By Dr. Dennis Klein
When I taught history at Kean University – a public center of higher education in New Jersey – I apparently performed the job well enough to attract the attention of my supervisors, including the university president. For extra pay and bit more prestige, they offered me the opportunity to direct and build a graduate program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. It was a field in which I created courses, published articles and books, and presented talks at regional, national, and international conferences. For taking on this responsibility I could drop one, sometimes two courses from the customary four courses per semester. I welcomed the opportunity.
I don’t regret the decision to manage a program of some 30 graduate students, on average, per academic year – a program that stood out as one in three programs of its kind in the United States. But it made clear that our commitments often take place on two levels: The level of practical tasks for practical, measurable results, in this case, running the program; and the level of direct personal encounters for incalculably intense if not profound gratification – for my students as well as for me.
Lydia Amir labeled these levels “esoteric” and “exoteric,” levels on the one hand that are specialized or “perfectionist” and, on the other, that is “melioristic” for the general public. We need both: A university would fail if it didn’t have administrators and teachers.
But in answer to the question that titles this essay, I came to see that, as important as policymakers are, frontline classroom encounters are incomparably special. I also realized that our society often overvalues management in relationship to frontline encounters. Afterall, managers are paid more than teachers and possess hire-and-fire power. I’ve often said, let the managers manage but reward teachers who are performing priceless and profoundly rewarding work. We should, in fact, compensate frontline workers more that those behind the scene.
Well, if I couldn’t prevail against the implacable grain of university life I could develop a practice that permitted and promoted encounters whose value was anything but data-driven. I wanted to give people the opportunity to sound their underlife, their inner life where a desire for purpose and connection reside; where not just the practice of living but the will to live breathes; where, we need to note, we come alive. As Amir observed, igniting inquiry, curiosity, deliberation, and “solidarity with one’s fellow human beings” is our highest calling.
We can perform our daily tasks and derive satisfaction from them, but we cannot live, or live well, without unleashing and cultivating our emotional energy.
I need to add that harvesting the fruits of our inner life is something most of us avoid. Hard as it is to believe that we do not want a complete life of fulfillment, we often stay busy and hard at work at the price of loneliness and burnout – some call it a midlife crisis, though the deficit is paramount at all stages of life – because boundless curiosity and open encounters feel threatening. They are threatening because they demand that we let down our defenses at the risk of self-exposure. This is exactly why counseling is so important: Not only can it help clients discern what is possible but it can also grant them the courage and conviction to give their inner life the freedom of expression it deserves.
In a society that defines itself by results it can measure we need a sideline that honors an existence whose expression is ineffable.
Learn more about my work at www.inklein.org.