The Dakota Student

Issue date: 10/12/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Michael Thomas

For many college students, coming to school, listening to a long lecture from a boring professor is commonplace. The relationship between that student and professor remains, for the most part, a one-way street.

But according to Father James Schall, a professor of political theory at Georgetown University, the professor is just as dependent on the student as the student is on the professor.

In his lecture Monday night, Schall approached the small gathering of students and faculty with three quotes form Plato, G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis.

"The relationship they serve is of good habits and a willingness to learn what is true," Schall said. "A professor has a particular status of rank and tenure that implies authority. It says that he is qualified by someone other than himself to teach and to prove himself and his qualifications."

He asked the audience, "How can you trust a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant? It's a fiduciary relationship, and it is the same with a professor."

Shall went on to say that it is the professor's love to teach and his love to spread knowledge that is the true payment and that being a faculty member in higher education carries with it a sense of "honorism," which, according to Schall, is "higher than justice."

In his lecture, Schall went on to define a professor as someone who is "consistently posing questions and systematically conveying those questions to the student. We begin our search for knowledge only with perplexities," he continued, "The university is the place where things are asked" and where students are "involved in finding where those answers can be given."

As he continued to note infamous people such as Yves Simone and Plato, Schall continued to explain how a student's presence in the classroom is just as much part of the learning process as is the professor giving the lecture. Schall also noted that while the experience of attending an institution of higher education is of great "importance" it is not meant to be a lifetime event.

"The world and knowledge of the world are different," Schall said. "We are not to be student princes or princesses all of our lives, life is larger that the university. The professor student relationship extends beyond just learning anything from anyone, students have to pursue their own lives and hopefully their quest for knowledge will not end,"

Continued...

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