In the beginning, there was Bassett. And, at the rate he's going, in the end there will be Bassett. As many of you know, Charlie is rather like Michael Jordan or the Rolling Stones; he's a serial retirer. Like many a term paper or senior thesis, Bassett has that quality of being never-quite-finished.
Bassett's initial alleged retirement occurred at the end of my first year here at Colby. It was the first week of May, 1999, and most of you were seniors of the high school variety. I was a new instructor here, and I had heard plenty of stories about Bassett's teaching. I was impressed (of course) and jealous (of course) but I was also suspicious.
Many teachers really are a bit suspicious about our colleagues who are popular with students. Deep down, we suspect that well-liked instructors are entertainers first and teachers only second. For the most part, suspicions like the ones I entertained about Charlie stem from ordinary jealousy and insecurity. But I think that something much more important than the petty jealousies of the overeducated lurks behind these suspicions, and I think that philosophers may be the best people to appreciate this fact. This is because we all more-or-less want to be Socrates when we grow up, and Socrates more-or-less tells us that if you do philosophy right, people should want to kill you. Philosophers like to say that they want to be gadflies, but it's almost blackfly season here in Maine, and you know (or soon will) that nobody could seriously model herself after a biting fly and expect to be popular.
None of this is especially peculiar to philosophy. Any kind of teaching, if it's done intensely, involves bothering the hell out of students. Hopefully it involves support and encouragement as well, but a good teacher has to be able to get her students actively annoyed about ideas. That's because thinking, if it's to be done intensely, requires letting ideas get under your skin, letting them have a real impact on you. Ideas can itch, they can sting and they can hit. Hard. Sometimes we whack you upside the head with ideas, and sometimes we just try to infect you with them and let them reproduce themselves inside you. Socrates was a little too cheerful, I think, when he said that "philosophy begins in wonder." I favor Peirce's rather darker vision, according to which philosophy begins in disturbance. And your teachers do go around trying to disturb and to provoke you. "Provocation" is Emerson's word for the teacher's central task, and it's my favorite.
It's not enough that we leave you with intellectual lacerations and contusions. We then make you write papers about your search for the cure. And this can be damn hard, in deceptive ways as well as in the obvious ways. Intellectual work is supposed to be work after all, and real work requires real exertion. [As many of you now realize, looking for work is even more stressful and demanding than doing work is, but I promise not to bring up unemployment again.]
The strains of intellectual work can be underestimated because the exertion is largely invisible. Real thinking certainly involves more than furrowing your brow and waiting for something to happen. This means, among other things, that we can fool other people and even ourselves about how much intellectual work we've done, or even about how much we've tried to do. How many times have you sincerely felt like you'd been working quite hard on a project, only to know deep down that you put a lot more of yourself into socializing, Snood or South Park than you did into the task at hand? If ideas haven't impacted us, we often manipulate them without really engaging them. We move ideas around without thinking them through. As wise old seniors, you probably know by now that you can write a halfway decent paper without doing very much in the way of real thinking (but please don't tell the underclassmen).
Real intellectual work is also humbling and personal and scary. "Thinking at its most" (this phrase is ungrammatical, but I like it) involves trying to get right with something you care about. And it's humbling and maddening to find your thoughts inadequate to their object, even after you've struggled to get things right. If we're the kind of teachers we sometimes like to think we are, then we ask a hell of a lot of you. And appreciation on top of it seems like too much to expect. And yet, if the Senior Exit Interviews are to be believed, we get appreciated for inducing so much frustration in you. Wow.
I haven't been entirely careful or accurate, but I hope I've made a case that there's something a bit weird about you folks liking your professors as much as you say you do. What could be the explanation for this?
Putting aside collective masochism as an explanation, the most natural theory is one that's also supported by a lot of independent facts. This is that, as a group, you welcome being challenged, you are energetic and expect to exert yourselves, you are modest and flexible, and self-possessed enough to allow people like me to try to disturb you. There is an awful lot of truth to everything I've just said. And it's not only true, it's enormously important. Many people in this country and in this world are unable to tolerate, much less welcome, annoying gadflies like me and my colleagues. I've seen these virtues demonstrated in your volunteer work, in your political activism and in your accomplishments in athletics and the arts as well as in the classroom.
If you're inclined to dismiss this as flattery, I'll probably be able to convince you in a moment that I'm not here to flatter you. But first let me continue appreciating you. I owe to your classmate Richard Thomas my awareness of what the Bassett Award signifies. It is given to the faculty member who best exemplifies the values of the Senior Class. If I thought I was chosen for embodying such values as Natty Light at cheap prices, I would be much less flattered than I in fact am. As it is, because of my beliefs about the values of the Class of 2003, I can honestly say that this award means enormously more to me than any recognition I have ever received.
I hope you understand why I can't stop here; why I can't just compliment you and thank you and let you go. I'm enormously fond of my students here, but compliments tend not to bother people very much and so they tend not to produce much in the way of good thinking. Though I've put a couple of ideas in front of you, I haven't yet tried to really make you think. I've so far tried to be an entertainer as much as a teacher, and so I've been supporting the suspicion I articulated a few moments ago. I'd like to spend the last couple of minutes I have trying to teach, by which I mean to provoke genuine thought, and that means I'm not going to make being nice a priority. Of course, teaching is no excuse for being a jerk, so I hope to avoid that as well.
I hope you'll ask yourself whether this sort of difficult teaching is what you've wanted from Colby and whether it's what you've gotten from Colby. I hope for a favorable answer to that question, but I do not assume one.
Let me first note that I said that thinking requires letting yourself be bothered by ideas, I didn't say that it consists in letting yourself be bothered by ideas. If it did, the Student Digest of General Announcements would be one of the world's great repositories of wisdom. But it's not the Digests that really bother me. People can be self-important when they vent about ideas, but I don't think that they mistake the venting for the thinking.
Here's an example of something worse. Many letters to the editor, in The Echo or in any other paper, present themselves as calm and dispassionate statements of pure reason. But they often reflect a (sometimes comic, sometimes tragic) refusal to engage the other side of the question. Ideas bounce off of or whiz past such people, they don't stick under the skin. And yet such people feel a deep-seated need to pay lip-service to thinking. My objection tonight isn't to non-thinking so much as it is to fake thinking. For my purposes tonight, I don't care how much thinking you came to Colby to do, I only care that you not pretend to be doing more of it than you do or to caring more about it than you do. Let's be honest with ourselves and with each other in our last weeks together.
I fear that, to some extent, those of us who get worked up about teaching are implicated in a good bit of fake thinking. When we were kids, the harder my brother tried to punch me, the happier I was, because he would always miss when he swung too hard. Similarly, does all of our apparent intensity about teaching make it possible, does it even make it seductive, for you to pretend (to other people, but mainly to yourselves) that we're a lot more serious about thinking around here than we really are? By the "we" here I mean all of us, not just students.
But tonight I'm talking mostly about you. Do you like your teachers in part because we go through all the motions of challenging you and thereby help you fool yourselves? Has Colby "discomforted" you enough? Have we let you down? How seriously do you tell your relatives about all the "critical thinking" you've learned to do at Colby? How well do you understand those words and how seriously do you mean them?
Again, I'm not accusing you of anything, but only hoping that you'll accept a challenge to face some difficult questions. The way to answer this question is to look at how well what you tell yourself meshes with what you do. You aren't automatically much of an "authority" [Cartman voice] about yourself. For instance, Colby students report very high levels of satisfaction with their college experience. It's striking, of course, that such satisfaction is quite unevenly distributed across such things as ethnicity and sexual orientation, but it's otherwise a very impressive record of satisfaction.
I'm also impressed, however, by the tone of the Digest announcements and the amount of dorm damage and allied belligerence around here. People seem to express a whole lot more anger than they report. It's quite possible, I think, that many people here feel happier than they are. The moral of the story is that you can't just look within if you want to understand yourself. You have to look at what you find yourself doing, not just at what you feel or think that you're doing.
How often have you lingered over the comments on a paper in ways that don't have anything to do with your grade? How often have you found yourself muttering about what "those queers" or "those hippies" or "those Republicans" are "going on about"? Is this because you've already let yourself be bothered by these ideas or because you're bothered that people are trying to bother you about these ideas? How much of your own do you have to say about whatever these people are "going on about", or do you mostly repeat things your friends or professors have to say? You have no obligation to take every issue seriously. You do, though, at least have an obligation not to pretend to have taken things more seriously than you have.
Let me return now to Bassett's Retirement, the Prequel. An amazing thing happened 5 years ago this Friday. Dozens of former students and alumni descended upon his (alleged) final class. They brought beer and champagne to celebrate the impact Charlie had had on their lives. It was an astonishing display of appreciation for outstanding teaching, and it was just the sort of thing that, in some sense, is supposed to happen at a small liberal arts college. You can almost picture people walking backwards in front of Lovejoy 100 telling this story to prospective students and their parents. Bassett, as you might imagine, was overcome with anger.
I didn't yet know him well, but I saw Charlie soon after all this happened, and that's when I knew I liked him. It's also when I knew that my suspicions about the kind of teacher he is were unfounded and that he was in fact the kind of teacher I wanted to be. I think it's fair to say that Bassett is not morally opposed to the consumption of alcohol and also that, like all of us, he enjoys being liked and appreciated. But the last day of his class was about John O'Hara, not about Charlie Bassett, and I think it mystified Charlie that people who claimed to enjoy his teaching wanted to turn his final lecture into a party. A good teacher doesn't let anything interfere with The Mission.
The moral of this story is: let's be honest with ourselves about what we're celebrating. There is much to celebrate about Colby. But let's make sure that we've really valued what we're toasting to. I stress this because I believe that if you ask yourselves hard questions and give yourselves honest answers, you will certainly turn out to be extraordinary people, and I hope that you will at least sometimes impose that challenge upon yourselves. I don't think you should avoid the questions I've asked, because I hope and believe you can answer them with your head held high. But be made uncomfortable enough to answer them honestly (to yourselves, if not to your relatives).
This is an amazing place, and it will be hard to leave. I will leave a year or two after you do, and I already find it emotionally difficult to envision moving on. But before you depart with your accumulated wisdom, put down your rose-colored glasses and put those highly-touted critical thinking skills to work. Figure out what you think and what you feel about this special place and care enough to make the people who stay here uncomfortable.
I thank you for letting me try to discomfort you for these past four years, and I thank the remarkable people at my table from whom I've learned so much about how to do it. I wish you well.
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