Professor Wm. Arctander
O’Brien is the recipient of this year’s UCSD Alumni Association’s
Distinguished Teaching Award. He previously received four Outstanding
Teacher of the Year awards from Revelle and Eleanor Roosevelt Colleges.
He came to UCSD in 1986 after teaching for five years at the University
of Virginia, and has earned a reputation as a teacher who can inspire
science majors to study and enjoy the humanities. He is currently
working on a book on the last writings of the German philosopher,
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Magazine: How long have you been teaching required humanities
intro courses?
Professor Wm. Arctander O’Brien: I started teaching in the
Revelle sequence in 1988 and in the Eleanor Roosevelt sequence
in 2000.
M: How do these big general introductory courses
fit into a modern science education?  O’Brien: These courses are really important to have when
you first come to a university, because they show you what’s
available at a college level—philosophy, history, literature
etc. It’s great to explore, at least for your first two years.
M: You seem to make an impact on your students, even though the
number of students is large. Do you find the size of the classes
a challenge?
O’Brien: The classes run about 200 students, but they’re
exciting to teach. They are required courses, and you can tell
a lot of the students come in there almost against their will.
At times, I can hear the chains clanking around their legs. The
challenge is to get their attention and hold it, and eventually
to make them enjoy the material and even want more of it. And that’s
doable, because they are really smart kids and if you can turn
them on to the pleasures of reading, they’ll get hungry for
more.
M: Do you find any difference between humanities, science and engineering
students?
O’Brien: I see the students who are in science flame on to the humanities.
I see them get excited. I see them start to think in a different way. In the
humanities, thinking and interpreting and critical thinking are just extensions
of a kind of thinking that we do in everyday life. And the students like it,
once you show them that humanities courses are not some kind of high culture,
but that it’s very much commonsense and real and practical and enjoyable
and fun. It has a lot to do with human questions, questions of values and concepts—questions
that are societal, psychological. These aren’t questions that necessarily
fall into the realm of science as we traditionally think about hard science.
M: What is your aim in a larger, required humanities course?
 O’Brien: To present the best interpretations I can of the books and issues
that we’re covering. I try to show how I’m operating, what kind
of moves I’m making, so that the students are aware I’m presenting
a certain interpretation. I’m not trying to be neutral or present myself
as neutral. I think neutrality is a myth, just like presenting the ‘truth’ would
be a myth. In a large humanities class, I try to work on one idea or one problem
in each class. That means that over the course of a quarter, I will have given
them 30 big ideas or 30 big problems to mull over. My point isn’t to
give them what one of my old professors called a “cultural suntan.” It’s
to get them to do critical thinking.
M: You’ve taught on the east and west coasts. What are the differences
in outlooks and teaching philosophies?
O’Brien: The biggest difference I found was that the students on the
East Coast were used to being taught in small groups, in seminars. The students
here are just not used to seminars. And they’re not used to contact with
their professors. I often ask my students if they have ever been to their professors’ office
hours, and they’ll say no. And it makes me want to weep. I used to spend
at least two hours a week with my professors during office hours getting one-on-one
attention. For whatever reason, I think the students at UCSD don’t feel
welcomed by their professors, whether that’s a perceived or real thing.
I think that’s a function of the size of the campus and the culture.
But public universities are very concerned with having a high student-to-faculty
ratio. There’s a bottom line on that. And we’re expected to keep
that high. And in the humanities, that just doesn’t work.
M: When you are teaching a class, do you want them to think about
an idea, and then select a suitable text? Or vice versa?
O’Brien: Depends on the course. Revelle Humanities is a traditional “great
books” course. So when I set up the syllabus for that, I think in terms
of authors. So, I’m going to have them read Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka,
T.S. Eliot, Sartre, that material. And we’ll let the ideas come out of
the text. When I teach Making of the Modern World (MMW) at Eleanor Roosevelt
College, it’s a little bit more historically driven and we have to cover
the origins of democracy and the rise of nationalism, colonialism and imperialism.
M: How do you engage modern students in the study of difficult
texts when you are in competition with MTV, text messaging and
Internet simplification of
ideas?
 O’Brien: You turn the difficulty into pleasure. Because the students
are so smart, they like a challenge. You sort of dare them to go ahead and
master the text. And they’ll respond to that. UCSD students get a rush
out of reading and mastering a hard text.
M: I believe you do a lot of reading aloud in class. Do you have
a theatrical bent?
O’Brien: No, although one of my favorite myths that grew around me one
year was that I had been a drama major as an undergraduate. I liked that a
lot, I was really happy that that was a rumor. But ultimately, with a big class,
it’s theater, it’s dramatic, it’s performance. And you make
the drama work to keep the students’ attention from moment to moment.
I always use a snap-on microphone in a big class because if you don’t
have a microphone, and if you’re not a professional at throwing your
voice, you’re yelling all the time. If you have a microphone, you can
really use your voice and that’s part of the drama. It keeps the class
alive.
M: Have you noticed a difference in intellectual diversity or receptivity
of your classes over the years?
O’Brien: Kids between the
ages of 18 and 22 are pretty much the same as they’ve always
been. Certainly, students have become more concerned with getting
training for a career. They know that the middle class is becoming
less and less viable in America. And either they’re going to be in the
upper class or the lower class and they want to get good training so they’re
in the upper class. Part of that also means they are more geared toward practical
scientific study. But as far as being open and receptive, they’re pretty
much the same as they always were. PAGE2
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