This guest post is by Dr. Nat Rutherford, Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. Nat’s primary research interests are on why we disagree about morality and politics and how these disagreements bear on the legitimacy of political institutions. He also works on the methods of political theory and the relationship between moral philosophy and political philosophy.
One of the virtues I try to realise as a teacher is liberality. ‘Generosity’ would probably be the more common colloquial term, but generosity implies a degree of supererogation that doesn’t capture the spirit of the virtue I have in mind. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he understands liberality as the virtue related to wealth and money, but I’m using it here in a wider sense to mean giving freely and taking sparingly (not least because I haven’t got any money to spend on my students). Like most teachers, what I have to spend is time and attention.
An example: Students often assume that they’re wasting my time in office hours with lengthy discussions and that I have better things to do than to talk about their essay plan or MA application. I go to great lengths to explain that I choose to spend a significant proportion of my life teaching precisely I want to have my time wasted talking about politics. I give them that time freely because I want to, not because I’m obliged to. On the other side of liberality’s golden mean, assigning hundreds of pages of weekly readings often takes more of students’ time than I’m entitled to. While such thoroughness might on the face of it look like liberality, it’s actually the inverse. Vast tomes of readings redistribute the demands on my time to my students by requiring them to do the work of understanding, so I don’t have to. As only one of their many teachers, I can’t monopolise their time and attention so greedily. This furnishes me with a principle of ‘give as much as possible, take as little as possible’.
Realising this virtue forces you to behave differently as a teacher. For example, liberality requires that I make idealising assumptions about students’ behaviour. I assume that they’ve done their best to understand the topic we’re discussing and that any misunderstandings are my fault or the fault of the author of the set reading or the fault of a university funding system that requires many students to work to fund their studies. I try to grant students that assumption freely, regardless of whether the evidence supports it.
Over the years that I’ve been teaching, some of my colleagues have made it clear that they consider my approach naïve, but what they miss is that this is a cognitive shortcut to improving the relationship between the teacher and the taught. The time spent trying to work out whether a student really needs further help can be spent providing that help. Realising this virtue makes me a better teacher, but it also makes teaching better for me. Reframing the demands people make on my time as me giving my time freely performs some magic on my simple brain so that I feel less harried and burdened. That applies especially when it comes to supervising undergraduate dissertations. Supervision is one of my most loved forms teaching. It’s also one I find hard because liberality doesn’t provide sufficient guidance on how to behave.
In our first supervision meeting, I tell my students that the hardest part of writing a dissertation is coming up with a good research question. They then prove me right by finding it hard. That’s unsurprising because it’s genuinely difficult to come up with good research questions that a) haven’t been thoroughly answered before, b) can feasibly be answered in c.10,000 words, with a non-existent budget, and very limited time, and c) are interesting enough that the student can be bothered to spend the requisite hours completing the project. As academics, we all know how hard it can be and yet we expect a student with only a few terms of university education to do it for themselves.
How does the virtue of liberality work in supervision? Frustratingly, it doesn’t. At least, when applied to supervision, interpreting the virtue as ‘give freely’ doesn’t work. Students will often start with a rough topic idea and then our task is to workshop it together to find a research question that is sufficiently new, feasible, and interesting on that topic. This exercise is, inevitably, easier for me than it is for them because I have some grasp of the relevant literature and I’ve done similar exercises hundreds of times. That skill gap often leads to a situation where I know what their research question should be and they don’t. This is where liberality is tested because telling them what their research question should be is, I’ve come to see, not helpful to them in the long run. This means that we’re forced to perform a lengthy and absurd dance, sometimes over a period of weeks, where I try to lead them in a particular direction and they try to guess what that direction is, while I desperately try to avoid uttering the words ‘your question should be…’. I find this excruciating because it seems to violate the virtue of liberality: I am withholding something that they want when it would be costless for me to give it to them.
My reason for withholding this information wasn’t apparent to me until I watched the recent documentary about Martin Scorsese’s career, Mr Scorsese. In one scene, Leonardo DiCaprio describes how Scorsese refuses to tell his actors how to play the scene, even when it’s clear that they’re getting it wrong again and again. DiCaprio comments that Scorsese, ‘didn’t want to tell me how to play it, he wanted me to find it for myself’. That might seem trite, but it actually recognises something crucial about the transmission of understanding between people: working out the answer for yourself produces something qualitatively different to being told that same answer. The struggle to see why some research questions work and others don’t will in turn inform the question itself and the research project that it produces. That’s not only because a student will feel more connected to the project that they’ve devised than the project that I’ve devised for them, but also because the struggle of working out why the question needs to be a certain way tends to give them the ability to see how they should answer it.
My refusal to give students what they want is frustrating for everyone involved. But, as Aristotle presumably recognised at his Lyceum, giving freely as a teacher also sometimes means not giving away too much.