EMMA ASHER

What is the best part about teaching the Core Curriculum?

I can honestly say everything about teaching the Core is exciting to me — from the syllabus to the activity of meeting students weekly and engaging with them. I really like the CC texts, and I enjoy the fact that, almost on a weekly basis, I’m learning something. I am a lawyer by training, both in India and in New York; in some ways it feels like a bigger challenge to come before a class of sophomores than it is to appear before a judge. I can afford to fumble before a judge — they understand. But students are very sharp, very curious, and there’s an immediacy to their encounter that demands an answer. You really have to be on your A game.

The other thing is, CC is one of the rare courses where you get to spend two semesters with students; you can get to know them and establish a relationship with them, which sometimes can last quite long. Equally importantly, the fact that they get to see you for two semesters humanizes you; there’s a cordiality and an ease with them that is really very rewarding.

How do you innovate and/or bring your own spin to Contemporary Civilization?

Because I’m a lawyer, I’ve been able to bring a lot of case law, both ongoing and historical, into my classroom; for example, there’s a lot of Native American case law from the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1820s that’s relevant to the modules on the Conquest of Americas and Locke. I’ve used questions from recent New York Bar exams during our discussions on Aristotle and drawn from Title VII employment discrimination cases in our classes on Race and Gender. Students are obviously not required to know the law, but court cases usefully animate the ethical and moral implications of the theories we study. Sometimes an answer students encounter in a philosophical text from 2,000 years ago turns out to be not very different from the conclusion that a court reached maybe 10–20 years ago.

I also come from a nonprofit background — I used to represent tenants in housing court and I worked at various NGOs in India— so I think I bring that sensibility about justice into my course. And thirdly, I’m a person from South Asia, which has both a violent and exploitative colonial past, and, for the last decade, a right-wing majoritarian party in power in India. I use this history as a pedagogical resource — South Asian events sometimes offer a neutral ground for students in my class to work through their ideas.

What are you teaching that feels especially relevant for this year?

Let me preface my answer by saying, I feel, on a weekly basis, that my students are smarter than me, more informed, more caring, more brilliant. They have a very healthy appetite for complexity, even without stepping into a course like CC. Historically, students have always been at the forefront of battles for justice. They work out their theory on their own in the trenches.

But there is one thing: I think that CC is a course that features a lot of historical defeat. What this does is teach you that if you find yourself on a losing side and there’s no way you can win, then take some comfort in the fact that you are among the vast majority of people throughout history who have endured such hopelessness. The lessons that defeat offers are not always edifying or what one wants to hear — sometimes there’s no way to exchange defeat for victory. Sometimes to be a “loser” is just to find ways to preserve yourself for another day. To do so is not to be defeatist or a coward. I don’t develop this line explicitly in my classroom, but in my best imagination, insights of this kind are available in a course like CC for students who are seeking them.

What has been your favorite Core Curriculum teaching moment?

One of my favorite teaching moments happened when I wasn’t even there. Last year, I had assigned my students to watch the movie American Fiction as a part of our module on abolition. A bunch of students in the class got together and decided to have a private viewing in their dorm; predictably, they didn’t watch the movie, but ended up having a great time and became good friends over the course of that night. It is a humbling thought that among the most valuable things that that group got out of my CC class was community, and they didn’t need me for it. So my favorite teaching moment was one that taught me something — that this was an outcome that I valued for my course. It’s not all about the curriculum.