Amy Laura Hall is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University Divinity School. She is the author of Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love; Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction; and Writing Home, With Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers.
AGLSP TEACHING AWARD – 2024
Liberal Studies: A Summons to Laugh at Midday
Amy Laura Hall, Duke University
The present remarks were presented as part of the Annual Conference of the
Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, October 10, 2024.
In the past 25 years of teaching at Duke, I have thought offhand and casually about the word “liberal.” Thank you so much for the honor and the prompt to consider a basic question. Given my instructions to keep my address to ten minutes, this was also a summons to be concise. What does it mean to teach liberal studies?
About a decade ago Donna Zapf, Anne Whisnant’s predecessor as Director of Graduate Liberal Studies at Duke, asked me to serve as the faculty speaker at the Duke GLS graduation service. The only other time I had spoken to a group convened for graduation had been as the student speaker for my own college graduation at Emory University in 1990. My words to my peers assembled at Emory in 1990 were urgent. I chose as the opening quotation words about hell that I incorrectly attributed to Dante. “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.” I proceeded in 1990 to tell my generation stuck there in their seats waiting for their diplomas that they were all headed for the hottest parts of hell unless they were determined to save the entire planet. “Education for the sake of education is a luxury we can no longer afford,” I told them. I actually said those words.
Decades later, as I prepared to speak with students and their families at Duke, what I most wanted to convey was the freedom to study with no pressure of utility. I knew from some of my own students in the program that Graduate Liberal Studies was their first opportunity truly to study freely, to pursue their curiosity without a sense that they had to justify their very existence in a classroom. I also knew that some of their family members there in the room wondered why these graduates had sought a degree with liberal in the title.
What would possess a person to seek out liberality, to study liberally, to read, write, and view gratuitously?
As I prepared this address to you, my colleagues, I asked friends from high school in West Texas, friends from across the academy, and people from churches I’ve served for words they associate with the term “liberal studies.” Here are some of their replies.
Well rounded
Grounded
Broad
Enlightened
Transparent
Critical
Ethical
Integrated
Imaginative
Unrestrained
Anything goes
Accepting
Unencumbered
Unbridled
Unrestricted
No rules
Unruled
Dangerous
Useless
Freed
Free
Freedom
Generous, as in liberal amounts of butter!
Something for which I am known in my teaching at Duke is close reading. This is not an exceptional pedagogical method, but my choice of items is often off the beaten path. I choose items for their effect as a kind of collage.
Here are three items I recommend as a collage, to think about our vocation of liberal studies:
First is a cartoon by artist Frank Cotham. It appeared in the New Yorker Magazine.
“Go find out why a peasant is giggling at midday,” the king orders. The driver of the coach looks sideways, with Frank Cotham’s signature cartoon eyes, as the king scowls. With a few lines, Cotham has indicated that even the horses are disgusted with the king. The man digging up potatoes in the field with a rake has paused, the words “Har! Har!” above his gleefully laughing face.
You can read more about Frank Cotham in interviews. Writing for Memphis Magazine in 2019, Chris McCoy notes: “No one in the Cotham family was an artist. And at first, young Frank wasn’t sure if he was, either. ‘I remember a teacher holding up a picture before the class that I had colored with crayons, as an example of how not to do it.’”[1]
The second item worth a close reading is a 2015 essay by political scientist Shauna Wilton, titled “A Very Useful Engine: The Politics of Thomas and Friends.”[2] Wilton explains the history of the Thomas the Tank Engine series, noting that the built world of Sodor was created by a clergyman in the 1940s. In the world of Sodor, the greatest praise is to be useful. Wilton explains that “the engines have no say over their collective or individual futures; they have little if any free will. Like the children watching them, they are powerless in the face of a greater authority that sets the rules, rewards good behavior, and punishes those that deviate.” “The message then,” she notes, “for the young citizens in the making in the audience is to follow the rules, do a good job, not complain, and hope for future rewards.” Wilton concludes: “what is missing, in my opinion, from this vision of citizenship is the ability to be critical, to question authority, and to participate as equals in the building of the community.”
In case you are not privy to the global phenomenon of Thomas, you may read details of episodes in Cezary Jan Strusiewicz’s “Thomas the Tank Engine Lives in a Totalitarian Dystopia,” including, in “The Sad Story of Henry,” “an engine refuses to go out of the tunnel because of the rain, [and] Hatt actually gives orders to brick him alive in the tunnel.”[3] Or in Jessica Roake’s “Thomas the Imperialist Tank Engine,” where she relates that on Sodor, “the consequences of defiance are illustrated in parables like ‘Hiro Helps Out.’” Roake tells readers that “Hiro, an Asian immigrant (he is voiced by Japanese actor Togo Igawa, and the images of his island home mirror traditional ukiyo-e woodcuttings)…oversteps his authority” by trying to assist Sir Topham Hatt in managing the rails. “When Sir Topham Hatt finds that Hiro has appointed himself middle-manager, he is furious (‘I am controller of the railway!’).” The episode has as the resolution, “Hiro must go to each individual train to prostrate himself and explain that only Sir Topham Hatt gives orders. He apologizes to each train for giving them instruction, saying ‘I was wrong. Sir Topham Hatt didn’t want that at all.’”[4]
Liberal studies may be a sustained antidote to the built world of Sodor. Liberal studies may be a world to which former, useful Tools of Sodor may escape and discover new ways of living. Even working within high pressure settings like Duke, we may discover, as Shauna Wilton recommends, a “say over” our “collective or individual futures,” and claim our “free will.”
Finally, consider an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education from July 2023 by Emma Pettit. The article appeared online with the title “Is college for puppets?”[5] Emma Pettit wrote about the effort to save the puppetry program at West Virginia University; “puppetry,” she explains, “is built on paradox. Toys taken seriously. Wooden faces that convey emotion. Dead things that are made alive.” I recommend her detailed research interviewing scholars in the field of puppetry and puppetry studies and students drawn to the seriously challenging whimsy of their work. She faces head-on the charge by administrators like West Virginia President Gordon Gee that there are fields of study that are too liberal, too impractical, too frivolous for higher education. She asks, “What is lost when a small, idiosyncratic program disappears?” She answers with her own close reading of the people learning and teaching there in West Virginia, a region itself seen by some to be small and idiosyncratic.
I recommend the chutzpah of the peasant in Frank Cotham cartoon. Teach, learn, read, create; not for that king evaluating critically from his (or her)em-bossedcarriage. Who knows? The driver, maybe even the horses, might join us.
Notes
[1] Chris McCoy, “The Well-Drawn World of Frank Cotham,” Memphis Magazine, June 2019. https://memphismagazine.com/features/well-drawn-world-of-frank-cotham/
[2] Shauna Wilton, “A Very Useful Engine: The Politics of Thomas and Friends,” in The Politics of Popular Culture: Negotiating Power, Identity, and Place, ed. Tim Nieguth (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015), 19-27.
[3] “6 Insane (But Convincing) Theories on Children's Pop Culture,” Cracked, February 2012. https://www.cracked.com/article_19673_6-insane-but-convincing-theories-childrens-pop-culture.html
[4] Jessica Roake, “Thomas the Imperialist Tank Engine: The Not-so-Hidden Subtexts of the Popular Children’s Show,” Slate, July 26, 2011, paragraphs 5-6. https://slate.com/culture/2011/07/thomas-the-tank-engine-the-popular-children-s-show-is-sadly-nostalgic-for-british-imperialism.html.
[5] Emma Pettit, “Fuzz Cut: Can a Puppetry Major Survive a Flagship’s Financial Crisis? Should It?,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 2023. https://www.chronicle.com/article/fuzz-cut