His teaching philosophy is deceptively simple. I want them to participate in their own education. He regularly volunteers to teach W courses at the 100 and 200 levels, despite the frequent papers that need to be read and evaluated. The enrollment is limited to 30, but he often subdivides his classes into small groups to debate ideas such as whether or not there should be a guaranteed minimum income for every U.S. citizen. Maintaining a position of neutrality himself, Neubeck provides the students with background material on various aspects of any topic and they may be assigned to defend an idea that they don't personally agree with.
Feelings run high.
Ponzillo, who graduated in 1999, recalls a particularly effective class exercise. After dividing the class into groups, Neubeck handed out manila envelopes with different amounts of construction paper. Each group had to use the construction paper to create simple objects. Most envelopes also contained items such as pencils, paper clips, rulers or glue, but some envelopes were nearly empty. The idea, Neubeck explains, is to simulate inequality of resources among groups.