Courage to Be

Professor: Jana Mader
When we think of courageous writing, we may think of reporters on the front lines: taking notes while bullets rain from the sky, interviewing civilians in the rubble of destroyed communities. But courage also goes beyond the battlefield: undercover investigators infiltrate an organization or an individual from the inside to hold those in power accountable, such as in cases against organized crime groups like the Mafia or religious organizations like the Catholic Church. In a military dictatorship with censorship, as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, writing a poem on a particular subject led to exile or imprisonment. In this course, we will explore different forms of courageous writing: from investigative journalism to undercover investigations to writing under censorship or in exile. We will critically examine the political context of different time periods, from ancient governments to contemporary times in various countries, e.g., the U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy, Iran, France, South Africa, etc. Texts include Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House, Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, Nadine Gordimer’s Burger's Daughter, Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, Ida B. Wells’ Anti-Lynching Campaign, Günter Wallraff’s The Lowest of the Low, and poems by Bertolt Brecht and Heinrich Heine. We will also take a look at the role of PEN America and its Freedom To Write Award, the history of book banning and book burning, and the ethical implications of undercover investigations. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Professor: Thomas Bartscherer  
In 2001, Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the sole member of the United States Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force that formed the legal foundation for military action in Afghanistan, and subsequently, many additional deployments of the U.S. military. Her vote was praised by many as courageous, and condemned by many others. Lee was celebrated in a poem by Fred Moten as “the unacknowledged legislator.” What is courage? In this course, we shall approach this question both directly and obliquely. We begin with Homer’s Iliad and with philosophical accounts from 5th century Athens. Should courage be understood the same way in all contexts? Is a warrior’s courage the same as that of a philosopher or a legislator? Who is truly courageous, the one who defends the regime, the one who critiques it, or both? Is the courage of Hektor or Achilles the same as that of Socrates or Antigone? Our discussion will proceed through close readings of philosophical texts and essays, both ancient and modern (Plato, Aristotle, Tillich, Arendt, Baldwin, Abani) and imaginative representations in literature and film (Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Antigone, Brecht’s Mother Courage, Fugard’s The Island,Bergman’s Shame). We will be asking, among other things, whether and in what way it makes sense to speak of a single virtue, courage, being manifest in varying circumstances and in different times and places; whether and in what sense courage brings people together or sets them apart; and what we may mean today when we characterize people or acts as courageous. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Professor: Maxim Botstein
What are the responsibilities of educational institutions and their members in times of political or social crisis? What are the forms that spiritual or intellectual courage (and cowardice, opportunism, and human frailty) take in such a context, and what relationships do thought and action, intellectual rigor and moral virtue, have to each other? This course will explore these questions, and others like them, by examining the responses of German and American universities and academics to Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, and McCarthyism in the 1950s, respectively. We will read the works of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt, with an eye towards the context which shaped their thought and philosophy, as well the writings of less well-known students and scholars who grappled with the same difficult questions in dark times, and did what they could to shape one of the most important institutions of the modern era -  the university. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.

Professor: Thomas Chatterton Williams
Though many racists and anti-racists engage and portray “black” thinking and sensibility as homogenous, for as long as there has been a tradition of black thought in America there has also been a robust and formidable thread of contrarianism and heterodoxy to defy it—even to deny there is such a thing as “blackness” (or whiteness, for that matter) to begin with. It has become a cliché to pay lip service to the notion that "blackness is not a monolith," and yet so many of us continue to speak and act as if it were.  In this common course, which will be comprised of shared texts as well as the work of iconoclastic and independent black thinkers—from Zora Neale Hurston, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison to Barbara Fields, James Baldwin and Adrian Piper—we will examine the question of what it means to create and define the self in a shared world that too often imprisons us all in ready-made categories. We will explore the tension between the courage-to-be-with and the courage-to-be-apart, specifically focusing on the idea of acting in common and the intellectual and moral courage it takes to stand alone and the price of prioritizing self-authenticity over consensus and group cohesion. This course includes lectures, dinners, and other activities undertaken in common with the other sections of this Common Course.