My Dean has challenged her faculty by coming up with what she calls “The Giraffe Award,” to be given to the A & S faculty member who sticks her or his neck out the farthest.  It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, among her faculty picks up the gauntlet.  I know that I did.   I hope she means it because I put my neck way out there, placing my exposed nape on the chopping block in the Holocaust class.  Briefly, with a gulp, and in the spirit of Joseph Campbell, I added to what I had planned for the class in order to have a class that was waiting out there for me and the students.  After struggling whether “to do or not to do” for the couple of years, I got over my reluctance, got past my resistance, ramped up my determination, made the commitment, and dove in.  Beyond what I already do in class for the students to have a visceral and meaningful experience, to “de-intellectualize” and “de-statisticalize” an event, a description of which, as Elie Wiesel said, defies language, my additional instructions to them were simple, but profound and daring.  In order to  have a slight chance “to feel and experience” what we’re watching and reading, I challenged them to wear on their chest a bright, yellow, large, noticeable Jewish star with the word “Jude” boldly written on it whenever they were awake and wherever they went.  In addition to keeping a daily “prejudice journal,” they now have to keep a daily “star response” journal to record the responses of others and of themselves.  For the last four weeks, they, at least, most of them, have courageously and heroically been wearing it on campus, out in the Valdosta community, back home:  to classes, on dates, to the bars, at parties, to sorority and fraternity gatherings, to social events, to ball games, to the stores, to church, among family and friends; some were allowed by their employers to wear it at work; some wore it at personal and family celebrations; one wore it to a job interview (she actually got the job on the spot because she did, although she can’t wear it on the floor}. One young A & S “non-giraffe” professor, shaking his head and smiling, said to one of the students, “Well, that’s Louis.  I wish I could do something like that, but he’s had tenure almost as long I’ve been alive.”  As the student reported back to me, she asked a barrage of questions in her journal entry, “I am learning far much more about the Holocaust I couldn’t get from watching films or reading books or even listening to guest speakers.  Don’t you all have something called ‘academic freedom’ to do what you think needs doing for us to learn?  Why is he so scared?  Why is he obviously holding back?  Why isn’t he giving us the all his insight and experience?  Why isn’t he being creative and imaginative to bring …..alive.  He doesn’t have the nerve to do the hard stuff.  Why?”  From the mouths of proverbial babes.

Simple questions; complicated and complex answers.  I’ll just ask what PBS’ “Declining By Degrees” asks.  How many of us professors, public and private bravado not withstanding, have the nerve to take the condom off our classrooms and stop practicing safe teaching?  How many of us are willing to tackle  huge, complex, sensitvie, and controversial subjects in a risky but meaningful way.  How many of us shrink away however we beat and inflate our “academic freedom” chests?   What the heck are we here for, to buckle under to the ever-increasing pressure to teach to some useless standard assessment test, to concentrate on being assessed, to focus on weighty, confining, quantitative  academic standards, to hand out grades, to credentialize, to get tenure and promotion?   No.  the real test is to explore, not to test.  The real test is to be meaningful, not to grade.  The real test is, as one student said, to create a “revolution inside,” to be an agent of change, not to fill in a bubble sheet.  The real test is to endow a student with a tenured love for learning, not to guarantee us a tenured job.  Sure it is hard, the hard stuff always is. And, it may not be fun, but it’s the hard stuff that’s the most fulfilling and meaningful.  And, I ask, to paraphrase Hillel, if not us, who?  If not now, when?   And, you know what?  It’s working.  You should read the student’s journal entries.  I’ll give you one typical reflection:  “After yesterday and being truly bothered by wearing the star, I have noticed myself trying to cover it up a little bit more. However, I think this makes it even more noticeable. Either that or I am more aware of people looking at it now. When I got coffee today, the woman who was making it asked something I had not heard before, and not just why I was wearing it. I explained anyway, but she asked how I felt having to wear it. And I replied to her that it “sucks.” It is not fun to be stared at and I do not appreciate the attention I get from it.  I am beginning to understand and get it and I got to do it then.  I left realizing that I am supposed to feel like an outcast.  I have a whole new feeling about alienation. ”

I find myself being carried along by the momentum; I find myself sighing a sigh of accomplishment that this project just may be doing what an education is supposed to do to me and them:  grant the deepest, most emotional, richest, longest-lasting, and most fulfilling sense of meaningfulness.

Louis