On the teacher

I.

Nearly two decades ago – it is astonishing to me to mark the years – I sat in a classroom at the University of Texas at Austin, at an oval seminar table that seated twenty, mesmerized by my teacher: Paul Woodruff. He was guiding us in a conversation about Sophocles. I think it was only later that I found out that he had made that table by hand.

I also didn’t yet know what philosophy was, let alone how one might think about philosophical questions through literature. I wanted to study math and linguistics. But I was also in the Plan II Honors Program, and Paul was in his last year as director, after fifteen years in which he had shaped the program. 

In Plan II you have to take physics and logic, literature and philosophy, courses in quantitative reasoning and the social sciences, and much else, whatever else you want to study, usually through specialized courses for students in the program. There were also small seminars that faculty had to apply to teach on subjects of their own choosing. In a university whose scale often places the liberal arts ideal beyond reach, Plan II zealously defends it.

Paul was a legend on campus, his life and habits a subject of frequent discussion especially among the Plan II cohort. We all knew he had served in Vietnam and was still involved in work with other veterans. We knew that he woke at dawn to row and that he often biked to campus. We knew that he played the cello and made wooden furniture with his hands. Of course, we knew that he was regarded as one of the most remarkable teachers at the university.

It is strange for me to recall a time when I knew only Paul’s reputation, rather than the man. In that classroom in Carothers Hall, Paul became my teacher, even though I didn’t yet understand what that meant.

II.

Later in my first year, I found my way to the study of Plato and Greek literature through a happy accident. A registration hiccup had put me in a seminar on the topic, despite my wanting to take something else. Paul was not the instructor; he was on leave and had announced that he was stepping down as director of the honors program, though my friends and I knew he would be back the following year to teach a section of the required Plan II philosophy course. With my interest kindled, I studied ancient Greek in the summer, intensively enough to begin taking specialized courses in the subject that next year, too.

I didn’t yet have any particular disciplinary focus, and Plan II let me do as I pleased. In my second year, I took advanced seminars in philosophy, classics, political theory, and stayed the course with my linguistics major (though I gave up math). In that period of intellectual ferment, Paul’s yearlong philosophy course met, surpassingly, a need I did not know I had: to think seriously about the core questions of philosophy – what sort of creature is the human being? what are the limits of our knowledge? how can we manage to live alongside one another and live well? – both in the company of bold and demanding thinkers and texts of the past and in the company of one another, that is to say, the community that arose in Paul’s classroom. He was our teacher because he fostered that community.

I had already been fortunate to have other charismatic instructors: members of UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers, professors whose recorded lectures were advertised in glossy catalogs, those whose learned digressions prompted furious note-taking no less than their systematic expositions. Plan II, in particular, selected such instructors for its courses. As we learned in our class, Paul was not only charismatic as a lecturer, but he also had a keen consciousness of our powers of attention.

I invariably sat in the front row, usually alongside a friend or two. I had learned in my freshman year that sitting further back in a lecture hall tended to blunt my concentration, but, looking back, I see that I also wanted to be close to Paul, as if his wisdom might be poured into me. I learned enough from his teaching, from the conversations in our class about Plato and Confucius especially, that human wisdom is not communicated in that way: reclining next to Socrates on a couch is no help, by itself, for becoming like him. But the desire remained.

In the Spring, I petitioned to take Paul’s graduate seminar on Plato alongside the second half of his introductory course. I had started going to the Greek philosophy reading group at UT and was, I realize now, embarking on the professional stage of my study. I don’t exactly know what Paul thought about it, but he let me into the seminar, warmly encouraged my interests, and wrote at the end of his comments on a term paper that we ought to talk about my pursuing the study of ancient Greek philosophy as a hairesis. The word literally means ‘choice’ but connotes a choice of intellectual discipline or affinity or even sect, a use that went on to yield the term ‘heresy’.

It is a peculiar sect, and, though he was a well-respected member of it, Paul demanded no allegiance to it. I went on to take seminars on the Sophists and Thucydides and Sophocles with him, learning the arts of reading and translating that underlie any of the disciplinary approaches to the study of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. The major on my transcript probably should have read “Wisdom Most Human”, the title of a manuscript that Paul worked on for many years about the late 5^th century BC Greek Enlightenment. It could almost have been “Woodruff Studies”: I took nearly every undergraduate and graduate course he taught from then on, all but one by my tally over the next three years, an undertaking made manageable by his inauguration as Dean of Undergraduate Studies for the university, which cut down his teaching for a time.

III.

In that time, Paul became not only my teacher and mentor but also my friend. He often invited groups of students to his house for play readings, alongside other professors and friends of his outside the university. One such occasion was his 65^th birthday, where we read all the scenes with Sir John Falstaff in them from Shakespeare’s Henry plays. Paul played Falstaff in many of them. (Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Laureate in physics, also took a turn.) We younger folks were encouraged to play Hal. I understand now how Paul was effacing the difference in age between us, forming us in friendship, as we shared the task of bringing life to Shakespeare’s poetry. I was still in awe of him, but that awe was becoming tempered by familiarity.

David Scott, Queen Elizabeth Viewing the Performance of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in the Globe Theatre (1840), image courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

We often met on the weekends, for brunch at Texas French Bread or another of his favorite spots, because his dean’s schedule of weekday meetings was full. I went to his house on Thanksgiving morning for a meeting about my senior thesis, because it was the only time we could find; he greeted me with freshly baked scones. Despite his being so busy, our conversations always felt leisurely. We talked about nature and art and politics, well beyond whatever it was I was studying.

Paul fostered friendship with his students by showing us respect, which, as he argued in one of his most beautiful books, is an expression in a teacher of the virtue of reverence. We, in turn, learned to have reverence toward what demands it: the shared task of understanding in which we, as students, had our place, and the truth and beauty and goodness there is to be understood and loved in the world. Paul would be the first to say that a human being is not a proper object of reverence, but he contained so much goodness himself that one came to love him. And we knew he loved us, too.

A few years after I left Texas, I was deciding between two PhD programs, one of which had been Paul’s own and was the one he really thought I should attend. When he told me that, he wasn’t simply conveying his own judgment; he’d also consulted others. I had told him I was leaning the other way. He wanted me to know what he thought about my choice, but I have no doubt that he was also keenly aware how his judgments might sway me, for the wrong reasons. He concluded his note to me: “I will love you whatever you decide”.

And it was true. He always loved me. He was one of my dearest friends, my mentor, my guide, my teacher. That is why it is so wrenching to face a world that lacks his presence.

Paul died on September 23 of last year. He wrote beautifully for the Washington Post about how he was facing his illness and impending death, essays that brought me, simultaneously, pain and delight. He remained a faithful correspondent — and was a loyal reader of this newsletter, in fact, often sending us his thoughts on our essays — right to the end.

IV.

For all that my scholarly and intellectual habits are shaped by his teaching, Paul’s life and example exert a still greater force. A few years ago, Paul invited me to come to his Plan II philosophy class. It was, coincidentally, in the same classroom in Waggener Hall where I had sat as a student thirteen years earlier. I watched both Paul and the students closely. He commanded their attention, as he had commanded ours. There was joy in the classroom, just as there had been in ours.

But some things had changed, or at least differed from my recollection. Paul organized the session around structured group-work that prompted the students to really do their own thinking and to form communities of learning (something I have come to incorporate in my own teaching, especially in introductory philosophy classes). Well into his fifth decade of teaching, Paul was still refining his methods.

As Paul argues in Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, a wise and reverent teacher will show respect toward her students for their place in the common endeavor of the classroom, display an awareness of her own imperfections (that is, proper intellectual humility), and model for her students a love for learning and an awe for the most important kinds of truth. Such a teacher must also be a leader, a person who can organize a community toward shared goals and keep them oriented correctly. 

The ideal of the perfect teacher lies beyond us as human beings. To be a wise and reverent teacher also demands reflection on the effectiveness of one’s methods and a curiosity about one’s students that allows one to understand their motivations and their limits. Students – and the world and the cultures they inhabit – are always changing. So the teacher’s task of reflection must be an ongoing one, as I learned from my visit to Paul’s class.

But, as I have learned from both wonderful and wretched experiences, a teacher is not solely responsible for the success of a class. The students, too, much cultivate reverence in their habits, and the very possibility of such reverence depends on the availability of cultural norms and social practices that sustain it.

V.

In his book The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched, Paul argues for the centrality of attention to theater, which he defines to encompass all human activities where performers enact something for an audience within a space sacralized by mutual awareness. The spectacle of a UT football game with 100,000 fans in a stadium is just as much theater on this view as a production of Hedda Gabler, in a way that neither a pre-season practice or a dress rehearsal is. Many classrooms, then, function as theaters, though students may well be both audience and performers, the sacred space marked physically by the exits, not a table or a stage dividing teacher from student, and preserved by joint attention among the students and between the teacher and the students.

Attention, of course, is under threat from technology. In his last book, Surviving Technology, Paul extends the argument of The Necessity of Theater to consider a set of further principles that underlie the theatrical arts of commanding and providing attention. While the book sets out to consider whether artificial intelligence in its present and possible future incarnations might undermine the exercise of the theatrical arts, Paul focuses on an earlier set of technological changes as posing more evident risks to traditional art theater: for instance, lighting and sound technology that is designed to control our attention instead of allowing for its free exercise and that breaks the intimacy between performers and audience that marked classical theater from the Theater of Dionysus in Athens down to Shakespeare’s Globe and beyond.

But, as Paul notes, that intimacy also depends on a truthfulness that the masterful deceit of AI might damage, as AI-powered emotional manipulation and illusion become ever more potent. Paul also holds out hope that technology might help revivify traditional art theater by facilitating the translation of classic works for each new generation, including radical translations that transpose the context and cultural framework of these works.

One piece of technology that Paul notes is damaging both in the theater and the classroom is the ubiquitous smartphone. Paul was not a Luddite, though he was keenly aware of the way that technology limits us even as it seems to afford us new possibilities. He had an iPhone, something that helped him be such a good correspondent. But he saw that these devices in our pockets call us to attend to them. Even when there is a human being on the other side, sending a text or posting a photo, our ability to attend to our own physical surroundings and to others in our presence is compromised. The sacredness of space characteristic of all theater, including classroom teaching, requires physical presence, and the theatrical arts of commanding and giving our attention require mental presence – attention – within those physical bounds.

Paul considers whether a Zoom classroom might allow for reverent interaction and concludes that it is unlikely with current technology and social practices, as the disastrous experience of teachers and students alike during the COVID pandemic showed; one basic problem is everything else our screens offer. Certain kinds of teaching do, of course, require the use of technology, but virtually all the teaching I have done myself does not. Apart from disability accommodations, I tend toward technological minimalism: I ask students to put their devices away if they can. When we are talking about Aristotle or Dostoevsky, we are able to give the unfolding discussion and one another due attention only when we turn away from other temptations, which increasingly saturate the rest of our lives.

One of the most striking arguments in Surviving Technology is that traditional theater has lost its way by becoming more like the movies. There is nothing wrong with the movies, of course, but in them there is no exercise of the theatrical art of commanding attention, on Paul’s view, because there is no possibility of shaping one’s performance to the waxing or waning attention of the audience. Reciprocity is broken in recorded performance. With the lights down in the house and the sound turned way, way up, an audience is held captive, rather than being invited to share in the performers’ activity. Despite involving live performance, Broadway musicals – enjoyable as they can be – do this, too.

As I noted, reciprocity is also largely lacking in online teaching, even with the best efforts of all involved. Since the pandemic, my experience has been that reciprocity of attention within the traditional classrooms has become increasingly difficult to sustain, as well. My own thought about this is that it is not just the smartphones or the laptops, but a culture in which everything has become content.

Classroom teaching is a remarkably inefficient way to deliver content, as anyone looking at the economics of higher education quickly realizes. Equally, students are resentful of their time being wasted, and sitting in a room without the freedoms they characteristically enjoy – not least to consume content at the pace they prefer and in synchrony with the other activities of life – seems unappealing. If we are in the content business at universities, it seems unlikely we’ll stay in it for long.

But if a classroom is instead understood by those present as a community of inquiry, new (well, old) possibilities arise. Each student is not an isolated consumer, but someone who is responsible to others. That is because, as Paul argued in Reverence, they have a designated role in a social practice. To be sure, teachers cannot force this role on their students, but they can self-consciously model the activity they hope to inspire.

VI.

Something I learned from Paul’s example, as well as from his writings, was that, for all the inequalities that exist between them, students are teachers, too. He was my teacher. I was his, because he let me be his. 

There was a joy in this realization in recent years, as my own academic career ripened. To be invited to speak alongside Paul a few years ago at a conference in Oslo was a wonderful experience. I dedicated my first article, published when I was still a graduate student, to him. My book, though it concerns Aristotle and not Plato or other topics that were the center of Paul’s own scholarly efforts, will likewise be dedicated to him. I am sorry I won’t have the chance to hand him a copy.

But I know, in a way, that our conversations will continue. I will keep talking to the part of me that is his, that is him.