Sound and Sense: A column devoted to “sensible soundings” from our faculty members. The Pharos, February 9, 1966, p.4.
Dr. Kenneth Welliver
A periodical in the field of higher education recently reported a most remarkable conference. The theme which had brought these educators together in solemn consultation was “The Role of the Instructor in Treating Students as Persons.” Mirabile dictu! Certainly there can be no question about the serious intent of this discussion for there are two footnotes for each page supporting the crashing conclusion that hostility can damage the teacher-student relationship.
The disturbing aspect of this article is of course hardly what it says but what it implies: that it might be possible for instructors to treat students as something other than persons and furthermore that such may indeed be the practice in colleges–somewhere. And could it even be that in some instances the treatment is reciprocated? When I began teaching, I was intrigued by the question of what it means to be a person in the educational relationship and to treat others as such. I quickly abandoned the topic because I found it slipping into sentimentalities which warmed the blood but would send no durable impulses to the brain. Now this conference gives me fresh courage to try to identify a few of the parameters of the human condition.
What does it mean to be a person? Perhaps we should begin by remembering that persons have purpose and intention. To be a human person means to be able to set meaningful goals and work toward their accimplishment. In our particular situation this reminds us that we happen to be here because we have some common serious purpose or purposes. It serves to clear away some of the sentimental folly about a college community. Having a personal dimension is not necessarily a matter appearing like the mythical “one big happy family” and avoiding unpleasant disagreements. It is not simply having informal fun together or dealing mildly with those who deface college property or teach and study poorly. To be a person is to set meaningful goals by which one is willing to be judged.
It is reported that publishers have a classification which they label “nonbooks.” This includes the variety of volumes that are written not to communicate anything of importance but to fill a market of ephemeral public interest in some personality or situation. What is there to protect a campus from welcoming non-students and assigning them to non-courses where they may forever sharpen their knives but never cut anything? Or how are we to be delivered from the demands of non-organizations with their ensuing round of non-committees which deceive us into thinking, as one biographer remarked, that “we are influential when we are only bustling?” Perhaps we at least begin when we take seriously our existence as persons dealing with other persons.
Persons have the power to communicate at various levels and to learn from other persons. This takes place in direct conversation but also through the less direct medium of a book. We understand this, for the two-way traffic of communication is our central task in a college. and yet how impersonal we often assume knowledge to be–as if history, philosophy, art, religion, biology are simply “things” to be reported and learned about. To act as a person toward a person would mean to know something of the human significance of these dimensions of truth and to seek to awaken this knowledge in another. In contrast to this we have the story of a professor who lectured on “The Secret of Hegel’s Metaphysics,” at the conclusion of which he was congratulated by a hearer for his ability to keep a secret.
There may be no need, finally, for the reminder that we are persons as we make choices, as we exercise our freedom and accept responsibility. Human life knows a continual opposition of freedom and limitation. In this respect, college life is altogether human. A vivid example stands no farther away than the recent ritual of registration–hundreds of people struggling between the frontiers of opportunity and restriction. Such tension is certainly a fact of life to be accepted. Yet it appears that we are persons not primarily as we fill the customary roles assigned to us or imposed upon us. We more likely know ourselves when we break our slavery to custom and reaction, to automatic reflexes or closemindedness, and act, with responsible openness. Correspondingly we treat one another as persons in the moments when when to the measure that we value them for their uniqueness and value for them their responsible choices.
Writers of recent years have alerted us to our tendency to love things and use people, when indeed it appears that the reverse is intended to be man’s nature. Perhaps this is the clue to the educators’ problem. Whenever within a context ike ours these are the things that mattermost–GPA or grade curve, success of project or campus organization, popularity, status and contacts, schedules, consitutions and syllabi, impressions and appearances (which are the “thing” side of ourselves)–we withdraw ourselves that much from the world of persons.