To Save Higher Ed, Professors Need to Get a Little Weird
I read “The Brothers Karamazov” for the first time last semester. For someone in my line of work — I’m a professor in a great books program — having failed to read one of the greatest novels ever written is embarrassing, close to professional malpractice. So when my co-teacher, Alan, proposed we assign this thousand-page saga to our third- and fourth-year students, I eagerly agreed.
“The Brothers Karamazov” consumed me in a way I hadn’t experienced in years, maybe decades. I could think of little else. Emails went unanswered. I repeatedly read well past my strict, middle-aged 10 p.m. bedtime. I was once so absorbed I forgot to pick up my daughter at ballet. I lost interest in my phone.
And I wasn’t alone. As my profession underwent a largeand public meltdown over the future of education in the A.I. age, I was having one of the best semesters of my career. When I’d enter our seminar room, I’d hear my students chattering excitedly about Dmitry Karamazov’s wild love life and self-destructive partying as if he lived in the dorm with them; there were debates — wrongheaded, in my view, but sincere — about which books might help the obdurate intellectual brother, Ivan, overcome his despair.
That my students — regular 20-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces — fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange little town might look like a miracle from the outside, but as the narrator of “The Brothers Karamazov” puts it: “Miracles never bother a realist.” To be a realist about higher education is to acknowledge that the challenge of our moment is not primarily intellectual, but sentimental — spiritual, if you will. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching is affectiveteaching.
Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life.
When I asked my students why they thought Dostoyevsky was such a hit, they routinely said two things. First, they were moved by the passions of the characters in the novel. As one student put it to me, the characters in “The Brothers Karamazov” approach life “head first, heels last”; they dash to extremity, grab what’s there, and bring it back to this otherwise insignificant village, where it explodes into fierce little human dramas that take on cosmic significance. The novel is an extravagant convergence of form and content in this sense: It shows us what real, life-shaping passion looks like, but also awakens something similar in its readers.
Second, the students explained that my own enthusiasm helped stoke theirs. When I asked how they were managing to keep up with the brisk pace of the reading assignments, one of them candidly said: “Well, it really helps that you’re so into it.” Since Alan knew much more about the novel than I did and mostly led discussions, I had the pleasure of becoming a student myself, proposing thrilling but wildly unscholarly theories about the ultimate fate of Father Zosima, or the motivations of the novel’s mysterious narrator.
As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem — tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.
Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students — and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.
Keeping a certain youthful enthusiasm or undergraduate idiosyncrasy is difficult when you’re contending with day care colds, spirit-rending administrative work, worries about the state of the world and the future, or simply the kind of routinized structures that bear the weight of bourgeois life. Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature. Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity — my dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line-dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese, before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird.
What I discovered anew in my encounter with “The Brothers Karamazov” last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien — let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization, and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.
Near the end of “The Brothers Karamazov,” the novel’s hero, the youngest Karamazov, Alyosha, is trying to win over an intelligent boy named Kolya, who confuses skepticism with maturity. Alyosha’s passionate appeal doesn’t involve rhetorical fireworks or hysterics. Instead, he takes the young man very seriously. He treats him like an adult. We forget, at our peril, how life-changing it can be for a young person to have an unrelated adult treat them with seriousness and respect. Alyosha is present to Kolya, and painfully earnest. For the most part, he asks questions rather than gives speeches. And eventually Kolya can’t deny that there is something about “Karamazov,” abandoning his prematurely world-weary cynicism for a more expansive embrace of life.
As educators the world over look toward the coming school year, perhaps, with a hint of dread, we should focus on what we can control. The challenges of our algorithmic age are real, but it has always been true that good teachers need to be exemplary students to help others learn. For Dostoyevsky, worldly common sense can make us unwitting fools. As Alyosha memorably notes, all capable people “are awfully afraid of looking ridiculous, and it makes them unhappy.” Remaining a passionate student yourself may well feel ridiculous, nowadays, but it is ultimately nothing more than realism about what education requires.
Matt Dinan is the director of the Great Books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. He writes the newsletter Prefaces.
