The co-teaching company

There are many reasons why I like to teach. I take pleasure in the company of college-age students, for one thing because their ways allow me to relive my own undergraduate years, which were mostly terrific. I enjoy figuring out how to present complicated material simply and, conversely, how to bring out the complexity of things that appear straightforward. And then there’s the fact that I get a real kick out of being on stage or otherwise having an audience — and no one should deny that even the most serious classroom contains theatrical elements.

So, I’m a ham. Worse, though, I’m something of a control freak. I imagine my classroom as my demesne: I am in charge, and my students are the members of a wonderful orchestra that I, alone, conduct.

Unsurprisingly, then, I haven’t done a lot of team-teaching. Before this semester, I had a co-conductor only once: In 2006, my Hellenist colleague Andrew Ford and I gave a graduate seminar called “Homer’s Iliad: Language, Style, Text.” (When Ford and I came into the room the first day, he announced the course title and added, with perfect timing and a suave dance move, “Katz is the language and the text — but I’m the style, baby!”) It was a success, I think, and I would certainly do it again, but in fact more than my desire for control stands in the way: There is a bureaucratic obstacle to having two professors lead a single course since the University clearly gets less for its money.

Or is this actually not so clear? In the case of the seminar on the Iliad, my colleague’s expertise and mine overlapped to a considerable degree, so the idea behind the pairing was to present an especially forceful case for a certain way of reading Homer, which we optimistically called “the new Princeton school.” The seminar was thus an Orange and Black luxury: Each of us could have offered a similar course on his own, but what we ended up with was better for having the heft of two like-minded people behind it.

In the current semester, however, I find myself in the unusual position of teaching two new co-taught courses, neither of them in my home department, classics, and neither of them on a topic I would have dared tackle on my own: “Imagined Languages” and “Style and Rule,” respectively an upper-level undergraduate class that considers material from Proto-World to Klingon, via Middle Egyptian, Cornish, Esperanto and Fortran, and a graduate seminar on the history of English prose style from Sir Francis Bacon to Walter Pater to Gertrude Stein. The former, which I am teaching together with historian of science Michael Gordin, is generously sponsored by the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication and cross-listed with both history and European Cultural Studies; the latter, for which my partner is Renaissance literature guru Jeff Dolven (the style to my rule, of course), is sponsored, likewise generously, by the Council of the Humanities and cross-listed with English. The two classes are pretty great, if I may say so — and I feel that I can say so since much of the credit belongs to my extraordinary co-teachers. In each case, the breadth of material and approaches is possible thanks to having a pair at the helm whose areas of expertise only partly overlap.

Dual leadership is fragile and can easily fail, whether through incoherence of purpose or struggles over power. It is dangerous — you will remember that Romulus killed Remus — and, at least in academia, it is also time-consuming: Preparation often feels like twice the work rather than half, for the simple reason that however bad it may be to embarrass oneself in front of students, it’s better than looking like a fool in front of a colleague. But familiarity can breed delight: Jeff and I have known each other since our student days at Yale and Oxford, while Michael is a more recent acquaintance, a buddy since not long after he flew the Harvard coop a decade ago. Kind, generous and frighteningly intelligent, Jeff and Michael are two of my favorite people on campus, outside — and now also inside — the classroom: We respect each other, spar playfully and work to build on our combined strengths. This makes for a good environment in which to teach and in which to learn.

At Princeton and nationally, the principal subject of pedagogical discussion in recent months has been the role of “massive open online courses.” The New York Times dubbed 2012 “the year of the MOOC” and ran a front-page story last November about my friend Mitch Duneier’s 40,000-person introduction to sociology, offered in connection with Coursera, on whose academic advisory board president-elect Chris Eisgruber ’83 sits; just two weeks ago, Princeton University Press published “Higher Education in the Digital Age,” a careful and nuanced view of the ever-changing relationship between teaching and technology by president emeritus Bill Bowen GS ’58 (in collaboration with Kelly Lack ’10). I am skeptical of the belief that one of Princeton’s main missions should be to teach as many students as possible. But I do believe that any educational institution that can afford it — and let’s face it: Princeton can afford it — should encourage unconventional partnerships among its faculty, certainly for the purpose of teaching a few dozen of its own students in a conventional classroom and possibly also to reach tens of thousands of people around the world.

Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics and a trustee of the Princeton University Press. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.