Class dismissed!

After another personal blow-up in philosophy, I took the only out: To shout like Jehovah and declare the end had come.

By David Alford

Oct 22, 1999 | I completely stopped a philosophy class in its tracks two days ago; I blew the whistle, shut down the factory and sent everybody home. It was a godly act, like an expulsion from the garden or a devastating flood, with no recourse and no mercy. There would be no more business as usual.

The class began in the typical, non-directive way I've been using lately. Two students who had volunteered to lead the day's discussion collected the questions, based on the reading assignment, that everybody had written on little slips of paper. We've used this method for about four weeks now, relatively successfully. Everybody was acting like Socrates. I made a couple of announcements and then took a student seat while Selena and Roberta sorted through the questions. The topic was Renaissance humanism, particularly all the big names in early astronomy and physics: Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo. I did notice that six students were absent, including Nikki and Dan, oddly, the two hardcore scientists.

"The first question is this," Selena read off a slip: "Why was the church so threatened by these men?" Standard question. No buzz in the room. Students lounged around in the circle we have adopted to replace the sterile rows.

"They challenged the old worldview." Somebody finally said it, and Roberta did her job by asking, "What's a worldview?"

Karl, stirred easily by anything that even remotely challenges Christianity, pulled himself up in his chair. Hair slicked back with a wet combed look, always slouching in the latest baggy fashion, he approaches everything with light disdain. Once when I had digressed into a current event that precipitated a wildly irrelevant bit of bantering and had then called us back to the topic, Karl had said, "This one's on you, Alford."

Columbia College sits in the middle of an intense Bible belt, and every class has at least one and often as many as 10 militants whose defense of the faith is almost unbearably predictable. Karl was an interesting case, though, usually trying not to appear doctrinaire. But this day he looked ready for combat.

A sincere young woman named Lessie kept the dialogue sweet by saying, "A worldview is the set of assumptions people make about life, including assumptions about the nature of the universe, God, all that kind of thing. Copernicus and the others made it seem like the earth was no longer the center of the universe."

It was very clearly stated, but I was just barely paying attention, the discussion was such stock stuff. Somebody else muttered, "Yeah, the church didn't like it that the universe might be dehumanized."

"That's not it," a young woman named Angela countered. "The church was already 'dehumanized.' They didn't want the universe de-deified!" She was mildly triumphant, pleased with her word coinage. I started paying slightly closer attention. A couple of people repeated 'de-deified.'

"How long did it take the church to get around to admitting that Galileo was right, about 500 years?" Nate asked archly, watching Karl. I started thinking, "Here we go again."

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