Knowledge Blooming
Robert André LaFleur
Underkofler Teaching
Award Acceptance Remarks
Beloit College
28 April 2011
Thank you Ms. Wink,
Mr. Adams, and Dean Davies. This award means a great deal to me, and precisely
because it is given at an institution that truly focuses upon the intellectual
engagement between teachers and students. I also cannot help but mention here
what is perhaps the most significant matter for me since I arrived at Beloit College
in 1998. At this very event, ten years and one day ago, I met for the first
time a vibrant new member of the college community, Patricia Zody, who had just
arrived that February. We went on to become the first marriage to emerge from
the original Freeman Grant (an anecdote that the Freemans always liked very
much), and she has been my greatest influence as a teacher and as a person.
I
Looking back over
the past decade, I cannot help but think of the enormous role that teaching has
played in my development as a scholar. No, you didn’t mishear. It is just that
in higher education circles we are so used to thinking about scholarship and
teaching as “opposed” realms that (relatively) rarely do we talk about how they
are beautifully and synergistically woven into a complex ball of intellectual
yarn. More than occasionally, we will talk about scholarship influencing
our teaching—how the article we have just written finds its way into a seminar
discussion here or a lecture there. It is a wonderful thing, and a significant
part of what we do.
I am speaking of
something slightly different, though, and I am delighted to say that I don’t
think that it could have happened with quite such positive results in many
other places. By this, I mean that Beloit College has offered me the
opportunity to go on what I like to think of as a ten-year reading and writing
program meant to bring me from the solid foundation I received in graduate
school in historiography, anthropological theory, and Chinese studies to new
dimensions of understanding in neurobiology, the philosophy of mind, and social
behavior, to name a few.
I have been able to
do that as a teacher, and for that I will always be grateful to Beloit
College. I have been free to develop a series of seminars that have had
us (students and teacher) hanging on to our objects of inquiry by the thinnest
of interpretive threads (or hermeneutic circles…or neural synapses).
It is not every
school—not even close to every fine liberal arts college—that has the patience
and confidence in itself and its mission to allow year-after-year of terrifying
seminars (a book a week, weekly “summary-reviews,” and a 10,000-word seminar
paper) on such topics as cognitive science, philosophy of consciousness, and
theories of history; the “long-view” history of Western anthropology, starting
with Herodotus and thinking it should really have been Homer; or even French
social theory from B to Z (Balzac to Zola). And that is not even to mention the
“one word” seminars that leave the interpretive path even more open to
students—Mountains, Itineraries, or even next semester’s partial word,
“—graphy.” It’s about writin’.
II
I have always known
that there is nothing more important than a deep intellectual curiosity—an
academic imagination—in all that we do. I have sought it in my own
academic life, and I have tried to instill it in my students, as well. I
will conclude here with a few thoughts that illustrate how much I believe that
imagination and rigor combine to create the kinds of classes in which both
students and professors learn deeply. Bear with me (briefly) while I tell
you a story of autumnal bloom.
In order not to take
up as much time and room as the long essay that I am writing on this topic
these days (check the blog in a few weeks), I shall compress a few parts.
1. First hearing of the Committee on
Social Thought (in college)
2. Packing for Taiwan—books, peanut
butter, notebooks, and Bloom (Republic)
3. Letter of acceptance from the
Committee on Social Thought (March 1987)
4. First reviews of Bloom's Closing
(April 1987)
5. Reviews cooling as the Taipei summer
warmed (what to make of this guy?)
So there I was, on a
warm Friday afternoon in early October of 1987, at the first of what would be
many Committee on Social Thought “sherry hours,” being introduced to Allan
Bloom. “Now which one are you?”, he asked, his whole long face—from the
rear of his bald head to his very focused nose—regarding me in a way
that told me my answer mattered. Really, it seemed to matter more
than it should. He must have better things to think about, I
mused—colleagues at whom to stare or departmental scores to settle—than the
background of a new graduate student. But he wasn’t distracted by the intellectual
and collegial tumult in the room. He kept staring at me, waiting.
Bloom, I already
knew, took students seriously. It was in the book—Closing.
This essay—a
meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the
young, and
their education—is written from the perspective of a teacher. Such
a
perspective, although it has grave limitations and is accompanied by
dangerous
temptations, is a privileged one. The teacher, particularly the teacher
dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of
human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now, ever
seeking to understand the former and to assess the capacities of the latter to
approach it. Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what
they
can digest, is the essence of the craft. One must spy out and elicit
those hungers.
For there is no real education that does not respond to felt
need; anything else is
trifling display.[1]
Trifling was the
last thing that came to mind when I first spoke with Bloom that day.
Display, however, was another matter. He was every bit the showman, and
he reveled in his booming question and even more so in the line that
followed.
“We take these
things very seriously, you see.”
Even then, for all
of his display, I could see the personification of his words. Real
education was about channeling energies, of tapping into human needs and,
indeed, longings. This last phrase was one I remembered from both his
interpretive essay in The Republic and Closing. I felt an
immediate kinship with him. Here was a person who, for three hundred pages
seemed utterly clueless about education, yet he had nailed it with the most
critical feature of all. He was saying something that only a few people beyond
Plato and Confucius bothered to say clearly. Unequivocally.
Over time, it is
what Bloom taught me to see in my own life. Eventually I learned just a
little bit about teaching it. It was something I already had—a longing and
passion for ideas, as important as eating or sleeping. I had also learned
(through painful socialization) that describing one’s passion for
knowledge is not something one does indiscriminately. It can clear a
room—or silence it, creating embarrassment for everyone except the speaker, who
fails to understand that such things are usually not mentioned in polite
company. Interest, yes. Passion, not so much. Let’s just keep to test
scores and not get “all emotional” about learning. Bloom wanted the
emotion. He wanted learning to matter. I do, too. It is as
simple—and powerful—as that.
I was ready to
answer this learned, quirky scholar with the strange new “popular book” about
big ideas and passion for learning.
“I am the one who spent the last two years in
Taiwan studying classical Chinese. I am interested in Chinese
historiography and political theory.” I had especially thought that the
last phrase would have an impact. I imagined an immediate segue into a
discussion of the parallels between Plato’s Statesman and Confucius's Analects. Or Rousseau’s and Mencius’s views on the
original nature of human beings and the consequences of social
degeneration. This was the very moment, I thought, when it all
begins—when my years of longing and study come together; when East meets West,
round meets square, and the heavens of China/Japan/Korea meet those of Europe
and the Americas.
“Oh…you.”
Before I could respond, Bloom was swept away by another faculty member needing
to talk about another matter. It was over in an instant, but the scene
cast a peculiar—and useful—shadow over the first years of my education at the
Committee on Social Thought. For Bloom, I was not exactly the enemy (I
could figure this much even in the otherwise deflating context), but I surely
was peripheral. If I had begun with any particular desire to
“please” the now famous author—or to join the small group of Committee students
who seemed to play the roles of acolytes—it was extinguished in those
moments. This was the best thing that ever could have happened to
me. I was free to begin the long process of figuring out exactly how and
where I did “fit” into the Western classics and the liberal arts.
Clearly, I would not be starting from the Bloomian center. I
finished my sherry and returned home to begin crafting my own plan…on my own.
III
I can say much more
about Bloom and his strange “influence/anti-influence” on my career. Check the
blog in June. That is not the point here. It was almost as though the
abrupt historical contingency of “oh, you” empowered me toward my own “teaching
of longing,” as it were. Partly because I was on my own, I was able
ultimately to benefit from Bloom’s idiosyncratic blend of annoyance and
brilliance (from which I would be alternately attracted and repelled in
subsequent years). I had to do it on my own—but not without him—and for
both I am grateful and fortunate.
*** ***
Flash forward
twenty-four years. At Beloit College, I have found a place where I have
continued what started on that autumn day when I began my studies at the
Committee on Social Thought. I can share my perspectives on books and ideas
with my colleagues, and expect the kind of engagement that will push me to new
perspectives on those texts and my own work. I have also found a place
where I have students who desire to learn in this same kind of inquisitive
way—understanding, even respecting, the recent history of academic disciplines,
but not being bound by them. I have found, in short, in my colleagues and
students, a place where the longing for meaning and introspection is not just talk.
That Bloomian channeling of intellectual passion takes place here
day-after-day and year-after-year. When we’re at our best, we are a
college that changes lives.
This award is for
all of us, and I will never forget that. All of us.
Notes
[1] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987), 19.
Bibliography
Bloom, Allan. The
Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
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