Past contributions
A couple of years ago, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an English professor at Michigan State, did what engaged faculty are supposed to do: she attended a workshop, where the keynote was given by the provost of a large university. The provost did what provosts do — extolled the American university’s public mission, its commitment to accessibility, the quality of its researchers, the impact of the knowledge it produces — and afterward took questions. What Fitzpatrick asked caused a record-skip moment at the party: was it perhaps the case that tenure and promotion decisions focus too much on rigid forms of traditionally pedigreed scholarship, and not enough on other types of service to the profession and the world?
In her classic work on pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks theorizes learning as “the practice of freedom.” She returns to this idea in Teaching Critical Thinking (2009), where she rejects the idea that education is something students passively receive or consume, instead contending that it must be active, democratic, participatory, and creative. hooks also dwells on this connection between education and democracy in the middle book of the trilogy, Teaching Community (2003). She writes: “[T]he classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place of passion and possibility; a place where spirit matters, where all that we learn and all that we know leads us into greater connection, into greater understanding of life lived in community.” There is no democracy without education, she insists, no education without democracy.
Think over your memories from school: middle school, high school, college, graduate studies, it doesn’t really matter. A history class, a course for machinists, freshman English, a Greek philosophy seminar, Drawing 101, whatever. Think about what you enjoyed. Chances are it involved freedom to explore your curiosity about things that mattered to you. It is likely that you had the range to pursue legitimate, deeper long-term interests while also trying out short-term activities. You probably got to play around some (or a lot) and were able to fail sometimes because you had teachers who supported you and helped you see that freedom and failure are intertwined parts of learning.
In the summer of 2014 — August, the sun hammering all day on prickly wheat fields — the first Islamic State fighters arrived in Sinjar province, close to the Syrian border in northwest Iraq.
Bearded and mostly young, lugging an array of weapons, they came in pickup trucks and cars, as well as Humvees captured from the Iraqi Army in earlier battles. Soon the black-and-white flag of ISIS, the freshest desert nightmare, would fly along roads and atop buildings in places that rarely (or never) make it onto American television: Tel Azer, Kojo, Siba Sheikheder, Tel Banat, Sinjar City. This last place was home of the Yezidis, a religious minority long accustomed to violent persecution.