A Professor Addresses His Class at the End of the Semester

There are churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship where people come together to do things that give great meaning to their lives. In Alcoholics Anonymous there is a phrase “we come into these rooms.” And in church basements and halls all over the world people gather to engage in activities that have become an essential part of who they are.

I believe that the classroom is also a sacred space. What we do here—if we do it well—has the power to enrich us in profound and lasting ways.

So thank you for coming here and spending this time with me. It has been a very important time for me, and I hope it has been valuable for you, too.

Odd Classroom Moments

Earlier this week while lecturing to my senior seminar, I uttered the following sentence: “Being sober is always worse.”

When the students laughed at this, I was jolted out of my concentration and quickly realized how ridiculous I sounded. There is a reasonable explanation. I was describing one of the features of relative addiction theory, as proposed by psychologists Howard Rachlin, Gene Heyman, and others. But to my students it sounded like I was expressing a personal preference for drunkenness.