On the topic of the required sophomore course “Cultures and Traditions”, Wabash students seem to fall into two categories: those who can’t see any relevance in reading classic texts, and those who can’t see a reason for reading anything besides classic texts. But for most Wabash professors, teaching C&T is a welcomed, albeit daunting, opportunity to engage with ideas outside their academic specialty.
“I certainly enjoy teaching it,” C&T co-chair and Professor of Biology David Polley said, “and I suppose I have selfish motives. It’s a chance to read things I wouldn’t make time to read, and it’s a great opportunity to get to know colleagues across campus in a professional sense.”
Each Tuesday afternoon, professors teaching C&T meet to preview and discuss the three upcoming texts. For 15 minutes a professor whose specialty corresponds to the text’s subject will present the main ideas of the text and field questions from other professors.
It is, in a way, a C&T class exclusively devoted to faculty. “We pool our intelligence,” C&T co-chair and Professor of Religion David Blix said. “What is nice about it is that you have people for whom this is not officially connected with their field who are just jumping in and giving ideas. That experience is very exciting.”
For Professors Blix and Polley, though, the first exciting moment of C&T comes with reading the text on their own. Professor Blix recalled how impassioned he became just the other night while rereading Marx and Engels. “And then I got to the communism part,” Blix said, “and I quickly thought ‘No, no, no, no.’
Visiting Professor of Religion William Cook, who went through C&T’s predecessor as a student in 1962, values the liberal arts aspect of C&T.
“There are C&T readings I have not read since I was an undergraduate and a few I have never read,” he said. “Reading them and teaching them allows me to connect the ‘old stuff’ I teach to more currents of thought.”
Professor Cook remarked that, though teaching C&T takes a great deal of time, he would not use the word “burden” to describe it, especially as he usually has a less set agenda in C&T than in his other courses. However, for new and old faculty alike, having but a flexible agenda for a course that covers areas outside of their academic training can be challenging, and even daunting. BKT Assistant Professor of Political Science Ethan Hollander remarked he was both scared and skeptical when he first heard he would be teaching C&T.
“They give you this huge binder, and say, ‘Here, read that, and teach on it.’ And then they tell you, ‘Look, you’re not supposed to teach it, just facilitate discussion.’ They tell you that as a way of calming you down, and it sort of does.”
Such nervousness, though, does not happen only to new faculty.
“Sometimes I go in with a text that is less familiar to me”, Blix said, “and, though I think of myself as a reasonably experienced teacher, I still ask, ‘Well, okay, how is this going to go?’ But that’s a very nice experience to have. It puts you on your edge.”
For both professors and students, the best teaching and learning often happens when a discussion is not merely a rehearsal of facts and clearly understood ideas. There is a territory where discussion reaches an ‘Ah ha!’ stage, when students and their professor alike get lost in a text and, regaining their ground through an unforeseen point, emerge all the wiser. In the C&T classroom of Professor Hollander, such territory usually resembles what one might expect to find at a late-night coffeehouse or faculty dinners at fraternity houses.
“The discussions go like a real conversation,” Hollander said, “and people just talk. When you’re out with your friends, you don’t pay attention to who speaks when, and you don’t all look back to that one guy each and every time someone says something. That’s C&T at its best. In the end, you’ve had a really good time, and you’ve picked up a lot, both academic and a lot of other stuff.”
What is picked up in a C&T classroom is often not dropped at the door, though. Morning C&T discussions continue to be conversation starters throughout the day and even the impetus to discuss morality and human nature over lunch at Sparks. Professor Blix calls this “the afterwards”. It happens when he passes another professor on the Mall and is asked how C&T went, or when he sits beside a student at a campus event and has a few minutes before the production begins.
“The course generates this ongoing conversation and dialogue with the text, with the students, and with the faculty. At its best, C&T helps build a sense of intellectual community. And, as most faculty have taught it at some time or another, that community extends through time, even over generations.”
“That’s how communities are really built,” Polley added, “through common purpose and common work. That is the function of the course, I think.”