Engineers and scientists sell colleges. They gather around test tubes and robots in college catalog photos, gazing with wonder at the marvels they’ve wrought. Here the American dream of money as power is traded for the Baconian dream of knowledge as power, complete with lab coats and grant money.
As for us book-mongering humanists, we just don’t make good advertising. We spend our nights toiling alone over forgotten volumes in dorms and carrels. No problem sessions, no study groups, no glamour. Welcome to the humanities. While we’ve retained something of the Socratic method, we have divorced ourselves from the Socratic attitude of unabashed confrontation. There are few loners in Raphael’s “School of Athens” but plenty in Princeton’s atomistic humanities departments. The academic solitaire we play has its benefits, of course. Constructing strong arguments, which is central to the liberal arts, requires one to recognize and address relevant objections. I have found that doing this is the intellectual equivalent of childbirth — the product is precious but the process is painful. Weighing your own argument on its merits is downright difficult in the same way that it’s difficult to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. But bootstrapping is the only way to make progress in our disciplines, supposing that there is a way forward rather than wayward in literary theory or philosophy or the other humane subjects. So learning to bootstrap, to distance yourself from your thoughts and evaluate them objectively, is a valuable tool for a humanist. We need more skills than that, however. We need to think on our feet, to dodge and parry, and we can’t learn to spar by shadowboxing alone. The skills required for dynamic intellectual exchange are undernourished in our drastically individualistic curriculum. Humanists have fewer opportunities for informal collaboration than do scientists and engineers; since we rarely discuss our arguments with other students, we have a hard time coping with criticism on the fly.
A glaring flaw in Princeton’s academic regulations is at least partly to blame: The line between legitimate and illegitimate cooperation is not sharply drawn when it comes to discussing one’s argument with another student. So why collaborate when doing so could put your degree at risk? Collaboration will continue to be suffocated until we clear this up.
That’s my first recommendation: Students, faculty and the Committee on Discipline all need a clear and reasonable understanding of legitimate informal collaboration. The regulations are tolerably clear when it comes to reviewing another student’s written work: whenever you benefit from someone else’s thought, you must acknowledge it. When it comes to discussing a topic with another student viva voce, the rule ought to be the same. This rule for informal discussions should be added to ‘Rights, Rules, Responsibilities,’ and professors should encourage students to collaborate within its bounds. Once these regulations are clarified, we’ll have a healthier intellectual atmosphere.
My second recommendation is that departments expand opportunities for formal collaboration insofar as that is feasible. Precepts don’t cut it; they rarely feature extended, dynamic exchanges. Every humanities student should have consistent and worthwhile opportunities to work with other students, whether for a group presentation or a co-written paper. Lest students protest that collaborative projects would quash their urge to compete, the projects may very well be competitive as well. For example, students in a philosophy class might collaborate in writing a paper in dialogue form, trading arguments and objections back and forth. And, to allay worries about assigning individual grades for these projects, students may be required to explain the extent of their contributions. Alternatively, professors may choose not to assign grades for the projects and instead require that they be completed in order to pass the course.
These recommendations are put forth humbly in the spirit of improving the overall value of our liberal arts education. While our administration is somewhat sclerotic, I suspect that it is a healthy sclerosis in that it is hard for the slow-moving to get very far off course. My suggestion for improving formal collaboration can be taken up at the discretion of individual professors; more systematic changes in department curricula will of course require more oversight, as will the amendment I suggest to “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities.” This bureaucratic ado, however, is far outweighed by the long-term benefits of greater collaboration to the intellectual spirit of our University and to the value of a Princeton degree. As Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879, put it in his address on Princeton’s sesquicentennial anniversary, let us make the humanities human again.
Matt Hoberg is a philosophy major from Kennett Square, Pa. He can be reached at mhoberg@princeton.edu.
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