A better and more productive response begins with us — faculty members and administrators. We cannot expect a skeptical populace to reverse course of its own accord. The onus is on us to better convey the value that a robust intellectual life adds to the public good. And we need to begin by respecting our students (and the wider public) not just as persons but as the arbiters of knowledge that they have become. Specifically, we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow. Moreover, our respect must be genuine. Students have keen hypocrisy sensors and do not like being patronized. Respecting students as thinkers means we need to reveal, not hide, the intellectual journeys we have taken, and make transparent the intellectual transformations we have undergone. Respecting students as thinkers thus involves a number of changes, including meeting students where they are, so that they trust us to develop their intellectual skills and expand their knowledge base; balancing our elitist values with democratic and more widely achievable goals; and, perhaps hardest of all, lowering the lofty opinion we hold of ourselves and accepting the public obligation that our privileged position entails.
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I am not asking for more entertainment and less substance in our classrooms. I am asking for a paradigm shift in how we approach our students that parallels the paradigm shift in the broader culture. I am asking instructors to see the two questions that the new epistemology emblazons across the front of every classroom — "So what?" And "Who cares?" — And then to adjust their teaching accordingly.
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