But it is exactly his approach toward teaching and learning as a reflective effort that has brought some criticism from students in his classes here. According to some students, lectures seem directed toward eliciting feelings of guilt and sections descend to the level of group therapy sessions.

In the face of this criticism, Coles says that the feelings of guilt that students experience is in large part due to the difficult questions that the reading brings up.

"This course takes emotions seriously, emotions generated by short stories and novels and emotions experienced by the students and the teachers reading the short stories and novels," Coles says of General Education 105.

"It is not a course in psychology or psychiatry," he says. "We don't mean to turn this into group therapy, but we certainly are anxious to respond to the heart and soul of the reading, as well as to respond intellectually in an intellectually and analytically. We aim to connect stories, novels, and poems to the human experience."

"I think we need to make a distinction here that Emerson once made, which is to ask how we use learning in such a way that it informs the moral, emotional and spiritual texture of our lives," Coles says.

"If to ask this question is to make us all feel a little uncomfortable, and if that's what's meant by guilt, then guilt in that sense is just a metaphor. What we're really talking about is a course that is trying hard through literature to connect us to our lived lives, to connect our intellectual life to our everyday experience," he continues.

Reconciliation

For a man who has spent much of his life among those in poverty, who stresses the virtues of community service and the sharing of wealth among the less fortunate, the question often arises how Coles reconciles his personal life of relative privilege with his work as a social crusader.

"It's been a life-long struggle," Coles says, describing his comfortable upbringing. "I don't know how you resolve a question like this. My feeling is that we owe it to others that more of us can have this kind of privileged life."

Through his experiences with Dorothy Day, the journalist and social reformer, Coles says, he realized that acknowledging the existence of poverty does not necessitate living a life of poverty. "I don't think I'm going to help poor people by becoming poor myself," he says.

"It does make me uncomfortable at times to work, say, in Roxbury or with migrant farm workers, and then to come back to a comfortable house in Concord," Coles says.

"But I don't know how to resolve this other than to try to tell the world about what I've seen and hope that such telling will make a social, political, and cultural difference."

"If one is a hypocrite for having been brought up in a comfortable life and not abandoning it to poverty, then I suppose I'd be called a hypocrite," Coles says. "But I don't really think that's what we're all about. I think what we're trying to do is to share the benefits of this country with more and more people who live in it."

According to Coles, the question of privilege and of relative privilege is a recurring problem on the Harvard landscape. "Smugness and self-importance is not totally absent from the Harvard scene," he says. "It can be found among some of us who point our fingers at other students accusing them of lacking this quality or that quality in the moral or psychological life."

"With that caveat in mind," Coles says, "I have to remind myself of the irony in life, that sometimes one can find arrogance among those who criticize others for being arrogant."