Live and Learn

by David B. Brownlee

September 16, 1997

Learning is a way of living. We teachers can try to inspire and instruct our students with our lectures, answer their questions during discussion sections, and create provocative assignments for them. But they learn for themselves, mostly during the ninety percent of their hours when they're not in class. It's then that they read books, write papers, do problem sets, and, of course, accomplish the myriad other things that may not have a clear relationship to what goes on in the classroom but which in the end will have a lot to do with what they learn-and how they live now and for the rest of their lives.

I think that the most important thing that college can do is to introduce intelligent young people to the ordinary pleasures of an intellectual life that is not limited to specific hours and places. I am sure that most of us have had experiences that support this notion, and it has been foremost in the minds of the faculty, students, and staff who have been rethinking the residential environment of Penn's campus (see, most recently, "Choosing Community," Almanac April 29).

Let me recount some of my own college remembrances, not because they are unusual, but because I think they are typical of a good college education and can serve as the basis for some generalizations and further reflection.

• I came to college with no knowledge of classical music, my parents having been scared away from it by "music appreciation" classes. But every Sunday afternoon, student musicians used the library of Dunster House, where I lived for three years at Harvard, as a recital hall. I wasn't cajoled into attending, but soon I was hooked. The other houses also had free concerts; I remember hearing Yo-Yo Ma for the first time at Currier House.
• Friday and Saturday nights belonged to the house film societies, and I must have seen most of what they showed in the tow of a cinephile friend. Of course, this was recreation, but for my friend and the group of us who regularly followed him, film was also the art of our time. He wrote reviews for the Crimson during college and went to work as a critic for the San Francisco Examiner afterwards.
• I had learned to be a pretty good writer in high school, but in college I discovered that the craft of writing is never perfected. My most ardent writing teachers were friends who also became serious intellectual colleagues, although we didn't think of ourselves in those terms. I shall never forget the loving and scathing review that my senior thesis received from my pre-med roommate and the German major friend who was later the best man at my wedding. They stayed up all one night with me as I cut long strings of over-vivid adjectives and passed the revised text beneath their combined scrutiny.
• At Dunster House I got to know faculty, too. The Master was a youthful and passionate English professor who had been mentioned as a possible University president-and then didn't get tenure. And down the hall lived a young history professor named Doris Kearns, aspark with the electricity of a changing power structure. I never took courses with either of them, but they shaped the way I saw everything. I did take a non-credit architectural history seminar with a British grad student who lived in Dunster House; that was my first course in the field that became my own, and today I assign one of his books to my own students.

As I ponder what we do and might do at Penn, these stories offer two important lessons, and I suspect the same concepts could be extracted from everyone's college memories. First of all, most of the events I remember seemed ordinary and probably non-educational at the time. And yet they changed my life. The other lesson is that, outside the classroom, intellectual energy is exchanged in an environment that possesses little formal hierarchy. Authoritative teaching may come from peers, and classroom teachers may play other roles, without diminishing their status as intellectuals.

These are important things for us to remember. Our challenge at Penn is to bolster the intellectual environment in ways that are non-coercive and natural, placing intelligent people together and providing a supportive environment in which they may do the things that intelligent people do. After all, intellectual life is the ordinary attribute of an academic community. We simply have to provide the time and place in which it may flourish.

Not surprisingly, the most successful aspects of Penn's present residential programs already embody these principles. Here are a few examples:

• As confirmed by the residential consultants Biddison Hier (Almanac April 29) our students form durable communities of their own. Some are very small, informal groupings of friends (like the movie-goers of my youth), while a few others coalesce, with the needed support of the University, in the "Living-Learning" programs and thematic College Houses. The latter sponsor a variety of programs and activities that can lure today's students into unexpected pleasures.
• The roughly two dozen faculty and fifty graduate students now in residence among our undergraduates already embody the splendid ordinariness with which intellectuals of different ages mix together. They are not there principally to teach undergraduates, but to live with them.
• The residences have proved to be the ideal setting in which to provide the growing number of decentralized services that are collectively called "The Wheel," including technical computer support, the services of the Writing Center, and advising for calculus. Notably, all of these "educational" services are provided to students by their own peers.

Like the things we remember favorably from our own college days, these successful enterprises underscore the importance of keeping our plans for Penn's residences simple and adaptable. With that in mind, we can find many ways to strengthen the community in which Penn's scholars live-and learn.

With this column, Talk About Teaching resumes monthly publication as a joint project of the

Lindback Society and the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Brownlee, professor and former undergraduate

chair of the History of Art Department in the School of Arts and Sciences, headed the

Residential Planning Committee of the 21st Century Project.