Dear Faculty,
A Letter from Your Head of School, College President or Provost . . .
In times of crises and uncertainty, civilization’s great ideas and artifacts should be a beacon, both to ourselves and to the world at large. As the faculty of this school you have always embodied its mission and culture. But you also embody traditions, practices, and disciplines essential to humanity. I urge you to draw strength from that as we enter this unprecedented academic year.
Will my parents be safe? Will my children enjoy the youth they deserve? What the hell is happening to our country? The palpable stress all of us feel as we ask those questions does not make our debate about how best to open in the fall easier. Some of you feel it essential to open with students on campus. Others think that madness. There is no good answer and the key criteria for these decisions shift by the day. So we will continue to address the difficult reality of the moment at next week’s faculty meeting and will move along from there as best we can. Together.
In the meantime, we all feel our jobs have been turned upside down and inside out. Many of you tell me how unsatisfying it is to teach on Zoom, how you were trained to be an educator, not a pixel on a screen talking to other pixels on other screens, that you have been exiled from the tools you know best: the seminar room, the laboratory. This was not the career you signed up for.
And yet as unwanted as all this is, I think it forces us to find the bedrock of our selves as educators. Yes, education is about the students we teach and teaching them virtually can never be the same as teaching in real space. But being an educator also presumes devotion to a field of study, love of a discipline we think can bring meaning to life. If that is true, then now is our first best chance to teach for real.
Because what, dear faculty, is the value of art and literature, math and science, history and economics when the world goes dark and we are all lost at sea? When your students look to the repository of knowledge you represent not for advancement but for light and direction, what will you offer? Can you recall the first moment you fell in love with reading, with observation, with numbers? Can you chart your private source of strength based on a lifetime of study and share that map with us?
For who will tell us about the drama of our time if not Shakespeare and company? Are not the works of Morrison, Dante and DeLillo, Fugard, Adichie, and Woolf safehouses of the human imagination as well as guides to how people preach and pontificate when the pressure is on? In their pages are solace and instruction and models of excellence a generation raised entirely on silicon could use. Texture and depth offer an anecdote to virality and the scrolling mind. (Or so I hope.) And if ever there was a time for our students to know the value of genius, the incandescence of art, the plentitude of life available in the self, it is now.
Now is also a pretty good time to trumpet the value of the scientific method, to tell all who will listen why a scientist is happy to be proven wrong if it brings us all closer to a truth. When our students think science leads to a new smartphone, makes airplanes fly and our public discourse demands facts be mutable to political expediency we could all use the vaccine against selfish thinking science offers.
And will those of you who know the history of Rome, the impact of colonialism, the details of each of our country’s civil wars ever have a better opportunity to say: you know, there may be a lesson about today in what happened in the past? The whole world draws up as if to a campfire, waiting for someone to tell a story of meaning. In the flickering light of pandemic, what do you have to say?
Of course, you have been doing all this your whole career. But yesterday’s machinery of curriculum, pedagogy, and requirements could not help but shape the gears of our teaching, our climbing the ladder towards tenure or department chair or dean meant losing sight of first principles. All understandable. All appropriate to the world we knew. But maybe too we forgot why we are essential, or what is essential about the traditions we guard. If COVID’s spotlight means nurses and grocery store workers can finally remind the world a person’s humanity precedes their place in the economy, maybe we can remind our students — and each other — how learning adds heft to life, that education is more than a stopover on the way to your job.
It may sound like I’m telling you to mix your politics with your field of study. Not really. We don’t need to win arguments of private belief to remind everyone civil discourse is how we build society. And if you hear me saying you can forgo curriculum, pedagogy, and requirements, O.K. Under these conditions, I trust you to teach whatever and however serves, though remember, people like to be well met and some familiarity of form will be a comfort to your students.
What I am saying is that to teach as if it were 2019 will lead to disappointment and frustration. Burrow deep into the earth of your discipline and your own experience with that discipline. Tell your students about how such digging feels and draw your lessons from there. A civilized life does not measure value in coins but in the love of art and story, in the poetry of numbers, in the grace of the past. Let us transmute that value as best we can and take pride in being those lucky souls able to fulfill such a mission. Teach, write, speak and connect — Dear Faculty — with the same purpose and charity and curiosity that led our ancestors to draw animals on the walls of a cave, to observe how the sun moves across the sky or to consider the proposition that all people are created equal.
It may not be better than the world we enjoyed before Corona. It will surely not be easier. But it might offer a way through. And, as I say, only you can do this. And there is glory in that.
Please let me know if I can be of help,
Your admiring Head, President, Provost . . .
