Brian Walker B.S. ’91, J.D. ’97

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Brian Walker comes from a rural area on the east coast of Canada and shuttles back and forth between Los Angeles and his home territory among the forests and rivers of New Brunswick. While a Canadian nationalist, he has somehow ended up becoming a specialist in the history of U.S. political thought, with a particular emphasis on antebellum political theory. This is the second year in which the political science department has nominated him for the distinguished teaching award.

Walker came to UCLA in 1996 after receiving his doctorate at Columbia University and after two years as a visiting doctoral fellow, first at Harvard University and then with the McGill University Law Department. Walker's research focuses on issues of citizenship in modern times and on the question of how modern societies might repair and care for the public world, especially the shape of cities and the lives of low-income people. In recent years most of his writing and research have been focused on the idea of “cultivation,” the belief that caring for the world (and ourselves) is best understood using metaphors that link ethics, politics and agriculture. Benjamin Franklin, Aristotle, Confucius, Mengzi, Xunxi and John Stuart Mill all used this cultivation framework, as did the French philosopher Helvetius who suggested that “Ethics is the agriculture of the mind.”

Walker's teaching is tightly linked to this philosophical perspective that emphasizes nourishment, care and the loving encouragement of positive growth. His goal is to encourage the “sprouts” (Mengzi) of better citizenship in his students. He teaches them to take control of their own education and to use the university to learn basic practices of self-education and self-care so that they can then develop and expand upon it for the rest of their lives. While Walker doesn't attempt to teach substantive political values, much less his own personal values, he does try to encourage his students to examine and improve their own lives, from whatever ethical or political perspective they hold.

Walker makes it a point to supplement and amplify his classroom teaching by making imaginative use of modern technologies and a range of resources. He shows Powerpoint slide shows and film clips, plays musical theme songs at the beginning of his classes and stages dramatic representations of philosophical debates, all in an attempt to light up philosophical concepts in the mind of his students and to make them realize the interest and importance of the subject matter he teaches.

“Professor Walker literally would run, holding a microphone, up and down the aisles between students to foster interaction,” a former student writes. “Most important, Professor Walker would truly listen to each student's comment, frame it in the context of the class, and then challenge it by presenting an opposing viewpoint or related but perhaps contradictory fact.”

Friday afternoons in winter and spring quarters Walker routinely holds “philosophy walks,” in which he meets students in the Mathias Botanical Garden, then leads them to Westwood Village or field trips to other parts of town. These walks are both an attempt to cultivate a greater sensitivity about the spatial underpinnings of modern communities and an occasion for more informal philosophical discourse in a setting that encourages friendship and the building of a community among people who share an interest in matters of the mind (and heart).