Ideas - A Guide to Hope, Learning and Shakespeare: Scholar Shannon Murray

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

Feeling the weight of a world? A lecture on hope might be a much needed balm. Scholar Shannon Murray shares lesson in hope, patience, empathy and 'freudenfreude,' and how Shakespeare’s words have become the narrative soundtrack of her life. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 13, 2023.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. True hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings. Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. And that's a line from William Shakespeare's play Richard III, essentially saying that having hope allows one to rise above their lot in life. The award-winning English professor Shannon Murray has thought a lot about this topic. She co-wrote a book called Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Empathy, and Learning, and the University of Prince Edward Island created a new lecture series to honor her acclaimed academic career. Today, the inaugural Shannon K. Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy. It was given by its honoree. We're calling this program Shakespeare's Guide to Hope and Learning. UPEI's Interim

Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sharon Myers, gave the introduction. Here's an excerpt. As an ally, advocate, and champion for the Canadian teaching and learning community, Shannon knows, as Rebecca Solnit writes, hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door. To hope is to give yourself to the future. And that commitment to the future is what makes the present, no matter how messy it is, inhabitable. It is my pleasure to introduce the inaugural Shannon K. Murray Lecturer and NAPA Award recipient, Shannon Murray. Thank you, Sharon, and thank you all for being here.

I love that Rebecca Solnit quotation. I'm going to think of the axe now. I am moved and overwhelmed by this honour and so grateful to you for this event. We are at the start of what I think will be a continuing conversation about hope and not just a once-in-a-year dip into educational optimism. Permit me to preface this talk with three quick ideas about hope. The first is that if we are just starting to hear and read a lot about hope, we're probably

in trouble. And that's okay. If everything is awesome, then hope is a virtue or a practice that is less necessary, or it might seem less so. I spent this past Sunday, as maybe some of you did too, on the North Shore beaches, and driving there and back, listening to the CBC, I heard hope invoked four times in three different programs. Now, I know I'm going to be sensitive to the topic since it's a large part of my scholarship, but still, we talk about hope and we need to think seriously about what it is when we have to imagine that the world can be better than it is. Lisa Dixon, Jessica Riddell, and I were finishing our book, Shakespeare's Guide to Hope, Life, and Learning, in 2020, and gosh, there was a lot of op-ed ink spilled about hope through those early pandemic years. Our experience was that talking and reading and writing about the nature of hope made us more hopeful. The second thing I want to say about hope is that I'm not thinking of a passive, it's all good approach to crisis. The hope we advocate for is active. It requires

engagement and a clear-eyed understanding of the way the world is before any attempt to make it better. The term we use is critical hope, and it's the kind of hope you'll read about in the work of Paulo Freire or Bell Hooks or Ira Shore. I'll quote from our introduction. Hope requires that we become comfortable with the difficulty of knowing in order to move forward into the future, into the unknown. Hope is fueled by values of integrity, of ethical and moral responsibility, of citizenship and engagement. We argue that teaching itself is among the most hopeful of vocations

because you must live in a world where you cannot see the impact you may make in some distant future you may never access, and do it anyway. In other words, the hope we talk about is hard work. And finally, I know it's important for me as a human to practice that tough, engaged hopefulness, but I also know it's exhausting when you hope in isolation. Hope may be an individual academic virtue, and it ought to be an institutional one too. Wouldn't it be wonderful to work in a hopeful university? What would that even look like? But I'll champion here some middle ground between the individual and the institutional. middle ground between the individual and the institutional. We need to look actively for others to talk to, to dream with, to struggle with, and to hope with. We need to form hope bubbles,

pockets of students and staff and faculty and others. Our university is going through a particularly tough time right now, and if we come out of this better, and I have to hope we will, I believe it will be because of the work of Hope Bubbles. So on to my end of career teaching philosophy, which is an idea I'm hoping will catch on. I do love reading statements of teaching philosophy. They try to distill in a page or two what teachers do and why we do it. I love how hopeful and aspirational they are and how they show off the twin loves teachers have

for our students' learning and for our subjects. How rewarding to be able to introduce them to each other, learners to material, as if we were planning a perfect dinner party. And I'm so glad that I've kept most of the teaching philosophies I've written since my first about 35 years ago. Because mine is an always evolving pedagogy, which means I never get it right, reading through them is like reading an educational autobiography. Reading through them is like reading an educational autobiography. But for many of us, in the last five or so years of our careers,

the pressing need to write them disappears after we're no longer required to for tenure or promotion or so on. What I'm proposing is the idea of a career-closing, ideally not a career-ending, teaching philosophy. What have been the most important, troubling, guiding principles in our teaching or learning? Or what just helped us navigate some of the rough spots in a career in higher education? Now, my love of teaching is equally matched by my love of Shakespeare. And I have a few students here who are nodding. They have experienced this. Shakespeare, and I have a few students here who are nodding. They have experienced this.

Since I first saw my first mind-expanding Hamlet at the age of 16, it was Derek Jacoby in The Young Vic. To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die. troubles and by opposing end them to die to sleep no more and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, to die,

to sleep. To sleep? A chance to dream? Ay, there's the rub. to dream. Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.

There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare-bottom.

Who would these fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life? But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose born no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sickly dour with the pale cast of thought.

And enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn and lose the name of action Shakespeare has provided the narrative soundtrack of my life, and lines and characters and stories pop into my head when I need them, explaining, coaching, warning, comforting me in my life as well as in my work. So I want to talk through the six principles I've settled on for my last teaching philosophy through the lens of some of Shakespeare's plays. And here are my six principles. Return to what you love. Cultivate Freudenfreude. Duckets are not daughters. Beware of efficiency, at least in things that matter. Mind the gaps and don't give up the ship because you can't control the winds.

This is a very short, short list and I kept these six in part because these are the things that I struggle with. They're not just what I most firmly believe to be true, but they're also the principles that I have most difficulty with. As always, Shakespeare gets it right. It is easier to tell others what to do than to do it myself. If I had another 30 years of a teaching career, I'm sure at least some of these would still be eluding me, which is what makes them worth wrestling with. As Portia in Merchant of Venice says, it is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach 20 what were good to be done than be one of the 20 to follow my own teaching. So principle

number one, start with and return to what you love. I'm guessing that many of us who teach at university got here because of a deep, burning love of some subject that very few other people care about at all. But we're nevertheless compelled to share with them, whether they like it or not. whether they like it or not. That's so important to hang on to. What got us here? Even if we took detours or wrong turns or found a better path, we who teach must teach from love as much as possible. And that's the whole of my friend Lisa Dixon's sermon. Start with what you love, she says, with what gives you deep, rich joy. Find that love and use it as a foundation in your scholarship, in your teaching, in your working life generally. And return to it at low moments, moments of despair, burnout, disillusionment, crisis, disappointment. Or just when, as we all do,

you have stuff to do that you don't love. I remember the moment I fell in love almost 50 years ago with Hamlet. I knew that I didn't understand everything about the Hamlet that I was watching, but I got it. And somehow he got me. And how could that happen? How could a 400-year-old play about a moody Danish aristocrat have anything to say about the experience of a middle-class, moody Canadian teenager? I think that's still my fundamental research question. What exactly is the strange magic that these plays have? It's a question that still brings me joy to wrestle with, with learners new to the play. And of course, the origin stories of your scholarly passions

will all be different. One of the things I love about higher education is how varied and esoteric and idiosyncratic all our academic loves are. There are people on our campuses who absolutely, passionately, hopelessly, devotedly love what no one else cares about. And that's what makes both professors and learners.

I think it might be telling that there aren't any university professors in Shakespeare's plays. Although there are university students on a break, there are four schoolmasters. There are some love-struck fake tutors in Taming of the Shrew. There are four young men in Love's Labour's Lost who decide on a year-long program of fasting and serious study.

They do have a tutor, though, Holofernes, and he is awful. He is a perfect satire of a dull, hot-air-filled pedant. Did you know that Shakespeare coined the word pedant just for him? That might be the most pedantic thing I've ever said. Shakespeare may have made good fun of teachers, but, as the Shakespearean Patricia Wilson wrote, Shakespeare didn't hate teachers. He just invites students to reconsider any blind faith they may have in us. Fair enough.

Shakespeare does have a lot to say about learning, though, about informal teachers, about those people who explicitly tell or perfectly model new and better ways of being in the world. tell or perfectly model new and better ways of being in the world. For example, he gives us characters who radiate one of my favorite academic virtues, Freud and Freude. You certainly met its evil twin, Schadenfreude, the delight in the misfortune of others, but Freud and Freude is its heroic opposite. It's a delight in the joys and successes of others. And Shakespeare gives us lots of examples, though mostly in his comedies, not so many in the tragedies. In Shakespeare's tragedies, schadenfreude leads to cruelty undermining depression and death. Freud and Freude leads to happily ever after. So let that be a lesson to us.

Freud and Freude leads to happily ever after. So let that be a lesson to us. If you are an Iago, jealous of the promotion Cassio got and hating the joy Othello has in his new marriage, and especially if you act on it, you will be stabbed. The inability to take pleasure when others succeed comes from the idea of scarcity, that if someone else has a success, has joy, then there must be less for us. And there are sometimes good reasons for that feeling.

In zero-sum games, where only one person can get a job or a scholarship or an award, it can feel like universities are more places of scarcity than abundance. But an envious Iago in Othello, or a competitive and vengeful merchant like Shylock or Antonio in Merchant of Venice, all of whom take some pleasure in seeing others fall, may end up isolated, bereft, stabbed. In Shakespeare's plays, schadenfreude does not pay. Two of my favorite examples of the abundance-filled Freud and Freuda mindset in Shakespeare are Celia and Rosalind from the comedy As You Like It. I love this play so much. Celia's father has usurped the dukedom from his brother, Duke Senior, and Celia has been left with Senior's

daughter, Rosalind, as a playmate. As they grew together, they became perfect fast friends, so much so that when Rosalind is threatened with banishment, Celia decides to disguise herself and go with her. Rosalind is understandably upset, but nevertheless says to Celia, I will forget the condition of my estate to rejoice in yours. And Celia responds that when her father dies, she will give the dukedom to Rosalind to make everything right again, rather than keep the power herself. She says, for what he hath taken away from thy father perforce, I will render thee again in affection. This is a play in which affection and love can defeat force and violence,

which is my favorite kind of improbable fiction. And what lovely models for teachers, colleagues, and educational developers. It might seem perfectly obvious that we should take pleasure in the successes and happiness of our students, But as we try to reclaim collegiality among ourselves, making sure we take time to enjoy and celebrate the successes of our colleagues is so important, as you've done, Sharon. We can be constantly pushed into the sense that we are in competition with each other as teachers, as scholars, and shrinking resources can make us feel as if our colleagues,

other disciplines, or other departments are the enemies, that the scarcity is their fault. We need to keep Celia's mindset, keep a focus on abundance and not scarcity, and keep up the practice, because it is a practice of delighting in the happiness of others. If we are to hope for hopeful institutions, developing that virtue as a culture is an important place to start. In the meantime, there are local ways to practice being Celia's and Rosalind's. When I took on my first administrative job, my academic mentor, who was also my dad, gave me one piece of advice. Keep a box of note cards on your desk, and anytime you hear anything good about anyone you work with, send a card. Emails are also good, but real mail is special.

If nothing else occurs to you, you could try what Anne Braithwaite and I do. We took to doing a few years back when we realized how much that we do goes unnoticed and unmarked. We periodically write to each other something that just says, you're doing good work and UPEI is lucky to have you. We started it as a joke, but even knowing that, each time we get the message, it feels really good. There's some research that suggests our own students will be more resilient, less depressed, generally happier if they practice at Freud and Freude. So let's model it for them. Do we find ways to celebrate the successes of our colleagues in our classes, to boast about their awards, books, tenure, amazing anything. And this article by Julie Fraga in the New York

Times from 2022 is a good place to start with the benefits to us and our students of Freud and Freude. So those are my principles, teaching and learning principles number one and two from Shakespeare. Remember what you love and be more like Celia and Rosalind and pass on the Freud and Freude. So number three, ducats are not daughters. That idea of needing to document in some credible way the impact of our teaching and its impact on other teachers leads me to this next lesson from Shakespeare. This one is about the danger of misplaced, obsessive measurement. The ducats and daughters idea comes from The Merchant of Venice, one of Shakespeare's comedies without a lot of laughs.

There's a man, Bassanio, who wants to win the hand of a beautiful rich woman, Portia. And he thinks he needs to borrow a lot of money from a friend, who then borrows a lot of money from the Jewish moneylender, Shylock, whom he has berated and spat upon in public many times. What could possibly go wrong? This is the play we get the pound of flesh idea from, because that's what Bassanio's friend Antonio puts up as collateral. There's so many problems here. First, the whole thing hinges on the idea that Bassanio needs money to look like a good catch for Portia, when in fact all he has to do is guess a riddle correctly. And so I'm starting to imagine an app, like a dating app,

Shakespearean dating app, that would actually require people to solve riddles in order to get matched. The riddle he solves, the riddle Bassanio solves, is all about not confusing silver and gold with true worth. So there. When in a subplot, Shylock's daughter, Jessica, runs off with a Christian and steals some money, Shylock rants, Christian and steals some money. Shylock rants, my daughter, oh my ducats, oh my daughter fled with a Christian, oh my Christian ducats. Justice, the law, my ducats and my daughter, a sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats, of double ducats stolen from me by my daughter. The jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones stolen by my daughter. Justice, find the girl. She hath the stones upon her and the ducats. It always feels to me like the twinned version of semantic satiation,

you know, when you say a word too often and it starts to get meaningless. So he says those two words so often that they lose their individual meaning and for him become the same things. His money and Jessica are mere tradable commodities. He's failed to see the difference between something that can be counted and something that really counts. Merchant is the big play of Shakespeare's that tackles love and money getting all mixed up, to quote the talking heads,

but we see it in other plays too, like King Lear, where a division of a kingdom into three becomes a game to make Lear's daughters quantify in public how much they love him. Now, I know it's a close race with a lot of contenders, but I see higher education's inability to distinguish between the things that count and things that can just be easily counted as our potentially tragic flaw. And boy, we spend a lot of time and money and resources doing a lot of quantifying, measuring, and counting up. And we know the frustration of those numbers associated with the student ratings of teaching. And we worry about the number of students in a program or a

classroom, too many or too few. And we know those colleagues or administrators who count up numbers of publications rather than looking at them or evaluating their worth. And we can get more bang for our buck if we put 400 first-year students in a room with one per-course contract person instead of 25 first-years with one very expensive full prof like me. If money is our goal and the bottom line is our bottom line, then of course we know what to do. It's simple. But that's not our business. That's not our mission, rather. And university is not a business. And I need to assure you that I'm not just being naive here. I know we need to pay bills and rent and light and salaries, and we have to be financially responsible and to collect good data and evaluate ourselves and others

and find the things that make us better. But that budgeting and counting up isn't our primary mission. There's a wonderful book I recommend by James Vincent, Beyond Measure, The Hidden History of Measurement, from qubits to quantum constants. In his last chapter, he gives a general warning that applies as well to governments and to our daily lives as it does to education.

Measurement itself, he argues, is not the problem. But it's too easy to get caught up. It's too easy for me to get caught up in simplistic measurement. Because measurement in numbers can seem easier to get your mind around, more solid, they persuade, they feel real, scientific, rigorous. They certainly sound bite better than a nuanced, complex argument. And when I have a lot to do, and when I'm feeling like my discipline is threatened,

I can be tempted to use the language or the numbers of those people I'm talking to. I'm not arguing here, and I want to be bold enough to say I don't think Shakespeare's arguing either, that measurement is the problem. It's excessive and inappropriate measurement. Not metrics, but what Vincent calls metric fixation that we have to be wary of. Now, I think there's a lot of preaching to the choir that I'm doing here. I bet no one who took the time to come to this university classroom on a lovely afternoon the day before your classes start will stand up and say, but money matters

more than people or learning or enriching our democracies. But I have to have this in my end of career teaching philosophy because I struggle with it. So much of the educational systems we inherit and work with are founded on ideas that Frederick Taylor got from Henry Ford. The assembly line, everything can and should be quantified, guys. And I'm shocked when I realize how much I have what Vincent calls the Taylorism within. I am deeply mistrustful of student ratings of teaching as a measure of good teaching,

but I'm really happy when mine are high, and I'm sad when they're low. I am philosophically aligned with ungrading practices, and my God, my brain is wired for percentages and letter grades. I walked the Camino this spring to focus on the now, on the journey, on the present, but one day my Garmin watch didn't record my walk, and I'm still irritated that I don't have the number of steps from that day in my log. So I have to resist my own metric fixation, both in myself and in the arguments of others precisely because education matters and knowledge matters

and students matter and they're more than numbers. And I don't want to model excessive and inappropriate measurement for my students. An essential part of my fourth year arts capstone course revolved around showing art students that yes, your degree has given you skills, attitudes, and knowledge important in the workplace, but you are not merely economic units, something Martha Nussbaum argues so well in both of these books, creating capabilities and not-for-profit. So I need the cautionary example of a Lear or a Shylock, to see people as people and worthy in their own complex selves

and not as easily quantifiable units for somebody else's use. I have to resist that urge to overmeasure, to confuse precious daughters with countable ducats. You're listening to Shakespeare's Guide to Hope and Learning on Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime

fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. English scholar Shannon Murray has devoted a lot of her recent research to studying hope, in particular, through the words of Shakespeare. The University of PEI, where she teaches, has created a new lecture series in her honour,

focusing on hope and the academy. Professor Murray gave the inaugural lecture in 2023. My next principle, I need to resist the urge to be efficient, at least in things that matter. I think of my favorite, favorite play of all time, Hamlet, which is four hours long and packed with meditations and digressions and ghosts and delays and pirates and Greek history and plays within plays and entire wars in Scandinavia and acting tips. And I still wish it were longer. Someone new to the play might

suggest a really vicious editorial pen. Shakespeare, I'm sure we can get that down. Cutting out everything that isn't right on the subject of Hamlet's vengeance against his father-killing, mother-marrying uncle. But the digressions in Hamlet aren't add-ons. They aren't distractions or filler. They are the play. And that's how I struggle to think of the classroom experience as well. Shakespeare critic Donovan Sherman writes about how educational principles of ancient Stoics and Hamlet together could help us think about the classroom now. For the Stoics, education is rooted in the actual, in the present moment, in the body. So what might seem to be interrupting or derailing is actually the class. Sherman writes,

the presumption is that what happens in the class is merely the transmission of learning, not the learning itself. Stoicism, by contrast, focuses and refocuses itself on the creak of a chair, clamor of construction out the window, the mispronunciation by the teacher, the sudden realization with five minutes left that an entire section of the lesson plan has been ignored. That's so familiar. So too would it train our attention to the individual experiences from outside of the classroom that cannot help but enter the room despite any fantasy of a hermetically sealed off space. So here's where I admit that I love this idea that everything is the learning and I have to

embrace and acknowledge that messiness, digression and inefficiency are essential to the full learning experience and I'm deeply uncomfortable with this. I'm a planner. I like plans. And yet I have to admit that my best and most memorable classes or even courses are not the ones where I pull off a meticulous plan. It's when I'm uncomfortable, when we're struggling with Zoom or masking or just back from a four-week strike, or when something terrible or wonderful has happened in the world, or when a wasp comes in and I have to invite it outside, or just when a student suggests something amazingly new, then I'm there.

It is to be truly alive in the knowledge that this moment together, like this one, with this material and these students and me and this classroom and this world will never happen again. It is the human and the humane and the present and the now in the experience. And like Hamlet, it's messy and digressive and painful and heartbreaking and worth it. So as with measurement, of course, there's a place for ruthless efficiency. I want to be efficient in answering emails. I do not believe any meeting should last longer than an hour.

I know that the amount of time I have in a day is finite, and some stuff might just not get done. In general, in things that don't matter, I want to be a model of efficiency. But I strive to be a model of efficiency. But I strive to be a consciously inefficient teacher. And I want a full, windy, and beautifully inefficient four-plus-hour Hamlet. On to principle number five, mind the gaps. Someone I spoke to recently learned that I've been teaching Hamlet for over 40 years, and she asked me, aren't you bored? No, I'm not. And how wonderful that is. I don't get bored because there's still so much I don't understand. I don't get bored because each time I teach a Hamlet or a Lear or a Midsummer Night's Dream, I'm different, and my students are different, and the world is different. And I'm not bored precisely because

of something that's most characteristic of Shakespeare's plays, and especially his best ones. He leaves space in those plays for us, for readers, viewers, actors, filmmakers, and writers to inhabit those openings in his plays. I think that's why there can be so many wildly disparate versions of his character. Hamlet can be active or diffident, quite mad, a little mad, not mad at all. The ghost who asks Hamlet to avenge him could be his dead father, or a demon sent to damn him, or a hallucination. The ambiguity that's at the heart of that play means space to move around in, to play in. And for me, that makes watching and reading about and talking to students about

Shakespeare's plays endlessly interesting. I wonder where the gaps are in your disciplines. So this is Shakespeare's gappiness, to borrow a term from Shakespearean critic Emma Smith, and the openings, the spaces Shakespeare leaves insist on a kind of trust between the author and his readers, audiences, and actors. So that's another thing I've learned about teaching and learning from Shakespeare. Those gaps are where the magic happens. One of my goals in class is to create the opportunities to encourage intellectual friendships. I organize permanent teams and give thought to how they should be formed, but they're still often hit and miss.

I've actually had marriages come from these teams, but I'm sure more than a few of them are just as happy to see the backs of each other. This year I had a really interesting and humbling experience. One of the teams of six in my Renaissance Lit class three years ago began connecting outside of class and even went to Ireland together this year on a break. And they had told me that they never would have met had it not been for my teams. Isn't that lovely? Then last term, I learned the awful truth. Their friendship began not because of my careful in-class curation of intellectual teams, but because I got a migraine

and ended class early one day, so they all went to coffee. I sort of created that space, that opportunity, but it was humblingly accidental. There was a gap, but they had to seize it. I know my own tendency is to over-plan, to over-structure, but Shakespeare reminds me of the beauty in the gaps and reminds me to talk to students about watching for those openings and taking advantage of them. Leaving gaps means trusting that my students might fill them with things even more interesting, original, and beautiful

than anything I could have planned myself. So, I've talked through love and Freud and Freude, measurement and gaps and inefficiencies. I want to end with something hopeful, but not just another triumphal narrative about university or college life, because all's not well. We are not dealing with a crisis,

but a series of crises in higher education in Canada. Some of them are common across the country. Others are particular to our own institutions. I'm talking now to my colleagues at the University of Prince Edward Island at a particularly difficult moment in our history. Let's hope it's the most difficult. Now, it helps to study old stuff like Shakespeare, stuff that tells me three things. Now, it helps to study old stuff like Shakespeare, stuff that tells me three things. Things can get better, things can get worse, things will certainly not stay the same. And there's hope in that.

So I want to end not with Shakespeare, but with a writer from a generation before him, and from whom he borrowed liberally, Sir Thomas More. Even if you haven't read it, you may know that Thomas More wrote the Utopia, invented the word, in fact. And in the second book of that wonderful work of imagination, he has his character, Raphael Heiflede, tell us about an island with an ideal social system,

the island of Utopia. But I'm not terribly interested in his description of the ideal social construct in book two. What I love in the utopia, what inspires me, is an argument between Heiflede and the character of Moore himself in book one. In that argument, the Heiflede character complains that if any prince he serves will not listen to his counsel, he will go elsewhere. As far as he is concerned, if his expertise is ignored, he's off. Heiflede's frustration resonates with me. I'm sure I'm not the only one to see a lack of interest in expertise from folks both inside and outside universities and colleges, especially when it comes to teaching and learning. So what do you do? Heiflede would say, go elsewhere. Find your

utopia, a place where your values are shared, where you can actively contribute. Be useful, and I do love to be useful. To quote Shakespeare again, there is a world elsewhere. To quote Shakespeare again, there is a world elsewhere. But the Thomas More character argues with Heithlede. He says that instead of leaving, you stay and fight, or you stay and find another route. You bide your time for the opening the moment those in charge are ready to hear you. It's such an important opposition and argument. And both men are surely right. It is reasonable to want to stay and fight. It is reasonable to believe you have to go. Have some of you seen Sarah Polly's wonderful movie, Women Talking? I hear echoes of this

dilemma in the decision the women of that movie had to make, do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. I am almost always of both minds. So far in my working life, I've been more Thomas Moore than Heifler Day. Stay and work and make things better, even in whatever small spheres you have within your control. As he says, don't give up the ship because you can't control the winds. And that applies as much to larger institutional issues or teaching and learning societies as to individual classes and courses. All the principles in my end-of-career teaching and learning philosophy have been the ones that I most struggle with. I want dearly to get them right, to be perfect, and I can't. Of course I can't. If I might quote the last episode of the supremely hopeful Ted Lasso, without spoilers,

human beings are never going to be perfect, Roy. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can. And if you keep on doing that, you'll always be moving towards better. I mentioned at the start that I reread my early teaching philosophies before I did this talk. I didn't tell you that the earliest ones are so simple and clear and confident. I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now, or at least less sure. But I cling to another moment from Moore's Utopia to keep going, to keep hoping, and that's what I'll leave you with. What you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can. For it is impossible that all should be well unless all people were good,

for it is impossible that all should be well unless all people were good, which is a situation I do not expect for some time to come. Thank you. Thank you. After Shannon Murray's lecture, there was a question and answer session. Here's an excerpt. After Shannon Murray's lecture, there was a question and answer session. Here's an excerpt. What you have said about hope is very inspiring, Shannon.

I think it's so deeply true that working with others who are trying to make good change happen, even if it's against all odds, it's that work with others that can reinvigorate us so much. And you've done so much here, Shannon. Thank you. Thank you very much. Very kind. Maybe I'll say to that, and back to what Anne was saying too, I'm a child of the 60s, right? And so when I was growing up, there was always going to be a Cold War, right? That's what we expected. And there was always going to be a Cold War, right?

That's what we expected. And there was always going to be apartheid, and there was always going to be a Berlin Wall. So when I find myself thinking, no, the things are too fixed to change for the better, I remember those three things because, you know, as a 10-year-old, 15-year-old, it would never have occurred to me that we would be, well, we'd be living with other problems now, but we would be living in a world that really didn't see any of those three things anymore.

Since I've been blessed for, since the last century, to have the office right across from Shannon, I've been able to see and hear how she gives hope to her students. But Shannon, could you talk about the students giving you hope? Yes. Don't you love September? Oh, September is so hopeful. I checked out this room on Friday. I've never been in this building before. It's beautiful, beautiful new building. And I got to see students moving in to this residence, and it made me weepy. It's just, it's so wonderful. And every September, I'm sure we all sort of feel this way, that this is, it's like the beautiful blank page of the term Talk to me again in November or March

But right now so I'm all of my students, of course But especially the ones who are coming to university for the first time. I just I love them dearly So so just there being here this is a big deal, right? And so just there being here, this is a big deal, right? If we've been at university for 30 or 40 or 20 years, it won't seem like it to us. But this is a big deal to go to university. And that's so hopeful. I am always struck by the extraordinary work that my students do.

And I know I'm lucky because I get to teach Shakespeare and I get to teach lots of the fun stuff as far as I'm concerned. But they rise to it. They say things that I wouldn't have expected. Yeah, thank you for that question, Richard, because they give me hope. And I think even at difficult times, what we can recognize, and Greg, you always say this, is that we may not have the ability to make huge change in the world as individuals, but we can decide where our individual spheres of control are. And that's sort of the classroom. The lovely thing about students is

that, you know, if you leave those gaps that I talked about, you're not going to be in control for long. So just let it happen and see what's happening. Yeah, it is the most hopeful, teaching is the most hopeful vocation, I think, because we trust in the future. But we get to be hopeful because every year that they come back and every year they're the same age. And we just keep getting older and older and older, and it's lovely. Okay, so the question is about whether the nature of students has changed over time or whether they're essentially the same.

Yeah, yeah. I come back to this a lot, and I think my short answer is, 40 years ago, tomorrow, basically the same 18-year-olds. I mean, there is so much. I see more similarity than difference. And I think one of our hopeful acts is to avoid the fist-shaking kids these days, which we might be tempted to fall into. Students come wanting to know.

They come curious. They come open. They come frightened. And, yeah, that was the same as when I first started teaching all those years ago. There are differences in the world, and those are going to affect both the classroom and the students and teachers in them. Technology, phones, of course, those are going to make some differences. COVID is an interesting one.

I hope that's a kind of a blip, but I've certainly seen some changes in the year or so since we've been back after COVID. since we've been back after COVID. But teaching in the humanities, not just even back when I started teaching, but when I started university myself, I certainly see more of a pressure on my students who are going to get English degrees and figure out later what they're going to do, a pressure on them not to end up in ditches, right? To get a job. So they're understandably worried about what's going to happen afterwards. And I think that's an outside pressure, but it's also another change, which is not their fault, which is that university tuition was $800 when I went to school. And so that's going to make a difference to them. It's going to make a difference to their anxiety, but it's also going to make a difference to their direction.

And that's not their fault, right? A friend of mine is really fond of saying, who are you going to blame, the salmon or their dam? This is a problem not of their making. So if they find themselves concerned with getting through courses, the system has made them so. Shannon, that was inspirational. And you have been inspirational for my entire career here. This is a knock-on question from that last one, because I was about, have students changed? So what about yourself as a teacher in your time here? I think my Bob Dylan joke is about right. I really feel much less comfortable with everything I do

and know now. I tell my students in their first year that this is what's going to happen to them. You come here much more confident about what you know than you will be in four years, right? This is the gift we will give you, that everything will be so much more complex. And no, you won't be able to watch a television show without endlessly analyzing it for your friends. So, I mean, they go through that for four years. I'm over 30 years. That's how I'm feeling.

And so embracing that sense that, oh my gosh, there's still so much I don't know about how people learn, and that's my job. And every year, they're all new and individuals. They insist on having their own personalities. So I hope I am more open to that messiness and more open to the complexity. It makes your job a lot harder, but so much richer. I think that's where I am. Shannon, one of the things that's really clear

from speaking with student after student who's had the joy of being in your class is that they know they are not ducats but that they are your daughters and it's student after I wouldn't accuse you of efficiency but it's so many students and somehow you do it at scale how do you communicate such care with your students? I was going to say, yeah. Yeah. Oh, what a hard question. Well, I'll sort of throw it back to you, Philip. It was probably 25 years ago,

and you were doing my review, because I was chair of the department, so you were doing my review. And you said something to me. You said that one of the students said to you, one of my students said to you that when she was in my office, it felt as if I was the only thing in the world that mattered to me. And I thought, that's not true. No. But I thought, I'm going to try that. So it was you reflecting that back to me that sort of, that made me think that's, that's what I will try to do from now on. That's, I'll try to live up to that compliment. So,

so maybe that's it, but, but, but they're lovely. Look at them. They're here. They're so easy to care about. I remember your capstone course, and I remember being with my peers, this is seven, eight years ago, at a party, far too many drinks probably. We decided to get together and make a video to promote this course

because it just made us feel so safe that we were going out into the world and we would be okay. And I think what you instilled in us really was that you believed in us and I think that's why you have such masses of students who feel so amicably towards you. So thank you for believing in us. in a mess. You were listening to Shakespeare's Guide to Hope and Learning. Excerpts from UPEI's inaugural Shannon K. Murray lecture on hope and the academy, given by the honoree herself, Shannon Murray. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or any other,

please go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. This program was produced by Mary Link. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Technical production, Mar McLeese, Gabby Hagorilis, and Danielle Duval. Senior producer, Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad, executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.