February 22, 2007
Faculty lecturer: Making learning practical
Make no mistake: UW historian John Toews studies erudite stuff: 19th-century European intellectual history — people like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Felix Mendelssohn and Soren Kierkegaard.
But unlike academics who get lost in their ivory towers, Toews makes the learning practical. He helps students use intellectual history to understand contemporary human action — conflicts, for example, in a Northern Ireland school, a South African township, and a Seattle neighborhood.
For his achievement, Toews (pronounced Taves) has been chosen by his UW peers for the annual Faculty Lecture, to be delivered at 7 p.m. Feb. 28 in 130 Kane. Toews has titled his talk, Thinking Historically about Thinking Historically: From Identity Politics to Ethical Action.
Toews, 62, has been the driving force in the Comparative History of Ideas, a UW program that mixes high-caliber intellectual study with domestic and international learning projects.
“Humans are historical creatures, shaped by their milieu,” said Toews, “but also historical actors who reshape the worlds in which they were formed.” The need for contextual understanding, he said, makes a good case for the Comparative History of Ideas, what he describes as “an adventure in undergraduate education.”
CHID began with a National Endowment for the Humanities seed grant in the late 1970s and has steadily grown. This past year, the program enrolled 265 majors and graduated 103 seniors. After English, said Toews, CHID is the largest undergraduate unit in UW humanities.
CHID is unique, he said, in the way professors, students and staff work collaboratively, structuring classroom learning with field experience and service projects.
In Northern Ireland, for example, UW students have worked in experimental schools where Catholic and Protestant children sit side by side. In South Africa, CHID students have helped with memory projects, writing the experiences of people who have lost family members to apartheid.
Problems in those countries help students understand foreign places closer to home, like the poorer neighborhoods of Seattle, Toews said.
He himself grew up the son of a Mennonite minister, John A. Toews, and his wife, Aganetha Toews, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Recalling his father, Toews said, “He’d often ask me how my actions and life choices were relevant ‘to the Lord’s work.'”
But what if you begin losing your religious faith? That’s where Toews found himself after graduating from a small Mennonite high school in Winnipeg, Manitoba. How, he wondered, could he leave behind Mennonite theology but retain Mennonite values about social responsibility?
He wound up studying the secularized theology of 19th-century German philosophy and literature, in which the content of traditional religious revelation was translated into the language of historical humanism. “My interests focused on the ways one could consider individual and collective existence without recourse to belief in transcendent truths,” Toews said.
He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in history and literature at the University of Manitoba then a doctorate in modern intellectual history at Harvard University. In 1979, after teaching at Columbia University, he arrived at the UW, where since 1982, he’s directed the CHID program.
Toews’ latest book is Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin. He’s also written Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 and edited The Communist Manifesto: By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels with Related Documents.
He’s been a MacArthur fellow and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science at Stanford University. He currently holds the Alumni Distinguished Professorship of the College of Arts and Sciences.
Despite the heavy-duty scholarship, however, Toews doesn’t take himself too seriously. He wears green, cream and coral-striped wool socks knitted by his wife, Eleanor, an archivist for the Seattle Public Schools. He usually walks or bikes to the UW from his house in the Montlake area of Seattle but sometimes drives a 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger. An all-season athlete in high school, Toews met Eleanor on a curling rink. They have two grown children: Julia, who teaches school in Tucson; and Jonathan, an architect in New York.
Doctoral student Matt Scheiblehner first met Toews in 1988, when an undergraduate in Introduction to Intellectual History. Toews told class members that if they encountered him on campus, he expected to see a dog-eared copy of Plato in their hip pockets. “If you’re working with a text, you live with it. That really stuck with me,” said Scheiblehner.
Because of their teacher’s high-octane brain, Scheiblehner and his friends referred to him as “Turbo Toews.”
“He’s just so impressive,” Scheiblehner said.
Martin Jay, a professor of intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley, first met Toews when they were graduate students at Harvard University. “Ever since his first work on Hegelianism, John has been widely admired as an erudite, lucid, careful scholar,” Jay said. “He’s scrupulous with his sources and the complexity of his ideas. Among his colleagues, he has a well-deserved reputation as trustworthy and thorough. He’s able to explore and make sense of the most labyrinthine theories of the most complex thinkers of the 19th century.”
If you wish to see the annual Faculty Lecture on UWTV, the airdates are:
Monday March 26 at 4pm
Tuesday March 27 at 10:30am
Thursday March 29 at 6pm
Friday March 30 at 9pm
Saturday March 31 at noon
Sunday April 1 at 8am and 11pm
