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Berkeley's Historian Carl Schorske, 51, never lectures before 11 a.m. because he wants two or three hours to get ready—and he still gets butterflies. "But if you have no tension," he says, "there's no spring. You must go in there with tension, and you should end up feeling worn out." Once onstage, Schorske gestures, grins, whispers, employs the full range of a booming baritone voice. He covers three centuries of European intellectual history in his most popular course, shifts spontaneously to suit the mood of his audience ("It's almost a cabaret thing") as he explores Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Marx and Freud. "He inspires an awful lot of hero worship from extremely bright people," says sandaled Coed Regina Janes.
The humanist must be involved in studies that are "really relevant to where the action is," Schorske holds, and research cannot be separated from teaching. "If I lecture on social democracy," he explains, "well, that's a subject I have finished with. I've written my book. It's out of my system. But if I lecture on 20th century culture, my work now; I really cook with gas—this is what I am still involved with intellectually."
A lecture is only a demonstration of "how a person thinks about a problem," says Schorske, and the lecturer should always assume the student is "informed, intelligent, and committed. You then talk to him as a peer—as your companion in learning—and he begins to behave like one." Schorske does not, however, believe in "being buddy-buddy, or in a libidinous relationship such as they have at Sarah Lawrence." The teacher should be neither "lofty nor authoritarian," but his enthusiasm for communicating a subject should command "a natural respect."
Better with Rats. All of these teachers, and the others on the cover, have some common qualities that tend to dispel what Cornell's Perkins calls the "marvelous smoke screen" teachers have thrown up to convey the notion that "what they are doing is an occult mystery." All have demonstrated sound scholarship through publication. All are immersed in a conviction that their scholarship has an irresistible relevance to life, and feel compelled to convey that relevance. And all believe that in sights, ideas, ways of thinking, methods of inquiry, are far more important to implant in young minds than any specific points of knowledge.
Any general improvement of teaching, however, cannot be accomplished simply by copying these qualities. For one thing, no one knows enough about how students learn. "We know more about teaching rats, and we are more effective with psychotics and neurotics than we are with freshmen," says Caltech Psychologist John Weir. One of the leaders in cognition psychology, Harvard's Jerome Bruner, has long insisted that "any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development" (yet a recent Harvard Crimson course guide terms Bruner's own classes "incoherent").