Our mutual obligation as professor and students is to care. I care enough to give engaging lectures and to stimulate discussion, even with 150 students. My students, for the most part, care enough to show up, or at least two-thirds to three-fourths of them do. Their obligation, as is the obligation of all citizens and residents, is to listen and to learn. To question. To participate. To be in a room where they share similarities and differences. These demands are similar to what a democracy requires from its residents and citizens.

We have a president who was elected by less than a majority of the voters. There are many other leaders in our democracy as well, in charge of politics, economics and culture. How many of these leaders can honestly say they reach and serve three-fourths of the people who fall under their sway? How many of these leaders can also claim to be teachers, sometimes in the lessons they might offer, but most of all in the examples that they set?

The spirit of general education — of a common core — should prevail for these leaders, too. And why not for the president as well? General education is not easy, either for the student or the teacher. Sometimes neither one wants to be there. But if the students may be reluctant, the teachers — and the leaders — must be enthusiastic. They must reach deep within themselves to find the passion and the story to bring their audiences together.

Nowadays the spirit of general education is hobbled by inequality, whether we speak of the increasing economic inequality of our country or the inequities of most universities. The unfortunate reality of higher education is that most of the undergraduate teaching is carried out by part-time lecturers with no job security. The full-time professoriate — people like me — are not rewarded for our teaching, but for our research and writing, often carried out in obscure ways for specialized audiences.

Higher education, like the rest of American society, from our political and corporate leaders on down, sends a mixed signal. We rhetorically prioritize general education, or a unified country, and yet put obstacles in the way of genuinely serving students or constituents. In this way, higher education is indeed a microcosm of our entire society and its failures, with an elite, well-paid minority and an increasingly suffering majority of the overworked and the underpaid.

If our leaders should be teachers, our teachers should also be leaders, understanding that what we do in our universities is not simply to research or teach but to model what a democracy should be. The most senior of the professors should be teaching to all the undergraduates, and the least senior of our underemployed teachers should be elevated so that they, too, can share in the promise of our general education: to prepare young people for the goals of economic fulfillment and democratic responsibility. One cannot survive without the other.

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