 Yes, thank you Annelike and thank you in the audience as well for showing up today and thank you to Richard as well for so generously accepting our invitation to speak today because what we're going to do is not an original ID. It was actually originated by Randy Paarsch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who upon being diagnosed with terminal cancer actually gave his last lecture and it was very inspirational, very hopeful and the same question that he asked himself, he also asked to Richard, if this was your last time in front of a classroom what knowledge would you try to impart on the people present? What do you want to say basically if you're giving a carte blanche to phrase it less morbidly? And Richard is going to talk about what the point is of a professor because he is one himself at the law faculty, he teaches and researches international law. So yeah without further ado Richard may I welcome you to the stage and good luck with your last lecture. Well thank you all for coming and thanks for the invitation to extra murals and to Studium Generale for the for the invite. I have to confess that when I was asked to do this I was kind of terrified of the prompt and the reason is that well I thought okay I knew about the story and I knew that there was this person who had kind of delivered a very inspirational last lecture as you say which turned out to be his last lecture and I thought how could I possibly do that? Me a you know a young assistant professor in their early 30s how could I possibly think about my last lecture which I hope will be very far into the distance but I was doubly concerned firstly because I could I really imagine myself into that position sort of hopefully 40 years from now with something to say about some last words and then something more disturbing which is what if I actually find out what I want to say now and then I've got nothing left to say for 40 years so there's a whole sort of loads of anxieties which I did manage to push through and then I kind of landed on this topic which I guess I kind of reasonably know something about which is hopefully not going to bore everyone to death which is this question of what is the point of a professor. So firstly don't imagine that I'm actually going to give you the answer um professors sometimes give answers but not on this occasion. I really do want to find out for myself um and potentially for others um other future professors maybe also 40 years from now and so it's partly a time capsule for me to look back and think oh look what I thought the point of a professor was way back and also just partly therapy to be honest so trying to describe what it is that I try to do in the classroom and make sense of this for students perhaps for some colleagues. So I'm going to speak for about 40 minutes and with a bit of interaction from you and and then I want to open into some wider discussion questions and so on. So let's begin. So to start asking what is the point of anything is kind of asking for trouble to be honest um and this is kind of a quote that I got from this book which is really great by Stefan Collini it's a bit old at this point but it's a really good book. In fact my colleague who's here today who I'm not going to name said that when they heard of the topic they thought oh is he leaving and I thought okay no I'm not leaving that's fine but the question itself it does um presuppose that there may in fact be no point whatsoever. What's the point of a professor? Well we don't need a professor thank you very much that could be an answer but actually if you ask anyone not just students of course there's a bit of a bias if you ask colleagues because they're professors but if you ask family members friends and so on they'll always have something to say about this to answer to this question. My mother who did not go to university who is a part-time bookkeeper for some small businesses in rural northern Ireland and also a part-time grandmother said that she imagines a professor as someone who teaches things way beyond anything students would have known otherwise. In fact there seems to be lots of possible purposes to being a professor and now I would like in the spirit of the interactive classroom to kind of gain some sense of what you think the point of a professor is before I go any further so please just shout out some ideas from the audience we'll take a couple okay teach specialized knowledge okay yeah leading a research group okay yeah yeah say that again Jim engagement okay yeah anything else asking critical questions yeah good yes thinking in an analytical way great good yes so these are kind of getting to some of the things themes that I'm going to pick up on in a moment but when I started asking around and actually when I started doing some research online I encountered a whole host of possible questions um a moral guide so these are my maybe be some answers already an inspiration a role model to students purveyor of wisdom okay so those getting there and then there were some negative responses which kind of made me feel not so great an exam grader oh that's very tragic that's all that I am I just a great exams a supreme authority or a dictator of some kind so probably you may have thought that this maybe is someone a teacher that you've had in the past a destroyer of youthful curiosity so okay these are really quite sad um none of these by the way are things that any student has ever written on any of my evaluations so it's fine and then after gathering these answers um like any good professor in 2023 I put my question through chat gbt um to make it AI proof to see what it would say so here's the answer it gave me the point of a professor is to educate and inspire students in a specific field of study conduct research to advance knowledge in their discipline contribute to the academic community through publications and presentations and provide mentorship and guidance to students pursuing their academic and professional goals okay it's not bad right but of course I can't use that um because if I do I have to refer myself to the examination board right and also that really can't be the answer yet because there's a whole hour left so I have to be able to say something else so what I would like to do is to use the rest of the lecture to identify and unpack the more common images um of the professor today before positing or suggesting my own image in contrast and so to briefly summarize the lecture or the argument at this stage in place of the familiar ideas about the professor as the kind of knowledge provider or a trainer for the real world which are two very common ideas of the of the professor today I would like to suggest that we imagine the professor as the kind of discomfort her it's a bit of a clunky term but I'll I'll say more about it later okay so then some caveats so lawyers love a good caveat so these are largely personal observations that I've had from teaching some of you but also in other places in the US and the UK they relate primarily to law teaching but they might be of use when thinking about the wider social sciences or humanities teaching as well the idea of discomfort that I'm going to talk about towards the end it may not be possible to do that all the time so there's a bit of a proviso about this there are many constraints on us as professors we of course need to be sure of who we're teaching what the program is and there's many other things besides so take this idea of discomfort as a way to strategically intervene let's say in the classroom sometimes it may not make sense to intervene in this way and then lastly as chat GPT already informed you teachers don't just teach so however much you students might think we do we also do many other things so we conduct research we attend and organize conferences we form reading groups we publish articles books blog posts edit commit edit journals comment on each other's work supervise theses sit on university committees attend meetings we catch up with one another over lunch or coffee we also shockingly have lives outside of the university so I enjoy creative writing playing the cello and I'm currently obsessed with the HBO series succession indeed this is also partly why I struggled to think about the topic of the last lecture not because I was watching too much TV but because I kind of started to think maybe I should be suggesting that you all do something way outside of what this university is about call an elderly relative read a good book laugh help out a friend and so on there's a whole world outside the classroom for both students and teachers and I think it's important not to lose sight of that that doesn't mean that there's no point to being a professor but that being a professor being in a classroom isn't the only point at the same time there's a whole world inside the classroom and what professors do there can be deeply impactful not only in terms of what we teach but how and I don't just mean which interactive learning tools we use or how we assess students I mean how we model intellectual and social engagement and what world we as professors create for students inside the classroom and from speaking to some colleagues and listening to conversations I think a lot of the time those kind of crucial elements of the classroom are kind of partly ignored or maybe even just reproduced without much thought so for the teachers in the audience this might help us to think more intentionally about things that we take for granted or don't realize that we're doing so I now begin then to sketch the common images of the professor so the first one being this idea of a professor as as a knowledge provider everyone with me so far yeah okay so this is not a recent idea it stretches far back into ideas about the function even of the of the medieval university long before the enlightenment came along and changed everything Elizabeth de Berg founder of Claire college Cambridge said in 1359 that through their study and teaching at the university scholars should discover and acquire a precious pearl of learning so that it does not stay hidden under a bushel but is displayed abroad to enlighten those who walk in the dark paths of ignorance so I probably should have had some kind of pearl here as a visual the precious pearl of learning then it continues to feature heavily in the modern professors teaching toolkit even though it's many centuries later except we don't quite use that term today we would call it perhaps knowledge transfer the pearl has morphed into lectures or knowledge clips where a teacher provides basic points or concepts before the student begins their readings but the idea is similar to the pearl right so that the professor who's an expert in their own field transfers knowledge to the students through what they've learned themselves and that knowledge which was called wisdom in the time of Elizabeth de Berg comprises not only facts but a sense of how the field works its expectations its cultural routines especially in law knowledge transfer doesn't just mean getting students to understand a court decision right but it might also be about understanding how a judge arrived at that decision so knowledge of interpretation let's say or in thinking about whether that decision was correct so knowledge about appropriate normative outcomes so we could visualize this image of the professor as kind of a conveyor belt in some way or a vehicle by which knowledge is sort of implanted into all of you and there's something very appealing about this image actually it sets clear expectations about the role of the professor and the role of the student it separates knowledge from application in ways that help students to develop theoretical skills critical judgment some of the things that you mentioned and indeed it would be kind of a very poor professor today who did not engage in any knowledge transfer so someone who just sort of jumps in during week one and says what do you think without having given any kind of context that would be kind of like throwing students into a lifeboat with light on ore right but this image of the professor as a vehicle or a conveyor belt has its problems so the first is what idea of knowledge is implied by this image of of knowledge transfer so knowledge is a pearl this is that's what Elizabeth de Berg said or an item on the conveyor belt something prepackaged and ready for consumption by you students that kind of sets the wrong tone right knowledge is not really a commodity it's not a brand of detergent that you can value and compare against competing products right that's not what knowledge is on a deeper level such an idea of knowledge also assumes that it can be packaged and kind of transmitted in isolation from its wider context and from the context in which students encounter it so in law students are trained to think of law as something that can and should be isolated from its context so that its rules and principles can be applied to a whole range of different scenarios and that's the basis for the problem-based exam question which many of you had to do were endured for one of my classes that's a kind of hypothetical scenario where you kind of apply your legal knowledge to advise a client in some way but the context is crucial right the context of knowledge is generally regarded as sort of inseparable one would say so for example the history of slavery is rather important for the history of international law which is my field the slave trade was abolished in the uk in the early 19th century and this on its own as a fact is okay that's interesting but there's a lot of context around it if this is the only thing that you listen to or the only thing that you find out do we also know that the same law that abolished the slave trade also compensated slave owners for the loss of earnings or that slavery itself remained legal or that the reason for the abolition wasn't necessarily humanitarian but was more about the fact that the slave trade was becoming pretty economically bad business so talking about the prohibition of the slave trade interesting enough on its own but we forget then all these other things around it the wider context of slavery the economy of empire and this leads us to have a pretty basic understanding of that particular question the other issue with this idea of knowledge is that even the setting in which students encounter facts shapes how facts are understood so talking to a group of 30 or so liberal arts students about EU law in a dutch university is very different to talking about EU law to 30 residents of the asylum center in terrapel for example in the safety of the university students may feel empowered to say things that they would not otherwise in another setting you might forget the personal impact of a legal regime or you might feel more empowered to imagine other possibilities beyond the status quo this is because the classroom is not cut off from the real world contrary to what some might think it is a socially situated space it's a microcosm of wider society and social relations local national global and the value and meaning of these facts in the classroom will change over the years as society changes so pretending that we can keep knowledge sort of separated off from the context and from where and when we approach it i think would kind of be to deny that we exist in the world the last issue with this knowledge transfer image is that it establishes quite a hierarchical classroom so i'm the expert you the students are knowledge deficient and the knowledge flows from me to you right but students are in the world by age 1920 you've maybe had experiences that i have never had may never have and although a classroom isn't necessarily a therapy session those experiences have created other forms of knowledge that are deeply instructive for students and indeed for teachers so i recall in one of my administrative law classes when i began at tilburg where we had spent many weeks talking about certain principles of administrative law so important principles like transparency participation the right to review and appeal a decision and so on only for one student towards the end of the course to intervene and tell us at length about her very racialized experience of the german immigration system which i think told most people if they hadn't experienced it themselves that these principles on their own really might not be enough to overcome what she was clearly experiencing as deeper patterns of structural racism so the knowledge transfer or the conveyor belt model ignores those active students i think and those stories and it pretends that everyone except the professor is passive and in that respect the image kind of uncritically adopts the social relations of other spaces obeying the professor obeying the authority of the professor quickly translates into obeying the authority of the employer and then that turns into quickly obeying the authority of a political leader and professor i think should be kind of reluctant to normalize those social hierarchies okay so the knowledge provider model then seems to be useful to a degree but may also have damaging implications for students now this model has been around for a very long time it's still a popular idea there are those who though increasingly interact or react against that model partly because of the limitations i already identified and they have tried to update that model with their own so i call this the idea of the professor as a trainer for the real world so where the knowledge conveyor belt only conveys information the trainer is kind of helping students to apply knowledge or imply information to the real world the conveyor belt centers the professor and their expertise but the trainer model looks to all the information that might help to resolve certain real world problems or challenges where the conveyor belt helps create a hierarchy between professor and student the trainer model turns the professor into more of a facilitator of students who are the real active participants in class-based exercises or simulations and all of these i think are good updates to the previous model and there are some additional aspects of the trainer model which are seen as improvements right so that instead of just giving students the basic building blocks of knowledge and a bit of application the classroom should be about skills training right so law students should not only know how to read and interpret a case but they should have writing skills research skills negotiation skills time management skills and so on so that's partly a different vocabulary to describe the pearl of wisdom that i was describing earlier but it also has a more specific meaning whereas the knowledge being transferred might have been used for many purposes so think back to the medieval university okay this stuff could have been used for work but it may also have been used for self-improvement or for the simple joy of learning and so on now in this trainer model the skills are much more focused on the professional world right students are expected to enter this world after they graduate and so skills training the idea goes prepares students for the world of work or for the real world right another key dimension of this skills trainer model of being a professor concerns what students will be doing with these skills here again skills designed for professional application are not just learnt for fun they have a specific purpose which is to help organizations i.e. your future employers and society at large to solve problems how many of you have heard in classes professors tell you about problem solving or tackling great challenges or even now the sort of wicked problems is also a very common terminology right this is everywhere problem solving is the mode of professional intervention par excellence and skills training equips students with the tools to help resolve or manage those problems and the image we have then of the professor is kind of as a firefighter or at least someone who trains firefighters and that's particularly I think applicable in something like international law where you have areas like environmental law or global health law that are set up or at least seem to be set up to put out fires like infectious diseases or climate change and so on now this image of the kind of the firefighter or the professor as a trainer is much more grounded than the knowledge transfer idea that conveyor belt because it responds to the realities facing society and it kind of seeks to adapt learning and teaching to match what organizations and society needs but let's just scratch a little deeper one consequence of gearing learning to what are perceived as practical problems is that a strange hierarchy again gets put in place we're familiar with this division between theory and practice right one is to do with the conceptualization of a field or to simplify complexity in some way and the other is about applying tools to a situation so there in very basic terms one is about thinking the other one is about doing right but when teaching is about practical problem solving theory kind of falls away a little practice is kind of believed to be free of the burdens of theory which are kind of regarded as sort of unhelpful jargon and here theory kind of gets subordinated to practice and the practicality of courses increases and at least in my experience this also means that theory but if practice is about solutions then theory is kind of about defining problems or that's one way that you could think about theory and what use are a set of practical tools if we don't know what the problem is implicit within this problem solving mindset is the idea that we all kind of already know what the problem is and the only task that is left is to figure out how best to apply our tools to resolve it personally I wonder whether we have maybe enough problem solvers out there and if we don't maybe need more problem framers more theoreticians to help us understand the problem better another implication of this skills training image of the professor comes from how it imagines the real world so if we are to help students tackle global problems then we're essentially preparing students to become professionals in various types of organizations companies governments research institutes universities of course and you might have heard of the school to prison pipeline which is often a way of describing the way that some minority communities easily end up in prison well this is the school to employer pipeline right where students are kind of largely funneled into thinking of themselves as a kind of future employee and my question here is whether this is the only real world we should be envisaging for our students or preparing you for framed this way society seems a pretty lonely bleak place isolated employers as kind of centers of your entire life what does the professor here have to offer to students as future members of a local community or a residence association or as a citizen as an activist as a protester as someone who is not sure what's wrong with the world not much if you're only concerned with problem solving again here the professor as a trainer image concedes I think too much to those institutions government and companies and so on that we're trying to get students to have a view about or to critique possibly so simply preparing you to uncritically optimize those institutions without getting you to think about the damage that those institutions are causing is I think professionally irresponsible so training students for the real world takes too much for granted societies inbuilt inequalities and hierarchies and attempt to train you into a system rather than getting you to question that system and the growing similarities even between universities and companies is particularly disturbing at a time when the hierarchies that get maintained by the modern economy are resulting in untold levels of inequality and misery and destruction of the planet I want students to be ready for the real world but maybe not as a corporate lawyer maybe as a pro bono advisor to tilburg students who need decent affordable housing or in raising awareness about the conditions in the refugee camp in terapel or in other contexts like international law about perhaps asking whether that field is enough to stop global inequality at the same time one cannot as a teacher just shout revolution in every class students need a training that's why you came here and in this particular environment it's training in a professional culture at least law is this doesn't necessarily mean institutionalizing you into law or even getting you to believe that law is a good thing it's just having a sense as a student of your own responsibility as a legally trained member of society and then appreciating the wide range of tools that are at your disposal when you go out into the world so how does the professor then encourage this way of thinking or this space between theory and practice or between hierarchy and revolution okay so this is where this idea of the discomforter comes in so to talk about discomfort can cause a bit of confusion or discomfort um people tend to automatically think that it means we need to make our students feel uncomfortable in some way maybe long awkward silences while we wait for students to respond to our questions in class or something but being uncomfortable is not the same thing as being made to feel discomfort in fact I think the ideal classroom for a professor is one in which students feel entirely at ease to speak their minds to be inarticulate to fumble through their thoughts without judgments without repercussions because after all how else are we supposed to learn and it's also important to recall that if the university classroom is a microcosm of society then it also harbors many of the same dynamics that society does gender dynamics racial dynamics meaning that as a professor you can't be tone deaf when talking about sensitive issues in international law like slavery or like violence against women when half of my students are women in their early 30s or early 20s sorry and a sizable number are ethnic minorities it would be irresponsible of me not to acknowledge the basic fact that there are much they're much more likely to have experienced these academic questions personally than I have and then to not somehow build that into how I approach them in the classroom so discomfort here is not necessarily about pandering to a particular type of student but in getting students to into a productive collective discomfort so that we can explore these ideas together so if discomfort is not being uncomfortable then what is it it is a space to inhabit where everyone everything is questioned it is staying with a legal problem rather than trying to come up with an easy solution or a quick fix and it is also admitting one's own role in reproducing social hierarchy whether as a teacher or as a student so in short discomfort relates to our own preconceived ideas about the world and about what we're learning we all have ideas about the world and what we read but often it's precisely those ideas that get in the way of critical thought or from approaching the world in a completely new way so for example scholars and practitioners are very quick to talk about the benefits of human rights to the world but they're quite reluctant to talk about how human rights has monopolized many discussions on inequality and injustice at a very basic level the expansion of human rights has coincided not with a decrease in global inequality but in a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor thinking about the role that human rights is playing here kind of is discomforting to us we kind of want to believe that we're doing good by advocating more and more effective human rights or we automatically rush to international law as the answer to say the Russo-Ukrain war Putin is a war criminal the UN Charter has been violated yes most of us would agree to that but what role has international law played in increasing the tension right in setting up self-defense as a key exception to the prohibition on the use of force that Putin has been able to exploit or in allowing Russian soldiers to lawfully kill Ukrainian civilians where this is deemed a proportionate and in furtherance of Russia's military objectives it is discomforting to us to find that what we thought was the solution might actually be part of the problem our assumptions get challenged and our faith in the discipline is shaken one might begin to even go through the various stages of grief denial anger bargaining one might start to ask what is the point of being a professor and it's often much easier to continue holding the views that you've had because they're familiar they're simple or because they kind of don't require you to make difficult choices or they don't require you to have difficult conversations with your friends your family yourself but would that really be learning unfortunately conceiving of the professor as a trainer for the real world I think completely cuts off this possibility for discomfort it can be difficult in the moment to know how to apply your expertise in a specific scenario right but that's not very discomforting so in fact if you work through the problem you get an answer you kind of feel very comfortable very proud that you've kind of got it right you feel you've embodied what it means to be a successful lawyer and that you then think well I could fit into your law firm or a government department but none of that requires us to question assumptions about society or about the lawyer's role in it so at this point if you're a professor you probably are also thinking okay how can I get students to question everything or challenge every assumption they have to understand something first and besides they also have to get assessed at the end of all of this and yes it's true we as professors do need to get our good evaluations but it's also true that it's easier to keep students slightly comfortable in beliefs or to not question many things but I'm not entirely sure that that's why teachers go into this profession in the first place I don't think that that's probably what people would respond if you asked them what is a professor today so done well discomfort can be more rewarding for teachers for students in the long term it can be a kind of model for how you go about your daily life way beyond this sort of student evaluations that we've come to be concerned about but discomfort is key I think and so in closing I'm going to pose some examples of what I think discomfort looks like from the professor's side okay so in a problem question or hypothetical requiring you to argue in favor of the position that you're opposed to so if you're normally the kind of person who might say argue for the human rights organization then maybe you would be required to argue in favor of the company to see what this does to your legal reasoning resisting the urge to answer questions about the correct answer for interpretation of a text okay something might be legally justifiable or more legally justifiable it doesn't mean that it's the correct interpretation many of you have already read much social theory so I don't think I need to tell you what about correct interpretations resisting the request that the professor tells students what their opinion is on a legal question I have a sneaking feeling that when I get asked this question it's because the student wants to say what I think in the exam or do the opposite rebut me so that they can say oh look I can take the complete the opposite position so I kind of resist giving my own personal position on something like this spending a little longer on the student who has a very strong position to kind of soften that certainty and to make them question it a little longer getting students to flip between different arguments making them proficient in doing so offering a blank text with no mention of the author date source anything like this to kind of force an analysis without any context taking an unserious text so for example I chose here a tweet by the former US president extremely seriously as a text kind of analyzing it as if it is a really serious text or the opposite which is taking a very serious text like a court judgment not seriously at all banning laptops which we can talk about contextualizing or decontextualizing the conversation contrasting different texts and drawing out their contradictions and also then asking whether there might be a point where our expertise runs out or a point where the language especially the language of law might need to be set aside for something else politics say so these are only some ideas that I've had and I've picked up and tried out in classes and honestly they kind of work they seem to keep students interested without sort of simply force feeding them facts and without also turning them into future professionals so in short they get students to think for themselves which I think is kind of the basis of what I've been trying to tell you in the most open critical radical way possible that is I think what a university could still be for it's certainly what I've come to think a professor this professor is for so I'm gonna end here thanks for listening and let's discuss yeah for the discussion please speak into the microphone so that we also have it on the recording who wants to start you you mentioned banning laptops yeah why so um yeah that was good so I uh I did this for a class that I had this semester and no one complained firstly which I was quite surprised about and and by the end they were all very glad that I had done so and I think well partly it comes for me the discomfort thing comes up again which is it's very comforting deeply comforting I think on a on a non-human but also a non-human level at this point to have a screen that you can then hide in right so oh I don't quite know the answer and I'm not going to look at this screen and so I don't have to look at the professor's eyes I'm not here of course students don't realize that I'm still here and I can still call on them but you know there's something about not having this wall it is a wall in some ways and and it kind of forces them either to be looking at something else their notes or to be looking up so in substitute for the laptop in this course I just printed off a reader for the course which was like lots of texts the the text that we were reading for the whole course and I think that kind of helped to take the edge off the laptop band so there was something that they had but they could kind of rely on which is good but I think there's a kind of comfort now and being able to kind of retreat slightly behind behind it it doesn't mean that in other courses I haven't used technology a lot as as you know so yeah that's kind of the reason um to what extent do you think the structure of the university you know with recent developments over the past 20 years bigger classrooms more students last time more pressure to what extent do you think the structures of the university are prohibiting or making it more difficult for you to be a disruptor or a discomfortor as a professor yeah I mean I would say probably a lot really I mean I didn't say much about the evaluations but there is I think something that you can take from the the shift to the student-centered experience right so on the face of it the student-centered experience who doesn't like that obviously that that's what everyone wants right but it's very similar to the customer oriented experience and I think there's something partly troubling in that shift because it's not the same relationship you're not buying a product from me you're not you know going to give me a five star rating on uber eats or something afterwards and so my concern there is that there's something in the nature of the student-teacher relationship that gets lost when it turns into the student is now also assessing how good or how much the professor is kind of meeting their expectations I thought it was the other way around I thought it was sort of the professor or at least the class as a whole that was supposed to be collectively challenging what they thought their expectations were so this is where I start to then hope that this move to you know bigger classes or have also you know really putting a lot of weight on things like student evaluations doesn't then just turn into an opportunity to get every classroom to look the same or to get teachers to conform to a particular model I mean discomforting types of teaching or disruptive types of teaching might actually be kind of messy and kind of chaotic in some way and it might lead some students to say in the evaluation this was a messy course right I don't like this course so there's a kind of clear correlation there where the clarity of what you're able to convey I think might then result in kind of conformity among teachers and I mean obviously on a just on a basic level having class sizes of 200 let's say versus 30 is obviously makes it much more difficult to discuss these things but there is also the benefit of technology here too I'm not a Luddite so I mean I kind of think that in those situations you can really use technology very very well so you have polls going with students and so on that actually kind of gets people to say something who may not otherwise have said something because everyone has voted so they have some kind of reason for voting right whereas maybe if they were one in a class of 200 before they might just have sat and said nothing so there are some disadvantages pretty big disadvantages to that kind of shift but I think it's important to kind of be aware of them and then try to either counteract them or make the most of them through the tools that we have thank you yeah so when I heard your prompt I got really excited because a few months earlier I was asking myself the same question as to what the point of me going to university is and then when you heard the lecture you were no longer excited yeah um but what I was thinking um so when we have all these different resources like we have access to all the journals that at the university library gives us access to um it's it feels like a professor is just another source among a sea of a bunch of other sources and I mean when we can mix and match all these different sources to reach like the most informed opinion that we can and it seems like a professor is just one other source that may be faulty or even non-credible so I'm thinking maybe the answer to the point for professor Leen's closer towards the two latter images of a trainer and a discomforter but at the same time um I see I think the answer is more nuanced I think it's just a combination of a bunch of different things it might be just a combination of like all the images but I think and the I think I heard about law majors I mean I'm studying law um kind of but I think I heard is that professors are supposed to kind of brand or impart legal thinking on tourist students but Thursday I'm still not sure what legal thinking is but yeah that'd be about it I'm not sure if these are coherent but yeah yeah I mean I guess the first thing would be whoever said professors are supposed to be x bad start right I don't know who they were right I'm not gonna but but I'm sure that there are as many ideas of what up the point of a professor is as there are professors right so that's kind of why I was giving those caveats at the start um but it is true I think that there are occasions where uh like I was sort of saying earlier as well doing the discomforting doing the disrupting may be completely inappropriate as the best way to teach so and here's the actually the example liberal arts so all of the liberal arts students that I teach by the time they reach me have been reading Nietzsche and have been reading all sorts of fantastic philosophical and social theory texts and for me then as the law person or the international European law person I then run and run into the problem which is what do I do here do I continue with those same things by that stage you've kind of gotten a lot of it right or do I then kind of completely go the opposite direction which is to only give you kind of the facts or what exactly what you need for passing the exam and I kind of ended up sort of slightly in the middle which is the trainer model right and there are there are problems to it and I guess you know this is a confession in a way right so I end up doing this because I think well these are other types of skills that I think would be super useful and I also know that many people who end up doing the liberal arts program are different to say a regular law student you are often like honestly more politically active just as a very basic point and so my thinking here is I don't want to stifle that political consciousness but I would like to then be able to give another set of very powerful tools legal tools I mean it's good or bad that they're powerful but they are so that when you end up in the world you can then use those tools in a strategic way for political projects in which you might be interested right so that is kind of where you might have to combine them all yeah totally I mean the I think they're all ideal types in a way none of them are completely sealed off from the other okay yes thank you so there's just two notes that I would like to add one is that I think that question that was just posed is actually the most important one I think every every student and also every teacher should ask themselves at this moment what is the point and also the reason I showed up today one answer for myself that I that I have that I after teaching and after going to university myself is that there's one thing that you can get out of university that I think is very important and it is unique and that is that university offers a space mainly in the classrooms where you get to discuss openly with people more or less in your age group that are might be very different and if you think about it and this is something I only realized once I was done studying that there are not that many places in the in your life after university that offer that and it might not feel as much right so it might just be okay what's the point of having an open discussion with people but I do think it is something that can give you a lot in your life maybe just for your own personal development that can shape you and that is something that university offers maybe it just only offers it because it has that platform right I don't know if if there could not be a better institution to offer them but let's say students show up to university and that's maybe the best thing that it has now a second point one that I use as kind of a personal ethic when teaching is I actually like there's this essay by Max Weber it's called teaching as a vocation and it's a bit of a classical piece I think you would fit more in the in the category of knowledge giver right but what Max Weber essentially says is that the most important thing as a teacher is to limit yourself to teaching to not become to not use the power because there is a certain power when you stand in front of a classroom that's just due to there's a certain charisma to just having that floor to not use that to impose your political opinion and when I read this I thought this was a shocking thing to read like okay she should show you should be careful not to use the power you have to impose your view of the world and that's a guideline I try to keep a bit so what does that mean what does teaching become then so for me I think it is quite a modest role so I think the first is you offer you're sure offer that space to have students interact with each other to have that moment and the second what I try to do is to make every individual a little bit more dangerous so I want them to have certain tools for whatever purpose they want to use them good or bad to be a bit more effective in those tools and I think that should be the modest goal of a teacher and professor I don't know because I don't know if we're using the distinction but I just talk about teaching in in general thank you thank you yeah I think that's great I agree yeah okay we have time for one final question thank you it was very interesting and now I just wanted to say that I had a gap year so I really felt what it was like to not go to university for a while so it was like for me being able to go to stream general is very nice and I'm also trying to stimulate myself and one thing to learn because I really noticed that I really miss going to university because you can actually learn a lot and I was there for wondering what can you do to be this comforter for yourself and to learn outside of the classroom like I have a couple of months till I start my master and I really notice I miss you know the discussions and the learning environment and I was wondering how can you create that space outside of the classroom yeah well I mean that's pretty difficult so as as brunt was saying I mean the classroom was almost sort of designed specifically for that purpose I mean you could just say that okay it's an open space and and you can have a kind of collective conversation but in that space you're almost aligned like I'm aligned to to be discomforting in some way whereas you know if if I was a boss and I had employees that that wouldn't really be make much sense like I have I have employees they have tasks to to complete there's no point in discomforting them right but the whole idea of you being here in some way is is to try and further that side of things when it comes to I mean doing this outside of the classroom surely that's a kind of deely constant thing right yeah I don't know what I would say here I think again this might be overstepping the binds of the professor because this is my domain is the classroom I guess but yeah you have to also be in the world right and probably there are lots of spaces that you're in where you find yourself maybe okay having certain assumptions not challenging assumptions that others have perhaps kind of allowing things to go unsaid because you're kind of afraid of the consequences and so on or you're maybe not sure exactly why you think something but you would like to explore I mean those things are important to explore and they can be kind of difficult because we're used to being in the same old structures right and things are kind of settled for us and they're simple and it's easy to make sense of something but those things are precisely what we should be trying to push against right so it might happen in anything it could happen just in reading it might happen in conversations with friends or other people but it might also happen if you are kind of active in volunteering or in many other areas of life right so I think it's an open sphere it's not just that you go and discomfort oh for 15 minutes a week in that particular place right so I think you could and you should try to then make this part of your own way of being in the world yeah thank you for sharing even outside of being a professor that was interesting thank you yes and on this note let's conclude this last lecture well done Richard you survived hopefully many more lectures to come it was very engaging thank you all for showing up for engaging in a very lively discussion speaking of the discussion we have drinks outside so if you would like to continue it just go down the hallway have a drink and discuss some more about what the point is of a professor but before we do that once again please give a big round of applause to Richard