A colleague reminded me that Einstein once said that if he only had an hour to solve a problem, he would spend all but five minutes making sure he had the right question. The right question! The tough question! He went on to argue that it is not enough to teach students merely to ask questions. We have to help them learn to ask the right and hard questions. With that I have no disagreement. The question my colleague next raised, and rightly so, is whether it is also required that students have the ability not only to ask but to answer as well, and then be courageous enough to act on those answers. In my mind, maybe. It’s the ideal, but not necessarily always the essential. To support his position, he cites Teddy Roosevelt that when a decision is to be made, “the best thing we can do is make the right decision. The next best thing we can do is make the wrong decision. The worst thing we can do is to make no decision.” Here, too, I can’t disagree. But, I think a “maybe” is in order, for I don’t think the questioner, answerer, and actor need be the same person. However, I would argue that the asking of the tough question, especially the public airing of an unpopular question, makes the person no less a target for tomatoes than the person who answers and acts on the answer. Posing the tough question, then, is no less a decision, a hard decision, a courageous and decisive action, than is coming up with answers and acting on them.

 And, I know when I go on campuses and offer workshops on teaching , I tell the participants emphatically that I come with questions for them to ponder. Asking questions is a push for change. All you have to do is to ask the right, hard question, ask before you have an answer, see a situation differently, see a problem from a new angle, and suddenly everybody’s perceptions and vantage points changes. It causes everyone to reframe the issue.

 I was not taught to ask questions in my undergraduate classes. I was taught to answer the professor’s questions. I learned to ask my own questions, to become a quester, at the family dinner table by my father. “Ask your ‘whys’,” he always would tell us. “It’s more important than just copying down the teachers’ ‘whats.’” Or, he’d tell us, “Don’t wait for other people to hand you a problem to solve, learn to see the problem on your own.” It’s like what David Brook wrote in a recent editorial in the New York Times about Iraq and the entire Arab world. Whenever the hard question is asked, you shake people up as much as an earthquake that registers 9 on the Richter scale. Ask that hard question and people squirm. Pose the tough question and people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities open up. It’s a new day. There’s a new world out there. A new reality is considered. Business as usual is no longer acceptable. Smug complacency is less comfortable. Silence and acceptance is less acceptable. The hard question poses a threat to all the glass objects in its proximity. That’s why it’s not particularly amazing to think of why there is often much resistance to listening to any tough, break through question. The tough questions are unsettling, often setting off a string of moans and grumbles and shouts and screams. Some people feel anxious, some frightened, some attacked, some depressed, some confused, some alarmed, some ugly and cruel, and some just flip out because of the annoying questions. Those burr-under-the-saddle questions ask us to dream as we hadn’t dreamed before, to hope as we dared not to hope, to do as we’ve not done before, to get unstuck in our traditions, to relinquish our vested interests, to tear down our confining and protective walls, to open the door and come out from their emotional bunkers, to reconsider the proclaimed right of our positions, to consider alternatives, and imagine a world beyond. To be sure, things don’t go smoothly, or come out wonderfully, or even work just because someone asked the hard question. But, this I know: Nothing changes without someone provoking with the tough, hard question. This is true of academia, sometimes especially in academia, no less than it is of world outside the Ivory Tower.

Make it a good day.

      –Louis–

 A friend of mine came over to the house the other day to stay with me as I recovered from my operation. He’s a businessman, a very successful businessman. We got into a discussion about the University and education in general. That was good since it helped me to start getting my juices flowing as I get ready for my return to the classroom on Monday after a nearly four week absence.

 In the course of our exchange he said something to the effect of, “I was having an argument with a friend of mine about the University. I took the position that the major purpose of the University to prepare students for the workplace. I’m sure you’ll agree with that assessment.”

 “You’ve got the wrong guy,” I answered. “I don’t buy that. If I did, the University would be merely a white-collar vo-tech school.”

 “Then,” he asked with a tone that combined surprise, slight annoyance, and lots of curiosity, “what are you supposed to be doing over there if not to give them credentials to get a job?”

 “I’d get my soapbox if Susan would allow me to get on it,” I comically answered.

 “No, I’m serious.”

 “Okay. I’m supposed to be scratching my head and helping students learn how to do the same thing.”

 “What are you talking about? We’re not talking about lice. Be serious!”

 “I am. Asking questions and teaching students how to ask questions and to get the nerve to ask questions,” I replied with a smile, “that’s my job! That’s why the University is here!! If I had to write a two sentence mission statement for the University, one sentence would be ‘our mission is provoke fresh thinking about and new approaches to everything by helping students to freely and fearlessly ask questions.” The going words are ‘freely’ and ‘fearlessly.’”

 “That’s all?”

 I told him something like this, but please don’t hold me to each word. “That’s all? That enough! That’s everything! It’s curiosity, wonder, experimentation, imagination, creativity, innovation, invention, growth, development, change, achievement, success, progress. Where do you think all the scientific advancements, industrial developments, technological achievements, and hordes of innovation and invention that you rely on in your business came from? They didn’t appear in some form of spontaneous creation. They came from people who had the audacity to ask first simple little challenging questions like ‘I wonder. What if.’ What do you think is the foundation of great art? It’s the questions the artists were asking. All social, political, economic theories, philosophies, theologies, policies and programs are rooted in questions. Ask questions, and the horizons are always broadening. Ask questions and your mind is always open and your heart is always receptive. Ask questions, especially of yourself and you’ll never get presumptuous, arrogant, self-righteous, and stagnant. Ask questions and you’ll never get stale or stuck in a paralyzing rut. Instead you’ll always be fresh and alert, and you’ll bring a freshness into everything you’re doing. Ask questions and you’ll always be independent and think for yourself. You’ll never be a mindless drone or a zombie-like follower. Ask questions, and you’ll value truth over mythology, ethic and morality over bias and prejudice, reflection over presumption, investigation over assumption, reason over ‘that’s the way it always been done’ sentiment. Ask questions and you’ll develop the imagination, innovation, and creativity. Stop asking questions and you’ve stopped learning; stop learning and you’re stopped in your tracks. And do you know which the most important questions are?”

 “It’s a good thing you didn’t get on a soapbox,” he smirked. “But, ‘no’ to your question. I can’t wait for you to tell me.”

 “The annoying ones. The pain-in-the-ass ones. The hard ones. The unpopular, provoking, uncomfortable, inconvenient, controversial, politically incorrect, and challenging ones. The ones that don’t blindly accept accepted answers. The ones that get under peoples’ skin are really all about: asking those burr-under-the-saddle, fly-in-the-ointment questions.” The ones that cause tomatoes to be thrown. That’s what ‘academic freedom’ and tenure are supposed to be all about: letting us do our job while protecting us from having to take hemlock.”

 “Never thought about it that way,” he said to his credit.

 “Please do. What do you think all the blue and red division around us is about? It’s about open-minded people, on both sides of the isle, asking questions and close-minded people, on both sides of the isle, not liking or not wanting the questions asked. I once had a parent assault me way back in the early seventies after her son had told her about a discussion we had had in class by saying ‘I don’t care if you get my son to ask questions, but there are only certain answers I want him to have.’ If I can get students to question my answers rather than merely answer my questions the way I want; if I can get them to learn to ask their own questions and challenge me; if I can get them to take a chance of fearlessly using their own hearts, minds and souls freely; if I can get them to have the courage to openly inquire; if I can stir their inquisitiveness, imagination, and creativity, I’ve done my job. I’ve left them asking

Make it a good day.

      –Louis–

Well, I’m still here. The surgery last week was successful. The cancerous prostate is out and so is all the cancer. The doctor’s used the word “cured.” Damn, that’s a sweet sounding word. Bless those annual physicals and caring, conscientious physicians. Now, I’ll be recuperating off campus for about another three weeks under the watchful and loving eye of my Susan who has mutated into a combined faithful friend, devoted companion, loving mother, caring nurse, and a steely-eyed, unyielding drill instructor. I have been such an undemanding good patient that it hurts, and have been uttering an endless string of obediently “yes, ma’am.”

Since my diagnosis last November, and even more so now, I have been facing my own mortality. I have realized that life is far more tenuous than anyone of us might or want to think. At some time, I had placed my hand over my chest, had felt my heartbeat, had understood that it is the sound of my life-clock counting down, had known it would some day stop and that I can’t do a thing about that. With the suddenly realization that I don’t have the luxury of throwing away a single, precious second, I found myself pondering the age-old questions of the meaning of life and what I do. I’ve mused about why I’m here and what is my greater purpose in the grand scheme of things. So many of us, most of us, so often look for the type of answers that are as grandiose and complicated as that scheme. We simply dismiss the simple possibility that there may be simple answers. Yet, as Newton said, Mother Nature does like simplicity, and following his Law of Parsimony, maybe the answers are simply found in that something that you truly like to do, that something that truly makes you happy, that something that stirs your passion and keeps you going, that something that gives you a sense of purpose and meaning, that something that makes you feel great about what you’re doing and about who you are, that something that has the true answers in your heart, that something that is incredibly rewarding, that something that keeps you hanging on, that something which keeps you free.

Most people don’t like jolting questions, academics included, even though we pronounce that we teach students how to ask them. Most people like answers, and if they don’t get easy, emotionally satisfying, suddenly bathed in bright light, burst of divine vision answers, their eyes acquire a glaze, they drift off into some dreamland, or their lips begin to twist as they prepare to defend to the death whatever it is they do–or don’t do. Nevertheless, my answers I pose in the form of questions. They’re “raise your hand if you feel you can get more out of what you do” questions. They’re tough, honest questions. They’re getting to the essence of what really matters questions. They are risky “listen carefully to your heart” questions. They are “do you hear destiny calling you” questions. They are “this is what I should be doing with my life” questions. They are my “when” questions:

When are we going to heed Martin Luther King’s word: “Our lives begin to end on the day we become silent about things that matter.”

When are we going to stand up and shout that, mission statements and glowing words to the contrary, we do not create a climate for students to learn about their own meaning, purpose, and mission in life?

When are we going to condemn the continuation of what I’ll call “false achievement” perpetuated by an approach “We compare, we compete. That’s all we ever do” that leaves students feeling isolated and alone, that destroys any concept of community?

When are we going to scream out that our reward and recognition systems cause a great deal of moral and ethical disconnection and contradiction between personal and academic lives both for students and faculty?

When are we going to yell about our restrictions, avowals to the contrary, on innovative teaching and bold new directions in the classroom?

When are we going to stop being silent that the real purpose of an education is not merely to transmit information, but to transform people, to help students learn how to use that information as a source and means of self-inspiration, self-development, self-transformation, respect for themselves and others, and to improve the world we live in.

When are we going to loudly demand that we expunge debilitating and often paralyzing “learned fear” and “acquired aloneness” from our academic culture for both the students and faculty?

When are we going to stop accepting a denigrating level of conformity in virtually every facet of our lives rather than exercise the individuality that is the very essence of who we each are?

When are we going to loudly demand that we develop an educational approach for “strategic achievement that nurtures relationships with others and identifies a purpose cause beyond oneself, that education should be defined primarily are the capacity to care about and to be cared about, to love and to be loved?

When are we going to shout that an education be about the moral development and character growth of students, not just preparing them to get a job.

When are we going to proclaim that the most important question we can teach students to ask is: “What can I do for you?”

When are we going to actively create a campus culture of welcome, of support and encouragement, of respect for and love of and caring of each and every student?

When are we going to shout that an education is a way of life, not an amassed amount of information, not an entry “union card” for a job?

When are we going to realize that the lifelong lessons inherent in a “strategic education” of respecting oneself and others, being empathetic, caring about others, and contributing to the well-being of others are far more important than any grade, GPA, or academic honor?

When are we going to stop focusing so much on what we are doing that we lose sight of where we’re going?

When are we going to realize that love–that warmth, that gladness, that encouragement, that embrace, that empathy, that otherness, that awareness, that sensitivity–is the one powerful, enduring, delicate force that brings real meaning to our everyday academic lives?

When?

Make it a good day.

–Louis–