When I taught my first class at Berkeley as a graduate teaching assistant, I felt confident, eager, enthusiastic. That was some thirty-five years ago. If anything, I may feel less confident today but no less eager, no less enthusiastic. To play some part, perhaps a small role, perhaps a shaping role, in the life of a student's mind is a most precious opportunity, a most awesome responsibility.

Teaching is more than imparting information. It is a process by which we seek to stir and challenge the intellect, to shake it up. The best teaching deepens sensibilities and develops insight and imagination, often by asking the most uncomfortable questions. The challenge in teaching history is to force students to see and to feel the past in ways that many be genuinely disturbing, to develop in them an appreciation of the inescapable complexity of human behavior and human relationships, and to underscore how a study of the past may teach as many ironies and ambiguities as it does clear lessons.

The facts we impart are important, no matter how quickly many of them recede or become indistinguishable in the students' minds. The danger is that students become so deluged with facts that they drown in them, that they lose their human ability to feel those facts, to consider their implications, to reflect on their social consequences. The amount of information imparted in the classroom is less important than the dialogue we begin with our students: that collective intellectual enterprise in which we seek to foster critical thinking and experimentation with new ideas, in which we engage our students in that elusive pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead.

Throughout history, the role of the artist and the teacher has been to challenge the conventional wisdom. The value of the teacher often rests on his or her willingness to be a disturber of the peace, to afflict the comfortable, the complacent, and the indifferent. Teachers at Berkeley have been denounced at various times in the past for free thinking, disloyalty, godlessness, and debauchery, for coddling communists and radicals, and for exposing students to dangerous and unconventional ideas. Whenever those charges are leveled, I take pride in this faculty, for it means that we are doing our job, that we are upholding the best tradition of the university.

In the classroom, the beginning of wisdom for our students is when they are exposed to social complexity, to alternate viewpoints, to the full range of possibilities in the human experience, when they hear and judge all answers, when they come to discover that there are any number of roads to Jerusalem, when they learn to be skeptical of delivered truths and belief systems. And it is when our students come to appreciate that Western civilization and Western culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition are not the sum total of human wisdom.

To overcome cultural illiteracy is to expose students to a diversity of historical experiences. It is to stand in the shoes of those who came before us, to understand the past from the perspective of the men and women who experienced it, including people ordinarily left outside the framework of history, many of them losers in their own time. That requires sensitivity to the complexities and varieties of historical and cultural documentation, an appreciation for the diverse ways in which people have conveyed their innermost feelings about matters of daily and far-reaching concern.

The life of the mind, imagination, and critical thinking remain the key to our survival. Hence faculty's critical role in the lecture hall and seminar room. The enduring ability of teachers, along with artists and writers, to disturb, disrupt, and inspire, even to change the course of history, is well known. That legacy, unlike many legacies, is well worth preserving.