theory & event

The preparation that goes in to teaching graduate seminars can pay big dividends in terms of one's research. This is often the case where my seminars are concerned. But this week I'm finding another pretty interesting confluence between the readings I have assigned and the administrative and service posts I inhabit. The topic for this week in my Aristotle seminar is "friendship, justice, and democracy," and in addition to assigning excerpts from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics, I also assigned two chapters from Danielle Allen's book Talking to Strangers. This book never fails to resonate with me in one way or another. The last time I taught it, for example, I was also teaching in the Odyssey Project, a free humanities education program for people in the community living at or slightly above the federal poverty line. That particular context made Allen's arguments about equity glow on the page; they still do. And incidentally, if Barack Obama gets elected, we might well be hearing more from Allen, an idea that makes me shiver with excitement. 

At any rate, the year I last taught Allen was also my tenure year, and post tenure I have become (as many do) more active in the inner workings of campus and my departments, and so Allen is rattling in my head as I adjudicate plagiariasm cases and worry about the culture of criminalization that often crops up around plagiarism charges. In addition, one of those departments has been going through a particularly rough patch and has experienced what Allen might call the corrosion of trust. So this time, Allen's arguments about friendship without emotional charge serving as a model for citizenly behavior, and about rhetoric as an art of trust production resonate on an even more local level.

At the end of last week, I agreed to serve on a committee whose explicit charge is to develop a plan for spending a pot of endowment money in a way that improves the departmental climate and attends to the aforementioned corrosion. It's not too often that one gets to join a committee and think about spending money, and so I of course said yes, and I reread Allen with this committee's charge in mind. As with all theory, though, the big challenge will be to translate principles of equity, democracy, trust, and healing into an event--or a series of events.

Comments

[dave's not here]

and the resonance goes on... I'm preparing for a monthly brown bag series here and the topic this time around happens to be plagiarism, inspired by the recent C's article "The Scarlet P". I haven't read Allen's book, though, so I will get it from our library and order it if we don't have it (tho the library staff here does a really good job with our titles). And, who knows, it may end up in my own grad seminar, tho I have the daunting task of covering the highlights of the past 2,000 years until the curriculum cycle is complete.

[mao.mimosa]

Speaking of Allen, I think I mentioned this to you a while back and meant to send you a link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062703781.html
(if the link doesn't work, google "An Attack That Came Out of the Ether")

[dhawhee]

awesome, mao. thanks!