The experience of classroom teaching reminds me of the Churchmen dunned by Dante in Paradiso IX

The Fate of the College Teacher

By ROD DREHER


When I was in Wichita the other weekend, I gave my talk about how Dante saved my life, and then took questions from the audience. A young woman who looked like an older undergraduate, or perhaps a young graduate student, asked me why I trusted anything Dante said, since he used his poem to get revenge, of a sort, on the people who had wronged him in life. She called Dante a “sociopath.”

I didn’t understand her question. It seemed so … ridiculous that I didn’t know how to answer it. I had just spent an hour talking about the spiritual grandeur and moral depth of the Commedia, and how it transformed my life, and she wanted to know how I could take any of that seriously because Dante was cross with the people who exiled him. Where do you even begin with that?

I assume I handled the question badly. I don’t remember what I said to her. Probably something like, “Of course Dante was wrathful in this poem. He was a living, breathing human being! The saints weren’t perfect either; they were holy.” Mostly, I’m guessing I just stammered, floored by the pettiness of the point she was making.

After the talk, a young professor who observed how rattled I was by the question took me aside and said, “You need to know that that is how Dante is taught in universities today.” He was not endorsing it by any means; he seemed to be saying, “See what we are up against?”

I thought of that young teacher’s remarks when I read this great essay by Georgetown professor Jacques Berlinerblau, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Berlinerblau says that surprisingly few of his undergraduates aspire to become professors themselves. The miserable job market for humanities professors is a big part of it, he says, but there are other reasons. What nobody can plausibly deny, he says, is that the humanities professoriate is in free fall. Excerpt:

Like the downfall of an empire, the collapse of something as complex as the professoriate defies simple monocausal analysis. There is, undoubtedly, a multitude of factors that account for our plight. Many are beyond our control and culpability, like decreased public funding for higher education and America’s inveterate anti-intellectualism.

That said, we can and should be held accountable for all sorts of inanities. If the nation’s humanities faculty consulted a life coach, even a representative of that peppy and platitudinous guild would conclude that we have made some bad decisions. It was not unwarranted to pose political questions in our research. We erred, however, in politicizing inquiry to the extent that we did. There is nothing wrong with importing theory into studies of literature, art, cinema, and so forth. It was ill-advised to bring so much theory—and almost always the same dense and ideologically tinctured brand of it—to bear on our vast canon of texts and traditions.

But no decision we ever made could have been more catastrophic than this one: Somewhere along the way, we spiritually and emotionally disengaged from teaching and mentoring students. The decision—which certainly hasn’t ingratiated us to the job-seeking generation—has resulted in one whopper of a contradiction. While teaching undergraduates is, normally, a large part of a professor’s job, success in our field is correlated with a professor’s ability to avoid teaching undergraduates.

Berlinerblau talks about the perverse “publish or perish” culture, and its offshoots. He talks about his own rise in academia, and how the higher he rose, the fewer classes he had to teach. For an outsider like me, it’s completely bizarre. The professors I remember from my undergraduate years — and there were few of them — were those who imparted to me passion for knowledge. They were the professors who made me believe that the wisdom they shared with us was vital to living a meaningful life.

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