Barry Spacks – Interview

How long have you taught?

I started teaching in 1952, at Indiana University. So I’ve been teaching for 55 years.

In CCS specifically?

I was off from teaching for six years, studying Buddhism at a Buddhist center in northern California. I came back in ‘96, and I think I’ve been teaching here for about nine years.

What prompted you to teach in CCS?

First off, the vitality and intelligence of the students. That reputation follows them all over campus. I was asked to do a mini course first. I did a couple of those while I was mainly still teaching in English. So I got an immediate close up taste of that quality. I think it’s really true what CCS claims, that it offers an undergraduate education that has the style of a graduate school education, and one of the characteristics of that of course is that you come much closer to being a colleague with your students rather than a schoolmaster…I really like that. The last thing I want to be is some sort of great authority figure. I want to release energies, I think that’s what I’m there for. It’s possible in CCS to be in a room full of folks in which there’s no fear on the part of the student, “Oh, what grade am I going to get?” No kind of class difference between the professor and the students. We’re all readers together, writers together, strivers together.

What is the difference between the students in the English Department and the Literature Department?

I was teaching a lot of large lecture courses there [in the English Department] and that was part of what made me feel a little bit starved for the immediate action of close up contact with students. I used to go up and down the aisles with my lavaliere and microphone and tried to get folks to do a little bit of discussion even though there were 300 in the room, tried to loosen up the lecture format…Folks in L&S have been trained to listen a lot more than folks in CCS who have been trained to respond and to come out with their style. There is obviously much more of a formal discipline involved in the English-Lit classes…the emphasis is less on direct creativity and more on study.

What do you think CCS students should ultimately get out of their education with the department? What skills should they leave college with?

It seems to me that all education in the arts and humanities has to do with developing maturity. Students these days are concerned a lot more with the bottom line than they were in my days as an undergraduate. We kind of took for granted that the rest of our lives would go swimmingly. People don’t have that luxury anymore so one can’t say “Oh, they should just concentrate on their studies, this is the most wonderful four years in their lives” without worrying too much about how there’s a payoff. I think in CCS there’s still this sense that the payoff is going to be in terms of taking on powers, intellectual, emotional, and in effect the word maturity sums it up. What we should talk about is a general education, basically getting what the Greeks used to call a Paideia, the sense of things, the sense of the way a particular culture works. And that’s what I think CCS students should look forward to, is that sense of the general education.