Professor McDaniel's course "Existential Despair" was featured in the Penn Gazette. Here's an excerpt:
Standing in front of a packed audience in Irvine Auditorium’s Café 58, it’s easy to see why Justin McDaniel captivates a class. He’s introspective, funny, self-deprecating, and prone to tangents—including an unexpected digression, during an Arts and Sciences’ Knowledge by the Slice talk in late January, on fencing.
While making a point that high school students today are more interested in building an extracurricular-laden resume for college admission than reading a book for pleasure, McDaniel exclaims, “Do you really think there’s actually this many people interested in fencing? Fencing is the only sport in the Olympics that’s never had an injury—and it’s the only one with swords! If it wasn’t for the Ivy League, fencing would not exist.”
The religious studies professor, who teaches courses on Buddhism and Southeast Asian studies and has written several books on those subjects, had a similar bout with anger and frustration years earlier when he lit into his students for giving him blank stares when he mentioned authors like Carson McCullers and Toni Morrison. If even Ivy League students “aren’t reading these books—and I’m not talking obscure authors here—then what are they doing with their time? We’re training them in so many things extremely well—from linguistics to biology to mechanical engineering to nursing. That’s awesome. But there has to be more. There has to be a kind of wondering and a wandering, a kind of pulling apart, a kind of struggling.”