The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t On The Syllabus: Humility

Following up on my previous posts (link below):  New York Times Op-Ed:  The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus, by Frank Bruni:

I warn my students. At the start of every semester, on the first day of every course, I confess to certain passions and quirks and tell them to be ready: I’m a stickler for correct grammar, spelling and the like, so if they don’t have it in them to care about and patrol for such errors, they probably won’t end up with the grade they’re after. I want to hear everyone’s voice — I tell them that, too — but I don’t want to hear anybody’s voice so often and so loudly that the other voices don’t have a chance.

And I’m going to repeat one phrase more often than any other: “It’s complicated.” They’ll become familiar with that. They may even become bored with it. I’ll sometimes say it when we’re discussing the roots and branches of a social ill, the motivations of public (and private) actors and a whole lot else, and that’s because I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

I’d been on the faculty of Duke University and delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that each component of it was about the same quality: humility.

The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole. The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. And “it’s complicated” is a bulwark against arrogance, absolutism, purity, zeal.

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility. ...

We all carry wounds, and some of us carry wounds much graver than others. We confront obstacles, including unjust and senseless ones. We must tend to those wounds. We must push hard at those obstacles. But we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Humility (Oct. 10, 2013)
• LawProfBlawg (Anonymous Professor, Top 100 Law School), Law Prof Humility: Self-Promotion v. Self-Adulation (Aug. 22, 2016)
• Wall Street Journal, In A Life-Or-Death Crisis, Humility Is Everything (Aug. 1, 2019)
• Phil Lord (McGill), Cultivating Humility In Law Students (Feb. 2, 2021)
• New York Times, Curing The Political Polarization Destroying America With Humility And Joy (May 29, 2022)
• New York Times, Humility Is A Virtue. But Can Humble People Succeed In The Modern World? (Oct. 16, 2022)
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), The Parable Of The Prodigal Son: Justice, Mercy, And Humility (Oct. 1, 2023)
• y Jim Gash (President, Pepperdine University), Universities Must Preserve American Values: Freedom, Faith And Self-Governance — Leavened With Humility (Dec. 10, 2023)
• Wall Street Journal, Lessons In Leadership From The Hebrew Bible (Feb. 4, 2024)
• New York Times, Don’t Let Our Broken Politics Mangle Our Faith (Apr. 7, 2024)