Lachs Lyceum: Critics for Hire

A student who lives a literal stone's throw from the recent tornado's path of destruction brought pictures today. They were stunning and sobering. The world of humanly-engendered upheaval seems to pale by comparison.

But that's where we live most of the time, and so it was heartening to be on the receiving end of a marvelous pep-talk from the incomparable John Lachs, at the first of our department's annual Lyceum lectures. Lachs reminded us:

Teaching the young involves activities that pull in different directions: the culture’s practices and values must be handed on, but they must also be criticized and suitably revised. In doing the former, teachers act as servants of the past, giving a favorable account of the fruits of long experience. In doing the latter, they labor for the future, presenting ideas for how our practices can be improved. The first activity is centered on sketching the geography of what exists and explaining the rules governing it; the second is about the ways the possible can bring improvement to the actual. The first without the second yields stagnation, the second without the first creates chaos. When properly related, the two preserve what is of value from the past even as they encourage active dreaming about a better future.

We are transmitters of what John Dewey called "the inherited resources of the race," but we're also instigators and subversives (or, less provocatively but no less crucially, ameliorators). That's in our job description:

Tenure in universities and colleges was instituted largely to protect faculty members in their vital activity of offering unpopular possibilities to their students, to administrators and to the public at large. Some may think that tenure confers on faculty members a right to speak and on institutions a collateral obligation not to fire them for the views they hold as professionals. This, however, is only a part of the story. The right conferred carries with it a duty: faculty members are not only permitted to speak their minds without retaliation, they must do so. By extending tenure, an institution of higher education hires critics and pledges to pay them for the trouble they give. Those who do not present possibilities constituting at least tacit criticisms of the status quo fail to meet the conditions of their employment.

So we'll continue to rattle the cages of those who would terminate our instigating mission, but we'll do it with a bit less trepidation than last week. Thank you, John. We needed that.