Lisa Delpit was at my Issues in Ed class this past Tuesday, and she asked everyone in the room why they went to college. A handful of the people in the room talked abouthow they were their “mothers retirement,” etc. but the majority of us in the room basically said we went to college just ‘because.’

It was startling to realize that, while I had a vauge I was going to college because I enjoyed that kind of academics and in theory it would help career-wise, I didn’t really have any clear purpose or answer to the question of ‘why.’ And without a purpose, Swarthmore can be a bit overwhelming and grinding. However, a lot of students at Swarthmore can (I believe) make ‘passionate intensity’ their purpose at Swarthmore; I think it is fairly easy to change the misery-poker-intensity of Swat into more of a passionate intensity, and I see a reasonable number of students doing so. In such cases, ‘because’ becomes enough of a reason. However, a lot of students don’t ever seem to make that transition though, and therein lies the real point of conflict, imho.

Perhaps one of the biggest impacts of Swarthmores intensity, passionate or not, is that it frequently discourages flexibility. I know many students who have sworn to never take another science/math course above and beyond the basic requirements. Lots of students applaud the ideals of liberal arts – we can be well-rounded! – and then ask “how can anyone manage to get 20 courses outside of major X?” . . . as freshmen.

Anyways, I’m not quite sure where I am going with this.

As always, I enjoy your posts.

Your post also reminded me of something Herb Kohl told my class recently: “It seems every teacher here is assigning dozens of articles a week, and every student here is only reading one or two of them.”

Another tradition that the University of Chicago has that ties in well with this post is the “Aims of Education” address given to incoming students every year by a distinguished faculty member. Of course, being incoming freshman we had a lot on our minds, and may not have fully appreciated sitting through a long talk. But there was definitely a seriousness to the tradition that rubbed off, and afterwards they broke up into smaller groups, and met in the dorms with various professors to discuss it.

I whole-heartedly agree with the call to encourage “passionate intensity.” I’m in math graduate school, and it seems to me at times that my field is particularly bad at this. It’s an elusive goal to work towards – the most effective instance I remember was simply running across a professor in the quads, who noted that my in-class comments were often in a particular vein, and that he looked forward to reading more of it in my paper. On the other hand, the professor who noticed that I lacked that intensity in his class and called me did nothing to inspire more.

Over the years I have been a part of many, many debates about curriculum and pedagogy, and invariably they center around two (usually competing) invocations: “This is how we’ve always done it” and “This is where the discipline is (or is headed).” Neither of those, for reasons that Tim indicates here and in other posts, is particularly helpful if you want to make substantive decisions that yield an exciting and challenging learning environment. I think I do a pretty good job of explaining to my students what I care about and why I care about it, but if they were to ask me how my decisions about the books they read and the paper they write were shaped by those deep concerns, I might stumble a bit. Because in many cases I assign what I think I ought to assign based on criteria quite unrelated to the matters I think so important. There’s a kind of false consciousness here that Tim is quite rightly encouraging us all to expose.