Nicholas Toloudis

I agree with the reviewer from January 22 2006 about Nick’s teaching style, goals and faults. I want to add that Nick can also help students improve their essay writing. Political, social, moral and religious philosophy are not the easiest topics to write about, but Nick did a great job of guiding students’ analysis. Nick spent a great deal of time and effort commenting on students’ essays; if you take the time to go through his comments and even discuss them with him, you’ll learn something about the topic, your writing style or both. Granted, it can be frustrating talking to Nick because he sometimes loses track of your question(s) while answering them – don’t give up, just ask your question again. Get straight to the point with Nick because one great quality of his is that he’s not pretentious or intimidating so you don’t have to tip-toe around him or his ego. Lastly, he truly cares about his students and that cannot be underestimated at a university like Columbia.

No surprises here. It's your average political philosophy class complete with Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Marx, and Nietzsche. But beware, Nick is anything but interesting. His lectures highlight the obvious and there is little (if any) discussion in his class. He spends 65 minutes providing a synopsis of the assigned reading, and leaves 10 minutes at the end for questions. He does not display even an ounce of origial thought and isn't really looking for yours either. He is a walking, talking collection of cliff notes- so if you do the reading, you never have to go to class. But if you don't do the reading, which you may not because there is so much, lecture will keep you up to speed. His grading guidelines are very vague and he lectures as if it were his first time (nervous stuttering, awkward pauses, and such). I'm sure there are better poly sci professors out there.

The appearance of understanding is probably the most frustrating part of talking to Nick. Big glaring eyes, a smile that says "I understand," but it's vacant of thought and when he responds to your question, you know it. Now, he's a very nice person, not very tough at grading or good at telling when you haven't read, but frustrating to work for: you can't reach very far and you have to write high school style papers. Use the biggest words possible, write what are called "topic sentences," and conclude with your introduction. I say transfer if you can, and if not bring something to do in class. I will not reccomend it explicitly, but it would be safe to say about a fifth of the class was on drugs at any given time last semester.

Really a good guy. He covered centuries of polical philosophy in a mostly comprehensive way. He expected a lot on the papers but had no problem meeting to help me with the biggest one. I found his lectures interesting and helpful. The course was a lot of reading though and if you get behind you'll have trouble following the class. On the other hand, the only grades come from the papers and the final and he gave us a list of possible final questions in advance. If you put in a minimum of work and writing skill, you'll do fine and if you put in more work for the reading, you'll enjoy the class

I feel the need to vindicate Nick from what I feel is some rather undue criticism of his (perhaps misunderstood) method. Rather than being pedagogically inept, Nick's primary fault could be said to consist in the fact that he teaches the class at a rather basic level. No, he is not much concerned with the historical context surrounding the texts, nor does he want to hear how the theories of Hobbes or Descartes somehow relate to your 21st century context in some mundane and ultimately unjustifiable way. No, Nick had two primary concerns in class: to convey as accurate an understanding of the texts possible to students, and to introduce subsequent problems arising from such close readings. In this, Nick, I think, was staying close to the spirit of CC- this is not a class which attempts to apply philosophies derived from, say, the 30 Years' War to our modern lives, but one which imparts the ideas inherent in "great books" upon students who engage with them not via various summaries or excerpts, but by reading them directly. To go beyond this, he may have felt, would violate the purpose of the course as constructed- rather than a basis for discussion, a groundwork laid by understanding the works in comprehensive detail. Naturally, even within this admittedly somewhat narrow interpretation, Nick had faults he needed to work on. Occasionally his understanding of certain texts was le…

Nick means well I think and he's generally a nice guy but CC with him was just unbearable. He knows the texts and probably understands them but he can't intelligibly express them to the class. Any questions and doubts that students had were always answered in a defensive, kind of aggressive manner. As more and more students got skeptical about his teaching, he got more and more defensive and at one point, while trying to maybe relate some kind of point about Rabelais (which by the way he stole from Mikhail Bakhtin but failed to mention that small fact to the class) he kind of just broke down and started desperately repeating the same phrase about “carnivalesque” over and over again. Anyway, loose borrowing aside, his lectures were always boring and his manner awkward and increasingly uncomfortable.

A horrible professor! Nick assigns more reading than most teachers and the class discussions are pointless and lead by students who want to hear themmselves talk. Nick never answers questions and instead asks the class to answer them. The result is nothing is ever clarified and even the most general points are missed. Nick is a boring lecturer and an annoying, awkward person. Grading is ambiguous and takes forever. Everyone is switching out of this class!

As convoluted as some of the texts for CC are, especially when placed in arguably arbitrary context with each other, such a course demands an instructor who can frame the ideas and philosophies of these thinkers accessibly and logically in a proper nomological net in relation to each other. Was the previous sentence difficult to read? Of course. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the epitome of Nick Toloudis. Nick possesses this truly extraordinary ability to transform somewhat difficult ideas into VERY difficult ideas. It appears as if the instructor himself knows the texts even less thoroughly than his students who, retaining bits and pieces of Marx and Nietzsche, can better and more clearly present an argument than Nick. Consequently, upon elucidating the works of CC, Nick very transparently tries to dodge difficult questions by asking for his students to answer them in class, and if no one volunteers, he circumlocutes until half the class is drooling. Furthermore, his class was so boring, even the clock on the wall appeared to move more sluggishly. We almost never discussed interesting or relevant contemporary topics (I take that back, we never did); we talked only about the texts themselves. Even for a person who (presumably) finds works of profound philosophical inquiry interesting, Nick Toloudis manages to suck the life and vivacity from these texts when conveying them to h…

Responses on any 5 texts on coursework (they can be as little as a paragraph). Three 6-8 page papers, midterm, final (Nick is not looking to trick you; both exams are easy if youÂ’ve read/paid attention in class).

Like two or three papers (I forget) on some extremely fetishized topics and/or anachronistic comparisons.