An Exeter teacher once earned high praise from a colleague who described his style at the table as “inviting and commanding.” The configuration On Campus promises the rich potential of that style to all Harkness teachers; but, of course, what is potential is not automatically achieved. The secret is in what teachers of mathematics call “working with the given.”

Science classes have always “worked with the given,” and in the new science building they will have the opportunity of working with the given at their lab stations side-by-side with their Harkness tables. After doing relatively independent lab work, they will move to a more collaborative setting at the Harkness table. Whether at the lab station or the neighboring Harkness table, they will be doing “hands-on” learning because conventional science learning and Harkness learning, being supremely inductive, emphasize the focused context.

Consider this context. The best Harkness class I ever observed must have been 25 years ago when a flu-stricken Bob Grey, my colleague in the English Department, asked me to take a class of lowers for him. The students were in the middle of Brave New World, and in agreeing to take the class, I told Bob that I didn’t really like the book. So in some approximation of George Bennett’s “unsettling question,” I said to the class: “Persuade me that I am wrong about Huxley’s novel; convince me that I should reread it and eventually teach it.”

The students, none of whom I had ever seen before, seized the challenge, and for 50 minutes they discussed their responses to Brave New World. They seemed unaware that I never uttered another word after my challenge to them. I cannot say that it was the best class I ever taught; it was, I repeat, the best class I ever “observed.”

Their interest in the huge issues raised in Huxley’s novel would likely be even more compelling for them today, but 25 years ago they animatedly exchanged ideas about the disturbing ramifications of genetic engineering and the lack of genuine communication between people who are programmed to deny authentic relationships. Their Harkness posture realized the ideal: elbows on the table, books open to this page, to that page under scrutiny, as they searched for anchors to their eventual generalizations about the core of the novel.

But what was most impressive about their 50-minute discussion was the civility of it. They revealed to a remarkable degree Loomis’ implication that “concern for others, and at least apparent regard for what they think” in a Harkness class establishes the oval table as the indispensable link between knowledge and goodness. Loomis’ affirmations about the heart of an Exeter education reveal how an innovation of the 1930s fulfilled an 18th-century admonition about linking intellectual power and principled behavior; and Loomis is right: “Civilized discourse must be at the core of all good education and all full lives."

—Charles L. Terry

Charles L. Terry, Lewis Perry Professor in the Humanities and chair of the Department of English, emeritus, taught English at Exeter from 1967-1997.

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