If only colleges had a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement!

Last night was a wonderful moment in my teaching this term.

The quality of responses from students to the question that I had assigned them was awesome.  Thoughtful and to the point.  It was one of those "By George, she's got it. By George, she's got it" instances that I like to think that faculty get excited about.

I wanted to let the students know right away that they "got it."  And, even more, I wanted to thank them for making me feel on top of the world.  I wrote to them:

... you folks have done a remarkable job of responding to the question that I had assigned.  It is one of those moments in teaching when I feel like I want to shake hands with every one of you for your responses. 

I added there:

I am convinced, yet again, that it is all worth it.  I can ditch my Rodney Dangerfield syndrome, at least for now.  Thanks for making me feel awesome that I am doing something constructive.

It is especially exciting because that course will not by any means get them a job.  The course is about understanding some of the larger issues of decision-making in a liberal democratic political economy. Even two weeks in, students started commenting along the lines of "I had never thought about these issues."  Through important issues, the students and I engage in inquiry--the kind of thinking that higher education ought to be about:

If a school doesn’t have a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement supporting its curriculum, if going to College X doesn’t mean entering into a force field that boosts each student’s will to learn, grow and discover, then the best rules in the world can only guarantee conformability of transcripts. With such a culture in place, many sets of rules can produce admirable results. Without it, we are tinkering with technicalities of compliance.

That was from a talk that the president of Duke University, Richard H. Brodhead, gave at "the Notre Dame Forum on the topic of “What Notre Dame Graduates Need to Know.”  I like Brodhead's phrasing: "conformability of transcripts."  Unfortunately, the transcripts and the mechanics of completing the requirements has resulted in the atrocious "technicalities of compliance." I wrote to students about that too:

In fact, [a much richer and nuanced understanding] is far more important to me as an educator than whether students earned an A- or a C+.

More Brodhead on the habit of mind:

Its value is that it supplies enrichment to personal lives, equips students to be thoughtful and constructive social contributors, and prepares them to participate in the dynamic, ever-changing world that awaits them after college. It’s easy to see why people might get anxious about something whose payoff is not immediate and the path to whose payoff is so oblique. But the fruits of such education can only be reckoned over long time-horizons, as they enable people to rise to challenges and seize opportunities they could not foresee at first. The lives of successful people almost never involve continuing to do what they first prepared for. As their lives unfold, they find that by drawing on their preparation in unexpected ways, they’re able to do things they had not originally intended or imagined.

But, of course, this is not the message that we convey to students, nor do we always have "a culture of active inquiry and intellectual engagement."  The net result is that most universities like the one where I teach are nothing but glorified diploma-mills: you give us the money, we will issue the transcripts.

Perhaps I am being a Don Quixote tilting at windmills.  But, I find it to be a rich life following my convictions and in pursuit of truth.  All I need is even an occasional moment like the one last night and I feel ready to charge full speed ahead at more windmills.

This academic term is already a success.