Monday presentation discussed role of professors, students

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," He added that the best learning happens not during college, but "long after. But we need a beginning; we need an inspiration to incite that pursuit … We are here to discover what is already there … knowledge is not owned by anyone it is free and it is freeing, that is the central meaning of a liberal education. What counts is what knowledge is passed through the mind of the professor and student and not merely transcribed on a paper or computer. Learning and knowledge and the university experience is an adventure begun, not a period ended."

Schall also noted that it is the job of the professor to understand the student and to realize that it is the student who "strives to learn" regardless of how smart they are or how high their IQ is.

"It is a dull professor," he said, "that does not realize that the students who are eager to learn are not always the one with the highest qualifications or the highest IQ."

He continued that the idea that students are all different inspires the idea that the relationship between student and professor is "a spiritual one" and that it that relationship that helps to answer the questions, "how do we know what we know?"

Schall's lecture, entitled "Why Professors Need Students and Other Philosophical Tales," was sponsored by the Honors Program as well as the Office of Instructional Development, School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and the St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center.

Schall also authored the book, "Another Sort of Learning."