David Lux

Whenever academic discussions turn to the importance of the "scholar/teacher" model, my interior warning systems go on alert. It's not that there is necessarily something wrong; it's just that when talk turns to this fabled emphasis on the "scholar/teacher," I become very cautious. I want to ask exactly what it is we're talking about in teaching - or in research? More significantly, perhaps, I want to ask why we're talking about teaching and scholarship this way. Experience has taught me not to have too much confidence in the real value of these discussions.

My earliest meaningful involvement with the scholar/teacher ideal came in graduate school. One afternoon the discussion in James Vann's seminar on early-modern German history turned to the reading "grind" that is the lot of all history graduate students. In the course of that discussion, one of our number expressed what seemed to us (the students) the quite logical proposition that we did not really need to engage in this endless round of seminar readings. After all, went our logic, we were all going to spend our lifetimes as "scholar/teachers" continuously engaged in dialogue with our students on issues such as the Stem Family and village property rights. Why couldn't we just do our research, write the dissertation, and get on with our careers?

James Vann was good. He didn't miss a beat. He launched immediately, and most vigorously, into a kind of verbal "delivery" for which he was so well known among students at Michigan. Something of a cross between a lecture, a homily, and a tirade, these moments with "Jamie" Vann were truly wondrous things, much discussed and long remembered. They always had a point; they drew on an amazing range of knowledge; and they were always cunningly laced with verbal pyrotechnics. He was a powerful lecturer - the only academic I've known who actually had to book an extra large room to deliver the "supplementary" evening lectures he sometimes offered to his students. He could, as he did that afternoon in our seminar, take very complex ideas and weave them together into a spellbinding mix. Then, when he was ready, he could jerk you down to earth and drive home his point in a very few words - even with just a phrase.

I can't do justice to the soaring rhetoric James Vann brought to his philippic against our sophomoric understanding of teaching and research. I've never lost sight of the message, however, and I'll certainly never forget the words with which he delivered his final punch. The message was quite simple. It had two parts: First, quit sniveling and do the reading; you're graduate students, this is your job. Second, recognize that no matter how grand your dissertation, or how glorious your research results, your research program cannot and should not be expected to meet the demands students are going to put on your teaching.

It was this last point that he really wanted to get across: get past the graduate school puffery that lets you think that your research and what you know is going to fascinate your students endlessly. The so-called "scholar/teacher" model is just so much nonsense. As always with his messages, he wrapped it up with a vivid image. In this case, he used the week's reading on social structures in peasant villages to spin out a verbal image that had us delivering a lecture on these very same readings to a classroom full of undergraduates. He brought the whole thing to an abrupt close by saying, "And no sooner will you finish with your lecture than a hand will shoot up in the very back of the room. The question will ask how this all compares to the economic and social interactions that characterize relations between the Twa and the Tutsi?"

That was it. He was done. He simply stopped. He had challenged us to admit our ignorance. Of course, none of us said a word, nor did we ask any questions. Later, we went to the library and read up on the Twa and the Tutsi (African peoples) to find out what in the world he was talking about.

The "Twa and the Tutsi" quickly entered the graduate student lore, and those of us who had actually been in his seminar on the day of the "Twa and Tutsi" tirade could always get a laugh from the story in the graduate student lounge. The lesson in of the graduate-student version was quite simple: There were no intellectual boundaries in that seminar. No matter what you know, he wants more.

That was a useful lesson for graduate school, and it was also a lesson that turned out to have real meaning for those of us who finished the dissertation and began facing undergraduates on our own. No student has ever actually asked me about the Twa and the Tutsi. Still, I've gotten versions of the "Twa and Tutsi" question many, many times - in countless variants. I've even come to know some of the standard places where the things I teach are likely to evoke student questions about the "Twa and the Tutsi." On occasions, "Twa and Tutsi" questions have led me to new teaching topics, and in several cases these questions from students have led to changes in a course syllabus or a course readings list. In short, I've found that my students actually do exactly what James Vann promised they would do. They constantly bring their own demands and questions to the material I teach. My neatly packaged bits of knowledge are often just a starting point for their questions. In short, their interests and their backgrounds can take the material well beyond anything I've brought to it in my reading and research. In the end, as James Vann asserted in that seminar something over 25 years ago, it's an intellectual conceit to pretend that my research program is going to furnish the real substance for my teaching. The body of knowledge I need for teaching is far larger than what I need in order to succeed as a researcher.

Experience with the Twa-Tutsi question is one of the reasons alarm bells go off in my mind as soon as someone starts talking about the glories of the scholar/teacher model. That discussion always makes me think of James Vann, and I want to know whether this isn't another instance of some slick graduate students trying to get out of doing their job. I can't help it. I try to listen with an open mind, but I always end up asking myself the same question. These discussions always make me want to know whether we aren't really talking about an insult to the obvious - research and teaching furnish the rationale for the existence of the academic world. That's what college professors are supposed to do. Isn't trying to make a virtue of the scholar/teacher model something akin to making a virtue out of doing this week's seminar reading? Isn't it what we're supposed to do?