Recently in Scholarship Category

Last Wednesday I participated in a panel discussion on the subject of teaching large lecture courses sponsored by NYU's Center for Teaching Excellence. My co-panelists were Jim Matthews, who teaches psychology, and Daniel Stein, who teaches physics. Jim set forth a series of generally applicable principles of good lecturing; Dan spoke about the special challenges facing the lecturer in science and, in particular, physics; and I spoke about my approach to lecturing in a humanities classroom.

As a way of preparing for the session, I dug out a "Statement of Teaching Philosophy" that I had occasion to write five years ago and then revise two years ago. I was pleased to see that I still agreed with most of what I wrote. Here's how it began:

My goals as a teacher have always been to make my students understand why I feel passionate about literary study and scholarship, to help them explore the contours of the discipline and its modes of thinking, and to awaken within them a sense of the pleasures and rewards of intellectual life.

What I want my undergraduate students to take away from my courses is not so much the memory of any particular text or piece of analysis, but rather a fuller appreciation for the value and, indeed, the joys of the life of the mind. I want them to realize why reading and thinking about literature should become an abiding part of their lives, and I want to give them the tools that will make their future reading experiences rich and rewarding, in college and beyond.

In my graduate teaching, I have sought to instill a professional approach to literary study, while also making my students understand that their training should help them engage more fully with the world, rather than remove them from it. Above all, I want my graduate students to understand the power and responsibilities that they themselves will have as teachers.

[If you're so inclined, you can download a PDF (98KB) of the entire statement here.] I realized, however, that one word that has become crucial both to my scholarship and my pedagogy was nowhere to be found in the statement: cosmopolitanism.

So I'm planning to update that statement in the near future. It'll address the pedagogical implications of recent theories of cosmopolitanism. I'm interested in the ways that cosmopolitanism has emerged as an alternative not simply to nationalism but also to the kind of universalism that reduces all people to some common denominator in order make generalizations about humanity. As I keep saying to whatever audiences are willing to listen: for the universalist, difference is a problem to be overcome; for the cosmopolitan thinker, however, difference is an opportunity to be embraced. Cosmopolitan theory stresses the importance of being willing to engage in meaningful conversations across boundaries of identity and of disciplinary thinking. One concept from recent cosmopolitan theory has provento be particularly useful in a classroom setting: "fallibilism," the idea that we need to listen to others and to be willing to have our minds changed because we are all fallible.

Announcing at the outset of the class that you subscribe to a doctrine of fallibilism at once establishes your authority and sets productive limits on it -- and helps you save face if you happen to make a gaffe during lecture!

By all accounts, the lecture that I gave for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute on Wednesday night went well. The title of the talk was "Cosmopolitanism, Multiculturalism, and the Promise of Literature." Like Joanna's lecture on the Silk Road, it took place at the Al Mamoura Auditorium in the building that houses the Abu Dhabi Education Council, which is the group that serves as our sponsor in Abu Dhabi. Here's the blurb that I'd given them about the lecture:

Originating in the idea of the world citizen and conceived in contradistinction to nationalism, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way of building community by embracing rather than avoiding difference. This lecture will explore the ways in which a cosmopolitan perspective responds to problems posed by contemporary Western multiculturalism. It will also suggest that literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker.

In the lecture, which owes much to the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and David Hollinger, I tried to tie together a number of elements from my recent scholarship and thinking: the problems posed by overly pluralist conceptions of multiculturalism; the problems posed by the desire for "cultural purity," the power of "emergent writing," Zoroastrianism, and Melville's Moby-Dick. In addition to serving as a way of tying together these strands, Moby-Dick was intended to offer a case study in the ways that a text can mobilize cosmopolitan perspectives and finally as an entree to the idea that "literature offers distinctive resources for the cosmopolitan thinker."

That idea is the least developed in my current work, but potentially the most intriguing. I wanted to get at the idea that great literature promotes a cosmopolitan embrace of difference because it often asks you to do precisely that: embrace a different consciousness than your own. In the case, for example, of reading a novel, what you do if you become immersed in it is to let the consciousness of another take over your own.

If you're interested, you can download the script that formed the basis of the lecture here.

The talk was also accompanied by PowerPoint that I hoped would make the lecture a little more vivid by presenting images and also the block quotes that I was using. I confess that I was worried that I had included too much material about Moby-Dick, a text that I'd assumed my audience had heard of but not read. I tried to solve the problem by telling stories about the text and anecdotes related to the text (in particular, the sinking of the whaleship Essex in the South Seas and Melville's reaction to reading Owen Chase's account of it). I tried to survey the audience: only one or two seemed to be asleep, and I really couldn't complain about that since I myself had succumbed to jet lag during my colleague Joanna's talk: apparently at precisely the moment that she made a reference to Zoroastrianism! (Whoops!)

The question and answer session was gratifyingly lively and gave me many things to think about. Indeed, I expect to be meditating on some of these questions more here in the days to come.

I had a question from a colleague at Zayed University about language differences, translation, and whether cosmopolitan conversation was predicated on a shared language. I tried to suggest that language was yet another gulf that the cosmopolitan tried to cross by whatever means he or she could and that one of the opportunities presented by the present moment is the fact that texts were so quickly translated and disseminated. And I suggested that one of the goals of the NYUAD literature program would be to make students aware of both the limitations and opportunities accompany the translation of any text.

Another colleague from Zayed asked whether my suggestion that literature offers an opportunity for cosmopolitan experience was limited to texts that don't themselves adopt a counter-cosmopolitan or fundamentalist attitude. I tried to suggest that in fact it would have been much more challenging to use exactly such a text as my case study, because I would like to be able to argue that even a counter-cosmopolitan text, insofar as it forces the reader to confront difference of perspective and consciousness, can encourage cosmopolitan thinking. And I talked a little about the way in which learning from the fundamentalist or from the provincial is the hardest thing for cosmopolitans to do today.

NYUAD Vice Chancellor Al Bloom gave me the opportunity to talk a little more about the interplay of sameness and difference, and I had the chance to talk a little about Anthony Appiah's slogan version of cosmopolitanism -- "universality plus difference" -- which I'd chosen to omit from the lecture and about my take on the recent history of cosmopolitan theory, including ideas about "rooted cosmopolitanism." I suggested that what can save  cosmopolitanism from being simply another Western idea imposed on everyone else is the idea that it is a "weak" conception of the good from a philosophical point of view. (Actually, in the event I didn't use the phrase "W of the good" when responding; I wish I had.) It's a structure, a container into which different ideas can be poured, so long as the ideas are compatible with the ideas of embracing difference and being willing to engage in dialogue across boundaries. A cosmopolitanism rooted in Abu Dhabi will have structural affinities with  cosmopolitanism rooted in New York, but also salient differences that enhance the cosmopolitan experience!

They put out a nice spread afterward, but I only had one nibble of it because so many people from the audience came up to ask questions and offer insights. I was particularly gratified to meet Alia Yunis, a novelist whose first book, The Night Counter, has been on my list of texts to add to read as part of my final revisions on the NYU Press book on emergent literatures. Now that I've met her, I've moved it to the top of my list. (She'll be reading at the conference on the 1001 Nights that Philip Kennedy has organized for the NYUAD Institute this December. Check out her website and you'll see why.)

With any luck, a number of  the people who said that they would e-mail me with further thoughts actually will! Meanwhile, i recorded the entire session and hopefully will have the courage to listen to the Q & A again soon. (You're never quite as good as you thought you were when you listen to the actual tape!) I'd like to keep the conversation that I started at Al Mamoura going, even if only (for now) here in the ether.

Sharjah, which is right next to Dubai, is more conservative than its neighbor. No alcohol is served in the emirate, which was named the cultural capital of the Arab world by UNESCO because of its excellent museums. The American University of Sharjah there was founded by the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qassimi III, and it is a forerunner of NYUAD insofar as it is a school that offers a co-educational experience. The Shaikh also founded the more traditional University of Sharjah, which lies just down the road from AUS and offers separate but equal facilities for men and women.

At AUS we met with the Dean of Arts and Science, Williams Heidkamp, and with faculty from a variety of fields including literature, mass communication, history, and international relations. The overarching subject of our discussion was the challenge involved in teaching the humanities in an Islamic setting: where were certain intellectual and social lines drawn, what kinds of interaction between instructors and students were permissible outside the classroom, and where might the expectations of Western teachers and students from the Gulf region clash, what was it like to live in an emirate if you were an ex-pat? Instructors at  NYUAD will face many of the same challenges, though our student body is likely to be more demographically diverse than that of AUS. The AUS faculty members seemed skeptical both about our aspirations to import some of the residential education models that we use back at NYUNY and also more generally about the prospects for a liberal arts college in the Emirates. Their institution is dominated by its engineering school, apparently, which is the first-choice program for the majority of entering students. Arts and Science seems to get those who don't find engineering congenial and who are able to convince their parents that a liberal arts curriculum is worthwhile. They wished us well, however, hoping that if NYUAD is successful, it will enhance the status of the liberal arts in the region generally and thereby help them. We expressed our hope that we would be able to establish scholarly ties with AUS and foster the creation of communities of scholars with mutual research interests.

After lunch at  the school cafeteria, we headed over to Sharjah's Museum of Islamic Civilization, a domed building with two long wings. I spent most of my time in the hall devoted to the history of Islam and found myself reminded of the very central role that Hagar and Ismail play in Islamic belief and more specifically in the hajj pilgrimage. And it made me worry just a little about the lecture on cosmopolitanism that I'd be giving the next day. The lecture's second half uses Moby-Dick as a case study in the dynamics of literary cosmopolitanism, and I wondered whether any in my audience might find my treatment of "Ishmael" disturbing or insensitive. Perhaps more significantly, I began to think about the significance of Melville's treatment of Islam in the novel, which draws on stereotype far more than his treatment of Zoroastrianism. (I'm thinking particularly of the episode involving Queequeg's "Ramadan'" but also about offhand references to Islamic and Near Eastern practices througout the book. I started thinking that I should write companion piece to my essay on cosmopolitanism and Zoroastrianism in Moby-Dick that would explore the novel's appropriations of Islam as (I suspect) an example of the limits of its cosmopolitan aspirations.

I'm writing this in a van on the road from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah. We've just entered Dubai. The desert surrounds us.

I'm traveling with three colleagues from NYU and one from NYU Abu Dhabi. I owe my presence here in part to John McCain.

Last year, after McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate and the Republicans received their post-convention bounce, my wife and I decided we needed an exit strategy in case the unthinkable happened. We'd need to find a cosmopolitan space, since the United States would clearly be something other than cosmopolitan if McCain and Palin could be voted into the White House.

Canada? Switzerland. "What about Abu Dhabi?" my wife asked, remembering that NYU had announced plans the year before to  build a campus there on Saadiyat Island. Take a look at one of their official websites, and you'll find that "cosmopolitan" is one of the words that Abu Dhabi uses to describe itself and its aspirations.

"Okay," I said, "I'll mention it to Matthew," referring to Matthew Santirocco, the Dean of the College of Arts and Science at NYU, whom I knew to be centrally involved in the Abu Dhabi effort. I  had to contact him by e-mail anyway about another matter, so I ended my message by saying that I'd love to chat with him at some point about ways to help with the Abu Dhabi effort. I had an e-mail back almost immediately: could he call me at 5:30 that day to talk about Abu Dhabi?
 
As it turned out, Matthew was the chair of the Humanities Coordinating Group for NYU Abu Dhabi, a committee charged with creating a portion of the NYU Abu Dhabi curriculum and then with hiring faculty members to teach there.  Apparently, the Abu Dhabi leadership had decided that the Group needed a representative from English, and my name had come up in part because of my work on cosmopolitanism.  Had someone in English mentioned this to me? No, I said. Kismet, then, said Matthew.

I liked to think that he and I had developed a good working relationship over the years, because of my service to the College over the years, particularly during my stint as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2001-2004, and also because I'd won some teaching awards and demonstrated a commitment to undergraduate education. So when he invited me to join the Group and started describing its work, I agreed even before he had finished. But I haven't told you about the perks, yet, he said. Perks, I thought. Oh, oh. That means its going to be a lot of work.

And it has been, but it's been the most rewarding  service work I've done at NYU. (We're passing the city of Dubai now. You can see the Burj al Dubai, the tallest building in the world, in the distance. We'll be stopping in Dubai this afternoon.)

It's that rarest of committees: I actually look forward to the meetings. In part that's because of the wonderful colleagues from different departments who are on it, but it's also because of the challenge and opportunity that NYU Abu Dhabi represents. The idea is to create a small college on the Swarthmore model coupled with a robust and well-funded research institute, thereby drawing on the best aspects of both the small liberal arts college and the research-oriented university. NYU Abu Dhabi would be a fully-fledged unit of the university, equal in standing to the Faculty of Arts and Science, offering a degree that would be a real NYU degree and not some equivalent. Moreover, unlike many abroad programs that draw on relatively inexpensive local faculty, NYUAD would offer a standing faculty that would be tenured and tenure-track and whose members would be equal in qualification and distinction to their peers back in New York.
 
"Our partners in Abu Dhabi" (as we like to say) invited NYU to open this campus and are providing generous funding for the venture not because they want to "Westernize" but because they want to engage in a dialogue with the West, presumably both to understand and benefit from some of the insights of Western culture and pedagogy and to expose us to central insights from Islamic culture . For that reason, they have guaranteed us  academic freedom that is unprecedented for their cultures, because they understand that to have what they want - a liberal arts college and a research institution on the American model - we need to have the academic freedom that makes those enterprises possible. In other words, they want us to do what we do, and they're committed to making that possible - despite the difficulties that our conception of academic freedom might pose for them.

It's a bold move and a risky move, both for NYU and for our partners in Abu Dhabi. But I have become convinced that it is the most innovative and most important educational project with which I am likely to be involved during my career.

I know that some of my colleagues at NYU are skeptical: they worry about the NYU administration's motives; they worry about dilution of the NYU "brand" or about the siphoning of resources and energies away from the New York campus; they worry about NYU's labor practices and about labor practices in the Emirates and about some of the problems identified by Human Rights Watch.

I respect those views, but (I'm convinced that one of the great tasks of the 21st century is for the West and Islam to learn how to respect one another and to engage in mutually beneficial conversations. And if we want to help promote change abroad, we can't do it from the relative comfort  of our offices in New York. We have to be abroad, on the ground, living and working with others, engaging in the give-and-take that characterizes real dialogue, which isn't always easy and doesn't have predetermined outcomes.
 
As I've worked on this project during the past year, I've been struck by the quality and commitment of the people involved at every level. Most of them have become involved in NYUAD for idealistic reasons like those I've mentioned.
 
Here's an example: we talked at the beginning of last year about wanting to create a liberal arts college on the Swarthmore model. So what did NYU's president John Sexton do? He offered the retiring president of Swarthmore, Al Bloom, the position of Vice Chancellor of NYU Abu Dhabi (the top position at the campus). Getting to know Al Bloom a little bit has been one of the unexpected benefits of working on the Abu Dhabi project: his intellectual acumen, seemingly boundless energy, and his deep commitment to undergraduate pedagogy make him the right man for the job. It struck me, when I heard about his appointment, that it boded very well for the future of the NYU Abu Dhabi project.
 
Do I have the fervor of the convert? I suppose I do.

Meanwhile, we're arriving at Sharjah, where we are scheduled to meet with a dean from the American University there. Stay tuned for more from the Emirates as the week progresses.

As I complete the revisions to my manuscript on emergent literatures for NYU Press, I've been rereading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, originally published in 1992 and now in a second, revised edition (1998). Schlesinger criticizes what he refers to as the "cult of ethnicity," the idea that "America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history" (20-21)

There's a lot to like in Schlesinger's book -- and a lot to critique as well -- and I'll be including a brief discussion of it in my emergent literatures book. One of the things that feels dated about the book is its preoccupation with Afrocentrism, a movement that has receded in importance in the ten years since the last edition of Schlesinger's book. His remark that twelve percent of American are black, and the felt pressure to correct injustices of past scholarship comes mostly on their behalf" becomes the subject of Nathan Glazer's We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1998), which argues that multiculturalism as an educational movement owes its power to the interest that African American intellectuals and educators have taken in it as a way of addressing the social and educational problems that blacks in America still face.

Schlesinger is no apologist for white resentment: although he believes firmly in the importance of "America" as an ideal, he also believes that the diversity of the United States is one of its chief characteristics and greatest strengths. He just doesn't want diversity to become fetishized in a way that prevents Americans from thinking of themselves as Americans first and representatives of some other group -- racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, or whatever -- second.

One remark in particular caught my eye: Schlesinger described the election of an "Irish Catholic" -- John F. Kennedy -- to the presidency of the United States in 1960 as "a signal of ultimate acceptance that relieved Irish-Americans of the need for ethnic cheerleading" (62).

Unfortunately, Schlesinger passed away in February of last year: he didn't live to see Barack Obama become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. I wonder what he would have thought about the meaning of Barack's candidacy. Is it possible that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the election of Kennedy had on Catholics? Or is the matter of race too important and divisive to make the cases similar? The "Catholics" that Schlesinger seems to have on his mind in the book are white Catholics.

Only time will tell, but it's worth pondering.

Last night, in Philadelphia, I watched my mentor, Sacvan Bercovitch, receive the American Studies Association's Carl Bode - Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement. It was my pleasure and my honor to have nominated Saki for the award and to have gathered supporting letters from colleagues and students.

In conferring the award, the prize committee's chairperson, Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne), described Saki as "the presiding spirit, in many respects, of American Studies. Through his writings, his intellectual politics, his service to the Association, Professor Bercovitch has made an unparalleled set of distinguished contributions over the past thirty years. Perhaps no single literary historian has exerted the profound influence over his field that Bercovitch has, for he has been the key figure in the ideological turn in American literary study and indeed has played a central part in galvanizing the source of its interdisciplinary practice."

Hutner noted that the American Studies Association is "infinitely more robust" than it was the last time it met in Philadelphia, in 1982 when Saki was president and suggested that this robustness may well be "the fruit of Sacvan Bercovitch's labors."

I didn't know Saki then (we wouldn't meet for another couple of years when he had relocated to Harvard), and it was a revelation for me to hear about the central role that he had played in setting the ASA back on course after a period during which it was foundering. I was struck by the fact that he was even more deserving of the Bode - Pearson prize than my letter of nomination had suggested.

What follows is the text of that letter. As a tribute it's inadequate, but at least it achieved what it was intended to achieve.