HumCore Workshop #2: Pedagogy or Catastrophe
Graphic design by Michelle Jia; images by Jonathan Park and Dru!
Read analysis of this session on Arcade
Transcript
Alexander Key:
It gives me tremendous pleasure to welcome everybody to the second workshop in this year-long series of workshops that the humanities core faculty at Stanford are having. And they're really an informal opportunity that gives us the space to talk to - about how our research and how our thinking about global humanities affects our teaching. And to talk to luminaries of the field of global humanities education from outside our immediate context.
Alexander Key:
So today we have with us Professors Nauman Naqvi and Andrew Hui. It's a great privilege to have both of them here. Professor Naqvi is a professor at Habib University in Karachi. And I'm just going to read his faculty blurb because it's particularly apposite and effective and considerably more eloquent than an introduction that I would write. And it's why he's so exciting as an interlocutor. Dr. Naqvi's thought and work cuts across anthropology, history, literature, and philosophy — and essentially concerned with displaying the strenuous universals veiled in pre-modern and vernacular experience in forms of knowledge. A practice and thought of the universal that has been conceptually and discursively shackled and buried under colonialism and modernity.
Alexander Key:
He believes that there is no genuine and rigorous universalism without inheritance. And that the freeing of universality inaugurated in the academy itself, with the knowledge revolution under the names of post-structuralism and post-coloniality has hardly begun to bear its potential vis-a-vis vernacular forms of knowledge. Dr. Naqvi believes that the realization of this difficult potential will be critical in the shaping of our futures. And he's engaged in building humanities curricula at the university in that regard.
Alexander Key:
Professor Hui, a professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, has written a number of important books and being concerned, as he will be talking to us today about constructing a liberal curriculum — a liberal core institution in Singapore. The book that I first met Andrew with was his A Theory of the Aphorism, Princeton 2019, which focuses on very short and effective speech acts written down.
Alexander Key:
And I just learned today, very excitingly, that his new book, The Renaissance Imaginary Library: A User's Guide, has just got an advanced contract again from Princeton. And there'll be a preview article coming out in Critical Inquiry in Winter 2022, which we are very excited about.
Alexander Key:
So the way the workshop is going to go is both Professor Naqvi and Andrew are going to speak for 15 minutes each. Professor Naqvi going first, if that's okay. And then after those first 15 minutes, they're each going to get five minutes to talk back to each other. And then we're going to open it up for question and answer.
Alexander Key:
So without further ado, Nauman, the Zoom room is all yours and this room.
Professor Naqvi:
Thank you so much, Alexander. And I'd like to formally, informally thank you for inviting me to this panel. It's a pleasure to be here. And to share some ideas about what I think curriculum in a context such as ours, that is in a postcolonial context, but not just so. I gather that it's not just the third world that is post-colonial, but also the first world, which is post-colonial.
Professor Naqvi:
So the formal title that I gave, Alexander, for this talk, which I was just trying to look up, it's a useful title, From Modernity to Hikmah, Cultivating a Philosophical Sensibility Today.
Professor Naqvi:
Hikmah, for those of you who might not know, is the word under which first they called it in Arabic, falsafah. But then quickly adopted this word Hikmah, which is there in the Quran. The Quran calls it khayrun kathiran, an abundant good, the greatest of goods or abundant good.
Professor Naqvi:
So why philosophical sensibility? Because one, I think that actually it's one of the most catastrophic. I think we are living in general through various forms of catastrophe. One of those is cognitive. Various dimensions of the cognitive catastrophe through which we are living. And you can see that in Muslim societies. They're the most notorious, of course, in this regard. But I think the cognitive catastrophe is actually quite general.
Professor Naqvi:
I mean he most extreme manifestation to my mind today of that cognitive catastrophe is the fact that people who live on a blue and green planet think that they are going to destroy that planet and colonize a red planet. You don't even need to use a telescope to see that Mars is red. So apparently people grew up watching science fiction films and thought it was real. They didn't actually grow up, having watched these science fiction films. Anyway, that's at the most general level.
Professor Naqvi:
Philosophical sensibility in the case of Muslim societies, I'm not going to make any kind of Islam are supremacists or Islam are exclusivists argument here. I think most pre-modern traditions are very philosophical traditions. And when I say philosophical, I mean it's kind of bizarre that the words that we use in the philosophical world were both the philosophy field which is the most philosophy that is done today can be characterized as the pursuit of wisdom. So when I use philosophy, I mean it in that sense.
Professor Naqvi:
So I was the first faculty member that this university hired exactly a decade ago. The university became operational in 2014. I was hired in 2011 as a first faculty member. I was the founding Dean of the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. As well as the Director of the Core Curriculum — that's relevant to what I'm going to say. So we started out with 11 courses that we thought were essential. One of them dropped out. But then we organized it under seven different forms of thought, partly inspired by the way Stanford had organized. The forms of thought that we had were historical social thought, philosophical thought, language and expression, quantitative reasoning, formal reasoning, scientific method and analysis and creative practice.
Professor Naqvi:
The component of the core ... So the programs that we have — we have computer science, electrical engineering, and in my school, the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Social Development and Policy. That was the first two programs that were established were a program called Social Development and Policy, once again an interdisciplinary program, Communication and Design. And our newest program of which both I and my colleague here who some of you would've heard before, Professor Muhammad Haris is currently the Director of that program, Comparative Humanities Program. And we also manage the Habib Liberal Core. So that's what I'm talking to you about, the Habib Liberal Core curriculum. Especially these two forms of thought, especially historical social thought.
Professor Naqvi:
So the students start in their freshman year with a course called "Rhetoric and Communication." But the substantive course from this sequence, this three-core sequence that I'm going to talk to you a little bit about, the first one is called "What is Modernity?"
Professor Naqvi:
So to my mind, to our mind I guess because it's institutional — disenchantment with modernity is absolutely essential to cognitive reparation. All these key modern institutions which people need to disengage from. Both concepts and institutions. So starting with the first module, it's five modules. The first module is called Modernity and World Historical Identity. So these are students in the second semester of their first year. So they take the course called "What is Modernity?" The first module is called "Modernity and World Historical Identity."
Professor Naqvi:
This is referring to the fact that, of course, we are the first people in history to have a world historical identity. Those of us who think of ourselves as modern. And the basis of world historical in the sense of a collective, singular humanity as a collective, singular subject of secular history. So that's the idea.
Professor Naqvi:
So there they learn about the theological and racial origins of the idea of progress. My own PhD was in anthropology. And anthropology, of course, has been in the forefront of the critique of progress since the early 20th century. So I guess, the disciplinary formation or post-colonial disciplinary formation, especially of anthropology, informs that outlook to some extent.
Professor Naqvi:
And then they do "Political Modernity" in which they learn about the origins of the nation state, the emergence of the modern state, as well as the emergence of the modern apartheid colonial state. Which is different from traditional empires because those empires were dynastic empires. These modern empires were national and racial empires. Even the names, those empires give that away. So unlike the past where they're named after families, these modern empires are named after nations. British empire, et cetera. And then "Economic Modernity," which about the emergence of capitalism. We use a couple of chapters from this project that Stuart Hall undertook, "Formations of Modernity." I don't know how many of you are familiar with it, but it's a really fantastic four-volume thing for undergraduates, "Formations of Modernity." We use a couple of chapters from that in this curriculum. So "Economic Modernity" is the emergence of the economy as such. Because obviously the economy as such did not exist before this time period.
Professor Naqvi:
Then that's followed by "Modernity and Ecology," which is about the anthropocene. And then finally, "Modernity and Religion," which actually hooks up with the earlier module on the emergence of the nation-state with the religious nationalism. And I don't think it's peculiar to the third world. Nationalism in the first world also has profound religious origins. In the modern period, obviously it coincides with the Reformation and everything that followed it. The two are coincident.
Professor Naqvi:
So they do this. "What is Modernity?" which is obviously global. And then they do that at the regional level, "Modernity in South Asia." Once again, primarily the past 250 years but starting with a little bit of a look at the pre-modern. One of the aims of this also is just to show these contemporary cultural forms, which we all take for granted, are direct inheritances from colonialism. They were formed under colonialism.
Professor Naqvi:
Nationalism in general, many of you, of course, will know this. But it needs to be stated anyway. Nationalism is heavily, heavily indebted to colonialism. And it is dramatically transforming, has continued to transform regional traditions. So our entire curriculum in that sense, anti-national. And it's a wonder that we've been able to continue to do this for seven years now.
Professor Naqvi:
Since my time is running out, the third part of the course is Hikmah, which is called the "History of Islamic Thought." Now, two of these courses, the "Modernity in South Asia," we're supposed to teach, it's called "Pakistan and Modern South Asia." The Government of Pakistan requires us to teach a course in Pakistan studies. And it requires us to teach a course in Islamic studies. So we use both of these as an opportunity to turn the tables against what their intentions. One, by teaching this totally anti-colonial and anti-national history of the region. And secondly, by returning to the contemplative tradition of Islam, restoring. Because in the modern period, part of this is part of what the havoc that colonialism and followed by colonialism, nationalism has produced in the region, is the imperialization of our traditions.
Professor Naqvi:
So people think of Islam as primarily an imperial tradition. These are not foreigners we're talking about. They are Muslims themselves, illiterate Muslims. Of course, we are talking about the literate classes. So most of this cognitive catastrophe has happened not amongst the illiterate, but amongst the literate. So in fact, the core curriculum is oriented to correcting these, repairing. So, we use that word here though. So the curriculum itself is supposed to be reparative. It has both senses of cognitive reparation, as well as, of course, the other connotation of reparations that we think of.
Professor Naqvi:
I think my time is up. So I'd like to stick with my time. I still have two minutes.
Alexander Key:
Two more minutes.
Professor Naqvi:
Okay. What else should I say? I think also partly it is motivated by the last part of the program, the Hikmah, which is the philosophical part. It only begins their philosophical requirements. Because they also have to take another course in philosophy, which is an elective course. So there are elective parts to the curriculum, which I have not spoken about.
Professor Naqvi:
One of them prominently featured in a distinctive feature of our core is that all students not only have to take this Hikmah but they also have to take another course on philosophy. And Professor Muhammad Haris here teaches most of those courses. I also teach a couple. But he's taught a great deal of those courses. So it's not just restricted to Hikmah, the philosophical explanation. And I was going to say that one of the reasons I think that's important is that not only for political reasons, I am also concerned as Bernard Stiegler, in his book "Taking Care of Youth and the Generations."
Professor Naqvi:
I'm concerned about the fact that my students are going to live through, that they are living through and will continue to live through worse and worse times, catastrophic times. And they need the inner strengths, the inner resources conceptually. Because a lot of those resources are all around them but they are unable to. Also because of the fact that the entire cognitive and linguistic culture is totally apartheid. They're not able to engage with those conceptual resources.
Professor Naqvi:
They read all these self-help books, et cetera, which are really no substitute in terms of their ethical and spiritual resources. So that's one of the motivations behind having this course. I just taught a course called "Comparative Hermeneutics of the Self," which about both ancient, the hermeneutics of the subject, this is not part of the core curriculum, as well as in Islamic, so one of the main textbook was called "Sculpting the Self." We have to reconnect with that contemplative part of the tradition, which allows them to cultivate themselves and help them start themselves. But that's my time. Thank you.
Alexander Key:
Thank you, Nauman.
Alexander Key:
And now I'll pass it straight over to Andrew who will also speak for 15 minutes.
Andrew Hui:
Okay. I'll try to keep my remarks to 15 minutes. And please call me to that. I'll circumscribe.
Andrew Hui:
So hello everybody here at Stanford. Hello, everybody on virtual Zoom. And thanks for the very generous introduction, Alexander. It's good to back at Stanford to see so many friendly faces and some new ones. And thanks Nauman for very fascinating talks.
Andrew Hui:
There are so many lines of affinities and correspondences, but also some divergences. And I'll try to interview some of his insights of ad libitum into my talk. So I was an IHUM Fellow here at Stanford precisely 10 years ago, from 2009 to 2012. It was an incredibly formative experience for me. If Princeton taught me how to be a scholar, and Nigel Smith is here, who was my teacher, Stanford taught me how to be a teacher.
Andrew Hui:
And it was working from Dan Edelstein, Josh Landy, Marisa Galvez, Robert Harrison, R. Lanier Anderson, Sepp, along with all the other fellows, all under the beneficent gaze of Ellen Woods and Parna Sengupta who's I think on Zoom. And the reason why I mentioned this is because that was my job right before I took up the position at Yale-NUS. And these three years here prepared me very well for what was in store for me at Yale-NUS, which is to say that, here I learned the importance of pedagogy, logistics, team management, which I've discovered are three essential life skills wherever you happen to be.
Andrew Hui:
So I'm going to share my screen right now, which you'll see. Does everybody see Liberal Arts from the Ground Up? Okay. I see a thumbs up from some people.
Andrew Hui:
Okay. So what I want to do in my brief talk today is give you the genesis of Yale-NUS, the development, what we've achieved in the past nine years. We were like Nauman, a very new institution. And I'll just acknowledge the elephant in the room right now. It's demise.
Andrew Hui:
Just three months ago, the NUS president unilaterally announced the closure of our little college which will happen in 2025. I'll say more about that in due time. All institutions, as you know, begin in myth. There is always an origin story, a tale of foundations and beginnings and origins. And our etiology is that once upon a time, two former presidents, Richard Levin of New Haven and Tan Chorh Chuan of Singapore met over tea, as one does, at Davos, at the World Economic Forum. They're both visionaries, empire builders and globalists.
Andrew Hui:
On the one side, Singapore wanted to expand its education offerings. For generations, NUS was very good at producing accountants, engineers, pharmacists — but the people at the Ministry of Education recognized that the university was lacking in both the softer or more critical skills of humanistic thinking.
Andrew Hui:
And so here is a quote from James Madison in 1780. He says, "I must study politics and war that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, commerce and agriculture. In order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." And I particularly like the last part, porcelain. I've never studied porcelain.
Andrew Hui:
Two hundred years later, Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore tells students at the University that, "Poetry is a luxury we can't afford." Let's try to read these two together to think about the progress of national development.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Andrew Hui:
Now that Singapore, in the past two decades, had entered late-stage capitalism, maybe it's time for a little study of painting, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Andrew Hui:
Singapore is mixed up with decline in school rankings. It become the top research institution in Asia. And as my colleague once said, Singapore was a little bit like Mr. and Mrs. Veneering in "Our Mutual Friend", in which Charles Dickens writes that once they got rich, they wanted to acquire a little bit of class.
Andrew Hui (00:24:38):
Singapore wanted not only to be the finance capital of Asia, but a global schoolhouse, the Boston of the East. So said administer white paper. In order to achieve that, they partnered with some illustrious schools, Wharton, to set up their management school, to establish something called SMU, which has nothing to do with Methodism, but Singapore Management University, MIT for the design and tech school, SUTD, and Peabody for the school of music.
Andrew Hui:
The next natural progression to acquire a veneer of class then was to partner with Yale for the liberal arts. The Yale president, Rick Levin, had been bewitched by China for decades. But risk-adverse, authoritarian regime, and freedom of expression, he thought stable and clean Singapore would be their foothold in Asia.
Andrew Hui:
Thus, the marriage of mind, Levin and Chorh Chuan, as I said, were empire builders, but also true believers in the power of the liberal arts. Levin firmly believed that liberal education would lead to political liberalization. And in parenthesis, I just want to invite you to think about how this theory has played out in the past five years.
Andrew Hui:
What are the intersections between liberal arts, political liberalism and neoliberal capitalism? The liberal and education, politics and economics, are they just false cognates, "faux amis"? Or do they participate in this same structures of power?
Andrew Hui:
Tan Chorh Chuan and the Ministry of Education wanted the next Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. And we all know they famously dropped out of liberal arts colleges. And so perhaps our next Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg would drop out of Yale-NUS college someday.
Andrew Hui:
So great fanfare and not a few controversy, the agreement for the creation of Yale-NUS was signed in 2011, and Robert Harrison and Dan Edelstein helped me prepare the interview, and I gave my mock job talk in this very building.
Andrew Hui:
So I joined the founding faculty in 2012, and we spent an incubation year in New Haven building our curriculum. Now, Rick Levin was a firm believer of directed studies. The Yale version of SLE, great books. But he not only wanted a DS, directed studies with humanities, but also for the social science and sciences, as well.
Andrew Hui:
Hence, this thing called the common curriculum, which is very similar to Nauman's set of seven courses that the first and second years have to take. And so our distribution requirement is 31% common curriculum, one-third major is in the capstone project, which is the senior essays and a third in electives.
Andrew Hui:
And here is the side of the common curriculum. First semester, we do literature and humanities. I mean, it's interesting that Nauman begins with world modernity and historical identity. We begin with the ancient world.
Andrew Hui:
And at Yale, they have literature and history, political and philosophy. So, we keep that matrix. And we also have quantitative reasoning like in Pakistan, and we have comparative social inquiry in the first semester. We have foundations of science and then scientific inquiry and modern social thoughts.
Andrew Hui:
So the first-year students are always complaining that they don't get electives to explore what they want. And so this is one of the trade-offs of having a core curriculum. And this is possible.
Andrew Hui:
So every single student at our little college, which has a thousand students, that everybody has to read a little bit of Ramayana, Plato, Max Weber, learn to code in R, know a bit of micro- and macro-economics.
Andrew Hui:
But the idea is really to forge a small community of learning. Every student from the first year to senior can sit in the dining hall to talk about "Mrs. Dalloway" or "Season of Migration to the North," two books that we read in the common curriculum.
Andrew Hui:
So what is common is as much as the common experience, as much as the epistemic commonality in our curriculum. Now, my part in this endeavor is precisely to teach "Mrs. Dalloway" and "Season of Migration," which are in my wheelhouse, the literature and humanity sequence.
Andrew Hui:
And that's something I've been teaching now for 10 years. It's basically a team-taught, team-designed course with about a dozen faculty every... That's very similar to what used to be IHUM or SLE, but that's for the entire college.
Andrew Hui:
So let me share with you the syllabus. Our first semester is dedicated to an ancient world. We don't have the advantage of historical sequence in western civ courses, like... You read Homer and then Homer is talking to Virgil and Ovid, and then there's Dante, and then there's Shakespeare and Milton and so forth. Right?
Andrew Hui:
But what we get in return is comparative pairs organized through genres. We start, as you see, from the world of myths and with epics, and with the "Odyssey" and "Ramayana." Then we move to the world of history, the genre of prose, Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian, the Malay Annals.
Andrew Hui:
We used to read Herodotus' history. But actually, we responded to a student demand. One quite brilliant student wrote, "We should decolonize the curriculum." And he wrote in our student paper, you see, in The Octant, "Yale-NUS in a Malay World: A Case for Decolonizing Our Common Curriculum."
Andrew Hui:
And one brilliant student, Faris Joraimi, he took my Dante course as a freshman and he wrote a beautiful paper about the celestial rose in Paradiso, but he's Malay himself and he writes, "The common curriculum is an ideological manifesto that must reflect this institution commitment to anchor the college to its local and indigenous context. It is then bewildering that the CC does not contain a single text from Singapore's indigenous tradition." He's absolutely right. Right. And so at the end of in ancient world, but the problem is based on the structure of hiring, we had no experts in the Malay world in either integrity or modernity, but we settled on the "Malay Annals" and I'll be happy to talk about that in a little bit.
Andrew Hui:
So in the second semester we do modernity and in the interest of time, I'll just skip over that. So I've given you the global perspective, the macro, now let's go deep, let's do a deep dive and let's zoom in on one teaching unit. And this is what happens when I teach the ancient Chinese historian, Sima Qian. I'm very glad we have a real Sinologist here, Ronald Egan and also Lee Haiyan. So they can correct the errors that I do. So we read this amazing heartfelt letter called "Letter to Ren An," which is basically a cri de coeur as well as his manifesto, why he writes this enormous history. So what do you need to know about Sima Qian is that he was considered the father of Chinese history, as well as the first biographer. And starts to describe is that he served at once a chronicler, archivist and astrologer, his work was entitled the Shi JI, the records of the grand historian.
Andrew Hui:
It has over 1.5 million Chinese characters, which makes it as long as the King James Bible clocking it at, I looked this up, 800,000 English words and Proust clocking in at 1.2 million French words. So it's a long swelling work, but what you also need to know is that this letter is very succinct. It's very concise. And this is where he gives his reason for writing his chronicle. And it's because he was castrated for basically royal intrigue, palace intrigue. Right? And so what he writes is... let's see. Okay. "I have tried to probe the boundaries of heaven and man, and comprehend the changes of past and present, thereby perfecting a tradition for my family. My draft was not yet finished when I met with this disaster. Mainly his castration. Thinking that it would be a pity were my work not to be completed, I committed the most extreme punishment."
Andrew Hui:
And this here is ..., which is literally cut or castration. "... without betraying any signs of resentment." And he says, "If I can truly finish this work and see it stored away in the Famous Mountain, ..., and then pass down to the appropriate people who would make it known in the towns and big cities, then I will have made up for the burden of my previous disgrace. Then, even if I were to suffer 10,000 deaths, how could I feel any regret?" Spine-tingling words. Now let's turn up. Do we mind if I have maybe five more minutes? Is that okay?
Andrew Hui:
Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to share with you... I literally found this, Egyptian ode on immortality of scribes, this is British museum, Chester Beatty, 10684. And that actually is the facsimile of the papyrus. Lets listen to this and why we write. This is from the scribes.
Andrew Hui:
"They did not build pyramids in bronze with gravestones of iron from heaven. They did not think to leave the patrimony made of children who would give their names distinction." These are the scribes. "Rather, they formed a progeny by means of writing in the books of wisdom, which they left. The papyrus roll became their lector-priest, writing board their loving son. Books of wisdom were their pyramids, the reed-pen was their child, smoothed stone their spouse." I mean, I love this textuality as sexuality here, right? Biological reproduction and textual reproduction. "In this way great and small became in inheritors and writer was the father of them all." Now let's jump to a different cultural context also in the ancient world, which is the Phaedrus. So we have a classicist here, Grant Parker. You'll remember that at the end of the Phaedrus, "The story goes that Thamus said so much to Theuth... And now, since you are the father of writing, ... , your affection for it has made you describe its effect as the opposite of what they really are.
Andrew Hui:
In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness to the soul of those who learn it. They will not practice using memory because they will put their trust in writing. You will not discover a potion, a pharmacon, for remembering, but for reminding, you will provide your students with the appearance, the thoughts of wisdom ... not with its reality." What happens when we do comparative analysis of ancient world and think about the function of writing and of reproduction of truth in the face of power? Right now, what I do in the 90-minute seminar is I start by giving my students a list of reading questions. I break them into groups of four, and for 20 minutes, they do a comparative analysis of these texts. And we ask the questions, what is writing? What is power? What is reproducibility? What is cultural memory? And you can see how, if you begin with these comparative analysis in year one, then they're already primed to analytic thinking in this way, right?
Andrew Hui:
And so this is basically a nitty gritty detail of a daily lesson plan, but there is actually a continuum to larger question of how I began with the infamous meeting at Davos because for Plato, Sima Qian and the enormous scribes, they're in fact thinking about the life of the intellect and it stands towards administrative state, right? What is the relationship between individual scribes and institutional bureaucracy? They're thinking about power and writing individuals and institutions personal and collective memory. So the payoff is that with these micro examples, I give to students, this is the new way to do classics, a new way of doing comparative antiquity, a global ancient world in the plural. Right? And so I'm so glad Nauman talked about comparative modernities because what I'm giving you is comparative antiquities. I think I'm going to stop here and leave it tantalizingly why I believe there's a closure of [inaudible] us for the discussion. So thank you.
Speaker 1:
Thank you. And now I will pass it back over to Nauman for five minutes of your thoughts and responses.
Professor Naqvi:
Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that wonderful presentation, Andrew. So you mentioned that it's an important point, I think, that we start with modernity rather than antiquity. Of course, that's the way most co-curriculars start. I went to Reed College and Reed has this well-known thing that all of us take called "Humanities 110," Greece, Rome in the middle ages.
Professor Naqvi:
And the sequence "Humanities 210," which is Renaissance and Reformation, which you take in your sophomore year, but that's elective. And then you take "Modern Humanities," which is from the Enlightenment to the post-World War II period. Even though those are elective, most Reed students ... So it's conventional. I mean, at Columbia, I taught contemporary civilization, which is their core curriculum, which is also of course begins with the ancients with Plato. So why do we begin with modernity? And like I said, I don't think that they can approach these older materials without being substantially disenchanted with modernity first.
Professor Naqvi:
Yeah. So the destructive part of the project has to come first. Yeah. Before the repetitive part of the project. So I mean, speaking of these old, really voluminous... So here we have a text called "Tilism-e-Hoshruba." Tilism is like this world encompassing, magical spell. Hoshruba, which carries away your senses, your discretion, your judgment, your understanding. Yeah. And the first time it was collected, it was in 40 large volumes. That's how long the fable is. Yeah. The fable of the contest between these on the one side... Actually, let me not go into the whole mythology. You can look it up. It's been in an abridged volume. It's been translated. I can't remember how it's been translated. Musharraf Ali Farooqi, this fellow has translated this "Tilism-e-Hoshruba." But that's what modernity is like. Yeah. This is a world-encompassing magical spell.
Professor Naqvi:
Yeah. So you've got to come out of this magical spell before you can actually be oriented philosophically. I mean one way to think about this is the tradition was that this world is finite and deserves only to have a certain secondary place, yeah. In your orientation to the world. Yeah. So a certain detachment from the world, which it does not mean because you know, Islam does not have in fact a monastic tradition. So a famous Sufi phrase goes, "In the world and yet not of it." Yeah. So you've got to have this vertical space of detachment. Yeah. And of course this modernity business is all about and secularism, it's just more and more entrenchment in the world. Yeah. So there's no space of detachment. Yeah. This immanentism, yeah. This immanentism of everything. So that's why we start with modernity. Yeah. And we do it for two semesters before we get to the ancient material.
Professor Naqvi:
So first at the global level, and then at the regional level, because as I was saying, our literary traditions, which are also inextricably... I mean, these are arbitrary, modern distinctions, religion, philosophy, literature, they're intimately related to each other. So yeah, before they get to that... Actually, funnily enough, the first course, before they took "What is modernity?" as I was telling you, rhetoric and communication, now it's become basically they teach them how to read and write kind of course. That's not how I would've had it. In fact, the first few years we taught it, it kind of synoptically anticipated the rest of the core curriculum. But it starts with the Phaedrus, as opposed to the way that people start with the Republic. And why did we start with the Phaedrus? The reason we started with the Phaedrus is because the Muslim tradition actually, believe it or not used to be called the Madhab-e-Ishq, the tradition of love.
Professor Naqvi:
Yeah. That's how central... I mean, love was the cosmological principle. And of course there's a reason that Muslims took to Plato and Aristotle, like bees to honey. Yeah. Because Plato, Neoplatonism, yeah, has that precisely the same kind of metaphysics and the heart of that metaphysics is this philosophy of love. It's funny, especially in the Shia tradition, it's known that there's this angel who Imam Hussain cured. God had destroyed his wings because of his hubris. And then Imam Hussain restored his wings. And he was called Fatras, like the angel without wings that Socrates talks about in the Phaedrus. And he plays and he puns on. Anyway those were some of my comments. Thank you so much for that very interesting presentation.
Speaker 1:
Thank you. Thank you, Nauman. Yeah, Andrew. Sure.
Andrew Hui:
Great. So maybe I'll just say three things. And one is just, maybe we can think about pedagogy, right? Since this is basically a workshop on pedagogy. What are some of the skills that you want to impart to your students? Because I mean, as we know undergraduates even at Yale-NUS, maybe only 15% of them are going to be humanities majors and of those 15%, maybe only 1% will end up pursuing PhDs. So Parna and Ellen drilled me this over and over again, "You're not training them to be literary critics, Andrew." Right. That's not the point of first-year education. Right? So what are some of the takeaways when they become consultants or engineers and so forth? And similar to this, what are the learning goals?
Andrew Hui:
One of the learning goals that I want to give to my students is this idea of the threshold sphere, which you see in museums, right? And threshold spheres is like why do only rich white people like to go to museums? Because there's this threshold fear of when you go to museum, there's this large classical building, it's really hard to get into, there's an entrance fee. The same thing for any Western cannon or even the great books, right? There's this threshold fear. And what I also want to disabuse the students of is what the Stanford psychologist called the fixed-versus-growth mindset, right. Because most of our Singaporean students, they're trained in the sciences. So they're great at test-taking, right. They're great at quantitative science. They're great at taking learning for the test.
Andrew Hui:
So they have a certain fixed mindset. "Oh, I'm an economics person. I'm a science person." Right. So how can we open the world of humanities to them? And third, I want to ask something about Pakistan studies and Islamic studies. You said, the government is mandating this. And I just want to ask about the institutional structures of Habib, is it privately funded, publicly funded? Because part of the reason why Yale-NUS just collapsed is the incommensurability between Yale, a rich institution in leafy New England, that's catered towards the replication of the elite class with a $40 billion endowment, with NUS, which is public serving 40,000 students. Right?
Andrew Hui:
Yale College is 4,000 students. Right? And so they just couldn't see what the mission of Yale-NUS, is it to produce the next Yale in Asia? Or is it to serve the National University of Singapore? Or is it in Asia for the world? Right? Which is in our model. Right? So the students of Habib University, do you want them to be cosmopolitans or do you want them to be good functionaries in the Pakistani civil society?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. I'm going to pass that straight back to Nauman.
Professor Naqvi:
Neither, really. So in terms of the skills, yeah, these are reading-intensive courses, so they learn how to read complex texts, make complex arguments. There's writing-intensive courses. And we have a writing center that also helps them and of course all of these courses. So the standard skills which liberal arts core curriculum is supposed to transmit. Yeah. But I don't think... I mean we've gotten too caught up in this skills business. Yeah. When I went to Reed, yeah, we had this core curriculum, nobody ever talked about skills. Yeah. So we read these texts and of course we learned how to read and write and think through reading and discussing and writing. Right?
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Professor Naqvi:
And that's what they continue to do. So for me, the more substantive questions should be what we prioritize. The skills will obviously come. I don't know why all of a sudden, I went there to these branch campuses in the Gulf when I used to be dean here, and there were all these other deans and provosts, and that's all they talked about. When I presented my curriculum, those were the questions that they had to ask me. I think the stakes really are very, very high. Our situation, Habib University also kind of emerged out of a sense of crisis.
Professor Naqvi:
So, you were talking about our finances. The most famous bank from Pakistan is called Habib Bank. They also own Indus Motors, which is a franchise of Toyota. They built the campus, $50 million they put in there, and they still put in $5 million because of course we have a very large scholarship program. Our students come from all kinds of different classes. I don't know whether they've done something like this, but I would think that on average, our students are lower middle class. Lower middle, middle class. Yeah. They're not elite students. Many of them are on scholarship, et cetera. So, that's why the Habibs need to keep putting in money every year, but now we've been extending all the different people, donors, etc. That's what the president is now primarily involved in. So, he was recently in Houston and a whole bunch of Pakistani-origin capitalists over there, they gave money for this.
Professor Naqvi:
Thankfully, the Habibs have never interfered with anything. When I was dean, Rafiq Habib told me, he said, "You should start a law program." I said, "There's no way. Definitely not." And he said, "You should start a business administration program." I said, "No way," and he didn't say anything. So, up to now, well touch wood, inshallah, things have been fine in this regard. And I don't think the outside Pakistani world can really figure out what the hell is going on at Habib. So, the first graduates started coming out in 2018. So, because we are on the one hand totally anti-imperial and anti-colonial but also anti-national, so they would've had a problem with us if we had just been anti-national but we are also anti-imperial and anti-colonial, extremely so, radically so. So, that's also what's protected us, I think.
Alexander Key:
Tremendous. Thank you. Okay. So, now we're going to open it up to questions from the participants either online or in person. And do please just wave your hands, or use the Zoom thing or start talking. I can see Dan and then...
Alexander Key:
Anybody...
Alexander Key:
Yeah. Dan, Ato, Laura. Okay, Dan.
Dan:
All right. Thank you. Andrew, it's so good to see you again.
Andrew Hui:
Hi, Dan.
Dan:
[Crosstalk] able to be there in the German Studies Library with you. So I thought this was a really fascinating discussion that you and Nauman were having about where to begin, how to get in. And it made me think about how in some respects, the chronological order just seems so natural, right? We always start in the beginning. And of course, that's what we've inherited, how great books, programs started in the 20th century. And even before that, there was this logic of chronology, but I wonder if we're not a little bit misled when we think about why programs have been organized this because I think that, that really makes sense when there's this broader social investment of cultural capital in the past, right?
Dan:
So if you live in a society where there's an understanding that knowledge of antiquity is valuable, then that's where you're going to start. Clearly, that is not our society anymore. And so I've also found teaching from IHUM to the new stuff we're doing in the first year but also in the Hum Core, students have such a difficulty now of accessing these past texts. I think I really resonate with Nauman, what you were saying about we have to first do a operation on them, we need to get them out of a certain modernity, out of some of those narratives to just even figure out what the hell's going on in these older texts. And so it makes me wonder though if the key here is that in order to really get them to appreciate the values of studying past traditions, it's actually rather than trying to convey, I have this conversation with Keith a lot about, "Well, they need to understand history, have a sense like this is in the past."
Dan:
And I almost want to say maybe it's the opposite, they have to feel like there were contemporaries with these past thinkers. I always love that line by, I think it's Bloom who talks about how at the University of Chicago, his students would say, they'd write in their essay, "Well, Mr. Aristotle said this," as if next quarter, they're going to take a class with this Mr. Aristotle that they keep hearing about. And that there's something about actually breaking down our sense of distance and obviously, that's important. It has to come but maybe it has to come later. First, call them Mr. Aristotle, then you can realize that actually Mr. Aristotle was writing 2,000 and so years ago. Anyway, I was just throwing that out there to hear what both of you might have to say.
Andrew Hui:
Go for it, Nauman. I need more time to think.
Professor Naqvi:
Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. I mean, there's a reason. I mean, I guess it also... So, like many of the people who went to institutions of high learning during this time from the '80s through the 2000s, grew up reading Foucault basically. So his trajectory is very interesting, so he starts, I mean, take out "Madness And Civilization," which is a different sort of work, but the trajectory is archeology, genealogy and then the thought ascesis, which comes at the end. So, Foucault returns to the ancients at the end. He does this critique of modernity first and then returns. And I think actually that's a very, very instructive way of proceeding.
Alexander Key:
I'm going to abuse my position as the coordinator here and just jump in before I pass it to Andrew because and thinking with what Dan was saying and what Nauman was saying, to deconstruct the conceptions of modernity that get in the way of the sort of access to the past that we might want, to sort of break down the problems of the present. Can you do that without taking a, going back to Mohamed Harris in the first workshop, can you do that without taking an ethical political stance, or does that deconstruction process necessitate particular ethical and political choices that have risks?
Andrew Hui:
I'm going to be candid here, and just say that our obsession with chronology into ancient worlds or modernity, 90% of the students just don't care in the first-year program, they just want to get the A. They just say, "Okay, tell me what I want to read. Tell me how to write my papers and tell me how to do well in your class." The wonderful student Faris, he's the.... right? He is exceptional. He's off to graduate school. So in the second year we have this, modern social thought where they do read Durkheim, Max Weber, Foucault, Marx. And it's really at that level where they get the metacognitive skills of temporality and historicity, right? And it's only maybe in the pro seminar in history or literature where you can really tell them, "Oh, what we've been doing all along is that comparative antiquity."
Andrew Hui:
And so not only do they have the content, but the framework and which I think once they get through the common curriculum, they should have a retrospective sense of how all this fits in. Because it's certainly... I went to St John's, the alma mater literally of the great books, and it wasn't just until years afterwards when I was able to reflect and I had the skills to do so. But first, let's just... Our tutors at St. John says, "Oh, it doesn't matter when Plato was writing. Let's just pretend we discovered the Republic in the desert island." So this is the same presentism of Mr. Aristotle, right? "Oh, he wrote this yesterday." It doesn't matter if he wrote this in ancient Greek, because the idea of universality, which some people don't believe which... As a crypto-Platonist I do believe in universality.
Andrew Hui:
I just put my methodological cards out there. Students don't know that. What's more interesting is that Harvard 10, which Stephen Greenblatt, and Louis Menand and Martin Puchner have been doing, they move classic Homer to Dante in the first semester. But then in the second semester they move backwards and then they move from Ulysses to Don Quixote. So they have this really interesting reversal of chronology. And Aristotle said, how do we begin learning, we begin learning from moving things that are closer to us to things that are farther away. And so by that rationale, yes we can begin by studying "Parasite," right? Studying Netflix "Squid Games," because the crisis of catastrophe, of global capitalism, why don't we just begin with the latest Netflix special and then get them interested, and then move backwards and end with Sappho. That would be the real radical pedagogy.
Alexander Key:
Ato.
Ato Quayson:
By the way wonderful, Nauman and Andrew both... But in a way... Andrew, I read this, I wrote to tell him, I picked this up and took it to... I have a traveling companions. So when I'm traveling, flying, I pick different kinds of books. So, I decided to pick this one up.
Andrew Hui:
I'm so honored.
Ato Quayson:
Then I read it, so I spent the entire flight reading, just a long flight to Africa. You actually exemplify in this book, the value of what you're saying of... You exemplify it materializes in this book because it starts from Confucianism, Africanism, from Confucius, you have Erasmus, Pascal and so on. However, there's another aspect that you exemplify in which, in the context of modern-day context of economics, this other value is not one that we can... I don't see how we can articulate it, which is the value of bewilderment. That is the introduction to...
Ato Quayson:
It doesn't matter whether they're ancient text, the ancient text augment, or they have bewilderment as say, but it's valuable to be uncertain. Uncertain about meaning. I mean, some of the certainty will come from provenance. So Aristotle wrote at this time, and these are his interlocutors if you can find them, but actually the text itself modulates uncertainty. And I think that is one of the main values of core curriculum, whatever point it starts at, whether it starts from modern going backwards. Or from back to front, or front to back. The text that we tend to place before them are text that don't deliver their meanings readily. So that actually, I don't think we tell them this, but the object of this class, it's to sow misunderstanding. And we certainly cannot state this as a bold principle to our senior administrators.
Andrew Hui:
Yeah. Right.
Ato Quayson:
You can't say that. So, we'll find different ways of coaching it. We'll talk about skills, close reading and so on, but actually one of the effects and you see it here that even yourself in the manner in which you write, you are wrestling with the material, it's a struggle. So you've written what I think is a really good book, but throughout you are exemplifying how difficult it is. And I think that the models of uncertainty, that whether they are talking about love or gold, more friendship or scribes, and so on that is really because they're wrestling with things that are bigger than themselves.
Andrew Hui):
Absolutely.
Ato Quayson:
Now, in relation to this, this is something that happened when I was in Toronto for a few years, and the Toronto district school board agreed after some pressure to establish what they call an Afrocentric school. And the Afrocentric school was going to teach only African and Black texts. This was supposed to be a high school. And I was asked, "What do you think?" And I said, "I've never heard the most ridiculous idea, principal. What you need to teach, especially at that age, is exactly the text that alienate them from their own identities. That later you can affirm the identities, but from, at that ages, when they should learn how to..." I didn't say it in those terms. But, now I'm stating it, to teach them Japanese. If I mentioned, teach them Aristotle, teach them, introduce them to Japanese philosophy. Of course, they have to be Black text, but you are not giving them the Black texts that will confirm their Blackness. You have to give them the Black texts that investigate and disavow and scramble their Blackness.
Ato Quayson:
Then give them Aristotle, give them Japanese philosophy and so on, and so. So, I condemned the idea. I thought was completely ridiculous of a school that will only teach one cultural, it made no sense to me. But this takes me back to where I started, which is that one of the principles of whatever we call it, agreed books, tradition, or Humanities Core, whatever we call it. I think one of the values, which as I said, we are not able to express because of our paymasters, is actually the value of uncertainty. And it is this value that we see repeated, whether you're reading Plato, Aristotle or even some forms of Biblical or Quranic exegesis, it's all about uncertainty and staying with the negative capability of it.
Andrew Hui:
Can I respond?
Alexander Key:
Yes.
Andrew Hui:
Okay. Thank you so much, Ato. I'm immensely honored that you took this on your transatlantic flight. So, yes let's talk about perplexity for a moment. And I invite, Nauman, let's think about the Phaedrus. Let's think about Plato. What does Plato say in the Theaetetus and in the Phaedrus, "Wonder is the beginning of philosophy and perplexity in Greek is aporia. And so you need the aporetic moment and Socrates is the midwife. He's a stingray, he's a gaffer and he's a stingray. So that's the philosophical tradition, right? Whereas philosophy begins in wonder, and that will lead you then to theoria which is contemplation. Aristotle says that in Metaphysics One, book Alpha. Now let's just depose this to the religious tradition. In Deuteronomy, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Andrew Hui:
So on the one hand, you have thauma, the Greek sense of wonder, perplexity. That's both Homeric and onwards to Hellenistic philosophy, but yet the monathistic movement, and I would love to hear Nauman's Islamic tradition. What fear or wonder of perplexity is, and wonder is actually huge in "Thousand and One Nights," right? There is this beautiful essay by Roy Mottahedeh at Harvard and Lara Harb at Princeton has written a book about wonder and Arabic literature. So, the fear of the Lord is the beginning. So, what's the difference between piety and inquiry and critique? That's how I would respond to, as pedagogies. Laura has had her hand up for a while, but Nauman also wants to respond.
Alexander Key:
Yeah, I want to go Nauman first, and then Laura because... And, yeah the misunderstanding uncertainty like Nauman, in addition to load you up with questions, in addition to Andrew's, how can that fit with the critically strenuous universalism? Is there a tension there or not?
Professor Naqvi:
Well, to begin with, I'd say this is... I'm not sure how, what I said came across as an identitarian project. It is anything but an identitarian project. I don't think, in fact, I never used the word identity at all. It's a completely... I mean, it's ravaged our discourses and it completely misleads in terms of what actually the person is. There's no person who is identical to themselves. Obviously. So it's not an identitarian project. What I will say is that as far as bewilderment is concerned, I assure you there's nothing more bewildering for the students than to have the idea of progress, to have the idea of the nation-state and of nationalism, to have the idea of the economy and of capitalism. Yeah. And of the idea of religious nationalism, it's like you are taking the rug out from underneath their feet. I mean the ground from underneath their feet.
Professor Naqvi:
Students regularly come up to me and say, "Sir, I'm having an existential crisis." Say, "Congratulations. That's where you need to be." Yeah. I don't think this question of uncertainty... I mean, we've got to take these questions given our historical moment, I think we should take all of these matters existentially. It's not just some kind of mental games that we are playing here. Really speaking, speaking existentially for the students, this is a real experience of bewilderment and wonder. And in fact, just the other day this one student was saying, "Sir, I feel like I'm going insane." As the student said to me. So, this is extremely, actually, it's a extremely agonizing process that they go through, because, don't forget, that a major part of this entire curriculum, and that's also essential to the philosophical sensibility that I said we seek to develop, is this critique of nationalism that runs throughout, and the colonization of religious traditions, which precisely made them unphilosophical, that's the basic concepts.
Professor Naqvi:
I mean, even the concept of God has been nationalized. So people think Allah is the proper name of God. In fact, so in Malaysia, the Supreme Court ruled that non-Muslims cannot use the name Allah. It's extraordinary. Nothing like this has happened in these 1,400 years of history that we have. That's the extent. So, even the concept of God has been destroyed essentially. Has been made unphilosophical, which was the basis, as Andrew, I don't know who else over here, but as Alexander knows, the idea of wajib al-wujud in Avicenna, the idea of God as the necessary being of course over the highest and the most invisible of realities. That's all about wonder, Neoplatonism is all about wonder, this is essentially... A lot of it is in the Hikmah obviously. This is not the opportunity to talk at length about what's in Hikmah, but that's an absolutely essential part of that part of the course. Yeah. I think we need to think about these things existentially, is what I'd say.
Alexander Key:
Yeah. I have a dream where the Humanities Core is entirely consist of the Neoplatonism. Lora?
Lora Burnett:
Hi, thank you for taking my question. I don't want to say it's more a comment than a question, but so let me drop the question. And, then I wanted to note some things that I noticed in both of your presentations that were very similar and see if you can relate those to my question. My question is, and Professor Hui answered it, well you both did.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Lora Burnett:
What role does the business school in the abstract, nevermind the business school, or lack of one, at your particular institution... What role do you understand it to have in shaping the curriculum? In my study of the history of Stanford's curriculum from the dawn of the university to the end of the 1980s, the engineering school held sway over the curriculum for most of Stanford's existence. In the 1980s, it began to be the business school. And you can see the results of the business school's involvement in the shrinking of the required hours allocated to the humanities. So that now, instead of a Western civ program or a Western culture program or different disciplines teach their own version of Western civ, you might get a course for all the freshmen. So that's always my question when there are rethinking of the curriculum in our neoliberal age, where's the business school?
Lora Burnett:
And if it's not in one of those divisions of knowledge, like you both listed the same basic divisions of ... the same ways of thinking. If you don't see the business school on the paper, my hunch is the business school owns the paper that the stuff is written on. That would just be my hunch. But you did from very different pressures. One from a wealthy benefactor who wants you to create a model liberal arts university and the other from the leading public institution of higher education that wants to get value for its dollar and serve the most students possible. Two very different kinds of business school pressures result in a set of core knowledge that obviously matches up to faculty. Your areas of knowledge that you're going to cover are going to match your faculty. You're never going to list an area of knowledge that doesn't match who your faculty are.
Lora Burnett:
So I wanted to ask how the business school and the abstract, or as a bogeyman shapes what faculty you have available to you, what kinds of knowledge you can even think of teaching as a way of thinking. And then I just wanted to say that, especially for Professor Hui, I don't know how aware you are, of how things like wanting the students to have a common textual experience so that they would have something to talk about in common and also worrying that you couldn't teach a particular text, because you didn't have faculty in hand who were experts in that text.
Alexander Key:
Yeah.
Lora Burnett:
That is very ... like that's right out of the 1980s.
Lora Burnett:
I mean those are the similar arguments for a common curriculum and also similar arguments for ... you didn't make the argument that you shouldn't change it, but that was a legitimate source of intransigence among faculty teaching in a Western culture program was, "Well, we can't teach Toni Morrison because none of us are experts in Toni Morrison," whereas responsibly, you better hire an expert in Toni Morrison, which Stanford has done, I assume. So then how does the business school shape the areas of knowledge that you make legible to yourselves as curriculum planners and that you make legible to your students, and how does it shape or limit the kinds of adventures you can take as a curriculum planner and as a teacher?
Alexander Key:
Nauman, the business school. Do you want to go first?
Professor Naqvi:
I personally, as I said, when they ask me to have a business program as a dean, I refused. Yeah. I don't think business schools have any, I don't think they should exist. I mean, they've done, they've done an extraordinary amount of cognitive damage in Pakistan. I imagine it's like that in a lot of other third-world countries. In the '50s, one of the first, actually one of the first schools that was established thanks to the United States here in Pakistan was a business administration school. It's the other big school in my city. It's called the Institute of Business Administration. There's another one in Lahore. It's known as one of Pakistan's best institutions. It called the Lahore University of Management Sciences. I would never work for a university that was called the university of management sciences or which was called the institute of business administration. Really. I'd rather staff than work for a place called such a thing. They're cognitively destructive programs. And as an educator, my concern is cognition. First of all. Yeah. So that's my response to that.
Lora Burnett:
And you mentioned that you didn't know where the skills language was coming from. It comes from the business school. Business schools that are worried about teaching marketable skills or whatever.
Alexander Key:
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. Like where's the business school in the Stanford Humanities Core? Yes. The skills. Yeah, no question about it.
Andrew Hui:
And I'm going to answer this question kind of obliquely by pointing out that The Straits Times, which is the national newspaper of Singapore each year publishes the annual starting salaries of our graduates. And that's how they determine like the ranking or the league table. Right? Ironically, young NUS students are placed at better corporations and our starting salary are higher than those in NUS business school. So, but then we became a victim of our own success because number one, then the rest of NUS got kind of jealous of us. Well, you guys are elite institutions. Of course our students are getting better jobs because there are fewer of you. And then the perverse of logic of neo-liberal universities says, "Oh, okay, well, if Yale-NUS students are doing so well, then we just expand at scale and accessibility and efficiency, therefore more students, but then they don't get the perverse logic. Well, the very reason why Yale, Princeton, Stanford students get the highest-paid jobs because there's so few of them. Right.
Lora Burnett:
Well, there's also a lot of cultural capital that comes with...
Andrew Hui:
There's culture capital and there's also know just signaling, right? What people...
Lora Burnett:
Right? I mean, it's not just supply and demand...
Andrew Hui:
But credentialism right. So, I mean, that's just one small anecdote to think about. Perverse incentives of business and in economics.
Nigel Smith:
It's me. Okay. First of all, I think, I mean, my wife is a is a graduate of the Stanford business school, 30 years ago. And they were teaching poetry apparently in the business school, although she, she then said, but that was for the people who went to do marketing, which is like, not, the necessarily, well, not the most numerate people I think was the implication. I'm not sure I should say these things publicly because it's, a kind of educated hearsay. Two questions. The... So I wasn't educated in a great books way at all in the United Kingdom as is common.
Alexander Key:
Right.
Nigel Smith:
And I was just trying to think what was running through everything that I did, and the answer was form of his historical thinking. On the one hand, a certain amount of philology.
Nigel Smith:
But on the other hand, how to think about causation and you, you might say that's very British and empirical.
Alexander Key:
Mm.
Nigel Smith:
But where is historical thinking in what you presented as an essentially philosophical paradox?
Alexander Key:
Yes.
Nigel Smith:
And the discussion about alienation — necessary alienation and disenchantment.
Alexander Key:
Yeah.
Nigel Smith:
That makes perfect sense to me.
Alexander Key:
Right.
Nigel Smith:
And, and the way to go.
Alexander Key:
Right.
Nigel Smith:
But I, but historical thinking, where is that in the syllabus that you've been talking about? And then secondly, most schools in the United States are trying to globalize their.
Alexander Key:
Yeah.
Nigel Smith:
Their great works course. What, what have you, what does, what should we, what should you tell us?
Andrew Hui:
Let me address this firsthand. Three months ago, we had our 10 year — what is it — external review. And that's precisely what somebody at the University of Chicago, our ... Said, and guilty as charged. This is the necessary sacrifice of a comparative humanities things. They lose all sense of causation, and what you get in Western great books program, which at St. John's is you get historicity. Okay. Aristotle is talking to Plato, responding to, what the predication of forms are. Dante and Milton are taking these epic similes from all of it. And, and Virgil and Homer. Our students are deprived of that consciousness. And it's very sad. And I don't know what to do with it. We try to remedy that by this thing called historical immersion. But historical immersion is more, a deep dive into one segment of history. Whereas I might teach a class on London in the age of Shakespeare, but they don't understand what Chaucer was or what ... so what's the point, right? And so this is a huge deficit in our common curriculum. And people have tried to remedy that. And I mean, it doesn't matter anymore because it will be gone.
Ato Quayson:
But there's another way of teaching causation. ... And that is that each text will be embedded in its historical context. But of course, embedding in historical context is not just direct causal relationship. So it was published in the 1840s. That's... it's a kind of a relationship of both direct causation and the survival of certain elements and certain patterns in the background. If every text, so they are not connected in terms of what you said — Plato was talking to Aristotle talking to — not in that sense, but each text is embedded in such a way that it opens up a portal into ideals of historicization, historicity.
Alexander Key:
Right.
Ato Quayson:
Even though it cannot necessarily be connected to the text before.
Alexander Key:
Right. Right.
Ato Quayson:
But because if you don't embed the text, that is where the students think that they're talking to Mr. Aristotle, because it's not embedded. If it's not properly...
Alexander Key:
Right.
Ato Quayson:
But there are different ways of embedding. There's a mechanical form of embedding, which is okay, let me just memorize the date and a more active... And that will then import the principles of historicity into thinking - Eric Auerbach!
Andrew Hui:
My favorite, yeah.
Ato Quayson:
Yeah. He, he, he gives
Andrew Hui:
My favorite. He's my man.
Ato Quayson):
Historicity through different modes of...
Alexander Key:
[Inaudible]
Marisa Galvez:
No, I'm just going to follow up on that. That I'm totally for — I think you should start with what you don't want to do, which is like a tokenism of different texts. Because then you say, what ideology are you following then? There's, that's coming from some, right. And then you don't. And so to follow ... he still works situated with the networks, works, situated constellations. You could do something like Greco, Arabic traditions...
Alexander Key:
Mediterranean
Marisa Galvez:
Dante ... like Alexander works on, but it would be a thicker, more robust constellation works where you would see relationality and then you would move into something else, with Rhonda as like kind of like, this kind of a certain period it's and make it interdisciplinary. That's so much richer. And the same time you can have diversity, but it's not just like where you have an arbitrariness... If you take away all historicity.
Alexander Key:
Yeah.
Marisa Galvez:
That is, that has — that's politically detrimental.
Andrew Hui:
Yeah.
Marisa Galvez:
And would be damaging for any kind of global canon.
Andrew Hui:
Let me just pick up at one point we were saying, which is tokenism and I'm afraid, I've lovely, wonderful, warm colleagues, but it's always about the politics of representation. And one of our guiding principles is about diversity inclusion. And so there's always horse trainings is okay, we need a queer text. We need something from Africa. We need something from Malay. And so it just becomes this hodgepodge. And so, because it's a team type class, there is no kind of master architect. And so that's why some ... I critique it is like our curriculum is kind of incoherent.
Ato Quayson:
But you mentioned teaching "Mrs. Dalloway" and "Season of Migration to the North." Those are two great texts for modeling bewilderment.
Andrew Hui:
Yes, absolutely.
Ato Quayson:
So, "Season of Migration to the North" may have gotten as a token representation of — but what it is allows you to network it, to base it in dialogue with, with Virginia...
Andrew Hui:
They're both London.
Ato Quayson:
They also both London, but they're also not texts that, that cover their meanings, like in any straightforward manner. So that is a way to, as it were, to square the representational idea that we need to have a queer text with the wider and more profound principle of what is this being network — what is it embedded in. So that if you have to choose, let's say an African American text, you would choose Morrison's "Beloved" and that will destroy any simple ideas you might have of what African American writing looks like and so on and so forth. So not to dismiss the need for some forms of representation, but what is taken as representative, that's where you can use, that's what you can use to do the, the work of wonder...
Andrew Hui:
Pedagogically, students don't like to be perplexed. They want, they want the hand-out. They want, you to, they want a lot of hand-holding. And I get that as, as a first-year student, because then you can ... curriculum. How can you make transparent that I, one of the learning goals is perplexity. If you make that transparent...
Ato Quayson:
If you make that transparent. That's what the thing — we want to do it, but you cannot, the administration, the newspapers will pick it up. I mean, it's going to be crazy.
Andrew Hui:
Yeah.
Ato Quayson:
That's what I think they're doing. Oh, I hope that, but you cannot say that this class, that this course that you're taking, you're going to leave more confused.
Andrew Hui:
Right. Exactly.
Andrew Hui:
Yeah. One of my colleagues says: One of my learning goals that I want my students to is keep them, keep them awake at night and says ... this perplexity and that doesn't translate well, for the administrators or business schools.
Alexander Key:
Okay. So we're getting close to time, but I want to give Nauman — not only did Nauman have his hand up, but also I wanted to ask him his take on the chronology question. So Nauman, if we have like a few different modes, there's the mode of embedding deep into a context that opens a portal in, in Ato's words, there's the broad chronological sweep mode that, that we've talked about as, as problematic. There's the, constellations, of texts around areas like the Mediterranean that, that we've talked about. Then there was also the idea like via figura of picking out forms, like specific forms that come out of context that can be pulled out, maybe as universal forms. So there are all these kind of different ways of thinking about doing something with the series. And yeah I guess — what do you think?
Professor Naqvi:
Well, you know, so both of the courses, "What is modernity?" and "Modernity in South Asia" are, on the, the historical social thought requirement and they're interdisciplinary, but all of the material in there is historical. And one of the aims is historical thinking. But I do think that the idea of progress once again, gets in the way of historical thinking. Yeah. I mean ... you have to start out by, that's why the first module, once again, is a critique of the idea of progress. So we can start thinking historically. So one of the things that it seeks to get across, I mean the historical range covered in these two courses is the past 500 years, roughly. Especially the past 200 years and 250 ... in the case of South Asia. So that's what they primarily focus on.
Professor Naqvi:
And it's both global and regional, as I said. Want to get across the idea of historical sedimentation, also want to get across the idea that thinking in terms of these, as Reinhart Koselleck says, history as in this collective singular, which is absolutely characteristic of modernity. And of course, characteristic of the nation-state that's you can't get either of, them without getting everybody to think of history in this collective singular as a collective singular subject. So we try to undo that and try to communicate a sense of history as a process of ongoing sedimentation, which is actually much more once again, that's an idea from Koselleck. We don't get them to read Koselleck. We actually do it. I mean, the material that they read is not that difficult. It's — except for a couple of chapters towards the end of "What is Modernity?" which they get from [inaudible]. Because that's the hardest thing to get across is to undo this idea of religion, which everybody takes for granted now. Anyway, so the point being that there's a range of ways in which historical thinking is part of the curriculum that I was outlining.
Alexander Key:
Tremendous. Thank you. Nauman, that's brilliant. And like to say that the great advantage of having a workshop series is this conversation is not finished nor do we want to finish it. So we'll, be back in January with two more speakers and the same people in the room. So thank you all ever so much for ... the thing. Thank you Nauman, thank you Andrew.
Andrew Hui:
Thanks everybody. Good night.
Professor Naqvi:
Buh bye.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:32:39]