NEH Summer Arendt Seminar

Today marks the end of The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt: The Problem of Evil and the Origins of Totalitarianism, a five-week seminar hosted at Bard College this summer.

[caption id="attachment_13806" align="alignleft" width="150"] Professor Kathy Jones[/caption]

The Arendt seminar was taught by Kathy Jones, professor emerita of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University who has published widely on Arendt and feminist political theory.

Professor Jones was also assisted by two scholars: Hannah Spector, Assistant Professor of Education in the School of Behavioral Sciences and Education at Penn State Harrisburg; and Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College.

Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, also spoke with the group, as did several other members of the Bard faculty.

16 applicants were chosen to participate in the Arendt seminar. Among them was Bill Tolley, the Learning and Innovation Coach and Head of the History Department at the International School of Curitiba-Brazil. Recently, Tolley wrote an article describing his experience as an NEH scholar for the Center for Teaching Equality. He had nothing but great things to say:

My comrades are brilliant, professional and witty and our conversations on free will, the utter loathsomeness of Adolf Eichmann, and Hannah’s chain-smoking start well before 1PM and continue well after dark.

One of the things both Tolley and Professor Jones appreciated most about the seminar was its flexibility when it came to allowing each participant to explore the course content on their own terms. Professor Jones comments:

At the seminar’s end, each teacher presented a project developed during the summer’s research. These included both curricular materials for the humanities and social science’ classrooms and artistic expressions (poetry, personal essays, staged theatrical readings) of themes from Arendt’s work on such topics as friendship, statelessness, plurality, forgiveness, and “love of the world.” Yet, these projects no more represent the meaning of the seminar to anyone in the group, myself included, than test scores represent a student’s learning.

“Meaning” is an elusive, yet eminently human concept. I cannot speak for the teachers, but, for me, the seminar means the chance to sit around a table and think and talk about the human condition with a diverse group of people, each one “the same, that is human, in such a way that [no one] is ever the same as anyone who ever lived, lives, or will live.” What I “get” from this experience is learning all over again why Arendt matters not only for the “what” of her writing, but its capacity to provoke fundamental questions about education as an activity of loving the world enough to take responsibility for it.

The seminar was made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), whose Summer Seminars and Institutes for School Teachers are designed to immerse primary and secondary school teachers in significant study of the humanities. You can learn more here.

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