Joel Upton and Caitlin Rhodes ’07 practice contemplation in the Yushien
Japanese garden behind Kirby Theater. |
Erôs and Insight
By Leanna James
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
5 | An
Introduction to Amherst: First-Year Seminars
It’s 11:25 on a crisp September morning, and every
seat in Fayerweather 117 is filled. Thirty young people from the Class of 2007,
clutching sharpened pencils and notebooks filled with clean white paper, are
waiting for the first college class of their lives to begin. The tension is palpable
and deeply familiar to anyone who has ever walked into a classroom for the first
time. Rows of eager young faces. The low hum of nervous conversation. Papers
rustling, feet crossing and uncrossing, an empty chalkboard staring out into
the room. This timeless scene
unfolds every fall, and what follows—lectures, textbooks, 10-page term
papers—is generally as predictable as the changing of the seasons. For
this group of expectant newcomers, however, something very different is about
to happen.
Erôs and Insight, scheduled to begin in five minutes, is a First-Year Seminar
that challenges common beliefs about the very nature of education. The students
may not have been aware of this when they signed up for the course. They may
have chosen this First-Year Seminar because the class meets pleasantly late in
the morning, or because “erôs” sounds especially promising.
A First-Year Seminar is required of all incoming students during the fall semester,
and the college offers a dazzling array from which to choose.
Erôs and Insight stands out among the list, perhaps because the first sentence
of the course
description is actually a question: “What would it be like to experience
yourself, those around you and the world through deliberate and disciplined contemplation?” Reading
further, one discovers that the seminar “will define and then explore contemplative
knowing as attentiveness, openness and the act of sustaining contradiction…[and]
seek common ground between the seemingly
opposed realities of art and science, erôs and insight.”
Clearly, this course defies easy categorizing. As the wall clock strikes 11:30
(universal law decrees that classrooms everywhere contain a loudly ticking clock),
Joel Upton and Arthur Zajonc, veteran Amherst professors who created and jointly
teach the class, enter together from the back of the room. Upton, professor of
fine arts, begins taking roll. Professor of Physics Zajonc (pronounced like “science” with
a “z”) smiles as he distributes photocopied handouts. The students
quietly regard their new professors, hope and wariness mingling in their expressions.
Zajonc has a kind, engaging face, gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a low voice; Upton
is trim and energetic—pacing as he speaks, drawing on the board, gesturing
with his hands. It is too soon to tell what these teachers will be like, but
the students’ anxious curiosity pervades the atmosphere. What will the
professors expect? How much work will be assigned? Will Upton and Zajonc be strict?
Fair? Demanding? Try unorthodox.
Upton opens the class by inviting each student to “honor” this extraordinary
moment in time—the first class on the first day of college. It is the beginning,
he tells them, of a new adult life, “as wonderful a day as the day of your
birth.” The students consider this notion in silence, puzzled smiles on
their faces. Veterans of A.P. classes and S.A.T. preps, admissions offices and
athletic fields, they are unaccustomed to language of this sort, which sounds
a little exalted, a little, perhaps, like poetry. And poetry is precisely where
Upton is leading, reading aloud a short excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “Little
Gidding.”
“Everything we do this semester,” Upton explains, “will lead
back to this poem, these words: ‘We shall not cease from exploration /
And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know
the place for the first time.’”
Continued >>
Photo: Frank Ward
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