(Thinking about starting a free university and trying to organize a regional conference on radical pedagogy--anyone interested in helping out? I keep asking myself what am I doing as a professor and who am I serving. Afterall this is what I have dedicated my life to doing--why do I do it, what is the purpose, and how is it helping my community/world? How should we live :) Article courtesy of Claire Glasscock.)
The People's Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League
by Courtney E. Martin
Utne Reader and Truth Out
An Ivy League scholar breaks the rules, waives the fees, and welcomes the workaday residents of Harlem into his politically charged classroom.
The lecture hall is nearly dark, lit only by the faint glow of a dozen laptop screens. Suddenly, a projector comes alive and a painting appears above the chalkboard. Seventy-year-old professor Dennis Dalton - his bald head, trademark sneakers, baggy jeans, and button-up denim shirt barely discernible at the front of the room - announces with glee, "Ahhh! There it is! The School of Athens!"
Half of the 150 or so Political Theory I students giggle at his zealousness. "My favorite thing to do when I go to Rome is to stand in front of this painting and have all kinds of thoughts and reveries," he says, stepping back so he can get a better look. "After a few hours, I get kind of diminished from lack of food and drink and I imagine the people, depicted so expertly here by Raphael, talking to one another."
More giggles.
The professor turns to face the students, whose eyes are directed upward at the great thinkers shown in his favorite painting. "Raphael was trying to capture a community engaged in the philosophy of the mind. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and all the other philosophers depicted here began a long tradition of street philosophy, a tradition that lives on in the streets of Harlem - the exchange of ideas, a passion for education and idealism, a community of learning and teaching." Then his tone shifts to disdain. "If only Columbia - the school on the hill - understood the importance of it."
Professor Dalton has taught for 38 years in the political science department of Barnard, the all-women's school of Columbia University in Harlem. Like many Ivy League schools positioned near low-income communities, Columbia has a strained relationship with its neighbors, working-class people who are not only kept out, but are threatened with displacement by the grand vision of the university's leadership. The school wants to seize property through eminent domain in its plans for a new $6.3 billion expansion into West Harlem.
Columbia says the project will create more than 6,000 jobs over the next 25 years. But Manhattan Community Board No. 9, which is the voice of many West Harlem residents, says it will displace 300 people's homes and 900 people's current jobs, not to mention destroy a neighborhood known for its rich history and culture.
Dalton is clearly on the side of the community. In fact, he doesn't just want Harlem protected from Columbia's encroachment. He also encourages Harlem to encroach into Columbia.
Many Harlemites have turned Dalton's courses into a pilgrimage of sorts. Neighborhood residents have been attending his classes, some of them for more than 10 years. They never pay a fee or officially register; they simply slip in. Some are bibliophiles or retirees; others are body builders and taxi drivers. They range in age from 19 to "I'm not telling."
If Dalton's lectures took place in a towering cathedral, they could be no more of a spiritual experience to the folks from Harlem. He gives them access to the inaccessible, an elite school that has, in its own posturing, presented itself as sacred but instead come off as segregationist. He adds structure to their lives, motivating them to make the trek up the hill every Tuesday and Thursday, come rain or shine. He sees them not as God's children but as Plato's philosopher kings. And they, in turn, give Dalton a gift that few academics will ever receive: a claim to authenticity.
How did a professor at one of the nation's most exclusive colleges manage to become the people's professor? As with many grand social experiments, it began with an unlikely friendship.
Ben Armstead, a gregarious entrepreneur in his 70s with caterpillar eyebrows and freckles thrown across his pale brown cheeks, learned about Dalton's classes in 1994 when he was helping Columbia students move into their dorm rooms for extra money (never mind that he was pushing 60 at the time). As he lugged computers and bean bag chairs, he would ask the students about their favorite courses and teachers. Dalton's name came up over and over again.
Their eyes alight, students spoke of a political science professor who preached the importance of finding one's Platonic areté, or calling. They talked about a professor who freely gave out his home phone number and the questions to the final exam prior to administering it - his own little rebellion against grades. They described a man who filled their heads with theory, but no less than he filled their hearts with love.
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