Beauty, courage, wisdom—sounds like a nice trio, but what are they and how do they work? Tom Ferraro, Frances Hill Fox professor of English and director of undergraduate studies, has made it his business to push his students to answer that risky question as thoughtfully as they can. If that sounds to you like high stakes stuff, you’re starting to understand why Ferraro teaches literature the way he does. To Ferraro, a liberal arts education is a powerful tool for living precisely because it involves asking difficult and essential questions.
You’re known among many students as one of the best teachers at Duke, and you won the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2010. What do you think a professor—especially a humanities professor leading discussion of complex texts—has to do at Duke both to draw out students intellectually and to help them build an emotional connection to the work they’re doing?
Reading can make stuff happen. What I’m after is to get students to inhabit the text to the point at which the text implicates them, so that they feel like it presses back—in Duke speak, it moves them beyond their comfort zone.
The teacher’s job is to figure out how to sponsor, how to induce, cajole, orchestrate and ultimately bear witness to that kind of critical inhabitation. What I’ve said in the past is that what I’m after is virtuosity, and virtuosity in many modes. I choose texts that do a kind of work, and then I ask the group to find a kind of alchemy of critical theater, of reading theater, where we discover that the very process of reading as a group replicates the tensions that are in a text. So, the text acts as a kind of mirror that reflects on what we are doing.
There is an old Kenneth Burke phrase that “literature is equipment for living.” And I think that’s part of what I’m after. It can happen precisely because it gives you access to both over-determined terror and ineffability. And the thing that saves us is the value other than the terror, the other half of the sublime. It’s the rush.
How do Duke students reconcile our desire to encounter that rush in our educations with the practical need to, say, get ready to find a job?
The humanities for 30 years now has done a very poor public relations job. It needs to get the word out, sometimes to its fellow intellectuals, sometimes to itself, also to the students and especially to their parents.
Doing the kind of critical engagements with literature that we do produces a form of what an older generation used to call “critical thinking.” English students are among the two highest scorers on LSATs—along with econ majors—and GMATs, and on any of the ones designed to test your ability to think analytically. An astonishing number of the Nobel Prize winners in the sciences have undergraduate liberal arts educations. They can teach you to think better within the box because they can teach you to think outside the box. So that’s half the answer in effect—that it’s a stronger form of pre-professionalism.
The other half is the sort of value added that links a little to the old humanist vocabulary of enriching oneself. But I would put it another way. It raises the question constantly of, what is education for? For what purpose do you educate? For what purpose do you enter a profession? For what purpose do you have a life? I’ve got my fingers crossed about reincarnation, though it might be as a rabbit or something else. But other than that, each and every one of us seems to only get one go-round. What’s it for? And because that is part of every imaginative form of art, what it does is it provides access to things that are harder to codify. My short form of that is very old-fashioned. It has to do with beauty, with courage and with wisdom, and with what role those things might play in a dedicated life, and that doesn’t mean a selfish life.
You like to talk about what distinguishes this generation of Duke students from previous ones. Do all of the bad things we hear about ourselves—that we can’t pay attention, that we’re entitled, that we’re too pre-professional—paint a fair portrait of this specific generation of college students, or is the reality more complex?
I think it’s a tricky thing. I think that it is the case that an earlier generation took its entitlement more for granted, before the dot-com crash. I arrived in ’88.... We were at a moment when gloriously well-paying jobs were available to students without particularly handsome GPAs. That was a form of freedom, so they could experiment more, or they could just cruise.
But I think that part of the pre-professionalism [this generation has] is also fear. It’s not just that we spent $50,000, but it’s that I spent the last four years working my bloody tail off. And I think there is a confusion between the quality of your first job and the quality of the job you will ultimately get if you take risks. I think that there’s a kind of narrow pre-professionalism as opposed to a capacious pre-professionalism.
When I sat on the [accreditation committee], there were representatives from all of the professional schools, and they were all interested in an expanded liberal arts curriculum for the undergraduates as a way that would produce better doctors, better Nicholas School scientists, better lawyers, better computer scientists. One of the computer scientists [on the committee] once said, “Students think that writing is just bullshitting. They manage to avoid somebody teaching them the distinction between precision in language and self-condemning flotsam and jetsam in language.”
Your own scholarly work has frequently focused on the way ethnicity works in the United States. Why home in on ethnicity like that, as opposed to other parts of identity?
As an arts guy, I have a long-standing interest in ethnicity, because if you trace the arts—the high arts, but particularly the popular arts—in the 20th century, what one sees is the African-Americanization of American culture. You see the Yiddicization of American culture. You see the Irish and Italianization of American culture. An older generation would call this a kind of “immigrant gift” thing. I have a more complex understanding of this, because I think it’s dialectical and it’s interactive. But the Marx brothers transformed the world—it is unimaginable without Jewish theater. The writers of Tin Pan Alley songs were Jewish guys working with African-American musical forms and the forms of the Viennese musical stage. It’s synthesis of the first order, but it’s an ethnicized synthesis of the first order. And when it works, it captures something that speaks to all of us.
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