Universities Need Teachers Who Want to Teach, and Students Willing to Learn

As a recent graduate of UCLA, I saw up close some of the worst excesses of the student anti-Israel movement: a massive encampment blocking access to the central part of campus, classmates chanting violent and vicious slogans, and an attempt to purge student government of “Zionists” (in practice, Jews). The last item led me to file a formal complaint with the university.

I’m not the first to point out that these problems, all too typical of American universities, are the result of a much deeper institutional crisis. I’d like to call attention to one aspect of this crisis, based on my own experience: the decline of mentorship, itself connected to the unwillingness of teachers to teach and students to learn.

There’s a reason why mentorship is the subject of some of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s most personal writings, the epitome of love in Plato’s Symposium, and the theme of one of my favorite films, Dead Poets Society. The wisdom in all three is the same: learning happens not just within the mind, but in the interaction between students and teachers.