Re: Our Professional Responsibilities

[Michael Bernard-Donals <mfbernarddon@FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU>]

[T]he ways in which student respon[d] -- to Tuesday, to the historical
events of the Holocaust -- are often not what we expect.  This worries me
too.

But I wonder whether we can easily move students as a group from visceral
feelings to a rational response.  We've all experienced a loss here -- of
friends and family in some instances, of a sense of security, of a normal
life, of any number of things -- and each of us continue to react with
sadness, with anger, and with expressions that defy reason.  Our students
will react no differently.  Some will do so in ways that are inappropriate
(with hateful language and actions) and we need to do what we can to divert
it when it happens.  But in the end students (as do we) react out of
belief, not knowledge.  We fill the hurt with what is ready to hand, and
sometimes (as in the case of some of the more jingoistic responses) what's
ready to hand isn't pretty.  The questions I've seen on this list about
international terrorism and history are fine too, but as someone said
recently here, I don't think we can expect many of our students to be able
to rationally connect their feelings of loss or frustration with history
right now; they're (and we are) too grief-stricken.

We affect our students most often one at a time.  In their writing, and in
their responses to us, we risk failure most often if we treat members of a
class as if they represent "students" as a group.  (Just as we risk
failure if we and our leaders think of "terrorists" or "Muslims" or "Jews"
or "Americans" as a group.)  We ought to resist the impulse not to talk
about it, just as I think Gordon ought to resist the temptation to abandon
his teaching of the Holocaust and his writing about it because of his
students' sometimes irrational responses to it.  But I guess the point of
this is that even *with* guidance -- and sometimes because of it (because
of what students see as our attempt to co-opt something that's not our
business to co-opt) -- students (and individuals in general) react in ways
that are disturbing.  And I think we ought to let ourselves off the hook a
bit for it, because as a reaction to a loss these individual reactions
that defy reason are inevitable.  It doesn't mean we stop trying; it just
means that we ought to be very humble and very careful about what we think
we can accomplish in the face of a catastrophe.

MBD