DECEMBER 5, 2021 – If you try you can remember our ignoble exit from Afghanistan. If you try harder, you can remember our failure in Vietnam. Between those fiascos? The fight in Iraq—our effort at “nation-building” and . . . the rise of ISIS.
Yesterday, I flipped through the latest issue of my college alumni magazine. If I remember the debacles in Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, I can’t remember why I’d picked up the magazine or how long it’d been kicking around. Most likely I’d casually lifted it off a stack of periodicals atop the old, decorative trunk in our reading room.
In any case, there I sat, checking the class news (there wasn’t any for my class) in back and skimming the list of alumni who’d died recently (I knew none). Then I thumb-flipped through the 64-page publication.
About midway through, a title shouted: “A CERTAIN KIND OF BRAVERY.” The subtitle read, In her research and in her teaching, Associate Professor of Government Barbara Elias focuses on a complex, thoughtful answer to any question rather than finding the ‘right’ one. Intrigued, I read the entire piece about the professor’s research into counterinsurgencies—primarily in Afghanistan—and how her understanding of them affects her worldview. I saw the service she brings to a crowd of undergraduates.
As I studied the article, I recalled my own freshman-year brush with the Government Department as it was staffed back then. I’d taken a course from a demanding prof whose purpose in life was to scare the hell out of students, then make them feel like idiots for having been scared. I raced back to History and Classics, where the profs were more “undergraduate-friendly.”
Professor Elias reminds me more of the “friendlies”—a prof intent on getting students to think and question without fright and humility. She cares not what ideas or prejudices are brought to class, just that people leave fear and hesitancy behind. She expects her students to participate in discussions and stimulations that challenge pre-set notions about history and ethics.
Her favorite exercise in role-playing is the “prisoner’s dilemma,” a common device of game theory. You and a partner are captured, then separated. If you agree to defect, you go free, and your comrade gets three years in the slammer. If you both snitch, you each get two years. If you both refuse to snitch, you each get only one year. The lesson learned is how difficult cooperation can be. (At UPenn, where Professor Elias had taught previously, she had no trouble getting students to snitch. At Bowdoin, it’s been very hard.)
Her bottom line is that “anything very simplified is almost certainly misleading.” Her goal for her students is not to adopt what she thinks is right but to think critically for themselves and ask questions together—in the manner a mature democracy should.
If the football coach is the hero at many American institutions of “higher learning,” I’m reassured to know that in some quarters the hero’s a prof who’s all about “higher thinking.”
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
