Leaving Castalia

As Timothy Burke notes, Erin O'Connor is leaving higher education to teach in a private high school, perhaps paralleling in some ways the departure of Joseph Knecht from Castalia in Hermann Hesse's masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game. I've hardly ever read "Critical Mass," so I don't know everything that led up to this decision and won't comment on the details.

I do, however, want to note something about the teaching/research dichotomy that comes up in a lot of higher education discussions, both on-line and in my real life. It is certainly true that many college professors get burned out on the teaching aspect of their jobs, if they ever enjoyed it in the first place. I think the reason for this is that teaching and research almost require different, not always over-lapping personality characteristics. In order to be happy teaching, it is not enough to enjoy talking about your subject. As one of my undergraduate education professors kept emphasizing, you have to like people. Even if a student forgets what you say about the causes of the Korean War or the stages of mitosis, you need to feel content if you have perhaps contributed to helping shape students' worldviews and otherwise live better lives by passing on the skills and knowledge you can from your corner of their undergraduate experience. A person who seeks primarily to immerse themselves in the ever-expanding horizons of their discipline will never be happy sitting in paper conferences with students trying to figure out what a thesis is. At the same time, a person who enjoys working with others and trying to help people will likely burn out isolated in an archive working on a monograph only a handful of people will ever read.

Incidentally, at the risk of revealing a very high level of nerdiness, there's one quote which I've long felt captures the spirit of what higher education in the humanities should be all about for the average student en route to the business world:

"The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons, and for one brief moment, you did. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration which awaits you. Not mapping stars or studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."

-Star Trek: The Next Generation ("All Good Things")

When you're out teaching, you need to be able to consider yourself happy if you can get most students to have just one extended moment like that above. Usually only a handful of students will share your interest in the subject enough to keep things interesting in terms of content.