Mr. Dedrick and the idiot intern

by David Benjamin

“College is about exposing students to many things and creating an aphrodisiac atmosphere so that they might fall in lifelong love with a few.” ― David Brooks

MADISON, Wis.—The word that comes to mind when I remember Philip Dedrick is “unassuming.” He was a tweedy man with a gray thatch of unruly hair, perhaps sixty years old, who wore thick eyeglasses to compensate for powers of vision that were steadily fading. He was destined to blindness. When I was a student at Rockford College, he taught art history and knew the creative culture of the ancient Middle East at least as well as any scholar in America. He presented his subject lovingly and illustrated it with a voluminous collection of photo slides. Although Mr. Dedrick had shown each image—of a pottery vase or a Mesopotamian goddess carved in stone—hundreds of times, he conveyed the sense that this handiwork of artists three thousand years dead was new and wonderful to him, as it should be to his students.

Mr. Dedrick took my class on a field trip to the Oriental Institute in Chicago, a treasure trove of the ancient artifacts that were both his passion and his lesson plan. He knew every inch and every object in the joint. We observed, but did not interfere, when an Institute intern buttonholed Mr. Dedrick and, in a gratingly pedantic tone, spent fifteen tedious minutes enlightening our teacher on the provenance and significance of this and that artwork. Any one of us, who had learned all this stuff in class, would have pounced on the popinjay and shooed him off. But Mr. Dedrick gestured us back and listened raptly to the kid’s spiel. Our gentle professor smiled and encouraged him. He took pleasure is hearing lessons he had told—in much richer detail—countless times. Graciously, he thanked the intern and, turning toward his students, winked.

I’ve thought of Mr. Dedrick during the current White House campaign to plunge American higher education into a state of right-wing political neurosis. Mr. Dedrick was on the faculty at the first of my two colleges. The leaders of these schools, only ten miles apart, were were as politically distant as any two educators can be. Rockford College’s president, John Howard, was a conservative so rigid that he refused all funds that might render the school beholden to any government. Beloit College president Miller Upton was a liberal luminary, happy to accept any handout, whose openmindedness fostered unique innovations in higher education.

However, neither Howard nor Upton meddled in the classroom. At Rockford, I had no sense that I was attending a “conservative” college. Nor, at Beloit, did I get the impression that I was being indoctrinated with Marxist propaganda.

I started at Rockford in 1967 and finished at Beloit—after a two and a half-year interruption—in 1974. That span covered much of the most tumultuous era of campus unrest in American history. It began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and escalated toward the occupation at Columbia, the Harvard strike, the math building bombing at the University of Wisconsin, the National Guard murder of four students at Kent State, the police killings of two students at Jackson State, etc. I was, according to the history books, present at the revolution.

But in class, I was safe and secluded. Politics was a student thing. I had politics. My friends had politics. But professors had subjects. At Rockford, our loudest agitator was a student, a John Birch zealot named Ramsey, who couldn’t resist spouting his opinions even during discussions of Paradise Lost in English class. This didn’t go over well with the prof. Ramsey’s views, he said, were irrelevant to John Milton and he should express them elsewhere.

All over the country in those days, faculty members were aware of—and largely sympathetic to—the grievances of students on race, religion, gender, sex, drugs, nuclear weapons, the war in Vietnam, etcetera. They even joined protests. But, in class, I could never tell whether my teacher was a Democrat or Republican, a socialist or conservative, a Red or a red.

This separation of the academic from the political is a timeless norm. Although it prevails today, it’s imperiled by a president who hated school and does not—cannot—read beyond the second paragraph of any document. His most oft-stated position on any topic posed to him lately is “I don’t know.”

I don’t care if he knows or not. But I object to his passion to prevent everyone else from knowing. The movement to make America ignorant again features the coerced expurgation from college curricula of objectionable subjects without clearly explaining what’s so all-fired objectionable or identifying who’s doing the objecting. When powerful men contrive to reduce the range of knowledge explored in school, and when they measure and sanction—through the lens of political ideology—the ideas discussed in class, they are repudiating the ideals of universal education that date back to Horace Mann. The philosopher of the American common school, John Dewey, addressed the danger of injecting political dogma into education when he wrote, “In spite of itself any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ’ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ’isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.”

The attack on America’s universities has no program. It specifies no needs, problems or possibilities. It consists of reaction against the idea of unfettered and expansive public education. It recoils from the inescapable reality that sending every kid to school, forcing them all into literacy and algebra, is probably the most liberal initiative in American history. To be a teacher is to be, by definition, liberal. To teach in an American university, dating back to the founding of Harvard College in 1636, is to be engaged in—or at least in collusion with—the liberal arts. This broad realm of knowledge includes every language spoken by human beings. It covers literature, art, music, history, geography, psychology, anthropology, political science, journalism and dozens of related disciplines.

William Deresiewicz has written that the value of the liberal arts “is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.”

Cicero called the liberal arts “the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; they are companions by night, and in travel, and in the country.”

Ironically, a curriculum that abjures political partisanship is profoundly political, because it fosters the position that all political—and religious, and ideological—species are fair game for reflection, discussion and criticism. It invites thoughts from every available source and churns them together not for the sake of advocacy but to enlighten and to share the sheer joy of argument. In the liberal arts, all ideas are not equal until tested and tempered in discourse. But their inclusion is fundamental and their diversity is both inevitable and sublime.

Mr. Dedrick, an unassuming mentor, was wise enough not to assume that his students would remember vividly every work of art that he paraded before us. He was right. I’ve forgotten almost everything he taught in class. But I remember, gratefully, his reverence for the beauty of those works of art and for his kindness to that clueless intern at the Oriental Institute. Simply, memorably, he embodied the words of Seneca: “The liberal arts do not conduct the soul all the way to virtue, but merely set it going in that direction.”