Via Jacob Levy, a little anecdote from a class at Princeton taught by Cornel West and Robert George.
Having touched upon such profound notions as free will, autonomy, and the alienation of man from God, the discussion of St. Augustine’s “Confessions” is humming along nicely when Cornel West *80, the Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion, poses the afternoon’s toughest question. “Who’s been deeply in love?” he asks, leaning so far forward in his chair that his goatee is almost touching the table as he looks around him at the rapt faces of 15 Princeton freshmen.
That’s not a question most students feel comfortable answering in a setting as public as a freshman seminar. There is silence until Dov Kaufmann, showing the sort of pluck you’d expect from a former first sergeant in the Israeli army, raises his hand, tentatively at first. If he is about to fall into a trap, it will be particularly awkward to climb out, since the climbing will have to be done in front of 14 curious classmates. But Kaufmann is spared having to make any further confessions when West steps in and rescues him: “Now, this brother knows!” he exclaims. “You fall in love, you stop looking at those other girls. They became uninteresting.”
“Now, let’s not look too closely,” laughs Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, who teaches the course with West and is sitting next to him.
But West is not to be deterred. He wants to bring the point around to the freedom that comes, paradoxically, from surrender. “When you fell in love, you became free,” he tells Kaufmann. “Before that, on Saturday night, you’d be looking at all the girls. You were a slave.”
It is a witty eureka! moment, one that deftly links Augustine’s 1,600-year-old autobiography to life on the Princeton campus today. Kaufmann remembers it fondly: “Professor West seemed to maybe have some hidden story of his own, because he was really smiling too,” he says. “I thought that was neat.”
A lot of college classes present intimidating vistas of endless drudgery, but occasionally you get ones that really, truly, make you think, deep down into your core. Those are magical, and are why the undergraduate experience can be like nothing else in your life. Celebrity professors are not required; I certainly had several such experiences at Villanova.
The news hook for the story is actually not “here’s a cool class,” but “look at these ideological opposites co-teaching a course.” West (who quit Harvard after clashing with Larry Summers) is a charismatic leftist, while George is an influential conservative. But they apparently have a good time coming together with students to engage seriously with Great Ideas, and have struck up a friendship “based on a shared passion for intellectual inquiry.”
It’s definitely good to get different schools of thought working together. This is a funny piece on that:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/03/23/stewart-v-bolton-post-game-analysis/
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I’m kind of surprised that this blog didn’t get more comment. Being able to get college students to pay attention to an instructor isn’t easy. Very few professors are really good at it.
I think physics should be taught with reference to love. And war, and sex and violence. It’s all a matter of seeing the things that are not always obvious, of seeing things from a different point of view.
For example, consider life insurance. It is a financial instrument that most people consider boring. But it is about how a person protects those that they love even after the grave. It is about love and death. And time. And exponential functions.
Is Cornel West worth reading?
I mean he gets all this good press, so I assume he has something to say. But damn, every time I have listened to him speak, and this is a considerable number of different talks, maybe five or six, I just cannot stand the way he talks.
The whole “I’m just a homey from the streets thing”, the way he throws out a comment to a women introducing him that, under normal circumstances would result in a sexual harassment lawsuit, it just makes me want to throw up. He comes across as the most extreme version of a used car salesman; you know, the guy who is immediately your best friend, who throws out something about “the game” on the assumption that, as a man, you obviously like sports and he can use that to bond, the guy who hears your accent and says hello in French (or Afrikaans or Mandarin) and once again assumes you are going to give a damn.
Obviously this kind of vibe works — both as a sales tactic, and in West’s case — but I just cannot get past it. So, as I say, is he more tolerable in print?
Poor Augustine and his many relationships (I rather sympathize with his longsuffering first wife, though they did have a rather sweet ending.)
I bet modern psychiatrists will diagnose Augustine with a case of Borderline Personality Disorder, maybe combined with a bit of depression.
I do realize the point of the story is about college life and the (sometimes) fascinating interaction between students and teachers. But surely the particular point expressed by the good profession as described in the post really has no legs: how is it that you become free after falling in love?
Could it be that one was never “not free” in either cases? Young men choose to ogle at other girls out of freewill and then
cease to do so after falling in love (also out of freewill). The change in behaviour is simply due to the fact that the object of desire has
changed.
Of course, this can also be argued from the opposite angle: men are not free either before or after falling in love, since it is just a
matter of swapping one type of bondage (the untamed desire for the opposite sex) for another (namely, the blind devotion for one’s chosen lover).
You either acknowledge we can freely choose what to decide or you don’t. To have it both ways is… well, does not compute.