Q: What classes do you teach at Reed?
A: Classical political philosophy, modern political philosophy, Hegel and Marx, judgment, the idea of the state, and freshman humanities.

Q: By teaching humanities and dipping into other disciplines, did you learn things about your area that you'd never conceived before?
A: I feel that in an important sense my education didn't really begin until I started teaching humanities. There were whole worlds that I knew nothing about or knew only vaguely, great works and great ideas, every single one of which, without exception, has something to do with my own professional work, if only indirectly. Hum 110 enriches and informs virtually everything that I do. It's the best course I know.

Q: Which philosopher do you most admire?
A: Kant. Of course, we don't read Kant in Hum 110, since he comes a couple of thousand years too late. But much of what I teach in political philosophy is a kind of closet Kantianism. On the whole, I think that Kant has things more nearly right than anyone else. Or perhaps more precisely, he points us in the right direction more often than anyone else.

Q: Whom did he spring from?
A: Philosophers sometimes talk about a Kantian revolution in thought, which suggests that in some sense he didn't exactly spring directly from anyone, but that he initiated a radical, dramatic change of direction for philosophy. I think that this is substantially true. Kant is a product of the Enlightenment, but also a critic of the Enlightenment. He emerges out of the Age of Reason and the tradition of rationalistic metaphysics, but he's a sharp critic of that tradition. He was deeply influenced by David Hume, but his philosophy is a profound rejection of Hume's. Whereas I would say, with some confidence, that Hegel came out of Kant, it's less easy to make any kind of similar claim about Kant himself.

Q: Sounds like Kant would have made a good Reedie.
A: He'd have had tremendous difficulty with the phys-ed requirement.

Q: What are your feelings about Reed?
A: I have a number of strong feelings. This is one of the few top-notch places that has successfully resisted--so far--the publish-or-perish ideology, and thus continues to take very seriously the idea that to have been a first-rate teacher of undergraduates is to have had a truly successful career. It's also one of the very few top-notch places that has managed to resist--again, so far--the pressures of fragmentation and over-specialization, and thus has a faculty that is, at least more than most, composed of genuine intellectuals rather than mere technicians. We have managed to do this while at the same time providing a setting in which a great many faculty members are, in fact, able to be highly productive and to make genuine and substantial contributions to their fields.

More generally, I see no reason why we shouldn't think of ourselves as, and at the same time aspire to be, the very best of all the liberal arts colleges. We have something that almost no other college has: a powerful sense of purpose and a fairly clear understanding of why that purpose has merit. This is a tremendous asset, something that is precious and perhaps unique. It prescribes for us standards of genuine excellence, and I would hope that we would all continue to be inspired by those standards and strive as best we can to live up to them.

Susan G. Hauser is a Portland freelance writer whose work regularly appears in Reed and in the Wall Street Journal. She wrote about Kenan Professor of English and Humanities Lisa Steinman in the May 1997 issue of Reed.