Teaching is a good way to stay metaphorically young. That said, it is hardly news that teachers do get older while freshmen remain forever youthful, and various things over the course of this semester have made me consider how curious it can be to go from young to not-so-young while remaining at the same institution. That cultural points of reference shift is, of course, no surprise, though I do sometimes find surprising what 18-year-old Princetonians don’t know. Here, for example, is a short list, from the ridiculous to the sublime, of some of the peoples, places and things that mean little or nothing at all to groups of students with whom I’ve been engaged in conversation: Kangols, corgis, Dan Quayle, Mae West, Claude Levi-Strauss, hanging chads and Xanadu. To be sure, they find my ignorance striking as well. Until recently, I must confess, I had never heard of MF DOOM (“Just remember ALL CAPS when you spell the man’s name”), though thanks to the enthusiasm of Giri Nathan ’13, I spent some time last week listening voluntarily, for the first time ever and in the privacy of my office, to rap.
What really interests me, however, are not matters of Trivial Pursuit, but rather the slow slide from understanding to non-understanding that comes from doing the same thing in the same place year after year. To take a case that is much on my mind these days: A decade ago, I could speak with authority about why a Princeton senior who was going off to England after graduation might wish to be in one or another of Oxford’s colleges; five years ago, I still presumed to speak with authority, without quite realizing the implications of the fact that my first-hand knowledge was losing its veneer; but earlier this month, I recognized with a start that my knowledge wasn’t what anyone could seriously call knowledge anymore. Perhaps the fact that I will be spending next fall (no, autumn) on leave in Oxford will allow me to offer better advice when I return in 2011 — though another member of the faculty will by then have taken over my position as one of Princeton’s official fellowship advisers.
It is not just circumstances that change (the relative merits of Oxford’s Christ Church and Magdalen, for instance). Attitudes change as well, but it often takes a special event to see this. One of the most instructive experiences I have had in recent months was meeting on two evenings with a bunch of juniors and seniors, on the initiative of Jonathan Giuffrida ’10 and Masha Shpolberg ’10, to read and argue about Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind.” This screed on the supposed decline in American sociocultural and academic mores, which I read sprawled on the floor of my freshman dorm room the year it came out, 1987, was a cult book at the time — loved and reviled in equal measure — but I had no reason to believe that students would still wish to wrangle with it (also in these pages) 22 years later . I have rarely learned so much so quickly about what undergraduates today think as I did by discussing with them our often considerably divergent reactions to the book and how we might actually go about judging changes that American students, universities, and society have, and have not, undergone from one generation to the next.
It is late in the day for me to be realizing that many forms of knowledge — scholarly, personal, practical — have a shelf life and that the best way to combat the problem is not to get into a rut. Ruts have advantages, of course: You go about your business smoothly because you’ve done that business a hundred times before. But I hope that students will continue to instruct my colleagues and me in today’s ways. And above all, I look forward to next year’s sabbatical, not just so that I have more time to devote to scholarship instead of administration, but because, much as I love Princeton, it is time to get away for a while. It’ll be good to return to a hill of new information to scrabble up rather than keep sliding down into ignorance.
Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.
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