When he first contacted me concerning this talk, Tom told me that the theme for this conference was something decidedly unfashionable -- "The Spiritual in Art" -- and asked me if I would speak to that subject. Foolishly, perhaps, thought not deceitfully, I agreed. And I did try, repeatedly, to draft something on that subject suitable to the occasion, but it all came out sounding either archaic or pompous, sometimes both at once.

Eventually I realized that I'm not a working artist in any medium now, and haven't been for several decades. Nor am I a teaching artist, as are many of you here. I'm an ex-musician who at best aspired to mediocrity in that medium, nowadays a sometime poet and fiction writer and an occasional amateur picture-maker. Frankly, were I you I wouldn't listen to myself, with those minimal credentials, opine on the spiritual in art.

What I am now, and have been for almost thirty years, is a professional wordsmith, a prose craftsman, a working critic with twenty-seven years of university-level teaching experience. If I have anything to offer you of substance and usefulness, it will be on the subject of teaching the history and criticism of photography in a photo-education context, our common ground. What I have to say on that score will address not generalities but the specifics of my own spiritual crisis as a teacher.

So I have taken the liberty of redefining my topic tonight as "Toward the Empty Place: On the Spiritual in Teaching." Some of this, I think, pertains to the making of art as well as the teaching of it. I hope you'll find something germane to the conference theme in my remarks -- and, if you don't, I hope to prove sufficiently entertaining that you'll forgive my straying from the point.

I should add here that this is the first SPE conference, regional or national, that I've attended since 1986, when I resigned formally from the organization, sending to the SPE's then Board of Directors and the editors of its several publications an open letter explaining my departure, which they decided not to make public. I'm here this weekend to see what, if anything, has changed for the better since then, but I haven't renewed my membership to date. So this is my first address to any component of the SPE as a non-member.

For the purposes of this talk tonight, suffice it to say that I left because I no longer found the organization and its activities conducive to the kinds of dialogue with my colleagues in teaching that I'd discovered there when I joined a decade earlier, circa 1976. I'd been missing that interaction for awhile before I left, so, practically speaking, my departure changed little. I know I'm not alone in having severed those ties. I can name dozens more who've fallen away from this organization and stopped coming to its meetings -- senior figures, people from whom I felt I had something to learn as a teacher, whose absence from these conferences made it easier for me to leave. But that's another discussion.

A few years later, toward the end of the 1980s, I found myself growing increasingly disheartened with the progressive deterioration in the quality of education offered by the university department in which I taught, and the concurrent decline in the energies and involvement of its students. My experiences as a doctoral candidate in Media Studies in another division of that university made it plain that the problem was systemic, not just restricted to undergraduate courses or fine-arts programs. My colleagues elsewhere in that institution -- and, indeed, in photography programs and other courses of study across the country -- reported similar observations, which, though reassuring in a way, hardly proved cheering.

To make a long story short, by the spring of 1993 I found myself walking unenthusiastically, even reluctantly, into classrooms full of students who seemed to have no particular reason to be there, and no real desire to be in weekly contact with me. I'd vowed years earlier to stop teaching if ever I felt I had nothing to give, and there I was, dispirited. So I finished out the semester as best I could, made a last futile gesture to provoke the university administration into changing course, and left.

•

Well, it's four and a half years later. During that interval I've guest-lectured in some classes, and taught a few workshops here and abroad, both within and without the academic environment. I find the same conditions everywhere I go. Indeed, the only vital, enthusiastic and aggressive students I've encountered anywhere in recent years are those I met last winter in the advanced classes taught at Arizona State University in Tempe by Bill Jay, the bête noire of one faction of this organization. That doesn't surprise me, though it may give you pause for thought.

So, since 1993, I haven't taught a full course anywhere. What I've found out is that I miss it, terribly, like the best parts of a failed or exhausted marriage. Teaching lies at the core of just about everything I do professionally, so I have other outlets -- especially my writing -- for some of those urges and energies. But the theater of the classroom offers something unavailable elsewhere, and I want to find a role for myself in it once more.

It didn't take me long to realize I'd teach again -- one academic year of letting go, to be precise, during which I spent most of my time in residencies here and abroad, writing and researching, getting some distance on things. When I came to that understanding, I knew I had to start from scratch -- which, for me, meant looking at my own history as a student, and at the models of teaching I'd absorbed and, perhaps uncritically, reflected in my own practice.

By my own lights, though my grades were generally better than average, considerably more so in subjects that interested me, I was a lousy student right up through graduate school in the mid-1960s. Fundamentally, though I'd figured out how to get through school, I didn't know how to learn from other people. This was due more to family-based emotional problems irrelevant here than to any principled commitment to the activity that educator Herbert Kohl calls "not-learning," about which I'll say more in a few minutes. Indeed, I didn't even know yet how to learn from myself.

Somehow, in the years between 1967, when I left graduate school, and the late '70s, I learned how to learn -- first from myself, then from others -- and began to learn how to pass it along to others of my cohort, how to teach. I began my teaching career, such as it's been, in 1970, in an adult-education seminar on the criticism of photography at the New School for Social Research in New York City, a seminar that ran for several years and through which perhaps a hundred people passed, some of whom subsequently entered the field, Sally Stein among them. Photography had not yet been fully academicized, or museumized. It was still an outsider art form, and it drew outsiders like myself to it -- loners, rebels, oppositional types, political activists, eccentrics -- whose weird energies gave photo studies in that period a distinct crackle and charge.

After that I taught here and there, on one-semester or one-year appointments -- art institute and university (graduate and undergraduate), independent workshop, all the variants -- until I landed at New York University in the late '70s, where I taught steadily but (by my own choice) part- time on every level from undergraduate to doctoral until my aforementioned departure in 1993. In 1982 I entered a doctoral program there myself and discovered, to my delight, that at the age of 39 I had indeed learned how to learn -- that I could enter any educational context, extract from the faculty and my fellow students everything of use to me (including ideas they didn't know they had, and others I hadn't known I needed), and could also return that energy in kind, in ways that furthered the work of my teachers as well as my classmates. Call me a late bloomer, but at least I did blossom.

During those same years, I also received substantial feedback that told me I'd learned how to teach. How had that happened? I'd never had a single course of formal study in educational methodology. Obviously, then, it had come from independent study, practice, observation of others, and reflection on my own experience -- especially thinking about those who'd taught me, in particular the two teachers I'd truly loved.

The first was Miss Gloria Salimando: P.S. 41, Greenwich Village, 1954, sixth grade, age 11. She was young compared to the school's standard complement of intimidating battle-axes (probably in her late 20s), and kind, and soft-voiced, and I thought she was beautiful. I was in love, obviously, puppy love, so I hung on her every word uncritically -- to such an extent that more than forty years later I still overcook what little pork I eat in order to kill those dreadful Trichina worms she drew nestling into our layers of muscle tissue. And it took me twenty years to discover that I'd unlearned the habit of crossing my legs because I'd devotedly memorized her schematic of the circulation system, along with her warning about the dire consequences of closing off sections thereof with pressure -- she sketched little trapdoors to illustrate the serious health problems that could result, culminating, if I recall correctly, in gangrene. Delightful memories, clearly, but not much to carry into the classroom as a teacher: If you want your students' love, or need it in order to communicate with them, you're in deep shit from the git-go.

The second teacher who mattered was Professor Leonard Albert: Hunter College in the Bronx (now Lehman College), fall 1964, age 16, my first college English class, required of all entering freshmen, English Lit 101. I was already widely if eccentrically read for my age, and had been writing -- poetry, fiction, political speeches -- since starting high school. Much of that I owed to my parents' gifts to me: a love of words and books, a respect for writers generally, the examples of themselves as readers and writers and editors and publishers. But when I stepped into Prof. Albert's classroom he handed out to all of us a clear understanding of the origins and evolution of the very language we spoke and wrote yet in so many ways took for granted, and in doing so changed my life.

He didn't hand this out a mimeographed schematic or cheat sheet. He made us internalize it by forcing us to hear it and feel it coming up out of our own chests, through our own mouths, off our own tongues. Let me interrupt my tale here to note that I use that terminology deliberately. Yes, he made us do this work, and the force, if implicit, was no less real. We were given no choice in the matter, were offered no alternative assignments, did not have our preferences consulted or considered, could not have inquired why we had to learn this stuff whose relevance to our lives was less than apparent. In that theater of education we constituted a captive audience, in every sense of that term, and our only option was to leave it entirely -- which, at least for the males of draft age, was no choice at all.

He started us off on "Beowulf," the impenetrable original alongside a respected translation, and then gave us Chaucer. No translation or "modernization." Chaucer in the original Middle English, all that weird spelling and guttural Saxon and vaguely familiar but strangely accented words with the stresses on the most unlikely syllables. He helped us decode its meaning, laid out the basic rules of grammar, syntax, spelling and pronunciation over a few class sessions, then gave the two dozen or so of us a weekend in which to memorize the first twenty lines of the "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales.

The following Monday morning, in alphabetical order according to last name, we began reciting, and Prof. Albert began patiently correcting. I was up early on, obviously. Some of us got it down better than others, but none of our efforts were less than embarrassing. Our teacher said nothing to shame anyone who'd clearly made the effort to fulfill the assignment. When we weren't reciting, we listened to each other, and to him. The next morning the recitals from memory continued, with the first day's slackers retested. Thursday he put Tuesday's slackers to the test, and we began collectively working our way, in class and out loud, through the "Prologue" and into the tales.

A few people dropped out -- pointless, really, except as teacher-shopping, since the course was mandatory and the curriculum fixed by the department. By mid-semester the remaining twenty or so of us could read any passage selected at random in passable if halting Middle English, and explicate what it meant, more or less, without Prof. Albert's help and with only the glossary to guide us. Without realizing it, I'd learned something about how to learn, had even sniffed something about how I learned. And, as a writer and speaker, I'd been given an insight into the DNA of my medium, a gift that, though I can't speak for all my classmates, was received in that room by others as well.

Finally, of course, I had twenty lines of Chaucer engraved in my brain. Over a third of a century later they're still there, and I can launch into them at the drop of a hat, as I've done in tandem with old friends at class reunions and even here at past SPE conferences with colleagues -- yes, photographers and photo teachers and curators and historians -- who went through the City University system during the same era. Did none of us any harm, so far as I can tell.¹

Bear with me, please. I'm not making some E. D. Hirsch or Allan Bloom stand here in favor of DWEM -- dead white European males -- or a fixed canon or rote learning. I'm just trying to convey something about the context in which I found myself, for the first time I could remember, cheerfully and eagerly setting out to learn something unfamiliar and difficult whose beneficial value to me I had to take on trust.

So I must also tell you something about the setting, and the teacher. By today's standards, the City University of New York (of which Hunter was one division) was appallingly regimented. Jeans and T-shirts were not permitted anywhere on campus. Women who wore slacks instead of skirts or dresses to school on any day the thermometer did not read 30 degrees Fahrenheit or below at 8 a.m. according to the city's official radio station were refused admission to the campus. (My cohort successfully fought for an end to that particular idiocy, I'm proud to say.) Three full absences from class meant an automatic failure; a lateness of ten minutes counted as half an absence. Of course we addressed all our faculty, and the administration and staff, by their titles and last names. We, in turn, were Mr., Miss (this was pre-Ms.), or, infrequently, Mrs.

I couldn't tell you if Prof. Albert was likeable as a person; though I took every course with him the curriculum allowed, we never had a private conversation. Teachers and students then never socialized off-campus, and hardly ever on -- no departmental holiday or birthday or farewell parties, no coffee klatches, no bulletin boards with postcards from old grads, no counseling from faculty on your love life, fights with parents, drug usage. I seem to recall there was a school psychiatrist -- one -- and I never met anyone, no matter how troubled, who visited him or her.

Prof. Albert clearly didn't care whether any of us liked him, and made it just as clear that he wasn't concerned with liking us. He played no favorites, though his pleasure in those who put effort into the class was discernible, along with his irritation with those who did only the bare minimum to get by. He wasn't by any means sour or bitter, but I never heard him laugh and rarely saw him smile; his humor was dry, manifesting itself in occasional puns and oblique references mostly available to those who kept up with the readings.

So far as I could detect in four years of studying with him, he had no hidden agenda in relation to us as individuals or as a group -- only the overt, declared intention of helping us achieve an adequate grasp of the material and the broader subject. Some people then -- and certainly most people in the academic system today -- would probably consider him overly formal, if not cold. I found that enormously liberating. He himself knew the material forward and backward, could recite most of it -- all of Othello, forinstance -- from memory, knew the critical literature inside and out as well. I saw in him a major resource, and greedily took from him everything I could, which he freely gave to all who asked; like one of Chaucer's characters (I'll translate here), "gladly would he learn, and gladly teach."

I don't say this to wax nostalgic about the old days and the old ways. I'm trying to describe a theater of teaching and learning that had enormous impact on me and in some important ways shaped my own sense of the dramaturgy of the classroom, though I never taught like Prof. Albert did, my own style having turned out much more improvisational and informal.² And when I speculate that no English department today would hire this man or his equivalent, I don't mean it accusatorily; he'd simply seem like a superbly trained Edwardian actor plunked down awkwardly in a Living Theater production.³ My main point is that I internalized that version of the classroom as theater just before a series of major stylistic changes in education began -- changes which generated new kinds of teachers and students as well.

•

I saw that as soon as I entered the graduate Creative Writing program at San Francisco State College -- the Bay Area, January 1965, just turned 21. Jeans were permissible, slacks for women anytime. Smoking was allowed in the corridors (we didn't know any better). Both graduate and undergraduate classes were much more dialogic. Everything was more casual. In quonset huts thrown up on campus as an "alternative university," anyone who could draw five students could teach a course on any subject -- rock and roll, comic books, Maoism, Black history. I thought a lot of those changes were for the better, still do, and when I started teaching I incorporated many of them -- including the very idea of teaching a previously untaught subject -- into my own work.

However, what I'm calling the dramaturgy of the classroom continued to change fairly steadily from then till now. And I stopped keeping up with the changes. Not consciously; I just fell into what felt like a viable form for me and worked for my students, until one day I looked up to find that it wasn't working at all for any of us. At first I blamed poor administration, lackadaisical students, careerist faculty, lowered standards, television, all the usual suspects, and there's doubtless some truth to that. But, though the students no longer knew how to behave in the classrooms we shared, nor had much of an idea as to why they were there in the first place, I see now that I didn't either, had fallen asleep at the wheel only to awaken in unfamiliar territory. Among other things, photography is now an insider art, and there's money to be made in it, and, as Cindi Lauper sang, "Money changes everything."

So here I am, coming back to teaching this fall; I'm conducting a seminar for undergraduate seniors at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and offering a private adult-ed seminar and several short workshops in New York City. And I find myself with no appealing model for how the job is to be done -- little from my experience of being taught, and little from my years of teaching, that I can identify as aspects of a viable methodology. That being the case, I've decided to invent from the bottom up a new way of proceeding, in collaboration with my students. To prepare myself for that, I'm reconsidering my own history as a learner and as a teacher, and also as an observer of both those activities. Furthermore, I'm reading and, in some cases, re-reading a variety of commentators on education and art whose writings seem resonant and pertinent to the present moment. I thought I'd take a bit of time to tell you what I'm finding there as nourishing food for thought.

I began by returning to what -- at the risk of implicating him in a position not at all his own -- I've long taken as an eloquent defense of what you might think of as the Albertian position, in honor of my former teacher. This is the 1972 diatribe Fellow Teachers⁴ by Philip Rieff -- yes, father of the writer David Rieff, and former husband of Susan Sontag. Unapologetically mandarin in his position, Rieff in this text prefigures by several decades the polemics of Hirsch, Bloom and others, denouncing the spread in academe of the lowering of the basketball hoops that he attributes to the embrace of an uncritical feel-goodism, a tendency he'd already excoriated in The Triumph of the Therapeutic⁵, his savage attack on Jung, Reich and those others he saw as betrayers of Freudís discipline.

Rieff willfully takes positions that were already unpopular a quarter-century ago. "If the university is not the temple of the intellect, then it is not a university," he writes. "In the temple, as its servants know, there are no students' rights, except the right to be well-taught. A university is neither a political democracy nor an oligarchy; it is an intellectual aristocracy."⁶ And "Fighting attitudes do not mix well with analytic. . . . Our duty is to hang back, always a little behind the times."⁷ And "We cannot be advertising men for any movement. Herald nothing."⁸

Yet he surely echoes many of us in the field when he laments that today "few students know how to read a book and fewer come out of families still blessed with oral traditions, upon which abilities to read build up. . . . How do you teach totally unprepared students? The American universities are now producing tens of thousands of failed intellectuals and artists of life; this mass production may lead to the destruction of culture in any received sense."⁹

Yet his authoritarianism and conservatism are (in my opinion) far from malign, and surely neither absolute nor unself-critical. In the same chapter Rieff also writes, of the classroom, "To preside is not to rule; here is the hairline that makes all the difference in the world between culture and politics."¹⁰ And "Messages and positions are the death of teaching. As scholars and teachers, we have a duty to fight against our own positions."¹¹ And "Denial, the discipline of double-crossing your own position, is an ancient tactic of exegetical teaching."¹²

From Reiff I went -- for counterpoint from within the university system -- to a lesser-known but no less insightful thinker, New York University's Henry J. Perkinson, with whom I had the honor of studying in the 1980s. In a small but wonderfully argued treatise, The Possibilities of Error¹³, Perkinson -- deeply concerned, as I know from his classes and private conversations, with the deteriorating quality of education everywhere in this country -- speaks eloquently of the problems inherent in a teacher's "masking" the authoritarian premises of most teacher-student relationships with kind, considerate and loving mannerisms. (Ah, Miss Salimondo.) Instead, he encourages teachers to "minimize the fears that adults cause in the young," to "try to avoid or minimize those behaviors or situations that pressure, confuse, bore, alienate, manipulate, and victimize the young."

"Yet it is not just the teachers who frighten the young," he continues; "it's the whole educational enterprise that has institutionalized moral and intellectual authoritarianism through policies and procedures that threaten and control pupils. . . . Through dialogue," he concludes, "critics and educators both can come to an increased consciousness of what educators are doing to the young -- an awareness of the ways teachers and schools do frighten them."¹⁴

Some of which is not much different from what I found when I revisited the thought of the Brazilian Paulo Freire, extracting from his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed¹⁵ the understanding that an oppressive educational system hobbles everyone within it, the rulers and the ruled alike. Furthermore, Freire's ideas pushed me to consider the possibility that, if I truly believed myself operative in an osmotically totalitarian culture, perhaps I needed to broaden my definition of "the oppressed" to include all of my students, regardless of economic class, and myself as well. In that light, I think I may have done my students at New York University a disservice in my final years there, coming to see them as pampered rich kids (which they were, with few exceptions) without also recognizing that even wealth and privilege did not protect them any longer from the stupefying tendencies of the system, which now runs so amok that it appears hellbent on dumbing down everything and everyone, even the offspring of the ruling class presumably groomed to inherit power.

That led me into Freire's wonderful "dialogues on transforming education" with Ira Shor, gathered under the title A Pedagogy for Liberation¹⁶ and published in 1987. To my relief, these two educators agreed wholeheartedly that as an educational tool the prepared lecture -- a form I sometimes utilize, as on this occasion -- was not inherently oppressive, but could appropriately be used in tandem with the dialogic method, so long as one employed it for purposes of challenge rather than as a presumed vehicle for some imagined, inoculative "transfer of knowledge." On another level, one important section of the book concerns the imperative of liberating "first-world" students, which begins with the recognition that what the authors identify as a "culture of silence" and a "culture of sabotage" among first-world students are symptomatic of the sometimes obvious but often subtle oppressions that permeate those societies. "The sad reality," Shor says at one point, "is that students are largely alienated, bored and uncooperative, even when they are 'well-behaved.' Who can celebrate their silent boredom or their passivity?"¹⁷

Because that described precisely the majority of the students I've encountered over the past decade, I decided I needed to know more about it. Fortuitously, I happened across Herbert Kohl's 1994 collection of essays, I Won't Learn from You¹⁸ -- in which he distinguishes learning disabilities from the willful activity he calls "not- learning," and proposes the latter as an intuitive response and a personal strategy for survival in an educational environment that a student perceives as hostile to his or her integrity and autonomy. Since I consider the corrupt, decaying culture I and my students inhabit as hostile to the integrity and autonomy of all of us, I found myself prompted by Kohl's concept to rethink the responses of many of my students to the ostensible educational "opportunities" and "privileges" available to them -- asking myself if their disinterest and seeming apathy might not disguise a deeper and not inappropriate resistance to everything and everyone (myself included) implicated in a system whose unhealth they sensed, however inarticulately.

As Kohl, who as a teacher works mostly with grade-schoolers, puts it at one point, "children in school act in ways that are shaped by the institution; therefore it is essential never to judge a child by his or her school behavior."¹⁹ Kohl also speaks for the necessity of what he calls "creative maladjustment" as an adaptive strategy for surviving within an unhealthy context, and urges teachers to encourage it, even when that means bucking the system alongside one's students.²⁰

And that led me back to Lewis Hyde's astonishing meditation, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property²¹, a book that has meant much to me and, I know, to many others as well. The luminous comments of this poet and essayist on the differences between a gift economy and a market economy must surely resonate for both artists and teachers in this country and elsewhere who nowadays find their fields of activity entirely and unapologetically market-driven, increasingly populated and dominated by bean-counters, number-crunchers, desk jockeys, career bureaucrats and MBAs.

The entirety of Hyde's intricate argument pertains to the issues at hand, and I recommend it to you highly. I find it particularly valuable because it confronts, names and explores at length the frustration and despair that I, and many others, feel at this present moment:

"[E]very modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by market exchange. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities?"

"Every culture offers its citizens an image of what it is to be a man or woman of substance. . . . [A] disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities. . . ."

"Moreover," Hyde continues, " . . . a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation. If this is the case, then the gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality. Where gifts have no public currency, therefore, where the gift as a form of property is neither recognized nor honored, our inner gifts will find themselves excluded from the very commerce which is their nourishment."²²

Yet his is not a despairing book, if only because Hyde knows that the world's need for the gifts of its teachers and artists endures, inexhaustible. "If the commodity moves to turn a profit," Hyde asks, "where does the gift move?" His answer: "The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. . . . The gift finds that man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own."²³

The task, then, for those of us who think we have gifts, is that of seeking "the empty place" and finding those who have "been empty-handed the longest," of whom there is never any shortage, and who may walk into our exhibitions and classrooms or find our words on a page at any moment -- who may in fact prove to be our next-door neighbors or our best friends' children, because we live in a system that impoverishes all and actively generates a pervasive, debilitating sense of futility.

It is that sense of futility that I see as the true enemy of all creative activity, including art-making and teaching, and it shames me to confess, as I've done tonight, that I surrendered to it for a time. For I believe that a poet of my acquaintance, Carolyn Forché, speaks the deepest of truths when she says, to people like ourselves, "It is/not your right to feel powerless. Better/people than you were powerless."²⁴

The obligation, then, is the imperative of action, and the struggle against nihilism, and the nurturance of hope. I would call all the authors I've cited for you tonight realists, even pragmatists; yet I find all their work permeated with what I'd describe as hope. Herbert Kohl, indeed, is an active advocate of hope -- of being hopeful oneself, and of seeking to instill hope in one's students and to evoke it from them. From his argument I would suspect that his definition of that concept would coincide with the one proposed by the Czech saxophonist, playwright, essayist and President Vaclav Havel, who wrote, in his book Disturbing the Peace,

"Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. . . .

"Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. . . .

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. . . . It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now."²⁵

•

Well, that's what I've been chewing on lately. And it's this undigested stew that I'm bringing into my classrooms this semester. I can't yet say how it'll turn out, of course, nor can I even tell you how it's going so far. The adult-ed seminars haven't started yet. The first session in Philly was every teacher's nightmare: twenty college seniors who sat on their hands and volunteered not a word, all of us looking ugly under glaring fluorescents in a cramped, overcrowded, underventilated room set up with traditional formica-and-tubular-steel student seats facing one of those hideous gun-metal gray office desks -- the classic "I talk, you listen" configuration. None of them had any familiarity with my work, or with the critical dialogue around photography in general. They manifested no interest in anything. The most significant question they asked me all day was what they should call me. I replied that that was up to them.

I indulged myself in feeling disheartened for a day or so; in fact, I came close to quitting. Then I asked my department chair to shift us to another venue -- a long, narrow seminar room overlooking the library. Last Tuesday we all sat around the polished wood table, a bit more like collaborators. As does Rex Stout's plump detective Nero Wolfe, I "prefer eyes at a level."

I avoided the paterfamilias seat at the head of the table, and plan to move myself around from place to place over the coming months. For whatever reasons -- change of stage set, a bit of familiarity with me -- they talked more, so I got to start to know them and see where we might go as a collective. Some of them had decided to call me Allan, some Mr. Coleman, and one insisted on addressing me as Professor Coleman, all of which are fine with me. I'd given them a few of my essays to read the week before, so we discussed Diane Arbus, and Cindy Sherman, and hermeneutics and exegetics, and text and context, and we all enjoyed watching the videotape of "spectacular implosions" -- you know, those explosive deconstructions in which buildings are levelled without disturbing the ones next to them -- that I brought along to serve as an example of critics at work.

So we've started to loosen up and enjoy ourselves. At the very least, the lighting's better, the acoustics too, and it's more spacious. There's even wall-to-wall carpet. I move around a lot when I teach, and I'm thinking of taking my shoes off next time. If I do, they'll get to take theirs off too, of course. I'm trying to decide if that means I should require the wearing of socks. It seems to me that, whether I take the authoritarian or the permissive position on that, there's a real possibility that some teaching and learning may go on in there. That's my hope, anyhow.

Thank you.

1 To my amazement and delight, after I gave this talk no fewer than four of the teachers in attendance came up to me to recite those same lines -- in passable Middle English -- from memory.

2 There were, however, many things I'd learned from him and his colleagues; and, in their honor, throughout my entire teaching stint at New York University I always wore a tie to work -- though loosely knotted, and often paired with jeans.

3 I did run into a brilliant younger version of him during my doctoral studies -- Prof. Philip Hosay of New York University -- who taught in much the same way and offered a superb course for doctoral candidates on the methodologies of historical research. The students he found himself stuck with were, for the most part, unqualified to study with him, and I predicted to myself that he'd take early retirement.

4 Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (New York: Delta Books, 1975).

5 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).

6 Fellow Teachers, p. 6.

7 Ibid., p. 4.

8 Ibid., p. 4.

9 Ibid., p. 15.

10 Ibid., p. 14.

11 Ibid., p. 6.

12 Ibid., p. 16.

13 Henry J. Perkinson, The Possibilities of Error: an Approach to Education (New York: David McKay Co., 1971).

14 Ibid., pp. 53-55.

15 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970, 1993).

16 ____________, with Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, 1987).

17 Op.cit., p. 129.

18 Herbert Kohl, I Won't Learn from You (New York: The New Press, 1994).

19 Ibid., p. 133.

20 Ibid., pp. 127-153.

21 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

22 Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv.

23 Ibid., p. 23.

24 "Return," in The Country Between Us (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 20.

25 Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace (?? ), p. ?