November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

The People’s Professor: Community Education Goes Ivy League

(Page 7 of 7)

January-February 2009
by Courtney E. Martin 
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Dalton looks up to the top of the lecture hall, where David sits nodding. “I’ll be on an island far away, but if you want to know what I’m thinking, ask David,” he says. “That is, if he isn’t out in the hills somewhere searching for Thoreau.”

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“And Ben and Gale Armstead, it is impossible to conceive of saying good-bye to you. I wish I could stay here with you.”

Just as tears start to well up in more than one pair of eyes, the professor abruptly shifts gears. “As we’ve discussed before, Hannah Arendt saw the diagnosis for our diseased world as thoughtlessness, a lack of moral imagination certainly, and, above all, a lack of caring.

“The remedy? To construct a caring community, to empathize, to connect.” Dalton then invites a senior to discuss her thesis about Danish gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. When she’s finished, he adds, “The story of the Danes is the story of us if we will have it that way. We must transform the banality of evil into the banality of empathy.”

As the audience chews on his last Arendt invocation, he ends: “This is my last plug: I beg you all to consider teaching as a profession. It’s a profession at which we can join each other and connect at any age. If you have any thought of giving thanks to me, I want to insist, here and now, that it has always been me who should give thanks to you. I owe you so much, and it is for that reason that I can leave with this feeling in my heart that we must,” and again for emphasis, “that we must see that we are all part of one another.”

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  • Victoria 4/30/2009 1:19:08 PM

    How surprised I was to come across this article as I was preparing a report on how to create authentic small groups in a church setting. I had settled down to a break from the work and was excited to see that the role of authenticity in relationships and providing a place to share and appreciate different perspectives was not just some idealistic idea but one that Dennis Dalton put into practice to the benefit of so many. A wonderful piece of wisdom from outside the church walls that we can all learn from. Thanks for sharing this story!

  • Keith Goetzman 1/27/2009 2:16:12 PM

    Joanna,
    Thanks for sharing your personal recollections of Professor Dalton, and for noting the gender imbalance in the sources used. You've helped correct it with your comments.
    Keith Goetzman
    Senior editor

  • Joanna 1/16/2009 8:56:52 AM

    This article captures the beauty that is Dennis Dalton. I attended his Modern Political Movements class in 1979 as a first year student at Barnard and continued to study with him three more times before my graduation from Barnard. I can't get over that Columbia University is once again trying to push into Harlem - has it no institutional memory? My one criticism of this article is that Barnard is a college that has dedicated itself to educating women for over 100 years. Most of the Harlem residents highlighted in this article are male. How is it that Barnard and Dalton's legacy of educating young women can be passed over in the writing and editing of this article? Is it only men in Harlem to have the time to come and take classes at the college?

    The beauty of a Barnard education was that in the classroom women dominated the discussion - women edited the newspaper, headed the student government and chaired every club. Yes, men from Columbia (in my day there were ONLY men at Columbia) were able to register for our classes and did. But Barnard and Dennis Dalton's classes, seminars and discussion sections (I attended them all!) encouraged young women to think deeply, act consciously and connect with their highest selves. Please, Utne, and everyone, don't suppress the voices of the women!

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