Many readers will have heard of the unexpected death of Paul Clough, an anthropologist and professor at the University of Malta. Anthropology may not be the most well-trodden of fields, nor does it enjoy the popular appeal of something like law or psychology. As for Paul, he was no self-publicist.
He wasn’t even Maltese, in fact. And yet, the news of his death was met with shock and sadness among very many. It was reported widely in the press, and I’m told there has been a deluge of posts and comments in the social media. It turns out that, in some way or other, Paul was part of the lives of a large number of people.
An opinion column is no place for an obituary, and I’ll resist the temptation. The reason I decided to write about Paul is that his lifework, and its impact on so many of us, says something about the value of teaching generally.
Admittedly, there are certain differences between schoolteachers and university lecturers and professors. Partly because their students are adults, lecturers can develop relationships with them that no teacher ever could with their pupils.
Paul Clough was my dissertation supervisor. I would spend hours at a time at his flat in St Paul’s Bay. He would smoke, suck on his trademark mints, and talk about my work, Marx, his parents, and his dog, and not necessarily in that order. I looked up to Mr Clough (as he still was at the time) as my intellectual superior, but we also got to know each other in a way that went beyond the straits of my student research. For largely sound reasons, that sort of rapport is not normally the case with schoolteachers and pupils.
Judging by the response to Paul Clough’s death… teaching is one thing that’s worth living for
Also unlike teachers, lecturers often become patrons to their student clients. I don’t mean this in a bad way, as in dispensing favours and cultivating dependence. Rather, and because university is the last step before a career or more university, it is part of the work of lecturers to write references, help with postgraduate funding, and such.
This was certainly my experience of Paul. It was to him and a couple of others that I turned when I decided to take anthropology further elsewhere. He wrote letters of recommendation, phoned old friends of his in England, and helped me find my way through the maze of course programmes and supervisors. This is what people mean when they say they are ‘forever indebted’ to their former professors.
And yet, all of that aside, Paul Clough was fundamentally a teacher. Over the past days I’ve asked myself why he was so popular, and why so many who did not know him as well as I did grieved just as much at the news of his death. While his wisdom and character also had a lot to do with it, the key part of the answer is that he had touched their lives as a teacher, and a wonderful one at that.
Paul would pour tremendous energy into his teaching – at times perhaps too much for his own health. He rarely missed a lecture and would show up with stacks of scribbled notes and books in hand. He’d get so carried away he once almost set the room on fire (literally) when a cigarette butt decided there was life yet in the bin. If you asked him a question after a lecture, you would likely spend an hour in his office.
Which brings me to teachers. The other day a former student of mine came to my office to ask for a reference. When I asked him what things were like at work, he said he didn’t want to be a ‘biċċa teacher’ (‘mere teacher’) all his life.
While I understand that people may want to change any job, I find his choice of language very troubling indeed, and perhaps more symptomatic of a general problem than one might suppose.
I’m not old enough to have lived at a time when teachers were held in awe, and when whole families were known as ‘tat-teacher’ (‘of the teacher’). I do, however, remember, not least from being my mother’s son, that teaching was once considered a desirable and highly respected occupation. People looked up to teachers – just as I looked up to Mr Clough, for that matter.
To be sure, the way respect is expressed tends to change over time. Teachers no longer stand on raised platforms, nor are they addressed as formally as they once were. That I suppose is called culture change, which is fine and in any case not limited to classrooms. It still leaves us with the fact, however, that the prestige and desirability of teaching have been drastically eroded.
In part it has to do with salaries, that really haven’t kept up. It’s also ironic, because teaching has been formally recognised as a profession for quite a few years now. So inadequate was the supposed upgrade that the very word ‘teacher’ is under assault. It’s now ‘educators’ (‘edukaturi’), quite as if the old one were a dirty word.
Judging by the response to Paul Clough’s death, the language acrobatics are both superfluous and unnecessary. Teaching is one thing that’s worth living for.