Out of the Mouths of Professors / A Freshman Seminar

Some years ago (don't ask how many), colleges across the country were finally driven to do something about the perceived gap between what the faculty was ready to teach incoming freshmen, and what these freshmen were equipped to, well, absorb.  Freshmen seminars were created, to help faculty and freshmen make the transition to the patterns of college instruction and thinking.  This blogpost is not about freshman seminars, but it was sparked by an event at one.

In the institution to which I was indentured, there was, one year, a newly-designed Freshman Seminar, and one of the components of this week-long program was a Forum; a panel discussion in an auditorium, with some of the most celebrated faculty of our school seated on stage, each of whom had a few minutes to give their best advice to the freshmen.  The rest of us faculty sat in the audience, prepared to be disgruntled (after all, the thing we professors hate most is to be deprived of an audience).

I am surprised that now, a couple of decades later, I still remember at least two of the professors, and their advice.  I won't keep you waiting.

1.  One of our most illustrious faculty members was a professor of religion.  He was a respected author in his area of expertise, which was basically comparative religion.

He said that the basis of Judaism was hospitality to the stranger.

The professor went on to say that, despite a multitude of details that confuse the issue, the bases of Christianity and Islam too, were exactly the same.

I hardly need to say that this floored many in the audience, some of whom must have never even thought about any sort of basis for their belief (except perhaps John 3:16, and I invite all those who subscribe to this belief to hurry on to the next part of our post; remember Jesus himself offered a summary of "All the laws and the prophets," and this verse was not it).

I certainly have thoughts about how the rules of conduct of Judaism evolved into the moral system of the early church, but more on that later.  One thing is clear, though.  If one has read anything at all about Islam, through the pens of European commentators of around the 1700's and earlier, one sees a confirmation of the opinion that hospitality forms a central core of the Islamic moral code.

That alone would have given anyone much to think about.  But the suggestion given by the next speaker was just as interesting (but of course, not being related to religion, did not have the sheer shock value of the previous one).

2.  One of the panelists was a celebrated political scientist, who had also earned much respect as an author.  His advice was a lot more personal, as befitted an occasion in which he had been invited to participate not as a specialist in his area, but as a member of the faculty at large, and a successful scholar.

I always, he said, keep a notepad by my bedside, to record those crazy ideas that come to me in the middle of the night.  (The wordly-wise freshmen must have thought this plan eminently worth ignoring.)  Often, he said, he would read what he had jotted down while half asleep, and laugh.

However, he said, some of his best ideas had been among those he had written down while half asleep.  In other words, those were the ideas that had not been filtered out by pragmatic considerations, or the cynicism of his waking moments.

Something to think about.

I believe that we have been a little too strongly influenced by the pragmatism of Business.  It is rarely that a successful businessman gets a wonderful idea in the middle of the night, which survives the censorship of his business sense.  I see this insight—recognition of the value of ideas that bubble up through our subconscious minds—as part of the college experience, and as part of the very sort of thinking that ignorant citizens (who want to squelch any ideas that do not profit business) find so repugnant in colleges.  We are sadly headed towards a sort of idea-free system of education, which would seem ideal to those who think of college as merely a place in which to efficiently manufacture docile middle-management.  (Upper management, of course, requires no education.)

I don't think that Christianity was intended to be a religion at all.  In fact, it was probably not intended to be any organized thing; it was just a reassessment of Judaism, and a sort of manifesto against the evils of Jewish leadership.

Beginning with the early bronze age, one can trace, through the traditional Jewish and Christian texts, a steady movement towards rejecting the belief that might was right, probably influenced strongly by frustration with the military forces that kept victimizing the Jewish people (or the tribes of Israel, as they began to call themselves).  The stories of Jesus explicitly show that Jesus the man, if he existed, or at least those who formed the archetype of whom Jesus was the personification, were firmly on the side of the underdog.  They turned the other cheek; they shared; they walked the second mile.

What an impression these ideas must have had on Paul, who was largely one of the architects of (the dogma of) the early church, and who invented christian mysticism (much to the regret of many)!

Could we interpret the entire moral code that is extractible from the sources we have (since the Roman Church tragically saw fit to destroy much of the writings which had been available in the first century) as flowing from hospitality to the stranger?  As far as I can see, it would certainly do no harm if people were more hospitable all round.

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