It may come as something of a surprise that my decision to pursue a career as an academic was not one motivated by financial gain. If Lao-Tzu was correct in asserting that “a journey of one thousand miles begins with one small step,” then my decade-long journey from college dropout to graduate student at a prestigious university began with one specific desire: to teach. More specifically, I was driven to teach about history, a subject too often associated with boring primary- and secondary-school efforts to drill rote learning into the heads of young people with the desired goal of promoting the regurgitation of important names and dates for the purpose of passing tests. When I approached friends and relations to pass on the good news that I planned on working towards a Ph.D. in the field, most looked at me with a mixture of bewilderment and pity. “Yes, to wish to achieve one’s ideals is always a nice goal,” I could imagine them thinking, “but aren’t there more lucrative and interesting vocations to consider?” After three years in the University of Pennsylvania’s history department – two of which were spent dedicating a great deal of time and effort to my responsibilities as a teaching assistant – I would have to say that if anything, my belief in the importance of studying history and passing on new knowledge to future generations has only grown stronger. To those who consider history a dull and stodgy line of inquiry, I would have to strongly dissent.

Perhaps it was fate that I would begin my tenure as a teaching assistant in the aftermath of 11 September’s devastating terrorist attacks. In the more than three years since that event, there has been a noticeable and dismaying trend in American national discourse, one that attempts to squelch dissent through underhanded means while simultaneously promoting the kind of enforced patriotism that immediately condemns as traitorous any who attempt to question the nation’s leaders or their policy goals. Many of the (mainly) eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds who I find it my pleasure to work with as a TA have naturally been affected by this climate. In addition, students are constantly barraged by political efforts to rewrite history. Issues ranging from the progressive income tax to a woman’s right to choose have come under fire from politicians who abuse history in order to push their particular agendas. Attempts to compare John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts to cuts passed in recent years would have much less impact if more of the historical record was taken into account. That record, of course, would point out that the top tax rate in 1961 was 91 percent, and that Kennedy’s cuts were crucial since the vast majority of those in the top bracket were not actually paying most of those taxes. Similarly, the abortion debate largely focuses on notions about traditions and values, when in fact both English Common Law and the ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment, upon which the US Constitution based many of its legal foundations, provide no guidance in regards to the issue of terminating a fetus. The fact that the successful efforts to ban abortion by state governments during the second half of the nineteenth century were largely the result of lobbying efforts by anti-Catholic nativists who feared that the flood of fertile immigrants would overwhelm White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and their shrinking birth-rates, as well as attempts by the burgeoning AMA to professionalize medicine and determine which medical practices they arbitrarily deemed “ethical,” never enters the public discussion. Instead, young people, who like most in the country receive the majority of their information from broadcast journalism, have been weaned on an increasingly uncritical press that places more emphasis on ratings and sensationalism than on facts and considered debate.

In many ways it is my outrage over this state of affairs, of how so many Americans have become increasingly less aware of the historical issues that underpin so many of the major conflicts over American policies – whether domestic or foreign – that define the nation’s direction, that has influenced my attempts to teach history to the next generation. In essence, I am constantly challenging my students to reassess their own received notions about America. Far from an attempt to radicalize students or create a generation of leftists who despise the United States, I see my job as steering students to a deeper understanding of the nation. Blasting through the myths that surround everything from the nation’s origins to the backlash against the civil rights movements that paved the way for the conservative ascendance of the last third of the twentieth century is not an exercise in anti-Americanism. Quite the contrary, I hope to instill in my students the belief that questioning their own assumptions comports directly with the ideals that have influenced every post-1776 revolutionary movement in the world to adopt the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution as their models for a pluralistic democracy.

However, I must also note that I not only welcome my students to dissent from my take on American history, but strongly encourage those discussions predicated upon hewing to the patriotic line. I try to constantly push my students, not only so that they can become better citizens, but also so that they can be ready for the real world that they will undoubtedly encounter once they leave the warm embrace of the academy. My own experiences have influenced this approach: having gone through my first attempt at college as the kind of underachieving undergraduate who spent more time and energy trying to figure out what my social plans were for a Friday night then on achieving an impressive GPA, I make sure that my students know exactly where I stand. Being acutely aware of the kind of roller-coaster existence that college life can afford, I consistently emphasize that I am always willing to take time out and talk to my students about the life issues that they must constantly face. At the same time, however, my students are also aware that since I understand where they are coming from in many ways, I expect more from them in return. Every once in a while I will subtly remind them of the great privilege they have been afforded in attending such an elite university, because at times I think that they forget. And I typically justify my tough grading style by noting that a bachelor’s degree is earned, not given. Too often it seems like many undergraduates assume that their college experience is nothing but a limbo state between working hard to assure admission while in high school and whichever professional degree they choose to pursue in the future. As a great believer in the old-fashioned liberal arts education, I do my best to convince my students to put as much into what they do at Penn as what they plan to do with the rest of their lives.

Ultimately, I am under no illusions that every student will emerge from my class with a desire to spend their lives in pursuit of deeper meanings and truths. I only hope that they will walk away from a class that I have facilitated with a desire to make sure that their beliefs – what they are willing to fight and make sacrifices for – are not merely chimeras, but are worthy of their passionate support.