My approach to teaching is, at this point in my professional development, a function of my approach to learning. That is, the choices I have made in my own education-to declare an interdisciplinary major when none existed at Gettysburg College; to study abroad in Central America; to study at another institution for a term (Bates College); to complete a wilderness leadership semester; to pursue graduate study in Philosophy and Public Policy at George Washington University; and finally to enter the PhD program at the University of Georgia reflect an intentional effort to extend myself, and to remove myself from the familiar. This is precisely how I approach my teaching. In my view, my obligation to the students, to the institution, and to the community is necessarily connected to providing a context for the expression of students' intellectual independence. I aim to "create a space" in my classroom where students can lay claim to knowledge-to become limited experts in an area. In the classroom, on campus, or in the community, educators have the responsibility of providing a context in which students may choose to free themselves from muddled thought, from presupposition, and from easy generalization. In this context, students are extended and challenged. They are asked to consider experience from another perspective. They are asked to link their experiences outside of the classroom to the works of Plato, of Rawls, or of Nozick. I challenge them to entertain competing views of positions they hold dear. From the responses of several students, this is not always comfortable, or even welcome. It is, nonetheless, a fundamental part of critical thought.
    In my classes, I have tried a number of things to encourage the "creation of space." Regardless of class size, I routinely lead the courses as seminars. I facilitate student discussion, organize group study projects, and offer several study sessions throughout the term for students to sit with me informally to discuss current events in the context of the course material. For example, I have arranged a series of these informal discussions around the recent efforts to make reparations to victims of September 11th-in the context of Rawlsian justice. Last year I arranged a similar series of talks relating the work of Bork, Dworkin and John Hart Ely to the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore.
My approach to my work in the classroom is consistent with my view of the value and purpose of higher education. Colleges and universities are places where individuals find the encouragement to free themselves from generalizations, received wisdom, or presuppositions that shape much of our public discussion, action and inquiry. As liberating institutions, they must be contrarian to some degree. They must, at some level, be critical of the prevailing assumptions regarding the accepted paradigms of public understanding. The public good of critical thought and analysis provided in part by these institutions is a necessary condition or precondition for a more robust democracy.
    As institutions that critique the norms of acceptance and consumption, it follows that they should similarly critique the general expectation that higher education should be a turnstile for a commodity-driven society. Many of the skills, qualities, and hardware necessary for success in the private sector will be developed in higher education institutions, but the value of education extends beyond this role. Students gain much more than a skill that may be brought to bear in a particular place or profession. Students are not simply trained; they are offered an education-the distinction is vital.
    The idea of a liberal education is not to hand students a product, or a result. Rather, the chief aim is to offer ambiguity-a struggle with difficult and often uncomfortable ideas and experiences-that must be interpreted. By having the world interpreted for us, or by uncritically accepting prior knowledge, we are not fulfilling our obligations as learners. To become marketable in the conventional sense, but not intellectually independent, not suspicious, not taken by the elegance of learning, not sensitive to the moral dimension of the educative experience is to have missed the value of higher education. To be offered skills or information and not struggle with ambiguity is to be trained, but not educated.
    In part, then, education is about intellectual emancipation. It must encourage students to extend themselves, to become self-reliant, and to lay claim to knowledge-to become in some sense limited experts in an area of inquiry. Free inquiry and the recognition of the limitations of claims of certainty are necessary conditions for critical thought, and as a result defining elements of our work as teachers and students.
    A liberal education also asks students to take responsibility for knowledge, to act. How we act-how we come to connect our intellectual endeavors with our expression of the resultant commitments-is equally important. Many students do expect a contrarian element to their education-precisely because they recognize the fundamental point of the institutions they inhabit. They recognize the important role of higher education as a critic of conventionality. They see themselves as part of the institution on which society relies for a critique of convention.
    Colleges and universities must continue to challenge what we know or believe. The role of the teacher within these institutions is to rebuke us and to remind us of our limits and the social costs of prejudice and presupposition. As teachers we must remove students from the known, the familiar, and affect the discourse, thoughts, and acts of students. This is education's emancipatory value, and the guiding principle of my teaching.