Toga! Toga! Pa. college kids do Plato -- in public

[May 25, 2010]  SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) -- Reciting Plato is hard enough. Try doing it dressed in a toga, in public, in the middle of a crowded student center at lunchtime.

Oh, and you must not laugh, grimace or otherwise betray any hint of adrenaline-fueled stress, nervousness or embarrassment, even as other young men and women gawk at you while sipping their Starbucks lattes.

No wonder University of Scranton honors students dread The Trivium, an intensive study of grammar, logic and rhetoric that harkens back to the medieval academy but is unlike anything being taught at an American university today.

Call it a marriage of philosophy, communications and critical thinking. Students read the classics, of course, but also learn how to communicate their ideas clearly, confidently and effectively, even under extreme circumstances like those conjured in the gleefully sadistic mind of professor Stephen Whittaker.

"This is the class where they grow up," said Whittaker, a droll man with a goatee and a shock of gray hair.

Whittaker, 59, developed "Triv" about 25 years ago. It's a requirement for sophomores enrolled in the Special Jesuit Liberal Arts Honors Program, a four-year course of study open by invitation to about 5 percent of incoming freshman based on SAT scores, high school class rank and record of community service. The Jesuit-run school in northeastern Pennsylvania has 4,000 undergraduates.

Such is Triv's reputation that some students drop out of the program rather than take the semester-long class.

For the finale, students gather in a highly trafficked spot on campus for a public retelling of "Phaedrus," a dialogue written by Socrates' protege, Plato, about 2,400 years ago. They aren't allowed to recite the text word for word. Instead, they must deliver the story in their own words -- without note cards -- yet get all the details and concepts right.

And they must do it in a toga, that less-than-flattering uniform of the ancient Greeks. No Snoopy bedsheets, either. (Students make their own, or get a friend who is handy with a needle and thread to do it. "Some are quite artful, some much less so," Whittaker said. "But no one is perfunctory about it.")

This year's rendition of "Phaedrus" was spread over three days, taking place on the campus green when it was warm and sunny and moving inside as the weather turned cold and wet.

Precisely at 1 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the class arranged itself in a circle just inside the front door of the teeming student center, a few paces away from the campus bookstore and a food court with a Starbucks, a Quiznos and a Chick-fil-A.

Whittaker, clad in his own toga (a Roman style, he acknowledged sheepishly), entered the circle and set the stage.

"Late summer, Athens, 11 o'clock in the morning on a street," Whittaker intoned, his students shifting uncomfortably in their billowy Grecian garb.

Like most young adults, those entering Triv are typically better at casual communication -- texting, dashing off status updates, chatting with friends -- than they are at speaking and writing formally.

Whittaker aims to change that.

In Triv, students start with basic public speaking, then progress through a series of progressively more difficult challenges.

Toward the end of the semester, they do a "creative misreading" of Shakespeare -- the more outlandish the better. One year, a seemingly deranged man ranted in the shrubbery outside the classroom windows, then entered the building and was taken to the ground by alarmed campus police. Turns out he was a Triv student, in disguise and acting out his sonnet.

He got an A.

If it all seems a bit silly and absurd, there's a seriousness of purpose here, Whittaker says. One aim of Jesuit education is to mold students' character and give them the tools to "set the world on fire," in the words of Society of Jesus founder St. Ignatius of Loyola. Thus, in Triv, the coupling of content (discussions of philosophy, morality, ethics) and communications (learning how to move people with your words). The class is "boot camp" for the honors program, Whittaker said, both character-building and a bonding experience.

Success is predicated on understanding and mastering the adrenal effect, the body's fight-or-flight response to stress whose symptoms can include heart palpitations, weak knees, quivery voices and something that Whittaker jokingly refers to as the "rhesus monkey panic face."

By the end of the class, students should be able to keep their nerve and stay focused.

"Whittaker never holds back -- if you smack your lips before speaking, or touch your hair 50 times during a speech, he lets you know it," said Jennifer Lewis, a Triv graduate now in medical school.

Inside the student center, toga-clad 20-year-olds followed Whittaker one-by-one into the center of the circle.

It was noisy. The automatic doors opened and closed, opened and closed. Students scurried this way and that, some pausing to watch.

Like several other Triv students performing that day, Meghan Loftus, 20, of Dunmore, momentarily lost her train of thought as she held forth on Plato's intertwining themes of love, the human soul and the use of rhetoric.

But she didn't shake her head in disgust, mutter to herself or make a face. Instead, Loftus remained still for several seconds, and then, back on track, resumed her part of the dialogue like nothing had happened.

Textbook.

"I was ready for it, I knew it was coming, and I was prepared to be humiliated," she said. "So I was OK."

Even when a band of mischief-making Triv alumni showed up.

Wearing togas themselves, the pranksters tried their best to disrupt the speeches. They wrestled, formed a human pyramid, played a spirited game of Duck Duck Goose and generally carried on like a bunch of 5-year-olds.

Whittaker loved it.

"This is the goal, to get out there and have people interfere in certain kinds of extravagant ways," the professor said. By acting nutty, he added, his former students were "joyfully giving people something that they could test themselves against."

[Associated Press; By MICHAEL RUBINKAM]

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