#5
Customarily when one is awarded the Ph.D. in anthropology he or she strives to find a job at a university and pursues tenure by publishing papers in academic journals, presenting at colloquia and symposia and the like, and defending his or her ideas among peers. But that was not the path I chose, more or less purposely.
It is part of the culture of higher education that the rewards in terms of status and salary are conferred virtually entirely on the basis of research and publishing. The ability to teach, to effectively deliver a live lesson, is not merely ignored as a factor in promotions, etc., but is actually viewed with skepticism or suspicion by administrators. That point of view is not as unreasonable as it might appear: The only objective way to evaluate a teacher’s performance is to measure the number of students who enroll is his courses. But popularity among students is not a trustworthy gauge of pedagogical excellence. Apart from the obvious problem of students being attracted to teachers who are easy, there is the deeper conundrum of students judging how much they’ve learned relative to what they still don’t know—that is, for instance, you can’t tell whether you’ve gotten a proper introduction to a subject without knowing what’s beyond the introduction. (This current value system dates back to Europe in the mid-19th Century when the practice was to elevate teachers on the basis of popularity, and the reaction among scholars to the weaknesses that it caused.)
But I wanted to teach, and circumstance put me in three positions. One was as an adjunct (part-time) at Stevens Institute of Technology, a small but highly rated engineering school in Hoboken, NJ, where I was living. All the non-technical courses at the school were housed in the Humanities department (or “Hum,” as in ho-hum, as the students were wont to say). I was the first anthropologist in the school’s history, and I was intrigued by the challenge of exercising a humanizing influence on these students, who were focused intensely and somewhat exclusively on their technical studies. Most were men and many were Asians.
To be succinct, I don’t know how much the students learned about anthropology, never mind humanity, but I learned a lot about teaching in this highly intelligent but detached if not skeptical (and occasionally hostile) environment—like a pilot stretching his skills by flying in combat. I recall arguing the practical value of knowing the history of ancient Egypt versus the ability to turn toothpaste into an explosive. (a debate that ended in a draw). So my few years there were instructive for me.
The second position I entered at the same time was teaching anthropology to eighth-graders at The Hudson School, a small middle school that had just opened, also in Hoboken. It was quite unknown at the time (and still is) for anthropology to be taught at the secondary level, let alone middle school, but Suellen Newman, who founded the school, offered me the chance to do so (part-time) and, as a teacher, I could not say no.
More about this situation later, but suffice it to say now that at Hudson, as at Stevens, I learned a lot as a teacher. And this was fun, even without the sexual dimension.
Maybe the primary lesson learned from kids is to be “real” because kids, being innocent, can see through a teacher’s defenses, which include complicating ideas he can’t explain—bullshitting—instead of simply admitting he doesn’t understand them—which students can better relate to—assuming, of course, the admission doesn’t happen too often. But even jaded adults, who are accustomed to exchanging bullshit, recognize candor and respond positively to it, and while bullshit might be endemic in democratic politics and other types of sales, it deserves no place in the classroom other than as a topic of discussion itself.
(I wish to take this opportunity to thank Harry Frankfurt of the Philosophy Department at Princeton for writing (and the University for publishing) On Bullshit, in which Prof. Frankfurt defines “bullshit” as speaking without regard to the truth—as distinct both from saying what one believes to be true and from lying, saying what one believes not be true—and thus providing a useful concept as well as legitimizing a vivid word long avoided as foul.)
However I learned the craft, my role as a teacher took off, and to some degree too much so, at The New School in New York City. (The New School was then a division of the New School for Social Research, a university that has since gone through two name changes, the first being the rather awkward “New School University” and is currently the rather awkward “The New School.”) But this one division of The New School was itself very unusual as an institution of higher learning. What is known as “continuing” or “adult” education, in which students enroll not for credit but for personal enrichment, was innovated here after World War II, and while this form of education had spread widely, The New School remained (to my knowledge) the only place where adult students were fully integrated into the classrooms with regular undergraduates seeking a degree. Socially, teenagers mixed with young professionals and old retirees, both in and outside the classrooms.
Basic academic standards had to be met for the credit students, but unlike other colleges, courses here were unabashedly designed to attract students, so an intended element of entertainment was common to most courses. If a course did not attract at least ten students, it was cancelled, and the teacher did not teach (nor was he paid). The curriculum of the school, that is, was entirely subject to market forces—an educational bazaar in which instructors posted their intellectual wares in a catalog that contained about two thousand offerings each year, some courses on ludicrously arcane topics (I will not cite an example out of respect for my former colleagues, but a reflection of the listings was the fact that the catalog was popular as bathroom reading throughout the greater metropolitan area). The point here is that teachers were evaluated entirely on their ability to attract students: There was no regular employment, much less tenure, so the reward for being popular was simply that one could continue teaching.
At The New School, I thrived. In my twenty years there, from, up to around the millennium, I held the unofficial record of having taught the most courses (about 80) of any instructor in the school’s history. The key to success for an instructor at The New School was to create new courses continually because, as the administrators at the school openly advised, a teacher had to cultivate a “student following”—those who were attracted to a teacher but would not, of course, take the same course repeatedly. So, also unofficially, I had taught the most different course titles (about 17)—all grounded in anthropology.
Anthropology is conceivably the most inclusive of any academic discipline since the subject is humanity and there is nothing that can be named that cannot be attributed to a person (because only humans name things) and therefore cannot be studied by the anthropologist. I was able to innovate courses focused on religion, cognition, cults, evolution, culture, primitives, intuition, family, gender, art, plus anthropology itself. Of course, there could not be an endless stream of innovation, so staple courses were repeated, and students came and went.
During my peak years the hard-core following at any one time was about twenty, with a total of perhaps 250 over the years. But of course the degree to which a student “follows” an instructor is on a spectrum and is not an “either/or” thing. An average class had 25 students, and I taught as many as five courses a year, so that a couple of thousand students came through in all, but by “hard-core” I mean those who took four or more of my courses, which would happen over a period of two years or so.
Now, to paint the picture accurately, the majority of the students at The New School were women, and they were about 3/4 of my classes (partly due to the fact that anthropology is not a fast track to making money, and the men tended to enroll in more “practical” subjects). Moreover, most of the women in my “following” were adult students. A good portion of the men who attended did so at least in part because there were so many women there.
The lessons presented in the classrooms fueled discussions in the sculpture garden that served as a “campus” and in the local cafes of Greenwich Village—settings of classic Athenian and Romantic cultures, respectively.
Even at this stage—and we have not gotten to the serious guru part—an irony began to impress itself on me. If there was a wisdom or message that was consistent throughout my courses, it was “think for yourself.” This grows out of the lessons in anthropology from the bewildering cornucopia of beliefs that leap out of the subject—beliefs that are not fictions or fantasies but realities experienced by real people—and which compels one to consider his own reality more carefully.
Yet this inculcating of independence of mind was the message supposedly being embraced by students who half-jokingly referred to themselves as a “cult.” This occurred even in a course I taught, titled Cults, in which we analyzed the very process by which individuals lose their independence of mind. It seemed in many if not most cases that “my” students were thinking for themselves but learned better how to do that through me—indirectly in my courses and then directly with the whys.
No Guru 