Back in the mid-80s when I was a young professor, I had a relatively straightforward understanding of my role. There were universal human questions – “What is justice?” “What is the good life?” – and my task was to investigate the plausible answers to these questions with my students. There were challenges – described well by Allan Bloom in “The Closing of the American Mind” – but, having experienced them myself as a young student, I was confident – perhaps overconfident – about my ability to address them. I could appeal to a universal sentiment like righteous indignation to show my students the incoherence of the value relativism most of them thought they espoused.
Fast forward to 2022. Most of what’s left of my hair has gone gray. And I’m listening to administrators, colleagues, and students insist upon particularity and intersectionality. Everyone’s story is different, depending upon their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity. (I had been accustomed to hearing talk about class, but that seems to have diminished in salience for those with whom I interact.) For the courses to be relatable and relevant, I’ve been told that students have to see themselves in the authors and texts I assign.
Taken seriously, this argument leads us into a cul-de-sac. Students can learn only from people like themselves, which means that none of us can learn about, let alone teach about, difference. We could, I suppose, call this a kind of civic education, an introduction into the story of “my people” defined in terms of the particular characteristics noted above. Recalling the familiar image from Plato’s “Republic,” each of us inhabits a cave defined by those characteristics and their intersections. But in contrast with the cave image, none of us can liberate ourselves or be liberated from our bondage.
In the first instance, there’s a grave practical problem with this view. Regardless of what we imagine about the intersections we inhabit, we in fact share space with others who have different identities. Our circumstances demand that we be able to communicate – and hence share understandings – with one another. We can’t just rely on a multiplicity of “my stories”; there also has to be “our story.” Were it not for the efforts of the 1619 Project, something like Abraham Lincoln’s “mystic chords [sic] of memory, stretching from every patriot grave to every heart and hearthstone” might serve us well.
But taking a cue from W.E.B. DuBois, there’s another route we might take. I have long appreciated the powerful defense of traditional liberal education he offers in “The Souls of Black Folk.” There he shows how an encounter with the great minds of the past could take us beyond the color line. Some three decades later, in “The Field and Function of the Negro College,” he takes a slightly different path. Sounding a lot like many of my colleagues, he affirms that “the university education of black men in the United States must be grounded in the condition and work of those black men!” This isn’t, however, his final word on the subject.
Every education begins with the circumstances of those for whom it is intended. A Russian university will have a different point of departure from its English counterpart, which will deal with different cultural beginnings than those located in Germany. Where the Russians might regard Tolstoy as indispensable, the English might look to Shakespeare and the Germans to Goethe. But that, says DuBois, is only the beginning: “It is the matter of beginnings and integrations of one group which sweep instinctive knowledge and inheritance and current reactions into a universal world of science, sociology, and art.”
Taking a cue from DuBois, we start where students are to bring them into full universal humanity. We honor and treasure the stories of our ancestors because they are ours. They’re both particular to us and part of the variegated human panoply. But that panoply is human, with its particular embodiments pointing to a nature that we share.
We’re not left with a multiplicity of stories necessarily at odds with one another, with no possibility of community or common understanding. Rather, our task as educators is to find the way from those beginnings to the larger whole that they help constitute and comprise. The great conversation should have many voices. But to be a conversation, it can’t be a series of monologues, intelligible only to the speakers and those like them.
This is, and indeed always has been, our task as teachers.
Joseph M. Knippenberg is Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, GA and a Jack Miller Center faculty partner.