From the General Secretary:The Autobiographical Classroom
Mary Burgan
I have recently been searching through the Redbook’s statements on faculty ethics in an effort to think through the issues raised by Professor Joseph Ellis’s reported misstatements of his biography in some of his classes.1 I’ve wanted to find out what the AAUP has had to say about talking about oneself in class.
There is not much in our scriptures. To be sure, faculty members are warned in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure to be careful "not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject" and in the 1970 Statement of the Association’s Council: Freedom and Responsibility that "it is improper . . . persistently to intrude material that has no relation to the subject." But each of these dicta assumes the impersonality of information—the notion that the subject under discussion can be defined by clear parameters and objective measures.
We have come to recognize that objectivity is a mercurial entity; contemporary works like Michael Frayne’s play Copenhagen dramatize the fact that even "hard" science is subject to the Heisenberg principle. It is one thing to recognize the limitations of objectivity, however, and another to embrace them as giving license to make the classroom a psychodramatic forum. I suppose my own lingering belief in some fidelity to the subject at hand as a mandate for teachers has always caused me to worry about overpersonalizing what I teach. The Miss Jean Brodies who seek to teach themselves rather than the course, using their personal charisma to weave a spell around their students, have always aroused my deepest suspicions.
As a beginning teacher, I cultivated an ethos of formality and distance. Or at least I thought I did. In English departments, those were the days of the text, and only the text—no reading in terms of the text’s author or the text’s emotional effect: "A poem should not mean/But be."
Nevertheless, I began to realize that I myself hoarded the small hints that I gleaned from my favorite professors about their personal lives. There was one graduate professor, especially, who seemed the epitome of pedagogical formality. And yet the classes he conducted on Wordsworth and Coleridge were intensely personal explorations of the meaning of youth and age, truth and doubt, sin and grace. He was a very tough teacher, but members of his classes always felt engaged by his personality. He presented it with a Presbyterian guardedness that made the mere glimpses intriguing. I remember that his acknowledged attraction to the deep and peerless eyes of the actress Kim Novak enlivened his commentary on the adolescence of Keats’s longings in the "Ode on Melancholy."
From this brilliant teacher, I began to realize that cogent teaching may require some revelation of the personal. And that realization was reinforced when I began observing other teachers. Some needed to realize that teaching is not stand-up monologue. But others needed to be more personal. There was one teaching assistant, for example, whose lectures were lifeless, even though she knew the material and prepared well. What could I tell her about how to enliven them? I found the key in her second lecture, when she mentioned observing a flower with her little son before class that morning. Her observation led directly into a line from a poem assigned for the class; more important, the interest in the lecture hall quickened as students realized that this lecturer was an individual with an eye to the significance of everyday experience in its relation to literature.
And so it seems to me now that successful teachers reveal themselves in the classroom, willy nilly. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that professors must always guard against the risks of intruding into their teaching. Since the AAUP makes it clear that professors should present the truth warranted by their expertise, it follows that they should be reticent about the subject they may understand least—themselves.
Perhaps this instinct to connect personality with reliability is embedded in the AAUP’s founding notion that academic freedom is, also, truthfulness. The 1915 Declaration of Principles puts it well: "It is not only the character of the instruction but also the character of the instructor that counts; and if the student has reason to believe that the instructor is not true to himself, the virtue of the instruction as an educative force is incalculably diminished."
1. For the AAUP’s ethics statements, see pages 131–38 of the ninth edition of AAUP Policy Documents and Reports, known familiarly as the Redbook, which also includes the other statements noted in this column. Back to Text
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