While Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) failed to entertain me as much as the quadrilogy's first film--or inspire me as much as its third--it does provide a (sometimes fun) object lesson for those liberal arts students at Cal Poly unconvinced that their university's central philosophy applies as well to them as to the engineering or architecture major.

Ever since The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) quickly cut from the jungles of Peru to the hallowed hallways of an Ivy league university, we have known that Indiana Jones was equal parts erudite professor and daring swashbuckler. What he taught in the classroom he had often explored firsthand in some hazardous, dimly lit corridor on the other side of the world. The same hand that flicked the whip cut world history into bite-size chunks on the classroom chalkboard and knew how to pen scholarly essays concerning the various artifacts that hand had touched, tossed, and tussled over.

What this film adds to the eloquent silhouette of the adventure-lovin' scholar adventurer is the brash and briefly blinding voice of disbelief, a thrill-seeking sidekick determined to write off the aging Jones as a musty professor. Shia LaBeouf's young Mutt Williams stands incredulous when confronted with the agility and fighting prowess of his older companion. (Most audience members will be equally shocked once they realize a sixty-five-year-old Harrison Ford is performing all his character's stunts.) The school-hating Mutt defines Jones by the first costume in which he finds him, balking at the fatigues and fedora into which Jones slides as he abandons his staid suit and moves into action. Mutt's incredulity is not unlike that of the student surprised to find his teacher shopping for toilet paper or riding to school on a bike, only taken (as with everything else in this popcornball affair) to the nth degree.

There is an important foil for the faithless, however, another young man of similar age enrolled in one of Dr. Jones's archaeology classes who finds his instructor zipping through the library on the back of a Harley. In one of the film's more successfully comic moments, the college student asks an academic question without missing a beat and receives as elaborate an answer as the professor can spare before he and his driver dart off again.

This moment amuses but also, I think, recommends an ideal dynamic between mentor and protégé, schoolhouse and public arena. The unhesitating willingness of both to join study with action--to, in fact, expect such synergy--provides an extravagant model of what learning should look like in and outside of the classroom. We should demand from both students and all kinds of teachers a similar commitment to performing ideology, matching lifestyle to lecture. Maybe then we will finally find conservationists willing to live green even when it's uncomfortable to do so, sociologists committed to radical forms of community living, and Christians ready to sacrifice.