Eugene O'Neill on Convincing People

How I misinterpreted the point of classroom discussions when I was a student, and what I have learned since.

As I have mentioned in this space before, during the late 1980s, all students in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame took a course that was just known as Core. The course was billed as a discussion seminar, with twenty students or less, and it featured major foundational texts from many of the disciplines in the College, from literature and history to anthropology and psychology. I can trace two of my intellectual loves to this course: foundational texts and interdisciplinary thinking.

The faculty who taught Core came from all disciplines. Mine was a professor of Greek, and he was a thoughtful teacher who was truly interested in what students had to say. That class was the first time I witnessed the productive use of silence in the classroom. If Dr. Vacca posed a discussion question, and nobody responded, he never saved us from our silences; we learned to speak once we realized he would not just keep talking if we didn’t respond. Although in general I didn’t love talking in class (typical introvert here), I definitely found my voice in that course.

Not unlike the Notre Dame of today, the political tilt in the course was conservative or centrist, although a few liberal students kept the discussion lively. This was during the period when I was having to examine the conservative values that I had inherited from my parents, and slowly transitioning away from them. Although I don’t remember specifically, I would imagine that if anything political came up, I was probably still arguing the conservative position at that time. I do remember sparring regularly with an art student who seemed to relish debate as much I did, and doing my best—with all of the arrogance of a multi-privileged, 19-year old male—to convince her she was wrong.*

In December of my sophomore year, between the two halves of Core, I went home for Christmas break and did what I did during all of my shorter breaks in college: spend as much of the day as I could reading, and then going out with my friends in the evenings. Used book stores were plentiful then, and in one of them I found and bought a copy of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Iceman Cometh, and I brought it home and read it in one sitting. I remember everything about this experience: the winter day, sitting in a high-backed chair, in the front corner of the living room, with Christmas lights visible in the bushes outside.

My yellowed old edition of the play.

After I finished reading O’Neill’s devastating play, I went back into that Core seminar in January almost never spoke again. I could see my professor, who eventually became a mentor to me, initially baffled by my behavior and then frustrated. He lowered my grade for the spring semester, and I could not blame him. Participating in the discussions was a major part of our work in the class, and I simply stopped talking. I did not stop engaging: I continued to love the texts, the assignments, and the feedback he gave me. But I had decided that I would no longer debate with anyone in that class anymore. Since I had been one of the main talkers, the class became markedly more silent, oftentimes awkwardly so. I felt bad about this, but I had made up my mind: I was done trying to convince people they were wrong.

If you have ever read or seen O’Neill’s play, you might not see the immediate connection between it and my hastily decided conviction. The play was written in 1939, although the action takes place in 1912. The premise is one that you can find in a million plays, novels, and movies: a group of characters, stuck in the deadening routines of their lives, are upended by the intrusion of an outsider. In O’Neill’s play, the characters are the residents of a cheap boarding house in Greenwich Village; all of the play’s action takes place in the barroom downstairs. The dozen or so jobless men, and three female prostitutes, spend their days cadging drinks from the soft-hearted owner, drinking and passing out from morning to evening. They are not hopeless, though: during the play’s first act, each of them reveals that they have dreams of liberating themselves from their alcoholic shackles and starting a new life—but tomorrow, always tomorrow.

Twice a year an upbeat salesman named Hickey whirls into their lives, buying everyone drinks and hosting a raucous celebration. As the play opens, the cast of characters are awaiting his semi-annual arrival, and anticipating the usual bounty of free alcohol. But when Hickey arrives, he announces that he no longer drinks, and that, moreover, he has come to rescue his longtime friends from their dreams about changing their lives. He intends to help them pursue their stated ambitions—but only so they can let go of what he calls their “pipe dreams.” The bar’s owner, for example, seems to have agoraphobia; Hickey intends to take him on a walk around the neighborhood. A policeman who was fired for graft claims that he was framed and that he could call on his sergeant any day and get his old job back; Hickey convinces him to wake up the next morning and visit the station.

I will risk playing the spoiler here by saying that what happens is what exactly what you expect to happen: all of the characters, browbeaten throughout the evening by Hickey, get up the next day—sick and trembling and sober—and attempt to follow through on their delusions. All are forced to recognize that they will never achieve their dreams and that they have destroyed their own lives with their drinking. Although this quick sketch does describe the basic plot of the drama, I can assure you that other revelations and insights throughout the play, especially in its final acts, make it worth reading or viewing even if you know this plot.

But O’Neill’s slow unveiling of Hickey as a character might be the play’s major achievement. Hickey, the outsider, comes into the play at the end of the first act as the seeming hero: he brings money, booze, food, and the promise of better lives for all. He has the best intentions. He explains repeatedly that after they have abandoned their pipe dreams, the self-knowledge that the other characters will receive will give them a welcome peace. As the play progresses, the viewer realizes that while Hickey does have good intentions, and in fact can see people’s delusions accurately, he has a disturbing zeal for convincing everyone that they are wrong about themselves—even after he starts to see the harmful effects of his arguments. By the end of the play, the viewer understands two things: Hickey’s real mission was actually more about helping himself than helping others; and trying to change the minds of people who don’t want their minds changed is a futile exercise.

Which leads us, finally, back to me sitting in that formal chair on a winter’s day in Cleveland in December of 1988. After I closed the book, I felt personally indicted by the character of Hickey; the sensation was almost physical. I realized that in that Core seminar, I had become obsessed with convincing people that I was right. I had no desire to learn from my liberal sparring partner or other classmates; I only wanted them to recognize my insights. My response to this recognition was simply to stop convincing people that I was right. And because my modus operandi in Core was arguing for my convictions, I felt that I simply had to stop talking.

I am not here to judge my 19-year old self, but to think about what my professor should have said to me if I had ever explained all of this to him—which I never did, and which I regret. He became a mentor, and ended up writing letters for my graduate school applications, and I continued to correspond with him after graduation. But I never discussed that spring semester with him. I would have loved to know what he would have said.

What I understand now, and what he might have said to me, was that I had a very constrained view of what can (and should) happen in a discussion seminar. Yes, it can be a place to argue with people, but it doesn’t have to be. The ultimate goal of a discussion seminar is learning—and we learn best from varying our modes of discussion.

Unfortunately, when I first started teaching, I still carried my constrained view of a “discussion seminar” into my course planning. As a new teacher of literature, I would search for the points of possible contention in a text, and then identify a question that would force students to take stands on those questions. Mindful of my Iceman Cometh experience, I made a lot of noise about how debates are useful for learning, not just for arguing our positions. But I still held the false equivalency that discussion meant debate.

It took me many years to recognize that discussion seminars can do more than pit student views against each other; reading some work-in-progress from Dickinson’s Noreen Lape has recently expanded my understanding further. Eventually my teaching evolved to the point where I very rarely staged classroom debates. Mostly we did other kinds of things in discussion seminars: collectively gather information or viewpoints about the text, search for connections within and across texts and other contexts, or clarify our own thinking with freewriting or opening and closing statements. I didn’t abandon debates entirely, however, because I still believed—and still believe—in their value. If we go into them with the right mindset, we can learn from our opponents, recognize flaws in our own thinking, and refine our positions. But debates became one small part of the active learning strategies I used in class, one that I reserved for certain moments in the semester, such as when I was preparing students to write an argumentative paper.

We seem to be in a sort of permacrisis in higher education these days, but a few crises ago we were all talking about the “crisis of disengagement” in the classroom. Although this might seem like a small cause among many, I wonder about the extent to which students feel inhibited to engage in classroom discussions because what they see around them in the culture are people constantly trying to convince them of things: politicians, social media influencers, misinformation purveyors. The culture, and especially social media, has become the playground of Hickeys. When they enter a discussion seminar, students might be looking around warily for the Hickeys in the room—one of whom might be standing at the front. Just as some of the characters do in O’Neill’s play, the students might realize that, when a Hickey enters the room, it’s better to clam up or just leave.

The Core seminar no longer exists at Notre Dame, which I consider a loss. If I had the opportunity to teach such a class, though, the first day of the semester would include an invitation to them to share what a “discussion seminar” means to them, an explanation of what it means to me, and how we can make it a place where we value multiple forms of discussion.

I hope that conversation would set the stage for more of them to embrace the participation techniques I use in class, and embrace the work of learning from the text, from me, and from each other in our discussions.

*At some point during the 2010’s, I tracked her down and sent her an email expressing my admiration for her standing up for her liberal positions (which I now shared) in that largely conservative environment. She had become a teacher as well, and we had a lovely catch-up for a few emails.