I don't regard teaching as a job. I consider it a vocation and delight in it. When students ask me how I see the classroom, I tell them I see it as a laboratory, a bullring, and a concert hall.

In the first place, as a laboratory because the classroom is a setting for the impersonal identification and examination of (political) phenomena. As a bullring because the classroom should be a setting for grappling with and grasping the intricacies, imperatives, and uncertainties of political life. And as a concert hall because the classroom should also be a setting for a substantial appreciation of the dramatic quality of political experimentation in history. That is how I see it, and that is how I address a class.

It's a mistake to assume a teacher has only two choices: to personalize the course presumably with attendant personal popularity, or to adopt a disengaged stance in the pursuit of a presumably detached treatment of material. Students shouldn't have to choose between personal engagement and intellectual stimulation. I remember a comment a medical colleague of mine made about psychosomatic illness: He noted that he had never met a mind that wasn't connected to a body. Well, our understanding of learning should be equally integrated. I try to intellectually engage all the students in my courses, and I have yet to find an intellect that wasn't attached to a personality.

Revised: 1993