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[The following is Professor Thorburn's MacVicar Faculty Fellow acceptance speech, delivered March 1, 2001.]
I feel honored by this award and proud to be part of a university that demonstrates its commitment to undergraduate teaching in such a generous and public way.
My writing and scholarship count a good deal in my sense of who I am, but I've come to realize that my best intellectual energies may emerge in the classroom, in the unpredictableness, the live, existential excitement of the lecture and the seminar.
I've always been offended by those who speak of "the real world" beyond the classroom, as if the passion and seriousness and joy and humility engendered by the work of thinking and learning were "unreal," irrelevant to the practical world. No! no! I want cry out in answer: What could be more real, what could be more useful or valuable than intellectual mastery, true understanding? One reason for this is that truly understanding a problem in biology or chemistry, a historical event or a poem involves a recognition of limitation and complexity, of the partialness of explanations and paradigms, the limits to understanding itself. The humility we learn when we think in these ways is uncommon in our civic and political life, and its relative absence impoverishes us all.
Teaching literature at MIT is a special challenge, and for me an inspiriting one. All of us in the Humanities work in a kind of enclave; some say we work on the margins of the Institute's mission. It is true, of course, that few students choose MIT because they aim to be historians or anthropologists or poets. Yet I feel this makes us not less but more central to the experience of undergraduates. My classes in literature – like the classes of most of my colleagues in the Humanities – have claims on all students, on physicists and engineers, on astronomers, linguists, biologists: on all manner and kind of nerdly genius. Literature - this is a rich paradox - is an amateur discipline: it belongs to all who can read, it addresses the whole human community.
And although it remains one of MIT's best-kept secrets, literature is in actuality a central, shared experience for the vast majority of our undergraduates. 75-80 percent of them take at least one Literature subject before they graduate – a remarkable statistic when we remember that no Literature subject is required. Annual enrollments in Literature have held steady in the 1000-1200 range for the last 25 years, another remarkable fact for a technological institution with fewer than 4500 undergraduates.
I'm deeply grateful for this recognition, but I'm conscious as well of how arbitrary it is for me to be singled out from a group of teachers as gifted and committed as my colleagues in the Literature faculty. They – we – are truly a special group. Better than any faculty I know of in this country, they keep alive the ideal of the teacher-scholar. I accept this award on behalf of my comrades in the Literature Section of MIT: James Buzard, James Cain, Peter Donaldson, Howard Eiland, Mary Fuller, Diana Henderson, John Hildebidle, Noel Jackson, Henry Jenkins, Wyn Kelley, Alvin Kibel, Christina Klein, Ruth Perry, Shankar Raman, Stephen Tapscott, William Uricchio.
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