Matthew Daude: Liberal Arts Can Save the World

[00:00:03] Speaker A: 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. The Austin 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. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Thanks for joining the conversation. [00:01:06] Speaker C: I'm Tonio Ramirez. [00:01:08] Speaker B: My guest today is Matthew Dowda, who has been a vital presence at Austin community college for 35 years. Here we discuss a few of the many roles he's held, including professor of philosophy, chair of the philosophy department, and dean of Liberal arts, a position he held for 10 years. Among other topics, we cover his approach to the philosophical discipline, his ongoing intellectual relationship with Aristotle, and his motto, that liberal arts can save the world. As you'll see, he's quite serious about this idea, and by the end of the episode, I wonder whether you might find yourself inclined to agree. It's my great pleasure to present a conversation with Matthew Dowden. Let's dive in. [00:01:56] Speaker C: Matthew Dowda, welcome to the office. [00:01:58] Speaker D: Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. [00:02:00] Speaker C: I really appreciate you being here. So I think you have a kind of unique trajectory in terms of the roles you've had at ACC and the hats, literal and otherwise, that you've worn. And I wonder if you might just briefly give us a whirlwind tour of the various things you've done here. [00:02:19] Speaker D: Sure. Actually, it's a 35 plus year odyssey. I started teaching here first as an adjunct, actually, and this was at a time before we had any full time philosophy faculty. So obviously we had no department chair. We were sort of absorbed under the umbrella of the humanities back then. And you know, when a full time position came along, I applied. The truth is, not really expecting to get it because I have kind of a non traditional academic career. I was in mental health. I do have a doctorate in philosophy, but I never thought of it as a, you know, as a trajectory toward academia. So to my surprise, I did get the job and I have a great story about that. I found out that I had been hired the Friday before classes began in the following fall. So there was a scramble to, you know, create a schedule, a full time schedule for me. [00:03:21] Speaker C: So you start as an adjunct. [00:03:23] Speaker D: Yes. [00:03:23] Speaker C: End up rather rapidly and to your surprise, assuming the title of full time faculty and chair. [00:03:29] Speaker D: Yes. [00:03:30] Speaker C: But your, your trajectory didn't stop there. Right. [00:03:33] Speaker D: No, it didn't stop there. I did have an interesting period where I was winding down my mental health practice and sort of juggling. It was a very busy few years. Very, very busy few years. But then after that point, I was. I served as department chair, I think. I think 25 years running. We have a great philosophy department. The people are wonderful. Very collegial. It's just a great atmosphere. And I like to think that I was a part of shaping that culture of collegiality and. And this sense of mission to take philosophy to community college students. [00:04:19] Speaker C: Yeah. I think it's hard to impress upon folks maybe who haven't been members of a philosophy department before how important that is and that it is not the case everywhere that you might go. I came to ACC in the spring of 2019 and was very happy working where I worked in California, but was really struck immediately when I arrived here at how collegial and cohesive the philosophy department was. These are people who don't just work together, they hang out. [00:04:51] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:04:52] Speaker C: And not only to talk shop, but to actually be colleagues in a wide range of senses. And it sounds to me as though your opportunities to shape instructional culture didn't end there. [00:05:09] Speaker D: They didn't end there. But I do want to add, it is extremely important to note that. I mean, I think it is that community colleges give us, as philosophers or scholars of religion. I'm talking about our department. But really the humanities generally, they give us a really unique opportunity to reach people and to help those people join that great conversation. Hutchins. You know, but also to see the value of the humanities in. In their lives and how the humanities can enrich their lives. And obviously, I feel very strongly about my own discipline, but I feel as strongly possible about the other disciplines in the humanities. They're just so important for a life of humaneness and flourishing. [00:06:02] Speaker C: Sure. [00:06:02] Speaker D: And community college gives us a wonderful opportunity to reach people who might otherwise never have taken a course like ours. And that puts also an important and weighty responsibility on us, because many times the philosophy course that you or I teach. I know you teach philosophy, too. Those courses are the only philosophy course a student will ever take in their whole academic career. And that, to me, that really sharpens the responsibility to communicate why philosophy matters to. To those students. [00:06:39] Speaker C: Yeah. I wholeheartedly share in that sense of responsibility, but also opportunity. [00:06:43] Speaker D: Oh, yeah. It's a wonderful opportunity. [00:06:45] Speaker C: You know, you've mentioned a few. A few ways in which you were. You were there to be at the vanguard of a number of things That I think are often taken for granted now. So online instruction is prevalent certainly in the wake of COVID but even before that, it was not uncommon to find online courses in higher ed and certainly community college. There are many institutions that offer community college, institutions that offer associate's degrees in philosophy now. But you've had it, you've had the opportunity to be there when that wasn't the case. Yeah, and I wonder, you know, and I look forward to opportunities to hopefully be at a different kind of vanguard now where people are starting to recognize that a discipline like philosophy and philosophy is not alone in the, in the liberal arts in this respect, but it's a discipline that a lot of people don't get exposed to or don't have the opportunity to engage with outside of higher ed, because for a variety of reasons, historical and otherwise, philosophy isn't a common feature in high school curriculum in the US anymore. And because higher ed in some of its incarnations, private universities and four year institutions, is restricted to people who have access to them, it really is at the community college where if it's going to be for everyone, philosophy gets to be for everyone. And so I wonder, as somebody who had a role in shaping the department, but then subsequently as dean of the whole division, how that kind of shaped the approach you took to the decisions that you had the opportunities to make. [00:08:20] Speaker D: That is a really great question. Some of it is entwined in my own weird intellectual autobiography, I guess. So when I was in mental health and training, there was a general encouragement to get a doctorate in something, you know, but the interesting thing is that the training was very pragmatic and hands on sort of process. But in those days, I mean, that's, that's another change that I think has come about. But because I learned the mental health psychoanalytic psychotherapy sort of as an apprentice, but that's a different story. But I got a doctorate in philosophy for no other reason than I just love philosophy. I had no career objective, I was doing okay in mental health. I like the work. But what I started to realize is, you know, doing mental health work exposed me to a range of people with all kinds of different problems, some of which you could classify as, you know, mental health issues. But some of them are just recognizably philosophical questions about meaning, like what should I do with the heartbeats I have left on this planet? And, you know, like things that we might now call value clarification, like if I'm in a conundrum about whether I ought to outright lie in a Certain situation. But if I do, then there will be negative content. I mean, there's all of those kind of questions that. That sort of turn up. And what I started to realize is that. And this may sound like a harsh thing to say, and I don't want to, you know, take this opportunity to insult all my colleagues, but I think some of it's our fault because philosophy has become so professionalized that it's. It's a little bit unusual now for philosophy to be a public force. And that's not how philosophy started. I mean, if you think back to, particularly the classic period, you know, Plato and Aristotle, I mean, both of those two had grand ideas about the importance of philosophy and philosophical wisdom in, you know, everything from. I mean, you know, Aristotle wrote a book on how to run a household that is a perspective about how philosophy can inform decision making on running a household, let alone the fact that he had lots of contributions, as did Plato, to government. So the point is, what I started to see is that philosophy really could be and should be something that has something to offer everybody, just in the ordinary process of trying to live a humane, decent life with other human beings in communities. So I kind of became. I know this sounds a little bit weird, but I kind of became an evangelist for philosophy as an actual force in the streets and not an academic discipline. Now, don't get me wrong, I think that the professionalization of philosophy has produced lots of great scholarship. Like, I am really glad that. That there are people, people who spend their whole lives studying duns, scotus, modal logic, because I can benefit from their work. But too often philosophy is about technicalities and less often about the sorts of problems that ordinary people confront. So the way I think about what we do in philosophy, especially in the community college and the opportunity we have, we have this amazing opportunity to show students that philosophy, as a matter of fact, does have something to say about the kind of problems that human beings face in the world. And to tell you the truth, you mentioned I had another. There's another chapter in the story of my trajectory at ACC. Yes, sir. A total of 10 years, I think, as dean, the last seven of which were dean of Humanities and communication. And I think one of the. I think it's probably fair to say that that sort of evangelical idea about what philosophy in particular can offer people was a hallmark of my time in, really in all the leadership roles. But as dean, because I genuinely do believe that liberal arts can save the world. Doesn't have to, you notice, can. But I think that the More we can help students see the relevance and the urgent relevance of what our disciplines say about the human condition and about our struggles to live humane, decent lives in community with each other. The more likely it will be that the liberal arts will save the world. [00:13:29] Speaker C: Yeah, I'd like to return to this idea in a moment because that idea of liberal arts being a vehicle for saving the world is, I think, a hallmark of your tenure as dean and probably one of the first things that people who have worked with you in that time would bring to mind. But just to emphasize all of this, this 35 year plus stretch at ACC, culminating in you serving for a significant period of time as dean, emerged from you in no way intending to work in academia. [00:14:00] Speaker D: That's right. No, I really, in lot of ways, and it might take a little longer to explain this without horrifying people, but in a lot of ways I saw our work as community college professors as a kind of mental health practice carried on by other means, because I do genuinely believe that the skills and the insights that the humanities can, can give us are conducive to well being. I mean, when we reflect some on the fact that I, as an individual, I'm not the only person who's ever suffered a loss or, you know, any of the normal sorts of ups and downs in human life. And even more, when we can connect that with the ways that people before us have reflected on the human condition, then it sort of situates us in a kind of larger universe and then our own experiences take on a different meaning. Sure, in a couple of different ways. I mean, the fact that I'm not the only person that's ever suffered a loss can also encourage me to have a bit of intellectual humility about my own experiences, which is one of, you know, as you know, Aristotle's key ingredients for an educated mind. Right. But then there's another sense in which recognizing that people suffer losses and they have various ways of responding to those losses can give us a bit of guidance in, in a world where otherwise, you know, we might just feel disoriented and lost. [00:15:47] Speaker C: Sure. [00:15:48] Speaker D: And even the experience of disorientation and. Yes, and lostness is a part of the great conversation. [00:15:58] Speaker C: Yes. And this is a hard one, I think, to explain to people who might be looking at our discipline or even academia from the outside. In many ways, I've always taken it to be our job to precipitate that disorientation, which isn't always a comfortable thing to experience at the outset, but it's a crucially Important thing. And I tend to find that people who are up for the challenge almost always end up reporting that they benefit from it. [00:16:29] Speaker D: No, I think you're absolutely right about that. In fact, I think that one of the dimensions of the humanities and liberal arts generally. I'll talk about the humanities. One of the dimensions that provides us the. The best sort of guidance through this world is the fact that the humanities as collectively suffers from that same sort of disorientation. So think about it, you know, when Hudgins coined that lovely phrase the great conversation, it would be pretty fair to say that we were talking largely about affluent, white, European sorts of converse voices in that conversation. And, you know, there's been a lot of talk about the elitism of humanities and that sort of thing. But ironically, humanities has also found sort of the will collectively to include more and more and more voices. And the interesting thing about that is that the more voices we include, the more scary it can get. Because it is disorienting to find that there are other ways of parsing the human condition than the one that I or you are any randomly selected person might be familiar with and comfortable with. But that discomfort is a part of the process of growth, I think, in recognizing our. I know that it's not necessarily, you know, it's not necessarily accepted way to think about this, but these days, but, you know, we've kind of forgotten that a lot of education was originally aimed at the cultivation of character. And while that can be allied with an elitist enterprise, does it have to be? I mean, that's a philosophical question that we need to be asking ourselves. Maybe the, maybe the emphasis on character and maybe, you know, well, being need to be retooled for a more inclusive sort of, you know, a more inclusive sort of great conversation. Sure, we put it that way. [00:18:53] Speaker C: It's been. It's been exciting. As somebody who's been, you know, I'm speaking to myself here, someone who's been involved in philosophy in a professional context largely since the turn of the millennium, let's say. It does seem to me that there's been an active effort to revisit the idea of an inclusive conversation, both in terms of historically looking back at voices that are available for us to discover but may not have been canonized, but also in terms of the present, looking to have a more inclusive conversation. And it's always striking to me, see how many facult at ACC are actively involved in both of those as vehicles for broadening the conversation. We have courses right now that are looking to rediscover for our own students as audiences, philosophy and traditions that you might not find in a typical textbook. So pre Columbian indigenous philosophy or African philosophy. And a lot of students are just, you know, often surprised to find that it is medieval Islamic scholarship that in fact keeps philosophy alive for a good fresh. Yes, yeah, right. But you might not have known that. [00:20:08] Speaker D: If you were certainly textbook, certainly Aristotle and the preservation of Aristotelian texts depended almost exclusively on that tradition. That's right. Yeah. [00:20:18] Speaker C: Yeah. So. So, you know, inviting. Inviting students to participate becomes a little easier when. When you see that there's a precedent for. For a broader range of voices in those conversations. Returning to this idea of a catchphrase, I suppose, that you coined here, liberal arts can save the world. I wonder if you might just unpack that idea a little bit. [00:20:45] Speaker D: Yeah. Let me start with what will either be a parable or a sort of pseudo scientific crackpot with theory. Right. I think that the engine of human progress, whatever we make of progress, and I know that's a difficult term, that is in itself a difficult term to unpack, But I think the engine is cultural interaction. You know, if you look, if you. I was a history major as an undergrad. And one of the things that my experiences. I was medieval in early modern Europe, matter of fact. And one of the things that really struck me is how often new technologies, new areas of scholarship, new ideas generally develop out of cultures rubbing and grinding against each other. And if you generalize, again, parable or crackpot theory. But if you generalize that. That idea, and you think that a lot of the good that human beings are capable of doing and that we can do today arose originally out of cultural interaction. Then one of the things that the humanities in particular has as one of its obligations is to teach us in every subsequent generation how to live together in a genuine pluralism. Because we don't want to lose the plural. We lose the pluralism. We lose the engine of human progress. So that has that idea. Again, I think of it as a parable, but people might want to think of it as a crackpot theory. But that idea has really been the guiding force behind my evangelism about the liberal arts. Because I believe that the. The key way in which the liberal arts can save the world is to teach each. We aren't good as human beings, as a species. We are not good at pluralism. We tend to be. And it makes. It makes perfect sense. We have had a lot more years on the savannah mistrusting people from over the hill. When they approached us. So every generation has to overcome, to some extent, the biological deck that's stacked in favor of anxiety about otherness. And how we can do that is by engaging in exactly the kinds of materials and intellectual experiments and knowledge that the humanities bring to the table. I mean, if you read a novel about someplace, you know, far removed, I don't know, the Chanson de Roland. I was just talking about the Song of Roland. It's probably the earliest work of French literature. In many ways, it's kind of this familiar story of a dude in a war Charlemagne. There's all this stuff going on, but in other ways, it takes us completely out of our own time, and it puts us into a world that we can't experience anymore because it's. That world is gone. And what we learn along the way is not just what that world might have been like for the people living in that time, but we also learn all the skills involved in projecting ourselves with a certain amount of empathy and intellectual humility into somebody else's shoes. That has got to be a key part of what learning the skills that are requisite for living in a genuinely pluralistic world are all about. Right? So that's. That's sort of the kernel of it, the idea that our disciplines can teach students, because it may not be the only place that students could learn those skills, but it's the place. It's like the home territory for those skills. Right. And so, you know, if you think about it from that sort of perspective, it actually emerges pretty naturally that the liberal arts and all it has to offer us is capable of saving the world. Of course, the responsibility is on us. It's not going to do that work for us. [00:25:14] Speaker C: No. Okay, so this is becoming clearer here. I imagine that some people, when they hear a phrase like liberal arts can save the world, are going to immediately connote some kind of metaphorical sense in which our spirits will be elevated, etc. And that's all important stuff, too. But it sounds to me as though you're talking about. No, in fact, the future of human survival may hinge on us carrying on the skill sets and traditions that we look at in liberal arts. [00:25:46] Speaker D: I absolutely think that. I think there's a couple of things that I frequently say to underscore this point. If you graduate from ACC and you've got your training certificates, degree, whatever, behind you, and you find yourself working in a situation where you have to work on a team with people from different cultures, different linguists, different languages, different religious or different worldviews, what's going to be more useful to you in terms of being successful and thriving and flourishing in that sort of environment. A, another PHP certificate or B a close reading of Melville. I mean, it just seems obvious to me that the sort of skills you want for yourself, if you are going to be in that sort of situation, are the skills that are going to equip you to not, not just to get by. Yeah, that's about pushing the right buttons and pulling the right levers. But there are, there are, there are ways to flourish under those conditions, but you have to be prepared for it in a certain way and, and not developing the skills that, that prepare you is one of the ways that we can close ourselves off. So that's one thing that I say. The other, the other thing I want to say though is we're living in a time where a lot of, a lot of work, potentially possibly already, but certainly in the near future, a lot of intellectual work is going to be offloaded onto chatbots and AI. So there we have a really legitimate interest in asking how we are going to preserve the humaneness of human experience if pretty much everything that I do can be offloaded on to, you know, a chat bot. [00:27:44] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:27:44] Speaker D: So there's the question. How are we going to gain the perspective that allows us to tell the difference between something that we're just technically able to do and whether we ought to do something just because we are technically able to do that thing? [00:28:01] Speaker C: Yeah. So I love the actual specific example you used here in terms of the PHP certificate versus close reading of Melville, because you said it's obvious to you, and I infer that it's Melville that's going to be more useful to you here. But I suspect there are going to be some people listening to this for whom that might not be obvious. So maybe we can, we can make it a little bit clearer. I think we could select among any of the various things that are popularly described as existential threats right now. So this could be the rise of, of AI, this could be the development of new capabilities in biology. This could be political confusion, the prospect of war. I imagine that any of these could potentially serve as a test case for what you're talking about here. How would potentially a close reading of Melville help me to, you know, participate in a solution to one of these problems? [00:29:00] Speaker D: Okay, let me, let, let's play this out. One of the concerns I have as a philosopher about AI is not what it will do to us, but what we're doing to it. So let me. And here, so let Me. Let me trace this out just for a moment. When we interact with the chat bot and I do this with my phone. I mean, sometimes my phone will announce something, and I tell people around me on my phone, my phone speaks German, which, you know, because we had to follow instructions. It's an amusing story, but we don't have to tell that. So if I project agency and personhood onto the chatbot and then use that chatbot instrumentally, which is exactly the point of a chatbot, then it's a legitimate question to ask the whether the more I interact with a chatbot while projecting agency, the more inured I will become to the instrumentality of that. So in other words, will it eventually erode my sense of the agency and personhood of other people around me? Will I just treat everybody who looks intentional as one more instrument in my own repertoire of instruments for getting what I want in the world? Well, that sort of depersonalization on the surface, looks like a new thing, except it's not a new thing. It's a very old thing. When you think about, for instance, the kinds of concerns that motivated some of the pre Socratic philosophers or some of the classic philosophy from India or China, or even questions that arose in the intellectual tradition of the Mexica people, the Nahuatl speaking people, we call them Aztecs. But in all of those traditions, there were people who were being exploited and depersonalized. And there is a rich intellectual tradition of exploring the effects and possible solutions to depersonalization in all of these traditions, if we're willing to have a look. So if we're. If we become worried about whether the. Rather the proliferation of AI in daily life is going to erode our sense of the agency and personhood of other people. We have a rich set of minds that we could go to to look for help in a certain sense, for some guidance, like what sort of solutions we might put in place, like, you know, to prevent this. People have talked about this now for centuries, and there are. There are. There are things we can learn from reflecting on those experiments. But here's the tricky thing about it. If we take a particular text, I'll just use Melville because it's a convenient example. So Melville wrote a bunch of novels about cultural. About cultures grinding on each other. Everybody knows Moby Dick. But if you want a really great taste of this, Umu Taipei, those. Those novels explore cultures like just interacting and grinding on top of each other. And there's this richness of subjective experience of what it's like to be caught in that in the grinding of those cultures. So if you think about that as a kind of, as a kind of template and you're just going to mindlessly take something out of here and apply it to AI, then we have a, we have a different problem there. And that problem is a lack of reflection on what's appropriate to our own particular circumstances and time. So that's why it's important not just to read one like to Melville, but we need to read. We need to read, we need to be exposed to multiple voices in order to get multiple different perspectives. Because that's where again, it's sort of like a miniature version of the, you know, my parable about the engine, the engine of progress. You know, one answer is probably not sufficient, but if you get two or three or five answers that can rub and grind against each other, that probably is sufficient to spark, create creativity. There's something I like to tell my students. Having convictions. There's nothing wrong with having convictions. Having convictions is wonderful and I encourage students, bring your convictions to the table. But just remember this. It's in the cracks between our convictions where truth likes to hide. Yeah, yeah. [00:33:58] Speaker C: I think that, that's, that's, that's a nice example of the wisdom in, you know, philosophia seeping in in a way that often we're not allowed to explicitly acknowledge. [00:34:10] Speaker D: Right. [00:34:12] Speaker C: So yeah, I think there's a lot to this example that you've given. And this is an oversimplification, but I can imagine it being a really awakening experience to realize that the ways in which I interact with my phone may be shaping how I interact with the person who's waiting my table at a restaurant and just taking the opportunity to reflect on that. Notice it, think about how it shapes the extent to which I depersonalize or even think about what personhood means in that context. There you can start to see pretty clearly how some of the work that we might do in philosophy or other areas of liberal arts would be applicable. You and I both come from philosophy as a tradition. Now I'm even more tunnel visioned than you. I did my undergraduate work in philosophy all the way through. Right. I don't have the benefit of other disciplines, but as a dean of a liberal arts division, you're supporting much more than just philosophy, much more than just humanities. What did you do or how did you cultivate a broader perspective that was inclusive maybe of disciplines that weren't your own coming into the role? [00:35:30] Speaker D: Yeah, I think that, you know, the people to ask might be the people that had to interact with. [00:35:38] Speaker C: That. [00:35:39] Speaker D: Was Dean about that? But generally, I have a. One of. I sort of go by an article of faith about this. Right. Which is these disciplines, particularly the academic transfer disciplines that have been around for a while, these disciplines have an inherent subject matter, and they have. They have a subject matter and a methodology. And whether I have any expertise in those or not, there some commitment to intellectual humility suggests that I take seriously that these are disciplines that have something to say about the human condition. And then, you know, the problem is me. Like, what do I not know? The problem is not the discipline. You know, it's like the problem is me. So looking at it like that, I started. I just made the presumption that every discipline. And, you know, generally since I. Since usually I talked about it as liberal arts, I just made the presumption that every one of those disciplines does, in fact, have something important and substantive to contribute to my own view of what the liberal arts. The ultimate goal of the liberal arts would be. [00:37:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:37:05] Speaker D: Which is, you know, really to save the world. Yes, that's the ultimate goal. So I went into those different. I mean, you know, there's all sorts of decisions that you have to make when you are in a leadership position that have to do with things that are extrinsic to what a discipline may tell us in the broad sweep of human experience. You know, like budget sheets and. I mean, there's all kinds of contingencies. Right. But ironically, I always viewed. I mean, let me not start that sentence with ironically. I always reviewed. Let me try again. I always viewed the need to make decisions that benefit students within this context of constraints that may or may not have any relevance to what's good for students intellectually or spiritually or morally or otherwise. I always viewed that as itself another ironic iteration of what the humanities explores to begin with. Because just think of all the great. The great works of philosophy and literature that turn on the issue of alienation from authenticity because of extrinsic constraints just like the ones you face every day as dean. You and one generally face everything, and I face them when I was in that role. So in. In a certain way, I sort of. I sort of conceptualized the work of the leadership work of the dean, job and department chair before that as itself an exercise in living in a way that is informed by the humanities and a reflection on the human condition. [00:38:56] Speaker C: It seems like it would be nice if that attitude and that openness to the possibility that all disciplines have something to say were easy to export to all practitioners of those Disciplines. I say this just because it's not uncommon within a given discipline to find some discomfort in trying to understand a problem from a completely different tool set and perspective and linguistic idiom that you're used to, and lending that benefit of the doubt to the fact that sociologists might have something interesting to say about justice in a way I'm not used to. Well, I would like to maybe turn attention to something a little more personal to you that I happen to know about. [00:39:50] Speaker D: Okay. [00:39:50] Speaker C: And that is that you have, in conversation with me and in interacting with the philosophy department, talked about having a kind of interesting relationship, that being a relationship with Aristotle the philosopher. And I thought maybe you might be interesting to hear you talk about this a little bit, just because the. The idea of carrying on a relationship with somebody who's been dead for thousands of years might seem odd at first or like a. Like a funny way of speaking, I think, to students who are unfamiliar with this idea. But I suspect that you take it actually rather seriously. [00:40:28] Speaker D: Indeed, I do take it seriously. There. There are a handful of people whose works I have, let me say, I have this kind of relationship with several intellectual figures, but Aristotle is probably the most. The most visible. Let me first say that one of the things we can learn from the humanities is that time, space, and death are really not obstacles to great conversations. [00:40:57] Speaker C: Yeah, Right. [00:40:58] Speaker D: As long as we have traces, and as long as those traces are available to us in ways that we can engage. Right. Then there's a green light to interesting conversation. We just have to have the intellectual humility to engage the conversation in a certain way. Because one of the things I say to students, you know, I usually hold up a book like Hume's Inquiry or something. I say, here's a way to refute Hume. You just close the book. I mean, but that is not a reputation worthy of rational animals. Right. I mean, just throwing something away doesn't really help you understand what it is about that that you find worthy of the criticism that you want to level at it. So that's the starting point. So my relationship to Aristotle started when I was in grad school in philosophy. I had a great professor who was interested in metaphysical systems, and this is Doug Browning, who ended up being my dissertation chair and also a great mentor over the time that I was in grad school. So I took an independent study with him, and I read Aristotle. And at the time, I was really trying to acquire enough Greek to be able to look Aristotle in the face, because I think that's an important feature of this. You Know, when we read people in translation, we are. In one way, it's a gift. Somebody has translated it. But in another way, our. We aren't, in fact, looking that other intellectual in the face. Because every translation is an active interpretation. So there's like a third party mediating between me. So try him in a conversation like that and you'll see what I mean. It's difficult. So I got the idea that I would. I've always been very fond in my intellectual life. Of picking a few important, influential characters. And trying to read as widely in their works as possible. So I was already doing this with a couple of people. Freud. Because of my background in mental health. I have, as a matter of fact, read everything Freud published. And some stuff that he had, you know, like letters and stuff, some of that. And the reason I do that is because is like a developing a relationship. You become more. You become more skeptical of the caricature versions of people that people attack. For whatever their own political reasons might be. It just gives you a greater sense of the depth of what's going on with this body of work. I mean, you know, and it's really easy to justify this because nobody's ever taken me up on this. But I would ask people, like, suppose I were to distill your entire life into the last four things you've said to me in this conversation. I mean, nobody would be comfortable with that. I mean, that kind of. That kind of crass character characterization of you as a human being. So it's not hard to see why you might want to do this. But what I did with Aristotle as a result of that independent study and my work on Greek is I started reading Aristotle on a loop. So I have the little Green lobe books, all of Aristotle's works that are reasonably certain to be by Aristotle himself. I mean, I skip over it. It's in the collection. The problemat that, I skip over that. Because that's pretty clear linguistically. That's pretty clearly later. But anyway, so I read Aristotle and Luke. I've read Aristotle's corpus probably a couple dozen times. [00:45:13] Speaker C: Okay, so revisiting this on a regular basis. Yeah. So this. This idea of being in conversation with Aristotle. I think there's a parallel here to something that struck me when we were talking about your idea of liberal arts saving the world. This is, again, not some metaphorical. Nice way of saying, I really dig this Aristotle guy. [00:45:34] Speaker D: No, not at all. [00:45:34] Speaker C: It's actually you being in conversation with another mind. [00:45:38] Speaker D: That's right. [00:45:39] Speaker C: Just one that happens not to be alive at the same time as you. [00:45:43] Speaker D: And like any genuine conversation, it's work. It takes a certain amount of commitment and work. And I do find that particular kind of intellectual work rewarding and grounding because, you know, I'll be honest with you, there were, you know, we had some difficult. Some difficult, challenging moments during my time as dean. Covid comes to mind. And all through that time, I was reading Aristotle regular. You know, having the. Having the work to do did cut into my Aristotle reading at times, but it was always in the background. And, you know, as I say, a couple of other people. I could list Nietzsche as another one, but I think having a conversation, having a genuine conversation with another human being is always certain amount of work because you, You. There are a variety of ways that you can check out during a conversation. [00:46:50] Speaker C: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So maybe here this. This kind of segues into the. The last thing that I had wanted to ask you about. You have extensive background in mental health. You have suggested that there are points of overlap in the. The ways in which people might turn to, let's say, clinical therapy that can be found in looking at philosophy and maybe even in reading a book that's written by someone who was dead long ago. And there's a. There's a common thread of conversation and connection and relationship with other individuals that seems to be built into all of these enterprises. And I imagine that people who have never taught a higher ed class might be surprised to define how often it is that faculty end up having, within the boundaries of appropriate restrictions, but conversations about the most personal of things with students, because students will often come to realize that whereas I had not expected that an ethics class was going to touch on those things that are most significant to me or most troubling to me at a given moment are. And being able to talk about these, maybe even in some abstract way, is not the same, but is in some way analogous to what I might be doing in therapeutic interactions. Does that sound right to you? [00:48:21] Speaker D: It does sound right. With one small emendation. Many times we are already in very meaningful personal conversations with students, and we don't know that we are. Yes, because we're saying things that are contextually appropriate to teaching a class or talking to a student about absences, whatever it might be. But what the student's frame of interpretation may not be. Our own frame of interpretation. And if we keep in mind. See, a lot of these roads lead back to intellectual humility, don't they? If we keep in mind that what a student may be hearing from Us is filtered through the vicissitudes of their own life challenges at that moment, then we can be more open to the possibility for meaningful conversations to emerge. If. If we are close to those possibilities, then for sure students are not going to feel. It's almost like people have a kind of. A kind of intimacy radar. [00:49:34] Speaker C: That's absolutely true. [00:49:35] Speaker D: And people won't share with you something if they feel that you are operating from a posture of inaccessibility. Let's just put it like that. Right. And, you know, I mean, I'm not advocating that professors all. In addition to all the other things that have been foisted on teachers in our society, now we have to become therapists, too. What I am suggesting is that the more we can remain open to the possibility of genuine human contact, even if it has to do with, you know, Aristotle or Descartes or whatever it is, then the. The more the possibility is there that we can empower another human being. Yeah. Maybe in just the right. Maybe. Maybe in exactly the way they. They need. Yeah. At this point in their lives. You know, it's sort of an interesting thing. I've been teaching philosophy now for 40 years, close. And I run into people that I had in my classes, you know, 20, 30 years ago. And most of those people do not remember a damn thing that we talked about in class. [00:50:45] Speaker C: I'm not surprised. [00:50:46] Speaker D: But what they do remember is things that I said to them that I don't even remember. And what this has really driven home to me is that I'm communicating. What. I don't know how to put this, but I'm communicating in what I think are trivial conversations that just further the business of class. I am communicating a lot of things to students because of their own interpretive framework, for good or for ill. And so if I can try to keep my focus on ways that I can empower students to take ownership of their educational experiences and ownership of what happens in a class. I'll give you one tiny example students will often come to. We all have this experience, and they're angry, disappointed about a grade that they got. Over the years, I have developed a sort of standard response when a student comes to me. The first thing I say to students when I'm having a good day, the first thing I say is, before we get into your grade, let me just say I do my best never to confuse a grade with a human being. So I don't see you through the lens of this C or D or, you know, whatever it is that they're complaining. I See you as a human being. And let's. So we're going to. We'll start our discussion from there. And, you know, that really changes the terms of engagement, I'd imagine. So for the next discussion, which is, well, what can I do about this? It's the difference between communicating to somebody. I have these standards, and you didn't live up to them, as opposed to empowering the student to find ways to accomplish what ultimately will be their own goals. Then we've done something that may last a lot longer than whether they can tell me what Descartes argument for the existence of God in the fifth meditation is. Right. [00:53:08] Speaker C: That sounds right. That sounds right. Yeah. It's a subtle but really important shift. It's not uncommon, I think, for faculty to be approached by students in these circumstances and. And be told up front, I am not a C student or I am not a B student. This seems like a way of shifting conversations away from this by saying, no, you're a person. [00:53:33] Speaker D: You're a human being. [00:53:34] Speaker C: Yes. [00:53:34] Speaker D: With aspirations. And I get it. Yeah, I get that. Let's. Let's start there instead of. [00:53:42] Speaker C: And that seems. That seems to me like a potentially really powerful way of thinking about something that can be hard to talk about for many people in higher ed, the idea of being in relationship with students and expressing care to students, it's clearly important, and there's a lot of administrative support for this. But it's easy to confuse, I think, with being emotionally enmeshed with students. And I think that what you're describing here is something quite different from that. It's. It's leaving students with an understanding that what I am as a person, perhaps, among other things, is something that has attention, that attends. And I'm attending to you right now. [00:54:28] Speaker D: That's right. Yeah. [00:54:30] Speaker C: That might be a way of framing that. That's. That's less scary. [00:54:34] Speaker D: It is, yeah. I think there's a danger. There's actually a sort of a silly ribdis kind of danger here with. With talk of expressing care and concern for students. I generally don't talk about it from. With those terminology. With that kind of terminology. I generally like to stick with terminology that has to do with, you know, respect for their autonomy and empowerment and ownership of their decision making, whatever that might be. Like deciding to go to a party instead of study for the exam, whatever that might be. Be. But there's a silly Charybdis problem here because you put your finger on one of them, which is we can become emotionally enmeshed, and that's not healthy for anybody. It. It will create huge amounts of stress and anxiety in the professor. I mean, that's. And it's not good for students who. [00:55:26] Speaker C: By the way, is also a person who's also. [00:55:28] Speaker D: Yes, exactly. [00:55:29] Speaker C: You. [00:55:29] Speaker D: You stole my punchline. It was going to be at the end of the. You know, so we. But the other side of it is that we lapse into a kind of formula. When I was in mental health, my psychoanalytic supervisor used to call it the Berlitz School of Psychiatry. Right. This is when you get the sense that somebody is going by some script, you know. Yeah. Like, if you tell me about something going on with you and I say, and how do you feel about that? I mean, that. [00:55:58] Speaker C: Sure. So like the old Eliza chatbots. [00:56:01] Speaker D: Yeah, that is exactly. That is exactly the. Yes. And, you know, there are some people who are going to respond to the, you know, the script kind of thing, but more often, as I said before, people have a kind of radar about the potential for sharing intimate, intimate things. And they're going to know that this is a script. Right. And that communicates something else, which is, you're not actually worth me putting any effort into establishing contact with you as a fellow human being. So the way through the middle of that, I think, is to. Is to remember that, you know, all of us, we are all in the same boat. We just happen to have degrees. Right. But, you know, I haven't met anybody who doesn't have some questions about their life trajectory and whether not. Or what they're doing is meaningful. And those are all quintessentially human concerns. That, first of all, made me realize the overlap between mental health and philosophy. And second of all, motivated me to think that, you know, bringing the humanities to people is a. Is a form of mental health practice carried on by other means. And third, it does change the quality of my relationships with media social students, because when I think of myself as a human being struggling with the same sorts of issues, you know, prioritizing my time, you know, I'm sorry, your group, your papers are two weeks. You know, it's like all of the things that you get caught up in in life to remember that really, we're all struggling with that. It's just a question of what. It's a question of the role we happen to have in the institution. Institution, not the quality of personhood. But remembering that in your interactions with students, that certainly helps me. It helps me stay focused on the ways that I can empower students and encourage them to take ownership for them. You Know, and it may help. It may help explain this. When students come to me and say, I am not a C student, one of the things that I hear in that is the commodification of identity by distilling it into this one thing. Sure. And again, it's very easy to see why. It's very easy to see why. Sorry, let me make a point. It's easy for me to convince somebody why that is not a good thing. Because if I leave out of this interview and I go tell somebody, my friend, yeah, I was just talking to this dude who wears a cap all the time. I mean, if I reduce you to this one characteristic without. Without at least making a gesture in the direction of your personhood, then you're probably not thrilled. [00:59:03] Speaker C: So. [00:59:04] Speaker D: So why would we do that to other people? I mean, that's the thing. If we. We can. We can model that and encourage it in the way we interact with students. Yeah, I think it's hugely important. I think it's hugely important because although I may be a little bit unusual in having this clinical background and experience, I don't think. I think that mental health has been a huge challenge for higher ed generally, but especially for community colleges. And we could pin this on Covid, but the fact is, I saw a lot. Covid did exacerbate the mental health challenges. I mean, a former colleague that I worked with in mental health, he and I were chatting just not long after the post Covid period, and he said, he's a psychiatrist. He still practices. And he said, I'm having trouble diagnosing anybody with generalized anxiety disorder disorder, because everybody has the symptoms now. It's like, yeah, well, there. That's a bit of a joke. But the truth is, it really left its scars on us. And we're going to have to find a way to support ourselves and each other and our students through these sorts of issues and find healthier ways to adjust ourselves, too, to all the stuff that's going on. [01:00:33] Speaker C: Yeah. And maybe that's. That's a powerful idea to end on here, because it sounds as though, you know, part of the moral of the story, if I may, you know, distill it, is that the liberal arts end up not just having the ability to save the world, it provides a mechanism for saving ourselves, too. Because as I start to learn more about the disciplines that we help students to engage with, you start seeing how powerful those can be as tools for addressing those most difficult questions for yourself. [01:01:03] Speaker D: Could I. Could I couch what you just said in the form of a little Story? [01:01:08] Speaker C: Sure. Please. [01:01:10] Speaker D: So I mentioned my daughter, and she would probably be horrified if I tell this story, but I'm going to tell it anyway. So I came home from teaching and came upon her at the kitchen table doing calculus homework. And to some extent, I mean, you know, it's calculus homework. You have to just, you know, grind through this stuff. She'd been at it for a while. She looked pretty tired. And I said, how's it going? And she looked up at me and quoted a very, very dark line from a poem by Yevtashenko, who is a Soviet discipline poet, in Russian, and then translated it for the benefit of anybody around. And I thought, that is what the humanities is all about. I mean, so she's in this moment and in her mind, suffering through doing calculus homework is like, you know, you just have to grind through. Through. But the fact that she made that kind of connection is not a trivial thing. It's an interesting way of connecting whatever you take to be your own moment of suffering. And, come on, suffering should not be a contest. Right. [01:02:31] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:02:32] Speaker D: Who, you know, so. But of connecting your own moment of suffering or joy or anything else with the larger fund of human experience. I mean, it's one of the greatest things that our tiny little planet in this dark universe has given us is all these different cultural traditions that situate our humanness in a larger story. [01:02:57] Speaker C: Sure. [01:02:58] Speaker D: To me, that is just the coolest thing you could wish for. Right. [01:03:02] Speaker C: And it's available to you at every moment. [01:03:05] Speaker D: Yes. And part of our mission is to help students see that it is available to you at any moment. And now more than ever. I mean, most of us now have more information at our fingertips on a smartphone than we've had in the last entire history of our species in terms of access to practically anything. [01:03:29] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And there. That ends up being kind of a funny phenomenon, because I'll sometimes talk to students about one of the powers of liberal arts being that it can transform an hour in line with DMV into a fascinating experience. [01:03:46] Speaker D: Yes. [01:03:47] Speaker C: Now, what a lot of people, in fact, will do when they're stuck at the DMV is they pull their phone out. And you're right, I do have available at my fingertips all of Shakespeare's folios, and I could, you know, use those to make that time meaningful if I choose to. Of course, I can also play Angry Birds for. [01:04:04] Speaker D: That's right. Yeah, that's right. [01:04:07] Speaker C: But that. That's a decision that we get to make. [01:04:08] Speaker D: That is a decision. And, you know, you know, we. Sometimes we're going to do that. There's a time for some Angry Birds. But what we have to do is convince our students that there's also some time to bust out a little Shakespeare. Yeah, right. [01:04:19] Speaker C: That's right. [01:04:20] Speaker D: Or Aristotle in the case, maybe. [01:04:22] Speaker C: And that there can be a pleasure to that. [01:04:24] Speaker D: Yes. [01:04:24] Speaker C: It's just one that requires maybe a little bit more for us to access. [01:04:29] Speaker D: Well, that's the thing, you know, if we're modeling. The pleasure of it. If we're modeling. If we're modeling, just, you know, ask what are. What are we communicating by the way we approach. [01:04:40] Speaker C: Sure. [01:04:41] Speaker D: The things that we approach. Right. I'm generally pretty joyful when I'm talking about Aristotle. [01:04:46] Speaker C: Yes. [01:04:47] Speaker D: I think students respond to that. [01:04:49] Speaker C: They do. They caught on to that immediately, and they can. They can see it as an invitation to pursue that joy and that it's something that might be worth pursuing. [01:05:01] Speaker D: Right, exactly. [01:05:02] Speaker C: Well, Matthew, thank you very much for stopping by the office, and I appreciate the time. [01:05:06] Speaker D: Yeah. This has just been super fun. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, John. Thanks.