Fr. David Collins, S.J.
Faculty
How does Georgetown’s Jesuit identity shape your teaching and research?
First of all, I’m here at Georgetown because of Georgetown’s Jesuit and Catholic identity. Second, there are kinds of questions and kinds of priorities that shape the scholarly and educational conversation — in the broad sense that philosophical questions about the meaning of human life, or the role of religion in society, how learning is connected to a broader good or common good. Those are some of the issues that make Georgetown the particular kind of university that it is and place in the tradition of the Jesuit and Catholic intellectual tradition. An eminent historian once spoke here years ago — a good friend — about why the humanities are important. Within the Jesuit and Catholic tradition, the humanities are associated with the morally good, at personal and social levels. Those aims were at the heart of the invention of the humanities education. The sad thing about this talk to my mind was that he gave many reasons why the humanities are important but not that most important of them all: that it is oriented toward the greater good within the person and within society. This reflects the tragedy of education when you feel you have to avoid its moral aims, as if the good really only has something to do with the hot-button issues. We’re not talking about a specific moral issue here. We’re talking about how education works to the greater good of the person and for the common good.
How did you narrow your focus to what you study today?
A lot of it is accident. It was these questions that I just talked about that are important for Jesuit education. There are 100 million different ways that those can play themselves out in the kind of research I do, but turn it around, and it’s, ‘Why is history my favorite subject?’ I had good history teachers, and what they taught and how they taught caught my imagination, and suddenly I saw, I could really work these big questions out in my mind through medieval history. Does everyone have to do it that way? I don’t think anyone needs to be a medieval history major. But it was a way for me to work out some of those broader issues. What’s the relationship between faith and reason? What are the ways that society tries to construct itself in order to achieve certain goals? I think about these things now through my work as an instructor and researcher of history. But it almost as easily could have been, say, an English teacher, in which case I might have turned out an English teacher.
What’s the greatest challenge you face in teaching?
I would like the students to be excited about what excites me as I am, and I understand that not everyone needs to be a history person. Euro Civ — the general education course — is so interesting. Students have to take it, so there’s always some corners of resistance in the lecture hall. I don’t feel I have to convince everyone that history is the absolutely greatest subject because ultimately I suppose I don’t believe that. But I do want to convince the skeptics that the study of history can shed bright light on important questions of human life and society. At the end of the day, the gen en classes — it’s interesting: The ones that come in with the chip on their shoulder, where they’ve always had dull history classes, they come to college, and they realize that history in college is actually more interesting. There is a greater chance for them to come out being fans than those that come in wanting to be history majors. For them, they’ve already been convinced, then they find it unchallenging. One of the challenges is how do you keep a diverse audience engaged in the material.
How has living in the dorm shaped your teaching or understanding of Georgetown students?
Teaching is more than imparting information. Teaching is about a pedagogical method. It’s about an engagement between a teacher and a student. Living in the dorms broadens that engagement. It’s not that I’m suddenly giving lectures on World War I in the dorms (though you should ask my fellow residents whether I slip into that mode). It’s in as much as it’s broadened my experience of students in a broader sense of circumstances. It’s made me, in teaching, more sympathetic more broadly.
What would be your ideal course to teach?
I like all the courses I teach. That’s the nice thing. In my upper-level seminars, I get to teach what I want to teach. So few students major in medieval history. The upper-level courses I teach, people take as electives. In the “Outer Space” class, for example, there isn’t a big section of student body that needs that course. What I get is an eclectic mix of students, most of whom are looking for an elective and are intrigued by the title. So I’ll get a couple history majors who say that it looks interesting, some people from philosophy and theology and government, but then also people from the hard sciences. I can pick the topic, so I don’t have any problem there, so what kind of market of students do you get that are engaged in the material? That’s my favorite class — other courses do it, but “Outer Space” does it really well — because of the diversity of students.
I actually just got an email from a student — a math major in an engineering firm. She said that once in a while, someone will make a skeptical remark about her liberal arts degree, and she reports always thinking first of that class, “Outer Space.” To her mind, that course is emblematic of what made a liberal arts education worthwhile.
What would you be doing if you weren’t in academia?
I’d always be lecturing. The Jesuits make us do all kinds of interesting things, and the most interesting things that really sparked a passion in me that they made me do outside was working at an Indian reservation in South Dakota. I loved that work. I was working in parishes and working in the tribal jail, and it was teaching GED classes — which I guess was still teaching. I’m a teacher — what can I do? I love that work. I’d go back in a heartbeat.
Interview by Penny Hung