The Abbot and the Teacher 1

In May, I will complete my fourteenth year of teaching college students. It has gone by quickly. I’m also going to turn forty four this semester. So, I’ve been doing some things for a while.

One of my good friends is preparing to retire after several decades in the classroom.
He’s about seventy years old. If I can live and teach that long, I will have taught for forty years. I
would like to see such an anniversary. Chapters 2 and 64 of Benedict’s Rule — both concerned
with the character and work of the abbot — are a big part of the reason I’d like to make it that
far. 

These chapters don’t deal solely with teaching, and they certainly don’t address teaching
in a university setting. I don’t think Benedict could have foreseen the 21st century American
university. Nevertheless, they have helped me understand my vocation as a teacher. For my
next few posts, I’m going to explore how they have done this. 

Together, chapters 2 and 64 sketch a portrait of the abbot startling enough to make any
reasonable person hesitant to take on such a role. Benedict recommends a certain type of
person: someone whose goodness and wisdom commends him to everyone’s attention. In other
words, a virtuous person. In fact, even though rank — time spent in the monastery — was very
important in ancient monastic communities, Benedict writes that a potential abbot’s rank
shouldn’t take precedence over his virtue (cf. 64:2). He’s serious about the abbot’s virtue: you
could be in last place in terms of rank and still be worthy of election to the position. That means
that you could be the member of the community with the least amount of experience as a monk
and still be asked to exercise authority over the community. 

In other words, to be qualified for this position, familiarity with the position isn’t
necessarily enough. Experience in the community isn’t enough. Though these are surely helpful,
something else is essential, and it doesn’t reside in practice or age, but in character. This insight
is the foundation of these chapters’ influence on my vocation. I came to the art of teaching more
focused on the exercise of my authority than on who I needed to be in order to exercise that
authority in the first place. 

This makes sense. There isn’t much in higher education by way of formal character
evaluation for faculty. If you have your PhD, you’re an expert in your field. If you’re an expert in
your field, you can teach other people about it. There’s a certain logic here, especially from an
HR perspective. Formally measuring a job candidate’s moral and intellectual virtues isn’t going
to become a part of the hiring process in America any time soon. But the fact that we can’t
screen teachers for virtue doesn’t mean that virtue is irrelevant. It just means that it’s up to the
teacher to discover the connection. In my next post, I’ll tell the story of how I discovered it.