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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

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http://web.utk.edu/~unistudy/values/ethics98/miller.htm

I. Pedagogy as a Disappearing Angel: An Introduction

My until now undeclared war with the Syracuse University
administration concerning assessment and accountability began in the
Summer of last year (1997). I may well have been a little late coming
to the fray, given the recent appearance of an enormous literature.
The deluge has been in print, in the media and on the web: for
example, Robert Bellah's essay, "Class Wars and Cultures in the
University Today: Why We Can't Defend Ourselves," in the July/August
issue of Academe (1997); Frank Kermode's review of John Ellis' book,
a review in the August Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Academy versus
the Humanities"; James Groccia's article, "The Student as Customer
versus the Student as Learner," in About Campus' May/June issue; Joel
Gold's article, "Student Evaluations Deconstructed," in the Chronicle
of Higher Education of September 12th; Mark Edmundson's article in
the September Harpers, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education as Lite
Entertainment for Bored College Students"; the article in the January
16th Chronicle that reports the statistical research by Anthony
Greenwald and Gerald Gilmore casting doubt upon the assumption of any
value in student assessment; the article in a recent education
supplement to the Sunday New York Times, "The Ivory Tower Under
Siege"; the report on "Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals,
and Supply-Side Higher Education," by Gary Rhoades and Sheila
Slaughter, in last Summer's issue of the journal, Social Text; and a
number of remarkable recent books, including William Spanos' The End
of Education: Toward Posthumanism, Bill Readings' The University in
Ruins, Donald Kennedy's Academic Duty, and Martha Nussbaum's
Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal
Education.

I won't continue this litany. The data is widely known. The point is
that it seemed to me in retrospect that my little battle was not a
limited warfare, not a border skirmish in upstate New York. Indeed,
from California and Texas to Tennessee and Connecticut, many academic
professionals had personally told me that similar battles were
breaking out everywhere. I suppose the convening of this third
conference on values in higher education under the aegis of the
thematic of assessment and accountability is itself testimony to a
national tension, if not an academic not-so-civil war. Nor may the
issues at stake be limited even to North America. At the end of the
book, Pourparlers (translated as Negotiations), by the French
theorist, Gilles Deleuze, the author bemoans the fact that education
in France has turned to business for its models, that the principle
of "getting paid for results" has taken over. "School," Deleuze
writes, "is being replaced by continuing education and exams by
continuous assessment. It's the surest way of turning education into
a business" (179). This is what my colleagues at Syracuse thought was
happening also on this side of the Atlantic, which led me into the
accountability and assessment fray.

It began as a result of my responsibilities at Syracuse University as
a so-called "teaching professor" and "mentor"-a phrase and term that
I absolutely repudiate as empty rhetoric and without relevance to the
proper work of any university. I had mounted a July conference of
colleagues at a lovely lodge in the Adirondacks. The white paper
produced after three days by the two-dozen faculty in the humanities
was filled with contestation and passion concerning the rhetoric of
our central administration, especially having to do with calling
Syracuse the number one "student-centered research university" and
identifying students as customers and consumers, and faculty as
service providers. The Chancellor had just before our Summer meeting
written a memo to all faculty entitled: "Customer is an Eight Letter
Word"! But this was not the only provocation. There had been pressure
on the faculty from administrative intitiatives to identify desired
learning objectives and means of assessing outcomes, a requirement to
name in advance behavioral goals in the teaching of arts and ideas,
that is, in courses whose aim it was precisely to remain open to
discovery and surprise. I was directed by my friends at the
conference to send our position-paper to the Chancellor, the Vice
Chancellor, the Vice President for Undergraduate Teaching, as well as
to publish it on a web-page connected with my professorship. The
results could not have been anticipated!

I was summoned to lengthy conversations with the Vice Chancellor and
the Director of the Center for Instructional Development, attacked
orally and in memoranda from the central administrative officers
concerning my competence in the classroom, and addressed (or rather,
dressed down) directly in three lengthy letters from the Chancellor.
It seemed to be a case of kill the messenger! After the third letter
from my Chancellor, I found myself in exasperation writing these
irrational words to the senior officer of my University: "You cannot
possibly understand the pedagogical perspectives of my colleagues and
me if you cannot understand the phrase 'we have nothing to teach, no
way to teach it, together with the obligation to teach.'" I meant, of
course, that there are certain subject matters in arts and ideas
whose nature is that they are not "things," no-things, and therefore
the goals of education, at least in these particular instances.
cannot be served up in a priori desired learning outcomes nor
assessed as products or commodities by student-customers at the end
of fourteen weeks. I was thinking that in the teaching of matters
that are in principle imponderable and undecideable-subject-matters
like truth, beauty, goodness, not to mention meanings and gods-
commodification and thingification in assessment might be entirely
inappropriate and beside the point. Many recent articulations lay
behind my thought, as, for example, Mark Taylor's theological
essay, "How to Do Nothing with Words," Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's
chapter on Lacan by this very same title, and Jacques Derrida's now
well-known Jerusalem essay, Comment ne pas parler (translated as "How
to Avoid Speaking"). Also, I should add that I thought that in
writing to the Chancellor I was paraphrasing a sentence by Samuel
Beckett. In any case, that was the very day Professor Burstein, our
host, asked me for a title for this talk.

The timing turned out to be terrible! That that sentence written in
haste and in rage to my Chancellor was to become my title here was
not felicitous, as will soon be apparent from my narrative. The
problem was that when I searched for the reference it vanished. I
could not find it anywhere! Was it a case of faulty memory, senility,
or one more instance of giving a title that one would later regret,
committing oneself to writing something that one could not write?

To be sure, Beckett said things something like what I thought I
remembered. In Krapp's Last Tape, Krapp says: "Nothing to say, not a
squeak" (25). In All that Fall, Mrs. Rooney says: "This is
nothing ... nothing" (1960: 61). In Embers Henry says: "Nothing, all
day nothing. All day all night nothing. Not a sound" (1960: 121). And
there is the famous line in Waiting for Godot: "Nothing happens,
nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" (27) There is also Estragon's
line: "Nothing to be done" (14). And Vladimir's line: "There's
nothing we can do" (44). They also have a back and forth in which
Estragon says: "I tell you I wasn't doing anything." And Vladimir
says: "Perhaps you weren't. But it's the way of doing it that counts"
(38). None of this was what I sought. I had thought that Beckett had
somewhere said about his vocation as an artist in our time: "Nothing
to say. No way to say it. Together with the obligation to speak."
Apparently he had not. What was I to do for my Tennesse talk?

I remembered a friend, Ted Estess, Dean of the Honors College of the
University of Houston. He was an expert on Beckett and would surely
know the referent and would be able to help. I e-mailed him my
dilemma and he responded immediately. But his lead turned out to be
completely off the mark. In fact, he could not find it either, and he
told me that I had probably made it up. No help!

But what is a professional in the lineage of Socrates worth if she or
he cannot make use of failure, or-to change the text but not the
trope-is there not teacherly wisdom in the implicit advice of Lear's
fool?-"What can you do with nothing, Nuncle?" This is when I thought
of another dramatist, Italian rather than Irish. I mean Luigi
Pirandello. When he was writing Six Characters in Search of an
Author, he was presented in his imagination with six characters but
no plot. So he wrote a play about that. I could do the same. I could
write a speech about pedagogical responsibility and accountability
using my irresponsibility and non-accountability as an example,
showing that I indeed had nothing to say and no way to say it,
together with the responsibility to speak. So I went to work on this
nothing, only to be disappointed again. When will a person learn not
to try to be clever or to force signification?

My nothing was itself naughted when my friend Estess wrote belatedly
that he had found the citation! It was in a dialogue that Beckett had
with Georges Duthuit. You may already suspect that I had known
nothing about this source which, nonetheless, I had remembered! In
the conversation Beckett and Duthuit are speaking about a surrealist
French painter named Tal Coat, and they note that this artist is not
painting things, but rather no-thing. Being finished with the ideals
of realism, on the one hand, and symbolism and expressionism, on the
other, Tal Coat-according to Beckett-had "nothing to express, nothing
with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to
express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to
express." After Beckett says this, his conversation partner, Duthuit,
says: "Perhaps that is enough for today" (Esslin 17).

Perhaps it should have been enough. After all, it comes close to the
point that I wanted to make about teaching arts and ideas. But it was
not enough for me. Who was Tal Coat, I wondered? I had never heard of
this artist. There was no listing of the name in any of the art books
that I owned. The art librarian and the professor of contemporary
French painting at Syracuse University had neither of them heard of
such a figure. Nothing, again! All of this was beginning to seem
somehow like real research in the humanities, like real teaching in
the humanities, where one finally never can enjoy the luxury of
knowing the result, or at least one cannot ever know the final
result. Gratification and closure are infinitely deferred.

However, on the virtual reality of the World Wide Web I did find a
flicker. A word from an art dealer in Belgium confirmed that Tal Coat
existed. He was born in 1905 in Brittany, self-taught as a painter,
little understood and known, and disappeared mysteriously in 1985. He
began as a realist and then became an expressionist, but moved after
the war to what the web page called "allusive and fugitive
manifestations" and monochromatic canvases in green, ochre and black.
He loved to paint the rocks near Château Noir, the same rocks that
fascinated Cezanne. I could find little else. Things were dark.

(Incidentally, I hope that you will stay with me in this narrative.
There is a point here, or so I passionately hope! It's like teaching,
isn't it? You never know. You just try to be accountable to the
material.)

Things were indeed dark. It was literally the darkest time of the
calendar year, the end of December, winter recess. I stopped trying.
I tended to personal affairs instead. In fact, I believe that I was
giving up on my original idea.

Christmas came with the usual tinsel and trimmings and other
distractions. My mother-in-law -being accountable and responsible in
regard to my wish list to Santa-gave me a new edition of the poetry
of Wallace Stevens for Christmas. I thanked her appropriately and
turned right away to an assessment of its contents by checking one of
my favorite poems, "Angel Surrounded by Paysans." In looking at the
new critical apparatus by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, I
discovered a surprising footnote to the poem (1004). There was Tal
Coat! When not trying, I found what I sought without knowing what I
was seeking! The experience I had had was somewhat like that of the
poet. Sight unseen, Stevens had in 1949 bought a still life of Tal
Coat's from Paule Vidal, the daughter of a dealer who owned the
Librairie Coloniale in Paris. Though it was not what he thought he
was getting, Stevens became obsessed with the painting. He wrote to
Barbara Church (1977a: 654): "My Tal Coat occupies me as much as
anything. It does not come to rest, but it fits it." He named the
painting "Angel Surrounded by Paysans" and fourteen days after
receiving the Tal Coat from Vidal, Stevens wrote the poem of the same
name and sent it to Nicholas Moore.

In the poem "the necessary angel of the earth" (i.e., poetry or art),
through whose imaginal reality one can "see the earth again," is
characterized as an "apparition" which, when we look for it,
is "gone" (1975: 496-97). It is gone like the Beckett quotation, like
Tal Coat, like the no-thing of ideas and imagination. Indeed, Stevens
often wrote about this process of signification. "Poetry," he
said, "is a pheasant disappearing in the brush." (1977b: 173) It
is "the great cat that leaps quickly from the fireside and is gone"
(1975: 264). It is like a "meteor" (1977b: 158), or like "an Indian
[hidden] in his glade" (1975: 412), or like "a woman writing a note
and tearing it up" (1975: 488). Stevens also wrote: "I do not know
which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of
innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling / Or just after" (1975: 93).

I was beginning to get the hang of this, but, like some stubborn
literalist or skeptic, I wanted to see the Stevens' painting in which
the necessary angel which disappears when one looks for it is
actually a folded napkin, or a glass of red wine, or (as Stevens
thought) a Venetian glass bowl with a spray of leaves in it. I
suppose that it was to be expected that I could find it nowhere.
However, I did discover that Stevens' literary estate, including
pictures and paintings, had been lodged in the library at Trinity
College in Hartford. When I inquired after the image that I sought, a
very helpful special collections librarian there told me that the
Stevens' materials were no longer at Trinity. They had been moved to
the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. She gave me the
phone number. After some negotiation with the manuscript library at
the Huntington, I was told that they would provide me with a slide of
the Tal Coat painting for ten dollars and for a promise that I would
use it only at this one lecture at the University of Tennessee, and
with appropriate reference to the Huntington Library. I wrote a check
for ten dollars and swore an oath, and so it was that I located the
slide that you now see on the screen Actually, what you see is a copy
(slide) of a copy (painting) of a copy (poem) of a copy (angel) of
nothing, i.e., of the nothingness about which I am talking, all the
while remembering the advice of Martin Heidegger that it is very
difficult to talk about nothing, because in talking about it one
turns it into something (19), i.e., one turns it into a desired
learning objective and then it is assessable.

While searching for this image, I had located interesting comments
concerning it in many of Stevens' letters. For example, Stevens wrote
to Paule Vidal in Paris that he had heard that "Tal Coat is one of
the few young painters from whom it seems possible to expect a new
reality" (1977a: 595). To Barbara Church he commented about the
painting, saying that "all of the objects have solidity, burliness,
aggressiveness. ... It contradicts all one's expectations of a still
life" (1977a: 654). To the French dealer the American poet wrote: "It
is obvious that this picture is the contrary of everything that one
would expect in a still life. Thus it is commonly said that a still
life is a problem in the painting of solids. Tal Coat has not
interested himself in that problem. Here all the objects are painted
with a slap-dash intensity, the purpose of which is to convey the
vigor of the artist. Here nothing is mediocre or merely correct. Tal
Coat scorns the fastidious. Moreover, this is not a manifestation of
the crude strength of a peasant.... It is a display of imaginative
force: an effort to attain a certain reality purely by way of the
artist's own vitality.... He [Tal Coat] ... has the naturalness of a
man who means to be something more than a follower" (1977a: 655).

I hope by now you will begin to sense that all of the time-while
appearing to be reporting on the Beckett, Tal Coat, Stevens triangle-
I have actually been talking about teaching and about accountability
and assessment in higher education, especially in the humanities. So,
teaching that is properly accountable to itself and to its subject
matter is like Tal Coat's painting. It is the contrary of everything
that one would expect, not solid but intense, vigorous, scornful of
the fastidious or the mediocre or the merely correct, a display of
imaginative force, strong and natural and vital, and never following
as a mere follower. It is the experience of a new reality, not what
one desires or expects. Again, Stevens writes to Church, now four
years later: "[Tal Coat] is so effective that the most brutal design
gives one an unexpected satisfaction" (1977a: 799), i.e., not a
desired learning outcome, nor anything that one can in principle
assess.

II. What Counts? The Language of Accountability & Assessment
The errant wandering through Beckett, Tal Coat, and Stevens brings to
mind a story told to me by my former colleague, Professor Huston
Smith. Huston had taught Philosophy at MIT in the humanities program
before coming to the Department of Religion at Syracuse. One day he
told me about having lunch with a high-energy particle physicist at
MIT. During the course of the lunch the philosopher of religion and
the post-quantum mechanics scientist discovered that they had many
perspectives in common on matters of cosmos, society, and self. This
did not much surprise Huston, but it did surprise the physicist. What
surprised Houston was the physicist's way of acknowledging his
surprise. The scientist said: "Why, there is only one difference
between us. You don't count!" So, counting is what counts. Assessment
is what confirms value.
The play in language can provide wondrous discovery, i.e., learning
and unexpected surprise in learning outcomes. There are leaps in
learning hiding in words' metonymies, in the very words the people
have used to name what they think that they are naming when they name
things. As Martin Heidegger says: "It is not we who play with words,
but the nature of language plays with us" (1968: 118-19).
Wittgenstein says it this way: "A picture [ein Bild] held us captive.
It lay in our language, and our language repeated it to us
inexorably" (115). So, I propose for a moment to look at the two
terms in the rhetoric of values assessment in the contemporary
university. Take the word and the idea of "accountability," for
example.

"Accountability." It goes without saying that both the noun and verb
forms of the word "account" come from the noun and verb forms of the
word "count," which means "enumeration" or " to compute." The family
includes the words "counter" (token) and "countless," as well as the
words "putative," "amputate," "compute," "deputation," "dispute," "dis
putant," "impute," "imputation," "repute" and "reputation." Already
one can see that there is some "fight" and some disputed
signification in the word before we even use it.

The base for the family is Latin putare, meaning (a) "to prune,"
(b) "to purify," "to correct" (an account), therefore also "to count"
or "calculate." But whichever sense of putare our notion
of "accounting" comes from, there is implied some pruning
(downsizing?) and some implicit political correctness or Puritanical
self-confidence. In the Sanskrit background, there is a relation to
the family of words from which we get the word "pave," Latin paure,
meaning "to beat" or "tread earth down to level it," i.e., to flatten
(mediocrity, democritization). There is also a connection to the
Latin puteus, meaning "a hole cut in the ground," especially "a
well," from which Middle English has the word "pit," meaning
a "cavity." I'll return to this cave at the end.

The compounds of putare that are relevant to English are
amputare, "to prune or cut around (am- for ambi-, meaning "on both
sides), so "amputation"; computare, "to count" (intensive use of con-
), hence "compute" means "really to count"; deputare, "to cut
downwards," so to esteem, allot, depute, as in a deputy or
deputation; disputare, "to think about contentiously"; imputare, "to
put into the reckoning"; reputare, "to reckon or examine accounts
again and again, to think over, to credit, so to repute and
reputation." There also belong to this family "recount," to count
again, or to relate, by way of French reconter, since Old French
conter became differentiated into French conter, to tell, and French
compter, to count (Partridge 124, 476).

Think of this verbal complex in relation to the words of the
poet: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." The poem actually
means: Don't count! Write a poem! And don't count on it! It's the
love that counts not the counting. The jazz standard says: "Will I be
in that number when the saints go marchin' in?" But in the singing
there is implied the advice: Don't count! The number 144,000 is not a
number, not a numbering. It means to discourage adding things up,
like merits. Luther mounted a reformation against that. It you start
counting, you might miss the rapture! (I'm speaking about education,
not religion.)

"Assessment." There are similar problems with the language of
assessment. If one were to bring the perspectives from the business
and commercial world, the world of "total quality management," to
bear upon assessment in the university, then one might first observe
that it is not very high quality management to use the
word "assessment" when what one really means is "evaluation." The
term "assessment" has become empty jargon, meaning nothing, a real
miracle term.

The word has actually referred to courts (a judge assesses a fine)
and taxation (as in the assessment of property). In the former case,
guilt is assumed and it is just a question of how much one is going
to have to pay. In the other case, it is assumed that one should pay
and it is just a question of how much. I well realize that this term
has passed from business and commerce, from law and government, into
the vernacular and that it merely means "evaluation." I realize, too,
that to say "evaluate" education and teaching is not a rhetoric that
is inflated enough to make university administrations sound like they
are doing something out of the ordinary. But does the university want
to ignore precision of ideas and language? Do we really want to use a
term that carries these negative, if unconscious, connotations about
behavior? Are we accountable about accountability? Are we willing to
assess assessment?

There are some philosophers and theorists who have argued that
language speaks, not the people who use language. These thinkers have
argued that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't be Alice's Humpty
Dumpty, who said that words would mean whatever he intended them to
mean. Confucius-during a moment of cultural confusion in ancient
China-called for a "rectification of names" in the land, for a proper
use of language, without which, he seemed to believe, there could be
no justice, or truth, or beauty.

The point about language is linked to the story of Huston Smith, who
didn't count, according to the pun of his MIT colleague! Smith has
argued passionately in his later life and writings for the important
value of being accountable to matters that are precisely un-
countable. According to Smith, the unassessables-at least in
quantifiable and empirical terms-are the following: (1) qualities,
(2) invisibles, (3) meanings that are existential as opposed to
cognitive, (4) purposes that are metaphysical as opposed to
teleonomical, and (5) values that are normative rather than
descriptive. In my view, the experiences that some teaching
professionals cherish for students have precisely to do with quality,
invisibility, existential meaning, metaphysical purposes, and
normative values. For these professors-on Smith's view-education is
in principle not assessable.

I should like for a few moments to amplify Smith's point in regard to
our conference thematic. For the sake of brevity, I will put these
reflections in the form of aphorisms or epigrams. I believe that it
was Michelet who said that an epigram is a half-truth so said as to
irritate the person who believes in the other half. Perhaps there is
a half truth in Michelet's saying, but it is not my purpose to
provoke you, but rather to provoke thought, things to think about and
to talk about at the beginning of our deliberations together at this
conference.

III. Aphorisms
* There is too much talk about teaching these days. It all leads to
self-consciousness. No one knows what teaching is. It always must be
thought in terms of something else. Metaphor and metonymy are need.
Imagination and vision. Not counting and assessment.

* Teaching is like baseball. Even in the majors it's not baseball
very often. Most of the time it's pretty boring. But sometimes it is
baseball. And then it is really something. While waiting for it to be
baseball, what does one do? One plays second base as best one can.
Outcomes assessment implies that the value in baseball is that it be
baseball all the time. It also implies that the players can control
it. But that's not the way things are. Even for the pros. People who
call for outcomes assessment don't understand the game. They don't
understand the nature of the game.

* There are two things that one learns from baseball: (1) You don't
have to swing at every pitch. (2) You know when a pitcher (professor)
is tiring when the ball starts rising. It takes a lot of energy and
concentration to keep it down. Letting it soar is easy.

* What is impossible is to undertake an evaluation of value in higher
education if one takes one's eye off the subject matter and puts it
instead on the performance of the teacher and/or the student.
Education is not the passing of information from one person who has
it to someone who does not. It is not the trading of databases.
Rather, the subject matter is a vessel into which the professor and
the student place themselves together. And then they see what
happens. They observe and take note. It is like alchemy. One cares
for the process in the alchemical vessel. It is like two people being
in love.

* To speak of "improvement" in teaching is nonsense if the eye is
really on the egos of the professor and the student rather than on
the subject matter. Do we "improve" the subject matter by our
activity? The irony is that attention to desired learning outcomes
and to outcomes assessment produces in fact just what it sets out to
eradicate: namely, emphasis on the professoriat rather than on the
student. Assessment is a narcissistic endeavor. It is not student-
centered. It puts the focus of consciousness on questions like "How
am I doing?" and "How can I improve?" We are only student-centered
when we have enough regard for the student to focus on the subject
matter and to trust students to take care of themselves. They are not
stupid. And they are not children.

* In education, as in love, sometimes the only way to improve the
quality and value of education is to stop focusing on oneself and to
stop asking, "Am I doing it well?" Such ego-consciousness can ruin
learning just as it can be a pain in the neck to the lover. When the
child says, "Look, Ma, I'm dancing!" she or he is no longer dancing.
It is the same with teaching and learning, not to mention loving. If
you ask about it, you are not doing it.

* Teaching in the humanities is like the fire-consumed stick in
Buddhism. A disciple once asked the Buddha how one should approach
his teachings, given that the overall aim of the Buddha's teaching
was non-attachment, including non-attachment to the teachings! The
Buddha replied that his teaching was like a stick that keeps the fire
going, stirring the coals, until the stick is itself consumed by the
fire. The stick disappears, like Wallace Stevens' angel. There is
nothing in the end to assess, if the teaching is really successful.

* Confucius said: "Do not wish for quick results, nor look for small
advantages. It you seek quick results, you will not attain the
ultimate goal. If you are led astray by small advantages, you will
never accomplish great things" (Smith 159). There are no quick
results in education. If an educator seeks a quick result, the
ultimate goal of great teaching is not accomplished. No assessment is
worthwhile until many years have passed. And then the need for
assessment has passed anyway.

* The great teachers-Socrates, Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao
Tzu, Maimondies, al-Ghazzali, etc.--- confounded expected outcomes
and in principle and iconoclastically made assessment impossible.
They would have failed in our current attempts to focus on values in
education. Their expected outcome was to make impossible the
achievement of outcomes that were expected before the teaching began.
One desirable learning outcome is not to have a desired learning
outcome.

* Think of the parable of the sower in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4.3-
9). It is the various soils that get in the way of the sowing. Or the
birds. Not the sower. Imagine assessing the outcome of sowing by
evaluating the sower!

* Teaching is improv, like good jazz. Does one ask a jazz musician
for objectives, goals, outcomes, and ways to achieve outcomes
assessment? Good scat is not playing it, but playing with it. In
scat, as in glossolalia, the discourse is non-mimetic. Good teaching
is scat. It is like speaking in tongues. The tongues of the material.

* Jazzman Wynton Marsalis, introducing Benny Carter at the Kennedy
Center awards in December 1996, said: "A man should not be forced to
live up to his art." The same is true of professors, which is only
one thing wrong with the demand for continual assessment.

* Being interesting and enthusiastic are not necessarily marks of a
good course or teacher. They may well be marks of educational fraud.
A famous Rabbi, commenting angrily on reports of his renown for
preaching, said: "God forbid that I should ever 'talk well'" (Ettin
183-84). This is tantamount to saying: God forbid that I should ever
be a good teacher in terms of conventional criteria of assessment.
Then I would not have taught at all.

* There is a sign hanging on a bulletin board down the hall from my
office. It announces "Teaching Tools for the Nineties!" and it
promises that if you get these tools your outcomes assessment will be
more successful. This sign of our academic times puts me in mind of a
line from the 1960 Phi Beta Kappa oration at Columbia University by
Norman O. Brown. Brown was recapitulating the values expressed in
Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture entitled "The American Scholar." In
the light of those values, Brown announced "Fools with tools are
still fools" (9).

* Continual assessment and a demand for accountability are symptoms
of a sickness, symptoms of the very sickness that they are meant to
cure: namely, they are signs that the intrinsic value of education is
not sensed or affirmed, that it must be proved. Even when pedagogy
fails--as it did again and again with Socrates, Moses, Jesus,
Jeremiah, Mohammed, Lao-Tzu, and the Buddha--the attempt to assess
learning outcomes is likely the worst possible indicator of
accountability, at least in the case of certain pedagogies in certain
subject matters. Socrates got hemlock in the assessment; Jesus, the
cross; Moses, no promised lands; and so forth. It is even arguable
that a negative assessment may indicate that important learning is
taking place. It is like the putative course evaluation by a
professor at Columbia. One of the questions he asks his students at
the end is the following: Tell which text you liked the least, and
explain what character flaw in you accounts for this dislike!

* The political correctness of the eighties has become the
pedagogical correctness of the nineties.

* If one wanted an assessment of value in teaching and learning, one
might ask the professional. That is, one might ask the professor how
she or he knows when it is going well. But even here one must be
careful. Long term psychoanalysis reveals that the conscious and
volitional ego is almost always wrong. Or rather that it is partially
correct. It is one-sided. There is always at least one other
narrative of what is taking place. We egos cannot be in on it.

* Thomas Green-a renowned philosopher of education-once told me that
he thought that the only useful question to ask students in course
evaluation was the following: What will you now not put up with that
you would have put up with before taking this course?

* Any teacher worth her or his salt makes assessments and takes
account of the teaching long before making course evaluations or
assessing results. Assessing goes on during teaching-mid-course, mid-
class, and even often mid-sentence. I call these mid-course
corrections, a phrase so crucial to aviation, without which activity
the flight would not work. Defining goals or learning outcomes in
advance is an unnatural way of defending against natural mid-course
corrections. It is a defense against the sensitivity that makes great
teaching what it is, always and already. It can make me believe that
I don't have constantly to be assessing or, as Wittgenstein said
about meaningful discourse, constantly having to take back what is
said.

* A great teacher-Jesus-once said regarding outcomes
assessment: "Judge not that you be not judged!" (Matthew 7.1)

* There is no learning outcome in ideas. Kant in the Critique of
Judgment called the goal of thinking ideas a "purposeless purpose
[Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck]" (55). In this sense every course in
arts and ideas is purposeless. Useless, at least in a utilitarian
sense. A course in ideas is in a way successful to the extent that
expected learning outcomes are iconoclastically deconstructed, i.e.,
insofar as they are not achieved. As Plato said in the Meno: If you
know what you are seeking, you are already there and there is no
point to the seeking. If you don't know what you are seeking, you
might discover something, but you will never know if it was what you
were after (299-301). There is no way to judge it.

* A Korean dance group was touring the United States during the past
year. The program announced that in Korea this group is referred to
as an "intangible cultural product." Teaching in arts and ideas
produces an intangible cultural product.

* Teaching is like the German word Funktionslust. This word means the
pleasure of doing as distinct from the pleasure of attaining an
effect or outcome.

* Looking for the uses of higher education in identifiable student
outcomes is usury. We may need a Protestant Reformation in American
colleges and universities. As in earlier history, usury has to do
with money. So it is in the contemporary American university. (See
Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology," in Margins, the discussion
of "usury" at the beginning of the essay, and compare his comment on
assessment in Archive Fever, page 36: "If we want to know what that
will have meant, we will only know in times to come.")

* Imagine the identification of desired learning outcomes written by
the chef or by Alice Waters on the menu of Chez Panisse, or announced
by the conductor of the Boston Pops in the program notes before a
concert, or articulated by a Zen roshi before a two-week sesshin. Try
to imagine these and you will see how silly and inappropriate is the
attempt to identify desired learning outcomes in the teaching of arts
and ideas in any serious university, i.e., a university that takes
its students and its pedagogical work seriously.

* Since every class is different, identification of desired learning
outcomes based on a concept of identification that implies an
unconscious metaphysics of sameness and presence is a category
mistake. (See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference.)

* The colleges and universities that advertise student- or teaching-
centeredness aren't. Their faculties are increasingly under pressure
to prove and to assess, to name rather than to do. Their eye is off
the ball. The students (as students) are losers. The students are not
honored as scholars.

* In the ancient world an important distinction was made between
teaching (didachê) and preaching (kêrygma). The latter is done in a
loud voice, as when the herald (kêrux) announces the winner at the
Olympic games, whereas the former is whispered. Preaching, is aimed
at outsiders who need conversion, whereas teaching is for those
already converted, as in catechetical instruction and debate.
Preaching, according to old Rabbinic convention, is done while
standing, whereas teaching should be done sitting down (see Miller
111-17). So preaching is "standing up for" something and its aim is
to convert the student to what the preacher imagines is the true
opinion or faith (orthodoxy), while teaching is, so to say, "sitting
down into" the matter at hand. Preachers, on this view, can identify
desired learning objectives in advance, but teachers cannot. In being
asked to identify in advance desired learning objectives and
assessing the results thereof, academics are being asked to be
preachers, not teachers.

* I have already mentioned some great teachers of ideas whom I
imagine would not do well in outcomes assessment in the contemporary
university-Jesus, Socrates, the Buddha, al-Ghazzali, Dogen,
Maimonides, Moses, and so on. Let me pause over one more image of
accountability in higher- (or perhaps deeper-) education. I am
thinking of a Greek archetypal image of great teaching: the figure of
Silenos. Behind Christ the great teacher, according to Erasmus (Benz
1-31), and behind Socrates, the great teacher according to the
Platonic Alcibiades (Plato 1982: 219-45), there is Silenos, tutor to
Kings Midas and Solon, to the god Dionysos, as well as many others.

IV. Silenos: Archetypal Image of the Teacher & Teaching

It is not any easier to find Silenos, archetypal image of great
teachers and great teaching, than it is to find a painting by Tal
Coat of Stevens' disappearing angel or Beckett's nothing. The reason
is that Silenos hides. He hides his real identity (a clue for
teachers everywhere), being part animal, half some satyr horse, or
perhaps half some goat like Pan. He sleeps in a deep cave. He does
not publish, nor does he teach. (Beware teachers that like to publish
and that like to teach. They may be preachers and not silenic
teachers).

Though Silenos hides and has nothing to say, Aelian (Varia historia
3.18) and Virgil (Eclogue 6.14-15) say that he can be snared.
Especially he can be trapped into teaching by using garlands of
flowers, as do the Naiads. King Midas managed to obtain his teaching
by making him drunk, as if the intoxication were already the
appearance of some tutor or some tutelage (Pausanius Guide 1.4.5).
The nymphs know where he is, as Apollodorus attests (Library 2.83-
85). Karl Kerényi thinks that the silenic nature is the "seat of the
comic" (195), as if great teaching were somehow ineluctably or deeply
comedic.

Difficult as it may be to locate Silenos (i.e., teaching) in life, he
nonetheless appears. He is teacher to king and fool, to lawmaker and
lawbreaker, to sober hero and to mad maenad. He instructs the gods
and goddesses themselves. As the Orphic Hymn (Orphica 53) witnesses,
he is honored by all. He is a teachers' teacher. Perhaps it is just
because of this fact that he was reticent to show himself, as if this
quality goes with great teaching.

Yet Silenos' secret was not well hid. Two things are universally said
about him by Pausanius, Ovid, Plutarch, Cicero, Theogonis,
Bacchylides, Sophocles, Plato, and others, though at least Plutarch
(Moralia 115-B-D) mentions that it would be better were we not to
have ever learned these two things about the great teacher's
teaching.

The first thing is that he was a drunk, a heavy man, saturnine. He
was known to drink-or so goes the tale-for ten days and ten nights
without stopping. However, the drunkenness was special in Silenos'
case. It is, for example, to be distinguished from that of Dionysos,
as Otto notes (177). In order to describe Silenos' particular drunken
nature, an Orphic Hymn uses a phrase that was already employed by
Aeschylus (Agamemnon 740), Euripides (Bacchae 115), and Plato
(Theaetetus 153C). The phrase is galênioôn thiasoisin, i.e., a "deep
stillness," like the calmness deep within a stormy sea.

The second thing known about Silenos is that he only had one
teaching. He taught that the best thing for all women and men is not
to be born! However, since none of us has ever succeeded very well in
this lesson, the second best thing is to die as soon as possible! How
can this be a great teaching of an archetypal great teacher? What can
it possibly mean?

Perhaps the teaching is connecting with the teacher, with the
intoxication of Silenos, the intoxication of a deep stillness. When
Philo a little later is puzzling over the report in the Hebrew Bible
concerning the drunkenness of Lot and Noah, how their intoxications
served the purposes of God for the people of Israel, he uses an
unusual phrase, nêphalios methê (Plant. 162f; Vit. Mos. 1.187;
2.162). The Greek translates literally as "sober drunkenness." It is
a drunkenness, Philo says, by which the self is led to itself deeply,
more deeply than ego's perspectives. This may be similar to galênioôn
thiasoisin, "deep calm." What is stilled or calmed is ego's desired
objectives. In the experience of a deeper intoxication, egoic
attitudes, values, opinions, and beliefs are sobered, i.e., in the
intoxication of authentic learning, one is sobered. The "I" goes to
sleep in the cave. It has so-to-say "died" so that another sense of
things can be raised up. The best thing would be that egoic
perspectives would not be born at all. The next best is that they die
as soon as possible in order that a breadth and depth of otherness
may amplify one's views in intoxicating ways. This surely is a not
insignificant teaching about teaching. (For sources to material in
this section and the next, see Miller 111-53).

It is this lesson that Alcibiades thought that his teacher, Socrates,
had learned. He compared Socrates to Silenos by referring to a Greek
toy. In the ancient world there were little statuettes of Silenos,
fat little figures that came apart in the middle. When one opened
them, there were empty. Nothing there. This is the same nothing that
I was referring to at the beginning. The fun of the toy was that the
empty center was filled with many little figurines representing all
of the gods and goddesses. Silenic emptiness was full of divinity. No
wonder Silenos was intoxicated.

The archetypal image of the great teacher is that she or he be empty
of preachings and preachments, ego's or society's cherished
attitudes, standpoints, and beliefs. In this emptying there is a
resonance, like the sound box of Wallace Stevens' blue guitar. What
resonates are other melodies and harmonies, ideas and values that
transcend any particular teacher or teaching.

Conclusion: The Education of a Chrysanthemum
Tao Yuan Ming seemed to know the Silenic emptiness, indicating that
the lesson of nothingness is by no means limited to the Occident, to
Silenos and those other silenic teachers, Socrates and Jesus. Tao
Yuan Ming lived in the 14th centruy in China. He was a poet, and he
loved children, chrysanthemums, and wine. He was drunk constantly,
and like Pu Tai and all those other fat and laughing Buddhas to
follow, he was a great teacher. He modeled his life on that of P'eng
Tsu, the great grandson of Chuan Hsu, who had ninety wives and was
eight-hundred years old when he went over the hills to the West
(Payne 129-31). Tao Yuan Ming says of P'eng Tsu: "Ceaseless
drunkenness brings forgetfulness" (Payne 135), i.e., forgetfulness of
ego.

In the "Elegy for Myself," the poet writes: "All I regret is that I
didn't drink like a prodigal" (Payne 142). In the poem, "Drunk and
Sober," there are these lines:
A guest resides in me,
Our interests are not altogether the same,
One is always drunk,
The other, awake;
We laugh at one another,
And do not understand one another's worlds" (Payne 138).

When the part of the self that is awake is put to sleep in a cave,
then out of the emptied cave can come a more intoxicating
perspective.

In his poem "Chrysanthemums," Tao Yuan Ming writes:

The wine is poured,
And the cup is empty,
And everyone is silent
At the setting of the sun (Payne 143).

A full cup can't be filled. In the famous Zen story, the master
served tea to the student, but he kept pouring when the cup was
filled and overflowing. The student said, "But my cup is already
full!" And the master bowed and said: "Yes, I can't fill a full tea
cup." He sent him away, presumably to empty his cup, to die as soon
as possible. This is the importance of the nothingness for true value
in education.

Tao Yuan Ming wrote a poem called "The Return."
I empty the cup and lean on the window,
And joyfully contemplate my favorite branches (Payne 144).

If the cup is emptied, then out of the new openness one can see the
chrysanthemums. It is seeing the chrysanthemums that is the
intoxication of education, the value of education. It is to the
flowers and the flowerings that we teachers must be finally
accountable. It is to the intoxication that the value attaches, not
to my intoxication, but to that of the flower and the blooming.

Teaching sobers ego's perspectives, for student and professor alike.
As the Christian mystic, Angelus Silesius said: "The rose is without
why. It blooms because it blooms" (Scheffler 54). No whys, or
becauses. No assessment. How could one assess the beauty of a
chrysanthemum? The intoxication of the bloom is outcome enough.
That's what counts. The intoxication is where the value is. In this
we die to outcomes assessment, to the desired learning objectives of
students, administrations, boards of regents or trustees, parents,
and especially ourselves. Finally, we are accountable to no one and
to nothing, except to the subject matter and its intoxications.

This is Silenos' wisdom. Die as soon as possible, that is, give up
ego's ideology, its desired learning objectives, and give it up as
soon as possible so that education can take place. Or a
chrysanthemum!
[The image of "Still Life" by Tal Coat from Wallace Stevens'
collection of paintings and prints is reproduced by permission of The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.]

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