Learning from students is its own reward

Once a year, right after the April meeting of the Board of Trustees, professors learn of the salary increment for the following year. This annual communication from the Secretary is for most of us a reminder that the rewards of college teaching are not primarily material. More important is its testimony to the amazing fact that this institution — and the society that sustains it — are actually willing to pony up cash for work which most of us would swim through a river-full of barracuda to do for free if we had to.

But what then are the "primary" rewards of college teaching? That is not a question easily answered, and different professors no doubt would answer it differently.

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of Noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days."

That might work for Milton, but as I become reconciled to the unlikelihood of my ever writing a deathless epic, I have to look elsewhere.

Fortunately, I have the considerable advantage of feeling quite comfortable with a vocabulary that seems to befuddle or even offend many of my colleagues. I still believe with Keats in truth and beauty, and with Matthew Arnold in sweetness and light; and I am convinced that these are to be found in literature and in the teaching of literature. I am convinced of the truly revolutionary nature of education, and proud to be a cog in that great engine of desirable social change that is American higher education at its best. But all that is rather abstract. The single greatest day-today satisfaction is simply to participate in the ecology of promise, vitality, optimism and talent that is our undergraduate body.

For Princeton at its best continues to be a place where formal pedagogical relationships can extend into informal friendships — and both sorts are the essence of "education." Last week, two of my former students personally invited me to artistic events in which they were performing: Georgie Sherrington '06 was playing one of the ditzes in Ionesco's "anti-play" entitled "The Bald Soprano" on Saturday night, and on Sunday night Meg Meyer '05 was singing the spectral role of James Joyce's dead mother in Muldoon and Hagen's opera "The Antient Concert." That seemed to block out the weekend pretty well. As late as Thursday, though, Friday night was still a blank on my calendar. On Thursday, at a pre-frosh pep rally for the parents of admitted students at which I was one of the faculty cheerleaders, the final number was a string duet by the Carpenter siblings, who of course played brilliantly. The subliminal message seemed to be: "Here are a couple of typical Princeton kids. If your kid accepts our offer, (s)he'll be on-stage in Carnegie Hall by midterms." I had a brief conversation with David Carpenter '08 and later he, too, sent me a personal invitation to the concert he and his sister, Lauren '06, would be giving in Taplin Auditorium on the next night.

So my long weekend became an intense cultural trifecta of learning from my students. The Carpenters' concert was luminous. The pianist needed for a couple of the scheduled pieces got lost on his way from New York and arrived only in medias res. If I could suspect guile of such wholesome youth, I might think they orchestrated that on purpose, so brilliant was their improvisation. They produced an electrifying event that, I suspect, no one who was in the room will ever forget.

As for Ionesco, they don't call it "theater of the absurd" for nothing. But absurdity in itself is not a terminal good, and it took the rigorous whimsy of a fully realized production and nuanced acting by Ms. Sherrington and others to make "Bald Soprano" a nonstop, thigh-slapping, laugh riot.

Finally, I came to my night at the opera. Postmortem conversation suggests that some colleagues found the "Antient Concert" a tad obscure.It is perhaps true that some of Professor Muldoon's subtler gestures might have sneaked by that small minority of the audience who don't have "Finnegan's Wake" memorized or who have imperfectly cultivated the sensibility of Mr. Browne in "The Dead." But it was impossible to miss the controlled energy and excitement of Ms. Meyer's singing and that of her colleagues. There's nothing like a weekend of learning from your students to clarify a certain sense of vocational contentment. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.