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Summer Session Kansan
Tuesday, June 15, 1965
No Vested Right to Teach
It may be heresy for a college professor to admit it, but here's one who thinks Earlham College at Richmond, Ind., in setting forth a program in which teachers are observed in the classroom, is right on target.
Under Earlham's president, Landrum Bolling, the college has put into work a plan (with $200,000 Danforth money) in which experts will visit classrooms, observe, make recommendations and perhaps aid the college in determining just what makes a good teacher.
Many college professors operate under the assumption that the classroom is their citadel, their sanctuary, their personal property. So everybody but students (carefully enrolled students) keep out. Some have even unfurled the banner of academic freedom in defending their right to teach as they please, and keep your nose out of my business.
WELL, IT WOULDN'T be too enjoyable to know that the dean or the chairman would be dropping in every day to see if everything is being taught to suit all hands, including pressure groups. For that matter, it isn't too enjoyable to have the most hypercritical of students sitting there, frowning, scowling, eyebrow-raising, doubting.
But how else do we build the kind of teaching and the kind of classroom atmosphere that truly mean education? There are some pretty bad teachers taking up classroom space these days. Ask any student. It is depressing to hear the comment from a graduating senior that he had only two or three good teachers in his four years (he exaggerates, in all probability, but then who knows?).
TEACHING DRAWS all types. There is some justice in the old belief that the campus draws those who can't make it elsewhere (some justice, please note; many teachers would do quite well in almost any milieu).
There is the arrogant, yet still insecure, youth
just out of or just going into graduate school, determined that these dumb kids are going to have to know as much as he knows right now. He "separates the men from the boys," out of his contention that there is no such thing as an "A" student (except himself, of course).
There is the classroom tyrant, the frustrated SS commander, who might not be in charge at home but runs a tight ship when he's on the campus.
There is the monotone who can't lecture so he spends half the period writing assignments on the board.
There is the teacher so convinced that the lecture method is outdated that everything is either discussion or class reports. So the students do all the talking. Free association of ideas, much discussion (no matter how confused)—these are the ideals.
IN THIS PAST SCHOOL year, one marked by discontent and protest, students frequently voiced their feeling that they were in large, impersonal factories where they were never able to come into contact with the great professors, only with graduate students. But the "great professors" might have disappointed them, too; some of them have been so busy in the lab or the library that they've forgotten what the classroom is really like.
For there is no reason to believe that the big name is necessarily the great teacher, or that the young graduate student will be uninspiring in the classroom. This professor has known so-called veterans who were absolute flops in the classroom. There is no reason why the college professor should not be answerable, in part, to his students, to his colleagues, to his university, to his state. The classroom is not his personal domain. The Earlham College plan could give universities a measure of excellence in teaching that would make more sense than those published articles we enumerate in our faculty annual reports.—CMP
Lobbyist Necessary in U.S. Politics
By Robert F. Ellsworth U.S. Representative
Contrary to some public opinion, the role of the lobbyist in politics is an honored, useful, necessary role. The lobbyist is more important to the honest legislator as is the consultant to the business firm.
The modern connotation of the word lobbyist implies an unethical, "wheeler-dealer" type individual or, for that matter, profession. This is due to a number of cases in which people have been unethically or illegally employing the use of political prestige in return for the rewards that a lobbyist may be in a position to supply. These cases, however, are exceptions and because of the great publicity they receive, the truth is considerably distorted.
IN FACT. the political lobbyist, for lack of a better term, is as much a part of the Congressional process as are Congressional investigations and lobbying is as old as the dimest origins of the British Parliament. Lobbyists serve as the liaison between their respective businesses and the Congress—be it in the National Congress or the various State Legislatures. Their purpose is to inform and persuade in the best way they can. This naturally includes the best factual information and argument that they can compile.
The Overalls In The Manhattan Chowder
There must be opposing sides of any important issue, which both attempt to bring the most informative, persuasive information that they can. The result is an informed legislator who in addition to his own views has two well defined, logical arguments to evaluate. Obviously the legislator is then in a better position to make an intelligent decision.
THIS DECISION many times will include a compromise, or an integration of the better points of the opposing arguments. This is really the essence of the political system: the compromise of different views so as to best satisfy the majority of the people. The lobbyist, consequently, plays a vital role in the modern political arena.
In a sense we are all lobbyists. As a Congressman and your representative, I am really a type of lobbyist for you—my constituents. The different religious faiths have lobbyists when a priest, minister, or rabbi comes to visit his representative and state his position. There are, to the same extent, lobbyists in the education, scientific, and socially oriented professions.
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LAUREL MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE: THE CLASSICAL AGE, edited by Lionel Casson (Dell Laurel, 95 cents).
Here is an excellent collection that demonstrates in its diversity the tremendous contribution that the classical age made to the culture of man. Some readers will quarrel with the choices that Lionel Casson has made, but generally one will find representative works of considerable interest.
Casson has gone light on certain familiar writings—the Greek plays, for example (he includes but one) and Homer's "The Odyssey." Yet there are all kinds of paperbacks now offering the classical drama, and "The Odyssey," in complete form, is readily available as well. The editor also has excerpted from "The Iliad" and "The Aeneid," and this will bother some readers who like their epic drama whole.
There is considerable poetry, and much philosophy. The historians are represented, too — Herodotus and Thucydides. Others whose work appears here include Sappho, Anacreon, Pindar, Sophocles, Aristophanes, the Greeks; and Lucretius, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Martial and Tacitus, the Romans.
SHORT STORY MASTERPIECES, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine (Dell, 75 cents)—An excellent collection, with some of the familiar titles that have helped to make the short story great. Famous names are here—Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg," Conrad's "An Outpost of Progress," Faulkner's "Barn Burning," Hemingway's "Soldier's Home," Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," Henry James's "The Tree of Knowledge," Lardner's "Liberty Hall," D. H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," Maugham's "The Outstation." Saki's "The Open Window," Katherine Porter's "The Flowering Judas," Irwin Shaw's "The Eighty-Yard Run," Steinbeck's "Flight" Thurber's "You Could Look It Up." Many other famous writers are on hand in this fine collection.
DON QUIXOTE, by Miguel de Cervantes (Modern Library Giant, $3.95).
It's getting to be a matter of which is the best inexpensive translation of "Don Quixote." This one, by Samuel Putnam, has been touted "as a literary event of the first magnitude." So many of the Dons that one sees in paperback editions are in that heavy, literal form, so loaded with commas and capital letters and ancient English that one is driven away from the book that was the first modern novel.
This particular edition of "Don Quixote" is non-paperback, the relatively inexpensive and highly popular Modern Library Giant, perhaps the best hardback buy in books. It also is easy to read. Samuel Putnam has provided a critical text based on the first edition of 1605 and 1615. He also has written an introduction and provided ample notes for the student.
A BANNER WITH A STRANGE DEVICE, by Arona McHugh (Dell, 95 cents).
Arona McHugh is likely to shout "Excelsior" when the proceeds from this one come rolling in, for it has a little of Harold Robbins, Grace Meliulous, Irving Wallace and Kathleen Winson. It is long and detailed and passionate.
The setting is Boston, the time is post-World War II, the cast of characters is Americans in a frenzied search for experience before a new war engulfs them. Sally Brimmer is the chief of these, and "A Banner" is largely about her sex life. That puts it bluntly. There are a prizefighter who lost a leg, and there are a writer and an intern. Sex, sex, sex.
LONDON LIFE IN THE EIGHT-
EENTH CENTURY, by M. Dorothy
George (Capricorn, $2.25).
Here is another excellent volume that presents a picture of an age relatively unknown to the contemporary reader. Mrs. George has endeavored to present a clear view of London in the days of Tom Jones and Moll Flanders. She has gone to numerous sources — trial records, petitions, inquests, Parliamentary reports, pamphlets, municipal records — to reconstruct the life Hogarth portrayed in his great paintings.
It is a dark and ugly life, and far from what some think of as the good old days. You have read it in Fielding and Sterne. Here it is in a valuable history.
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VOLTAIRE'S POLITICS, by Peter Gay. (Vintage, $1.95).
Peter Gay subtitles this work "The Poet as Realist." The great philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose ideas ring so many bells with Western Civilization students, is in some ways one of the most modern of philosophers.
Voltaire was a reformer, a man who looked with cynical—yet idealistic—eye on his times and found them wanting. The author's design was to present Voltaire in relation to the history of ideas, to place him, as well, in the 18th century to consider how what he wrote was related to that great period.
Gay sees Voltaire as a realist. He believes that the 18th century, with its air of scientific optimism, is in bad odor today, and he would rescue the century along with whatever has happened to the reputation of Voltaire.
A COMPACT SCIENCE DICTIONARY, edited by G. E. Speck (Premier, 60 cents)—A handy and valuable guide to scientific terms and definitions. Sorry, there is no plot, and no point of view to try to interpret.
SHORT NOVELS, by Leo Tolstoy (Modern Library, $2.45).
They may be considered as precursors of the great novels that came later in the century. All fit into the form that Simmons designates as "short novel," and constitute almost the entire literary output of Tolstoy in 1851-63.
Five works constitute this new collection, some of which are available in other anthologies. Ernest J. Simmons has picked these as being representative of the formative period of Tolstoy “Two Hussars,” “A Landlord's Morning” “Family Happiness,” “Polikushka” and “The Cossacks: A Tale of 1852.”
Here we are introduced to the kinds of characters one would find later in such works as "Resurrection" and "War and Peace"—the hussars, the Cossacks, the peasants. Tolstoy also leans on his own life to provide insights, as in the young student in "A Landlord's Morning."
Of this group at least one can stand as almost a full-length novel, "The Cossacks." The story concerns events inspired by the author's own experience as a cadet fighting in the Caucasus in 1852.
In this one we hear the argument that has been voiced in several quarters that the American economy, for a variety of reasons, is doing a poor job of allocating our many great resources. A generation ago Thurman Arnold was writing similar things in "The Folklore of Capitalism." Now David T. Bazelon and J. K. Galbraith, of "The Affluent Society," are shaking up a good many readers.
Bazelon tells us an obvious thing — that we have hunger and food surpluses side by side. We have education which is virtually in pauperdom, but we exploit new and perhaps unnecessary products at the same time. Business is obsessed by the standards and the platitudes of the past, by too much dedication to the concept of the balance sheet.
THE PAPER ECONOMY, by David T. Bazell (Vintage, $1.95).
When the book appeared a year or so ago it angered many critics, including some in the more liberally oriented magazines. Like Galbraith, Bazelon stirs you up, but he retrains from giving absolute solutions himself.
AMERICA TOMORROW: CREATING THE GREAT SOCIETY, with preface by Walter Lippmann (Signet, 60 cents)—This is the 50th anniversary issue of the New Republic which appeared last year. It is an excellent symposium of ideas for our time. Commentators predict the future of the United States, and treat such matters as community life, conservation of natural resources, education, economic planning, the role of women, the role of youth, problems of the aging, racial conflicts, the "culture explosion" and the meaning of history.