I'm the Teacher, You're the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom (review)

Imagine a situation in the only remaining institutional home for those on the left was one whose members were responsible for assigning work to, and evaluating the performance of, a clientele on the verge of adulthood and understandably ambivalent about authority. This institution would be a godsend for the right, a virtual engine for generating anti-left ressentiment. As all but the most doctrinaire rightwing partisans would recognize, one might starve such an institution to the bone, and launch destructive campaigns against some of its members as a way of keeping its domination by the left (never mind the business schools and departments of economics) in the public eye, but one would never want to get rid of it entirely. Why kill the golden goose?

No need to imagine such a situation, of course. For those of us on the academic left, the question is, what do we do about it? This isn't a question that Patrick Allitt explicitly poses in his eminently readable narrative of one semester teaching a post-Civil War history class at Emory University. But it's one I couldn't help thinking of as I made my way through his account of teaching as a vocation, as a site of day-to-day labor, and as an affectively charged space of public engagement. As the briefly fashionable literature on public intellectuals resolutely failed to register in its emphasis on publishing, all university teachers are public intellectuals by virtue of the two, three, four, or more new audiences we encounter each semester. Yet with notable exceptions like Allitt's book and the journal Pedagogy, discussion of this most public role, however passionate, remains confined to graduate student training courses and the personal, transient realm of shoptalk. We need more such discussion, addressed both to each other and to those outside the profession. I'm thus glad to see that the University of Pennsylvania Press website is promoting the book to "parents whose children are heading off to college," and that it's been reviewed by a variety of non-academic publications.

I, of course, read it with an insider's interest. As Allitt himself notes, no one is going to learn how to teach from reading his book: "the way to improve as a teacher is by actually teaching; hypothetical situations or abstract discussions are too different from the real thing" (x). But if teaching is an art and not a science, that doesn't mean that one can't learn how to do it better—among other ways by watching people who are good at it. Allitt is an experienced and dedicated teacher, and reading his book is like sitting in on a colleague's class without the impossible time commitment that that would entail. As someone who had very little teaching experience prior to my first job (the place where I got my Ph.D. had more graduate than undergraduate students), and who picked up most of what I know on the fly, I was pleased to find Allitt confirming some of the things I think I've learned: enthusiasm makes a big difference (as does moving around in front of the class); quizzes that test basic content give students the basis to think creatively; students write better papers if you tell them "you have to assume that you are writing . . . to someone who knows less about the subject than you" (82).

Allitt's main point, stressed in his title, is the necessity of maintaining emotional distance and professorial authority: not because professional relationships are cold and manipulative (the stereotype still all too prevalent among proponents of Freirean pedagogy and its offshoots) but because they're supercharged with emotion that needs to be managed for the common good. "[D]espite the steady temptation to make friends with the students," Allitt writes, "I have to resist it lest it compromise my judgment and impartiality" (x). Allitt's account...