Jason Epps: 'We Must Support Students With Real Fears'

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This was made by humans. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Welcome to Austin Community Conversations, a podcast featuring discussions about the interests, backgrounds, and projects animating the members of a vibrant college community. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. Community college name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner, and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product or service. [00:00:57] Speaker C: Thanks for joining the conversation. I'm Tonio Ramirez. My guest today is Jason Epps, a faculty member in the philosophy department at Austin Community College. Jason is deeply interested in stoicism, an ancient movement that's enjoyed a resurgence of popular interest in recent years. He uses it as a vehicle for teaching philosophy as both an intellectual discipline and a way of assessing how we choose to live. I recorded this discussion in November 2024, shortly after the publication of a letter Jason wrote to the editor of the Austin American Statesman, a major daily newspaper in the area. As you'll hear, he felt compelled to address a form of criticism aimed at higher education that had emerged shortly after the presidential election. This criticism took aim at the fact that some faculty at some higher ed institutions attempted to actively address distress that they perceived in their students, so surrounding the political moment, in some cases canceling class meetings, allowing for extended deadlines on assignments, or preempting planned class activities to instead facilitate discussions of student concerns. This kind of criticism bears consideration because its target is not restricted to any particular political moment. Interesting questions arise here. To what extent, if any, should student fears about a given political or cultural event change the goings on of the classroom? Do instructional adaptations in the face of such events distract from the proper function of higher education? What should an institution that is primarily aimed at teaching and learning do in response to the emotions that its students bring with them? Today, you'll hear the perspective of a teacher who believes that, to borrow from the title of his own editorial, we must support students with real fears. It's my pleasure to present a conversation with Jason Epps, so let's dive in. [00:02:51] Speaker A: Jason Epps, welcome to the office. [00:02:53] Speaker D: Thank you. [00:02:53] Speaker A: So one of the things I'd like to do, just to get started so that you can introduce yourself to students or anybody else who might be listening, is to talk a little bit about your path to teaching, if you will. What led you to working in philosophy? [00:03:08] Speaker D: Okay. Well, I first started teaching philosophy probably back in 2004 at a prep school in Salt Lake City. And, you know, I've been interested in philosophy most of my life, and so I started doing that and then started teaching online a few years later and then did some in person classes. And so I've been involved in it, you know, in some form for 20 years. But I think, you know, I've been here at ACC for about three years now, something like that. But I've always been fascinated with philosophical questions. What is it? And how do you know? Metaphysics, epistemology, that kind of thing, and ethics. And, you know, before I got into philosophy, I thought ethics was primarily about right and wrong. And I didn't realize that the greatest book that's ever been written in ethics by Aristotle was about how to basically be happy, how to achieve eudaimonia. And so I found it to be eminently practical and just kind of worked back from ethics into epistemology and metaphysics and just found a lot of joy in philosophy. And I found that it's a great tool for personal growth, not only for myself, but for friends and students as well. Well, so I very much enjoy it. [00:04:19] Speaker A: That's, you know, it's striking that you talk about joy in philosophy. That's not something that I think a lot of people can note immediately when they hear about philosophy class. [00:04:28] Speaker D: Right. [00:04:28] Speaker A: But it is an important part of what I hear you talking about. So when people think about ethics, I think you're right. The idea of thinking about what is good in the context of ethics usually pops up something like, what's the right thing to do in a given situation? [00:04:43] Speaker D: All right, well, that's always been the big question that, you know, at least many of the ancient philosophers had was, was what is the good life and how do you live it? And, you know, maybe it's an intuitively obvious thing for me, but I think joy is probably something, you know, properly understood, that is, you know, every human being seeks after. And the philosophers, at least the ancient ethicists, seem to have that in mind when doing their dialogues and their theories and conversations. [00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it seems like at its best, an introduction to philosophy can help students maybe shift a focus from. It's a caricature, this kind of, like, juvenile question of what it means to be a good kid to this bigger question about, like, what does it mean to live a good life? Like the kind of life that it makes sense to want to live. [00:05:33] Speaker D: Right. Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of students do come to philosophy classes, especially the intro class, with preconceived notions about what it is. And even ethics, you know, this issue of, you know how to ground morality and right and wrong, which is certainly, you know, something that's, you know, we want to do. But it all goes back to, how are you living? Are you living well? Do you have joy? Do you know who you are? And, you know, it used to be that that's what college education was about. [00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:03] Speaker D: And as much as we now want to get people jobs and certificates, I mean, that's, that's very super important. But there's also this question of how to live. And if our students are not learning this in our philosophy and our humanities classes and literature and poetry, you know, where are they going to get it? And I tell my students often back In World War II, Parliament tried to ax funding for the arts in the uk and Churchill stood up in Parliament and said, if we ax all the funding for the arts and the humanities, then what are we fighting for? And so one of the things I think that we've lost in college education, as good of a focus it is as it is to prepare students for the job market, it doesn't do very much to prepare people for a job market when they don't know who they are, when they don't know how to think, when they don't know how to struggle with the great questions. And I think that our philosophy and humanities and religion departments and colleges in this country are kind of the last great stronghold to allow students to explore these kind of, you know, character building qualities and fundamental questions about reality and who they are. [00:07:19] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that that anticipates some of the questions that I'd like to ask you in a moment about the recent article that you had published, Statesman. But maybe really quickly, before we get to that, for a student who might be listening to this and is curious about what's distinctive about taking a class with Professor Epps, how would you describe maybe one of the features of your classroom? What's distinctive about your approach to teaching? [00:07:43] Speaker D: Probably two things. Number one, we are very intentional about creating a learning community, and that includes facilitating relationships between the students. You know, a place where you can come during class and you're going to meet the people that you are wrestling with these questions with. And the first few weeks we get to know each other and, you know, develop relationships and some rapport. And so because of that, as we get into deeper issues, philosophically and ethically, students feel as if this is a safe space where they can share what they believe and in some cases, even what they're struggling with. And so instead of it being a class where you Have a sage on the stage, so to speak. It's a little bit more of a guide on the side because, you know, we wrestle with ancient and modern texts together, but we do it in the context of a learning community that we very much protect. You know, we don't allow people to shame each other, we don't allow people to look down on each other. If someone is not as philosophically astute, or if they don't know what epistemology is, or they've never had a critical thinking class, we try to make it very much a safe space. And I'll say the second characteristic which is part of the learning community is just the focus on discussion. And I wouldn't say that it's a full on Socratic dialogue, but it's very much conversational in the way we orchestrate the approach to these subjects. I don't necessarily have a template of ideas that I absolutely have to get through. If students are really interested in one particular aspect of the course or unit, whether it be, you know, let's say that we have a, you know, let's say that we have a section of the ethics class where people are very much interested in utilitarianism. And I only had, you know, three days plan for that. If I'm getting a lot of discussion and a lot of reflection, you know, then I can extend that, you know, for a day or two just based upon where the students are at. So there's a lot in my classes where I'm trying to kind of gauge the class and read the room and figure out what is landing and what's not. And so I like to think that when students come to the classes that I teach, that they find them interesting and they find them to be a safe place to explore, and they find a place where they can be affirmed not just by the professor, but by their peers as well. And so at community college, sometimes people show up to college and they're not sure whether they should be there or not, or whether they're smart enough to be in college or smart enough to take a philosophy class. And so we very much try to affirm that they probably do have gifts intellectually that they never thought about and that they've never tried to develop because nobody ever told them that they had them. So that's, you know, that's very much a distinctive of my class. And I always share with the students. William James, who was kind of the father of modern psychology, first guy to ever actually hold a psychology course at the university level at the end of his Career. They asked him, they said, professor James, what is the one finding of your career that you could just, you know, bet the farm on in your, you know, 50 years of research and all that? He said, is there anything you've learned about human beings that you would want people to know? And he said, absolutely. What he wanted people to know was this. People become what they think about themselves. People become what they think about themselves. And this is so true for college students because you have a lot of students that come into classes, particularly philosophy classes, that have already written themselves off and think that they're, quote, unquote, not smart. And that's most of the time not true. One of our jobs as professors, and I'm with Plato on this, I'm not saying that education is complete recollection, recollection, or I'm not committed to all that necessarily. But I do think that an educator's role is something like a tutor or a midwife to bring out the gifts in the student that the student may not necessarily have known were there. And I can't think of a greater discipline to do that than in philosophy or maybe a humanities course, because these questions that are addressed, you know, really strike at the soul of what it means to be a human and things that our students are wrestling with. And so if we can use the discipline. Discipline to affirm them to believe in themselves, I think that we're using the discipline for what it was intended for. [00:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You know, I often like to begin my classes by explaining to students that, you know, one of the obvious reasons you might take a philosophy class is because you need a few units toward it, you know, toward a program. But with a little luck, hopefully there's a little more for you in it than that. And it sounds like you have a pretty clear picture of what. What can be in it for a student who's prepared to take those questions seriously. [00:12:41] Speaker D: Sure, sure. [00:12:42] Speaker A: That's great. Also serves, I think, as a natural segue to talking about this piece that you recently published. The editorial was entitled Never Apologize for Supporting Students who have Real Fears after an Election. The first question I'd like to ask you here is maybe grounded in our shared discipline in philosophy. It's a question about the principle of charity. So one thing that philosophy hopefully helps students to learn is to try and interpret this other points of view, particularly opposing points of view, in a charitable way. To not argue against straw men, as it's sometimes said, and to make sure that you're taking as seriously as you can the views you're Engaging with. How would you describe the position that you're responding to in this article? [00:13:37] Speaker D: Well, I wrote that article in response to a mainstream news site that was criticizing college professors in college campuses who were providing basically support services to students who were very much frustrated, consternated, afraid because of the results of the election. And this article seemed to chastise educators who tried to support those students as saying that these students, you're not preparing them for the real world, okay? And you know, sometimes you lose elections and all this kind of thing. And you know, my response was, was basically to say that as an educator, as a person who is invested in these people, and as professors, you know, myself and the colleagues that I have, that I know of, you know, we're, we're not just invested in students intellectual education, we're interested in their heart as well, because the heart is the seedbed of the intellect. And when we have students who express fears about what happened with the election, it is not profitable to shout them down and tell them they're immature and invalidate their fears because that's just, that's, that's not appropriate and it doesn't matter. You know, the political position is, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that you have people that are under your charge. You're charged with educating, you're charged with mentoring, you're charged with supporting. And for whatever reason, whether the reason is good or not, they are having this experience of fear. And you can't help somebody by invalidating their fear. You have to sit with them, you have to listen to them. And that's really what we've lost in the national discourse is we don't want to listen to people anymore. We want to advance our position, our narrative, and we even want to go as far as demonizing other people that are diametrically opposed to us. And this is something that has to change in our society. And the best way to do that, or one of the best ways is at the college level. Because if people don't understand, if they don't learn how to dialogue with people of different opinions and to listen to other opinions when they are in college, when are they going to learn to do that? They're not going to learn to do that by watching Fox News or CNN or listening to Joe Rogan or watching Bill Maher or any of these other agenda based media presentations. We have to learn how to get people who are pro choice and pro life and Democrat and Republican and theist and atheists in the same room appreciating and valuing each other and from that context, talking about the great ideas and talking about the great questions and talking about the controversies of the day. But if all you do as a professor is if you go to your students and say, hey, you are so not in the real world, or you are so stupid for being fearful because of what happened, you know, you're missing an opportunity as an educator regardless of what your political position is. And so, yeah, the original title of that article that you reference was no, I won't apologize for supporting students after the election because they do have real fears. You know, I have kids when my kid has a fear, when they think there's a monster in the closet or something, I don't go and talk about how stupid they are and why they shouldn't have the fear. I sit down and I say, okay, how are you feeling? What's going on? And then, you know, we, you know, once they, once they calm down on the emotions a little bit, you know, we can assess, you know, how reasonable the fears are and see what they think. But this is all a process. And you know, college professors should be, in a sense, shepherds. They should be mentors. They should. People should be people who are concerned about the maturity and the care of the soul of their students. Or at least that's what I'm committed to. And I, my professors were like that coming up and I try to, to model that as well. So that was the motivation for the article. Long answer to a short question. [00:18:04] Speaker A: That's great. No, I appreciate it. So I wonder in, let's say, broader national media presentations around issues like these and around education in general, if sometimes comments like we're not preparing students for the real world are grounded in a lack of awareness about the specific role that community colleges play in higher education. Your article touches on this a little bit, about the fact that many of our students know the real world in some very deep ways already and they're inhabiting responsibilities and difficult experiences already in ways that I think a lot of those media presentations probably just don't understand. [00:18:51] Speaker D: Why does a student in one of my philosophy classes, classes who is working two part time jobs is a single mom and a caregiver to an elderly grandparent, when, and I have several of these, why does that person need to hear a lecture from a pundit from Fox News about what the real world is? Sure. Explain that to me. [00:19:15] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I'm not going to try because I don't think there's a good explanation. [00:19:20] Speaker D: That is the pinnacle of nonsensical elitism. [00:19:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:24] Speaker D: And it just drives me crazy. [00:19:27] Speaker A: Sure. And I'm going to assume that, you know, maybe referring back to something you said about the way that you construct communities in your classrooms, that those experiences, far from inhibiting students from seeing what the real world, it probably builds for a very rich discussion about topics you're addressing in philosophy precisely because of those experiences and struggles that they're engaged in. Right. This isn't just idle intellectual exercises. This is really engaging with the world as students encounter it. [00:20:00] Speaker D: No, absolutely. You know, I have students who were breaking down in class many in the two days after the election because they're afraid for family members and they're, they're afraid that their family members might get separated because of possible immigration policies. And, you know, and I don't know the ins and outs of what immigration policies or deportation policies may be in the pipe. I just, I don't know that. But I don't feel like I need to know that to validate real concerns that they have. And I'm certainly not going to tell them that, you know, they don't live in the real world because they're afraid of what might happen to their family because of the election. [00:20:39] Speaker A: Yeah. So you also, in the, in the article, talk about being aware of your students as whole persons, and then here, I think you've said in this discussion that you teach them as whole persons. Yes. And so is it reasonable to say that you don't view the acknowledgments of fears like the ones that students might have had after the election or in response to any kind of event? Those aren't isolated from their work as students. Those fears and those concerns aren't separate from the work of philosophy. They're integrated in some kind of way. [00:21:19] Speaker D: No, absolutely not. You know, a person's emotional disposition or psychological bandwidth available directly impacts their ability to learn. You know, we become different and our abilities become different when we are fearful. You know, and if I, if I try to, you know, teach a student something while they are fearful and while they have all these other things going on or they're not thinking maybe as rationally as they otherwise might, and I just ignore that. I don't think that I'm being a good educator. And some people may disagree with that. Some people may say, well, they've got to learn how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, yada, yada, yada. Again, these are people who are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. By and large, my students are not privileged. They're not like the kids that I Went to college with. I went to college at Emory University. Most of the people there on my campus lived in the dorm, they didn't have jobs, they went to school in their pajamas, they went to the cafeteria, took a nap, were involved in a fraternity or sorority. I was one of the few commuters that wasn't really involved in that because I was working. But most of the students had that experience. My students don't have that experience. They are, as I said in the article, they're the salt of the earth because they are trying and they are giving everything that they can to afford for themselves opportunities that they were not given when they were born. And so how you can look at students like this and not have immense admiration and respect for them, you know, is. Is beyond me. And how you could even, you know, ever make comments about that they don't live in the real world because they have fears about the election is just, you know, shows a complete detachment from reality in these students lives. And so I think that one of the reasons I like ACC is because most of the professors that I know really actually love their students. And they have no problem telling you that. And they're not embarrassed to tell you that because, you know, they're the, they're the people that we live for and mentor and spend time with. And I think that they feel that. And here's the other thing, Tonio. You know, education is about more than content transmission, right? If a student wants to learn about Immanuel Kant, they want to learn about Aristotle. They can get a book that is much more competent in its presentation than my presentation is. And they can read that and they can get the content. However, you know, as Aristotle outlined in one of his books, Rhetoric, communication is not just about content communication. Logos begins with what Aristotle called ethos and pathos. And so when you're trying to communicate with students, or if a politician is trying to communicate with potential constituents, the questions that are in the mind of the people who are listening are not first and foremost, what is the teacher trying to communicate? The first questions are, is this person with me? And is this person for me? This was the foundation of all Aristotle's communication theory. And communication theory today is still in part based on that. And so I can have the greatest lecture in the world, I can be the most inspirational speaker, I can give the best books, and I can transmit all the logos, all the content of Kantianism, utilitarianism, whatever. But if those students don't see that I am with them and I am for them, then this Content will not land to the degree of efficacy that it would if those students believed that. And so when you take time to form a learning community and you treat each student as a person and you try to spend time with them out of class and you try to respond to them and you try to learn their names and all that this makes the student think, oh my gosh, this professor actually cares about me. Maybe I'll listen to what he has to say. Yeah, and that's the whole point of what Aristotle was trying to teach with his logos, ethos and pathos lesson. And that's the same thing. And so when we are taking fears seriously after the election, we have 2,500 years of educational theory behind us saying that those things are important. And if you don't think those things are important, then you need to stay working at FOX News and out of education because you have no business there. [00:26:00] Speaker A: I'll refrain from talking about the. [00:26:02] Speaker D: And I'm not picking on FOX News. I'm sorry, they all have their issues and I don't mean to pick on Fox News. [00:26:09] Speaker A: I was just going to make a cheap shot joke about the imminent possible integration of entertainment and education, but I'll refrain. Well, winding the conversation down, it seems like the remarks that you just made here about letting students know, let's say as a teacher, that I am with and for you, that at its best, when we work as an integrated institution together, ideally students will have to start to be able to understand that the institution is with them and for them as well, that it becomes an opportunity for them to have not just a community, but in that classroom during that hour and a half there with you, but that the college that they're part of can be a community and maybe even the, the city in which the college is embedded and then so on and so on. And hopefully the liberal arts, broadly construed, not just philosophy, but the various disciplines that are involved in liberal arts provide students with ongoing opportunities to see themselves and their communities in that way. To that end, as we start to wind down here, if, if I'm a student and I'm curious about something to check out content wise, something to read or something to whet my appetite. If I'm thinking about maybe trying a core Saturn philosophy, what's something that you might recommend that people read or listen to or check out? [00:27:35] Speaker D: That's, that's a great question. I would say, if there, I would say take the plunge and sign up for the class. Yeah, sure, but, but if you're not to point yet, I'M going to tell you what a great introduction to philosophy is, and you might find this to be curious, but it's a book that was written a few years back, and the book is called the Practicing Stoic, A Philosophical User's Manual. And basically what the practicing Stoic is. It's an introduction to philosophy in the form of practical ethics. And it's based upon the writings of the late Roman Stoics, namely Seneca the Younger, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. And Ward Farnsworth, who is the author of this book, who is actually, he was the dean of the UT Law School for many years and still a professor there, he has basically systematized the philosophy of stoicism into 10 or 12 practical areas, like desire, wealth, attachment, externals. And I think that this book, for someone who has never had a philosophy class, instead of going and getting a book that's an introduction to philosophy, like Philosophy for Dummies or Philosophy A Short Introduction or whatever, those are all fine. But this book shows you how the Stoics, one of the primary four groups of ancient philosophers, approached ethics and how to have that eudaimonistic life, that life of happiness and joy, and, you know, to be congratulated life. And again, that's how I started in philosophy, because Ethics and the Good Life is immediately practical and you kind of work backwards from there and you address metaphysics and epistemology. And they can do that in classes, if they take classes. But I would say get the Practicing Stoic and read through that because it's very accessible, but at the same time, it integrates a ton of primary source material. So I think it's one of the greatest introductory philosophy books that's available on the market now. [00:29:39] Speaker A: All right, well, thank you for that recommendation. It seems like Stoicism generally has been having kind of a cultural moment the last couple of years. And so students who dive into that might be surprised to find how integrated it is in other things that they might have been checking out without being aware of its influence by Stoicism. [00:29:55] Speaker D: It does, and it's helping students to be more self aware. It's helping them to become philosophers. And as philosophers, what we're trying to do is we're trying to separate ourselves from our situation so that we can look at our situation from the outside as objectively as we can, and look at the scripts by which we live and evaluate those scripts, and if we find them unreasonable, change them so that we can live better lives. And that's what philosophy's always done. That's what stoicism has done, and that's what we try to teach in our classes. [00:30:24] Speaker A: All right. Well, thanks a lot, Jason, for stopping by the office. I appreciate your time, man. [00:30:28] Speaker D: Absolutely. Enjoy it. Thank you for the invitation. [00:30:35] Speaker A: Sa.