As part of a new regular opinions series, “Office Hours,” we aim to feature a range of faculty voices on higher education and specific questions relating to Swarthmore College. We believe that students, staff, and other faculty could greatly benefit from reading professors’ diverse perspectives which many in the community may not have ever considered. This week, we asked professors to share their thoughts on what the role of professors should be in the service of a liberal arts education. Here are their responses:
Alba Newmann Holmes, Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Associates Program
As an undergraduate (at [University of Chicago]), I was struck by a passage from Moby Dick in which Melville says, “All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her seas …” We live in a moment that is so crowded with thinking that is neither deep nor earnest, and definitions of independence have largely been uncoupled from the kind of profound self-reflection Melville describes here. The role of a professor at a liberal arts college is to partner with students to make room for this inquiry and self-reflection. To do this, we draw on our expertise, but we also draw beyond our expertise, because depth includes exploring connections — between bodies of knowledge, between humans and their concerns. And that kind of work is especially possible at an institution of our size. Open independence, for me, means having the space to consider not only what I think, but why I think it. That is the foundation on which to build future discoveries, as well as future relationships.
Diane Anderson, Associate Professor of Educational Studies
“You know this already.”
Our obligation to teaching Swarthmore College liberal arts students in this challenging moment includes creating space for what they know and what they can do and rigorous ways of expanding their capacity to think critically and expansively. Further, this campus is the perfect place to help them to redefine who and what they think of as their community.
Whether I am teaching in the college classroom, working with staff and students through the Learning for Life program, or doing professional development in Sikkim, I begin with what others know: their voices, their experiences, their ideas, and what they care about. It’s funny and fundamental that people want to be respected for what they know, their skills and experiences, how and what they care about. This community includes all who teach and learn on this campus: students, faculty, and all staff included.
This allows all of us to play with theories — those of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and Lave & Wenger — in order to deepen our appreciation for complexities, our own intelligences, a multitude of ways of learning, and one another. Learners write and speak their own experiences, such as literacy autobiographies, hear one another’s, and contextualize them in theories and histories. This seems an important responsibility for a teacher, including in this current moment.
Students have reason to feel anxiety, despair, and fear. I think I owe it to them to make space to engage with one another critically as a community, but to not slip into simply criticizing. We need to find ways to be strategic, both politically and personally. At Swarthmore we do not always tend to our bodies and our well-being, often because of how deeply we care. For me this also means modelling behaviors: showing how a person can change their mind, share uncertainties, apologize, take and give care, and find some love and joy. To pay good attention.
I am inspired by a book titled “We Make the Road by Walking” (edited interviews of the critical educators Paulo Freire and Myles Horton), scholar/teacher Gholdy Muhammad, artist/teacher Corita Kent, and bell hooks, all who courageously speak of love and joy. Embodied learning can focus our attention, become metaphorical, and develop our agency in troubling times. We make marks and artists books in my literacies & social identities course, we learn to knit and dye in the antiracist (etc.) literacies seminar, and we engage in pedagogies of care, play, and even drag in pedagogy & power. Staff members teach and learn in partnerships or woodshop or knitting circles with students. When we make something, with materials and with words, when we learn and teach, we have agency. We are all makers and knowers. This can give us power, even if we feel powerless at this moment.
Donna Jo Napoli, Professor of Linguistics and Social Justice
Our role is largely determined by stated roles in our appointment letters — we are to teach, do research/creative work, and do service. Clearly people differ in how they juggle that; I read it as a balance of the three. It’s interesting though, that we might not require all, or even any, of those three of our students. That is, while perhaps many of us integrate all three in courses we offer, there are certainly legitimate, valuable courses in which students are not required to lead the class in discussion of the materials at hand, or do/create original work and give presentations or write papers concerning that work, or take actions to support (the study of) the class topics or the community to which class topics pertain, or any two or perhaps all three. So our roles clearly are not exclusively to act as models to the students. Our roles seem to be responsibilities we hold with respect to the whole idea of knowledge and how we, in particular, acquire, share, and use our knowledge to create a better world. I would say that professors’ roles are only indirectly in service of a liberal arts education. Rather they are roles of responsibility toward the larger world, and professors simply have the wonderful benefit of being allowed and encouraged to welcome students into that activity.
Elise Mitchell, Assistant Professor of History
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” — bell hooks, “Teaching to Transgress”
“An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor” — Lerone Bennett, Jr. (Unknown)
To sit and spin word webs and pontificate in an ivory tower is, to me, the least appealing image of a professor. For me, educating has always been the practice of being an intellectual. I began teaching in college, as I studied for a history major and minors in Africana studies, Latino and Latin American studies, and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. Teaching basic literacy classes for high school students at the (now demolished) University City High School and Black studies courses to middle school students on weekends through [University of Pennsylvania’s] Ase Academy never felt separate from my collegiate academic pursuits. In graduate school, I felt no different. Being a TA or instructor was just as crucial to my intellectual maturation as being a student. Educating forces one to sharpen the blade of the mind like nothing else. It is knowledge as craft.
At this time when Black history, Black studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Latin American and Latino studies (all fields I straddle at Swarthmore) are under attack on a national scale, my role as a professor at a liberal arts college has and has not changed. It has changed in that the stakes of the knowledge we share and hone in my classrooms are much higher than they ever have been in my lifetime. What we study is at risk of erasure in ways that foreclose not only what we can learn from the past but what kinds of knowledge we could potentially produce in the future. It is urgent that we learn what we can while the resources to learn it are still available to us. At the same time, my role has not changed in that I am still responsible for exposing students, with a range of intellectual interests, to the vibrant intersectional histories of Black life in the Americas. I am still responsible for teaching them to write and think critically about Black life as a way of understanding broader questions about power and the past, social and political life, and knowledge production.
Under our current regime, professors are forced to choose between capitulating to oppression, leading to the destruction of knowledge past and the foreclosure of future knowledge, or the sort of revolutionary persistence and resistance that seems radical in these times. I choose the latter.
Jean-Vincent Blanchard, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
What is the role of a professor in the service of a liberal arts education? Guiding students as they develop problem-solving skills in a wide variety of disciplines — that is, helping them formulate good, pertinent research questions and giving them the means to find the right answers within each of these disciplines, but also with insights borrowed from the other ones. For that, students need to learn where to find elements of information and sort out the good ones in the overwhelming torrent that our digital world delivers. Then, students need to find the right method to go about solving the problem, supported by good mental and work habits. Lastly, they need to express their findings to a variety of audiences clearly, convincingly, and eloquently, including before those who might oppose or disapprove of the message. On that last aspect, it is always useful to remember that one’s own path of discovery is not necessarily the best path to convince someone else.
Karolina Hicke, Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies
At a liberal arts college, professors not only teach their disciplines but also help students build habits that last: reading carefully, writing clearly, and being willing to revise a position when the evidence requires it. The humanities — and language study in particular — are central to that work. Courses in literature and culture train students to weigh arguments, notice gaps, and recognize complexity. Language study makes this concrete. It shows that meaning depends on relationships with others rather than being fixed, and it demands attention to nuance and context.
Yet across higher education, the humanities and languages are often being pushed to the margins. At a place like Swarthmore, one of the leading liberal arts institutions, we should lead by example. Building a more just and peaceful world will not come from assuming a monolingual norm where everything happens in English. Whatever field students enter, they need the intercultural competence that comes from knowing other cultures and languages.
My role as a professor at Swarthmore is to design challenging but supportive encounters with unfamiliar texts and perspectives and to hold students to clear standards of evidence and interpretation. The goal is straightforward: graduates who can read with care, argue with integrity, and take part thoughtfully in public life.
Keith O’Hara, Associate Professor of Computer Science
As a computer science professor, more than training future software engineers or computer science researchers, I see my role as preparing ALL of our students for a future workforce and citizenry that relies on computing regardless of their career path. Sure, computers make some things faster, cheaper, or both, but it can also let us solve problems, reflect on humanity, and make art in new and powerful ways. Moreover, I hope our students take a critical eye to computing developments and realize nothing is predetermined; everyone should have an informed say in how computing will change society.
Kenneth Gergen, Senior Research Professor of Psychology
Fostering dialogue on the relationship between significant traditions of thought as they apply to contemporary issues, in the service of fostering more promising futures for humankind and the environment.
Peter Baumann, Charles and Harriet Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy and Religion
There are currently some very serious threats in this country against the academic freedom of teaching and research. Whole areas of research (not just climate science) are under ideologically motivated attack (economic interests certainly also play a role here). Professors, like everyone else, need to defend the integrity of institutions of higher education and of their profession — and not succumb to a kind of deal-making that really amounts to capitulation and self-betrayal. At the same time, short-sighted and narrow-minded financial considerations (often motivated by bad priorities) lead more and more to the closing down of whole departments in many institutions of higher learning (often in state schools). We must argue and push back against this, too. Finally, many of us — the list is long — are more vulnerable than before in the current political situation. We must do what we can to protect and defend them. All this concerns not just the liberal arts but education in general. This is a challenge for everyone, not just for professors.
Peter Schmidt, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Literature, Environmental Studies, and Black Studies
Give students data they haven’t encountered before. Let them ask questions about how to interpret it, and how to learn from others, who may ask questions they didn’t think of.
Learn to ask follow-up questions and dig deeper, not being satisfied with quick “answers.”
Learn to reflect on the assumptions behind your questions, so that (as an experiment) you can change up your assumptions and try a different approach.
A good artist needs to have a good b.s. detector, Hemingway said. Lots of other creators, including Georgia O’Keefe, have said the same thing. A character in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses adds this:
“A poet’s work [is] to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.”
Why does algorithm have a first syllable that signifies it’s of Arabic origin? https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=algorithm
At Swarthmore we talk a lot about cultivating “empathy.” Also “critical thinking.” What do we really mean by these terms? Is there such a thing as deep vs. shallow empathy? Are these two processes at odds with each other, so that you can’t do one if you do the other? Why or why not? Hypothesis: good works of art and literature — and maybe some religious and philosophical traditions too? — teach us to do both at once, or at least to oscillate back and forth.
Always think historically … but beware of turning “history” into a simple past that explains the present or contrasts with it. Read up on Raymond Williams’ idea that each historical moment has three layers or patterns: residual, dominant, and emergent.
Sit exploring this quotation from James Baldwin for at least a half hour or more:
“We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other. — from “The Creative Process” (1962)
Investigative journalism is like a phoenix: it teaches us how to understand the cause of a fire, but also to see what may be born out of fire. It’s also an endangered species: who’s trying to kill it?
What difference does it make to talk about the “non-human” world around us, versus calling it a “more-than-human” world that we humans need to know?
Scott Gilbert, Howard A. Schneiderman ’48 Professor Emeritus in Biology
I feel that the main imperative is to pay attention and listen to our students. We aren’t working remotely and we don’t have graduate students. Many of our students are dealing with difficult personal, professional, and political issues; and many of our students are formulating ideas and hypotheses that they need to test on someone. Personal connection is part of the education.
The second demand for liberal arts faculty is to give students some critical life skills. When I was an undergraduate (at Wesleyan University) I was told that a liberal arts education should give you the ability to recognize excellence in whatever form it might take. Teaching biology at Swarthmore allowed me to propose a corollary to this idea: a liberal arts education, especially a liberal arts science education, should allow you to recognize bullshit no matter how well it is packaged. In this world, where governments make laws against scientific findings and algorithms do not sort truth from opinion, this is a crucial skill to have.
One of the ways we can do this is to make students question their assumptions. I would introduce myself to Bio 1 students as their “defense against the dark arts instructor.” People are casting spells on us to alter our perception of the world. Do you think that sperm race to the egg through a passive female reproductive tract? Do you think that our bodies are readouts of our genomes? Both of these ideas are wrong.
The second way we can separate bullshit from provisional truths is to ask “why” do we believe such ideas. Liberal arts professors should teach about the historical and philosophical contexts of generating knowledge. Why do we discuss the immune system as defensive weaponry? What are the social factors that formulate DNA as the secular analogue of the Christian soul?
The third way is to emphasize that knowledge is not organized by our disciplinary cookie-cutters. Knowledge is syncytial. Our students are fortunate in that most of their courses are outside their majors. They should be encouraged to make connections between their classes. Similarly, this is where our research can excel. We may not be able to match the research of university professors within our fields, but we can do state-of-the-art research collaborating where disciplines meet.
Fourth, students and faculty should be empowered to explore new ways of teaching and learning. I’d often had my seminars take a “group final exam,” where they collaboratively write a publishable review article. We published three papers and a bioethics book. This collaboration is a great way of having students fact-check their ideas. It is also a way of showing that the students’ ideas are worthwhile and that they have entered into the academic community. I’ve also known faculty who have their students write zines and songfests about their disciplines.
Last, being a professor at a small liberal arts college means that each of us has to be able to teach the entire field. This makes us good candidates for writing textbooks. When I was at Swarthmore, several textbooks — including those on genetics, developmental biology, and biochemistry emanated from our science departments. This allows us to bring some of these liberal arts perspectives to national or international audiences. If you’re dissatisfied with existing texts, think of writing one.
Sukrit Venkatagiri, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
As a faculty member who teaches topics at the intersection, I see computer science as a means to an end and not the end itself. In my courses I aim to foster a sense of social responsibility in students and a more critical understanding of the unintended or wholly predictable consequences of designing technology used by people. Many computer science majors will go onto work at “big tech” companies, so it’s important now more than ever to develop critical thinking, integrity, and clear communication skills, alongside the courage to say no when they are asked to build something that goes against their values.
Syon Bhanot, Associate Professor of Economics
The world right now is a complex, rapidly changing, and often disorienting place. In the modern information environment, it’s hard enough just to “think,” let alone “think straight.” For me, a central role for a professor at a liberal arts college is to teach students HOW to think in challenging times, and not just WHAT to think. Whether we like it or not, the world outside of Swarthmore is much different from the world within. I think most (all?) of the Swarthmore faculty would love for our students to go out and create positive change in the world. But in order to do that, it is critical to develop a nuanced understanding of the world as it exists — you cannot change a world you do not fully understand. Implicit in that is intellectual humility and the willingness to subject our own views and beliefs to interrogation (I include myself and other faculty in this!). So, I believe a great liberal arts experience involves intellectual discomfort and wrestling with your own and others’ views. In my opinion, great professors don’t just teach students the subject material — they also help students learn about themselves, and about the complex cultural, environmental, social, economic, and political landscapes outside our walls.
