of which has a certain nature to be overcome with special skills, weapons, and virtues.

Some trials involve disguise or becoming someone else; heroes may dress up as villains, just as the Scarecrow et al. do to infiltrate the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West to rescue Dorothy. There they may even explore their capacity for evil: killing, stealing, deceiving. When Luke Skywalker faces the aforementioned apparition of Darth Vader, he beheads him only to discover that the face inside the head is actually his own. Student-heroes should also explore different roles, even those of a different gender, age, or culture, as a process of self-definition and of understanding others. Whether this process is enacted in the student’s imagination through art (film, literature, paintings, sculpture) or in practice would depend on the character and sensibilities of the particular university.

All of these trials, whether of monsters or alien societies, are temporarily traumatic yet central to the hero’s self-definition and maturation.

If we want our trials at the university to have a similar effect, we will need to be honest with our students. We cannot inflate their grades to build their self-esteem or to avoid wrangling; we will likely need to fail some of them in order to help clarify their quest. Some of them will need to know that their goals are unreasonable given their talents and career options. We must be equally careful, however, to call attention to a student’s real talents and to suggest the kinds of monsters they might be most suited to face.

Planning the Journey

Beyond facing a series of trials that we would more or less engineer for them, student-heroes will need to determine, self-consciously, what their crowning achievement is going to be at college. This achievement
may take the form of a final research project, but it should be integrated with what kind of monster the student hopes to confront after college. We might begin the process by posing a simple question to the student like, “What monster do you hate more, sorrow or injustice — and why?” This question could similarly be influenced by the kinds of “monsters” the university itself has decided to confront as part of its mission. For her part the student should actively decide how to get to the end of the journey and what will be needed along the way, including the skills, knowledge, and technology (weaponry). This final journey may be undertaken alone or, as often in the case of heroic journeys, in collaboration. It may even be the case that in such a collaborative quest, the student acquires additional self-knowledge. Whereas she may have initially seen herself as a warrior (a business woman), she now realizes that she can make a better contribution to the group as a wizard (a professor).

Aid from the Mentor

At any point in the journey, heroes may receive aid from a mentor. This aid may take numerous forms. Mentors may train heroes to practice a particular skill (often a sophisticated and ancient one). They may train them to use a magical implement or give them this implement, like a light-saber or Excalibur. They may help the hero make ethical or tactical decisions. Mentors may also hint at the kind of quest a hero should undertake. For example, Glenda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz instructs Dorothy, rather cryptically, to “follow the yellow-brick road.” Mentors are actively involved in the hero’s life, but may die or otherwise depart from the journey; this is necessary because the hero must learn to make meaning and act independently. Heroes are often lonely, solitary figures, and their story is always in some way unique: no one else can fully understand it much less enact it. But it is in these moments of greatest solitude that heroes often discover and define who they are.

Ultimately, the secret to the mentor’s art lies in timeliness and proportion, giving the aid just when it is needed and in the right dosage. As the Gray Wizard Gandalf in Lord of the Rings tells Frodo, “A wizard is never late, nor is he early; he arrives precisely when he means to.”

If we the faculty are to be true mentors to our students, we must be aware of the roles we can play in their lives, as well as those we should not play. It is not enough to supply the proper structures for the student’s journey and then teach her things. We should continually help students see themselves as heroes on a journey and all that this journey entails. One way of doing this university-wide would be to develop a heuristic that all faculty engage the student in, even on an informal level:

• What are you questing for?
• Where are you in your quest?
• What clarifying trials have you had lately? What do they reveal about you?
• Do you need some more or different trials?
• What monsters are you confronting? Do you understand the nature of these monsters?
• Do you know about a similar quest that a former student-hero at this university underwent?
• Did you know that I tried and failed in some of the same endeavors when I was your age?

Administrators could facilitate this process by ensuring that faculty have many informal opportunities to interact with students in a cafeteria, gym, or lounge. On a grander scale, universities could have designated learning communities or “houses” (like Gryffindor or Slytherin from the Harry Potter series) that serve as activity centers for faculty and students with common interests. Faculty members should also be compensated (or relieved of other responsibilities) for making such mentorship a priority.

The Final Achievement

At the end of the quest, the hero will become known and eventually celebrated for one crowning achievement, which often entails a glorious prize or “holy grail” (e.g., Jason and the Argonauts winning the Golden Fleece). This Final Achievement may be the taming of a monster, but, unlike the previous clarifying trials, it will become the foundation of the hero’s glory and reputation in the community.

Moreover, the Final Achievement confirms that the hero is an adult for having completed a great rite of passage and is now recognizably distinct from the person at the beginning of the quest. In myth the achievement usually involves “saving the world, ”either by defending a village from villainous foe, rescuing a child from a monster, or averting a natural disaster. Wealth, glory, or luxury may result from this Final Achievement but they are seldom, if ever, pursued for their own sake. Luke’s crowning achievement as a Jedi is not a physical prize, but rather the redemption of his father, both an act of civilized skill (defeating his father in a light-saber duel) and an act of compassion, especially his resisting the Oedipal impulse to supplant his father. What he “wins” is affirmation from his father that he is a Jedi Knight and that he was “right” to believe that his father was capable of redemption.
The Final Achievement for a student should also be the culmination of her trials, her experiences, and her choices. It should be as public as possible, either a performance, or a presentation, or a publication. As many members of the academic community as possible should know about it and celebrate it. The student should know well in advance that the community expects it to be something that demonstrates the student’s fitness to be a participating member of the adult community.

Homecoming and the Neverending Story

Sometimes for the hero the Final Achievement in the quest is reaching home safely (e.g., Odysseus in the Odyssey). Such a return comes with a higher station in the community, founded on glorious deeds or prizes and the wisdom gained through experience. Moreover, sometimes a heroic journey gives rise to further iterations (or sequels), in which the hero will undergo different journeys, but will also become a mentor to new generations of heroes. In subsequent stories in the Star Wars expanded universe, Luke opens a school for Jedi Knights. For his homecoming, the student-hero may return to his actual home and try to save it; or he may put down roots in a new area, now with a cosmopolitan sensibility about how to deal with strangers and adults.

From this point on, each student-hero will enact the heroic journey again and again in life, this time with the comfort of knowing something about how the story should go, though ultimately the unpredictability of the story is part of the fun! Just as importantly, the student-hero can become a leader, i.e., a mentor or benefactor to a new generation of heroes at the university. Perhaps these former student-heroes will identify better trials to clarify the quest of these future heroes (e.g., by sponsoring a scholarship for study abroad); or they may find a way to outfit students with cutting-edge weaponry to tackle the ever-renewing hydra of human problems (e.g., by donating a new computer lab). It might be enough if a student-hero simply leaves behind “magical” tokens and riddles that will inspire and guide new students, like a trophy or a lucky sweater — or a creative form of scholarship.

The Benefits of the Heroic Journey Metaphor

A significant, but perhaps not-so-obvious benefit to this approach is its prescriptive potential. The heroic journey metaphor places clear responsibilities on both students and faculty. The student can no longer think of an education as a series of “credits” or “hoops” and “hurdles” to be overcome; instead there are “trials” to be encountered that are designed to clarify two things: reveal the student’s talents and hone the student’s passions. Experiences on campus that cannot be so understood should be eliminated. The student-hero is expected to crave the excitement, the danger (of success and failure), the competition, and the glory contained in these trials. The hero is never “along for the ride” but continually chooses one path over another. Moreover, the student is always discouraged from thinking of an education as a means to a certain job or career.

A job or career (money, fame, luxury — even knowledge) may be the consequence of the heroic journey, but the essence of the quest is always “to save the world.” After all, slaying monsters is more fun than making money for a person of any age.

The faculty have their responsibilities, too. No longer will it do to assert that the benefits of a course include only “critical thinking skills” and “broadened sensibilities.” In their role as mentors, faculty would be expected to present students with clarifying trials and train them to understand and confront “monsters,” much like the wizards in “Harry Potter” teach courses on making potions and casting spells. Beyond this, they must somehow ensure that each student is learning to narrate her own heroic journey, a task that may involve much more one-on-one time than faculty are used to sharing or even enabled to share (given the teaching loads at many schools).

Another benefit to the heroic journey metaphor is that it mandates moral and prosocial behavior, if for no other reason than that the heroic journey is about becoming integrated into society and societies (even societies of thieves demand moral behavior from their members). Beyond this, heroes are expected to discover themselves through trials. Of course the student-hero must passionately desire to know what his talents are, but his weaknesses must also be understood and owned. He may need to fail in order to discover them clearly. Cheating in one of these trials would only deprive the student-hero of self-knowledge. To use a particular example, if a university determines that writing is the kind of trial that every student must undergo as part of the rite of passage, it will be unacceptable for the student to commit plagiarism, because this act deprives the student of self-knowledge. This is not to say that plagiarism deprives the student simply of the knowledge that “I am a bad writer” (the student probably already knows this), but it deprives the student of the knowledge (or of the acknowledgement) of exactly how he is a bad writer and how vital writing is to most anything the student will want to do to save the world. If, in an extreme case, the university has determined writing to be essential to the hero’s quest but the student-hero has some quest in mind that would not require proficiency in writing, then it would probably be best to encourage the student to select another university, if such a one exisits. Students should not be allowed, nor ever want to choose “the quick and easy path” to completing the trials that a university has deemed vital for the quest. And if the university asserts that certain clarifying trials are crucial to completing a quest, it must expend every effort to ensure the integrity of those trials.

A final benefit to the heroic journey metaphor is that, once adopted, it is very easily grasped by all members who need to grasp it. It transcends the uninspiring (if necessary) administrative language about credit hours, delivery, student-learning outcomes, core curriculum, and “academic excellence.” Most importantly, the metaphor meets students on their own terms, as many of them will have seen or read about hundreds of heroic journeys, even if they have not yet processed them in formal terms.

A salutary consequence of the fact that the heroic journey is so readily understandable to the student is that after graduation she will be in a perfect position for self-characterization and self-presentation, one manifestation of which is the so-called elevator speech.

Student-heroes would be able to narrate — with poetic fluidly and color — what they quested for, what trials they faced, what they achieved, and what they were transformed into as a result of their journey. In such a scenario, the graduate’s fitness for a particular career path would be readily apparent to both the graduate and the employer. The graduate’s ability to narrate his journey would clarify compatibility in other areas as well: friendships, romantic partnerships, business propositions, or leadership roles.