Minds on Fire

A Book Review

Walter Charles Horseley, Old Time Tuition at Dulwich College (1900 or so)

Sometimes the best arguments against an institution come from those who are trying to fix it. Such is the case with Minds on Fire, a book which begins its celebration of a revolutionary teaching technique by explaining, in great detail, that, on the whole, American college students would much rather play than study. In particular, the author, Mark C. Carnes devotes his first chapter (“All Classes Are Sorta Boring”) to the enduring absence of academic engagement and the second (“Subversive Play: The Bane of Higher Education”) to a pocket history of such mainstays of college life as fraternities, competitive drinking, and various forms of role play (both virtual and “away from keyboard.”)

By themselves, these two chapters make Minds on Fire a worthwhile purchase. Indeed, I recommend that people who plan on discouraging their kith and kin from sending their children to college keep a beat-up copy or two in their “here, read this” stack. That said, my own motivation for picking up Minds on Fire had nothing to do with the way that Professor Carnes begins his book. Rather, as a long-time proponent of the use of decision-forcing case studies in the military world, I was drawn to the volume by its subtitle: How Role Immersion Games Transform College.

Like a decision-forcing case, a role immersion game puts a student in the shoes (or boots, or sandals) of a person who lived at some point in the past. However, where every participant in a decision-forcing case plays the same part (that of the protagonist) each player in a role immersion game assumes a distinct character. In short, where a decision-forcing case asks participants to solve problems from the past, a role immersion game features complex interactions of the kind seen in improvisational theater and Dungeons and Dragons.

As the title of Minds on Fire suggests, the role immersion games that Carnes and his fellow game masters used in their classes wrought many minor miracles in the realm of motivation. In the course of such exercises, students who had previously shown little interest in the French revolution were dressing up like Robespierre, filling mock newspapers with Jacobin propaganda, and composing speeches inspired by those heard in the National Assembly in the age when all the cook kids were dancing the Carmagnole. Better yet, in the course of preparing for these amateur theatricals, the students neglected their obligations to beer pong and Grand Theft Auto in order to hit the books.

Minds of Fire rolled off the press in 2016. As might be expected of a work written by a tenured professor at Barnard College and published by the Harvard University Press, the book found favor with reporters from public radio and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Marvelous to say, Minds of Fire also garnered praise from folks to who see themselves as critics of the liberal establishment. Thus, a quartet of authors published a piece in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy that praised Carnes for “decentering the instructor,” a move they characterized as “a hallmark of feminist approaches to teaching ...”¹

Inspired, in part, by the aforementioned puff pieces, a small number of college teachers have incorporated role immersion games in their classes. Some make use of the materials provided by Reacting to the Past, a Barnard-based consortium run by Carnes himself. Others do so under the banner of (I wish I were making this up) Edu-Larp. However, notwithstanding the fulsome praise of paid-up members of the socks-with-sandals club, the folks most excited about role immersion games seem to be neatly-dressed men of Midwestern demeanor who teach at small liberal arts colleges.²

This impression fits well with the notion that teachers at small liberal arts colleges are people who would rather engage with undergraduates than write footnote-laden essays that few will read. It also suggests the possibility that some combination of the playing of board games, whether social or strategic; attendance at Renaissance faires; and experience with “live action role play” of the original kind, may have predisposed small college game masters to the larpification of their courses. (To put things another way, I suspect that a higher degree of freedom from pressure to “publish or perish” enables teachers at small colleges to participate in nerd culture to a degree that would be fatal to their counterparts working at a research university.)

As nerd culture moves from the margins of society to the mainstream (thank you, Peter Jackson), one might expect to see more in the way of role immersion games. Two trends, however, work against that happy possibility. One of these is the passing of the institutions most congenial to it. The other is the definitive ethos of the academic profession, which holds that the greatest benefits students enjoy during their college years (bright or otherwise) derive from their proximity to serious scholars.

My pessimism in this regard owes much to the decade I spent in a vain attempt to encourage members of the faculty of the Marine Corps University to incorporate decision-forcing cases in the classes that they taught. While I enjoyed considerable success with non-commissioned officers, and made some converts of commissioned officers, the number of civilian professors I managed to interest in this form of teaching was, to quote the immortal words of Christopher Walken, “zero, zip, zilch, nada.”

Of course, this failure may have had something to do with me. That is, while I like most sergeants and many majors, I thought poorly of most of the civilian professors. To make matters worse, my connections with Yale, Harvard, and Oxford led my colleagues to suspect that, in addition to being an academic apostate, I was also an academic snob. (It did not help that I preferred to spend my lunch hours in the company of librarians, archivists, and writing tutors.)

That said, the experience of graduate schools of business administration over the course of the past century suggests that the antipathy of American academics towards interactive teaching methods draws its strength from very deep roots. Notwithstanding the success of a curriculum composed largely of decision-forcing cases, most professors of marketing, finance, and management science attempt to prepare people for the cut-and-thrust of commerce by filling them with the theories of people like themselves.

With this in mind, I can safely predict that most attempts to make major changes in the way students in taught courses are taught will invariably run afoul of academic culture. Indeed, I imagine that, some time in the near future, the last professor at the last university will be furiously typing up an article for the last academic journal as men who practice honest trades begin the work of turning his office into the dining room of a family-sized apartment.

1. Jason D. Martinek, Jacqueline Ellis, Mark Carnes, and Courtney Klaus “A Conversation with Mark Carnes, Professor of History at Barnard College and Creator of Reacting to the Past” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 29, no. 2 (2019) pages 198–209 (I would like to provide a link to the article. Unfortunately, the inclusive scholars and pedagogues have hidden their content behind a paywall.)

2. See, for an example, Cynthia Mjewa, PhD “Historic Immersion: Games, Trips, and Podcasts at Newman University” Private University Products and News May 2023.