Convocation Address: We Will Nurture You Here Because We Need You Out There

Tuesday, Aug 30, 2005

Whitman College
Convocation Address

by Julie Charlip
Associate Professor of History

August 27, 2005 

 

It is both my honor and my challenge to welcome you here today. A challenge, because the convocation speech is not an easy assignment. Just look at the audience – administrators, students and your family…and faculty—and you’ll find out soon enough just how critical we can be.

You are perhaps expecting wisdom, even inspiration; hoping for wit, humor, and brevity; and given the choice of speaker, some fear a bit of outrageousness…. I hope not to disappoint. 

 I pondered this assignment all summer, and I finally settled on that tried and true first day of school assignment – what I did on my summer vacation.

 On my summer vacation, I visited college and university campuses in Chile and Argentina, in Rhode Island and upstate New York – by Pacific Northwest standards, the latter may be considered foreign countries as well.

 When I spend time on other campuses, I cannot help but think about what it is that we do at Whitman College that sets us apart from the others. And the first thing undoubtedly is the very ceremony in which we are now involved: convocation. It is rather old-fashioned, this ritual of formally opening the new academic year. It is an old tradition, as is the classic liberal arts education. 

 The idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, who envisioned the liberal arts as study that was appropriate for free men, for the citizens of the republic, that is, what free men ought to know. The Greco-Roman canon of texts was reworked into the seven liberal arts, which constituted the core of medieval education. In fact, much of the rules and rituals surrounding academe, right down to the robes we are wearing today, come from these medieval traditions. 

 But, it is a model that has been under great duress in recent years.

 The Carnegie Foundation classifies United States colleges and universities by programs and degrees. Fifteen years ago, the foundation listed 540 schools as liberal arts colleges. In 1987, economist David Breneman examined the curriculum of those schools to see whether they really were liberal arts colleges, and he set the bar fairly low. In his view, a college offered a liberal arts education if at least 40 percent of the students majored in a liberal discipline, that is, a course of broad study rather than professional training. The result of his research showed that only 212 of the 540 qualified. The majority had become something else – schools that offered programs in nursing, business, computing.

 Indeed, this summer I was told in upstate New York about a night school program in human resources at the local “liberal arts” college. I visited two supposed liberal arts colleges: One now claims to offer “the perfect blend of liberal arts education and professional preparation.” The other touts that it is “the place where you can be yourself – whoever that may be.” And that may be an accountant or a nurse. Eventually, the Carnegie Foundation stopped using the term liberal arts college and now calls these schools baccalaureate institutions.

 Now, I certainly do not mean to disparage nurses and accountants and the fine institutions that educate them. But I want to focus here on the importance of that small and unfortunately dwindling space, the liberal arts college, that attempts to do something else. 

 There are 3,941 institutions of higher education in this country. But there are only 101 schools that can be considered traditional liberal arts colleges, that is, residential four-year colleges devoted to a broad education in the humanities, social and physical sciences. In other words, less than 1 percent of the nation’s students will receive the kind of education that you new students are about to experience at Whitman. And only 44 of those 101 schools have enrollments of fewer than 1500 students.

 This is a rare, privileged space indeed.

 Is Whitman, then, some bizarre anachronism? Are you stepping back into a quaint relic of the past? Well, luckily for you I’m an historian, so I am qualified to answer those questions. And I can assure you, that is not the case.

 

 The opportunity for a purely liberal arts college experience – no professional programs, no graduate students, no vocational tracking – plays an increasingly important role in modern, or postmodern, society. More than ever, liberal arts colleges will produce our future leaders. And that makes you students a very privileged group indeed. Those privileges become clear when I compare Whitman with the other schools on my summer tour.

 The most startling contrasts are, as can be expected, in Argentina and Chile. There is no such thing as a liberal arts institution in Latin America. Indeed, in most of the world, it is an unknown phenomenon. Latin America’s premier institutions of higher education are the massive national universities, where hundreds of thousands of students attend. 

 Despite their size, the University of Chile and the University of Buenos Aires are selective institutions. Only the nation’s best students are admitted, and the education is either free, as in Argentina, or of minimal cost, as in Chile. Private schools, with the exception of the venerable Catholic universities, are viewed with suspicion as the place where rich but mediocre students can buy an education.

 Furthermore, these top students do not apply just to the university but to a particular department. That means that in their last year of high school, they choose not so much where to study but what to study. If they change their minds, they must start all over again in another program.  Change represents a substantial loss of time and effort because little if any of their work will be transferable. It is no wonder that the Spanish word for academic major is carrera, career. 

 I find it more than a bit disturbing to think of students who are channeled into career paths chosen at a very young age, without a chance to explore a variety of options. Without a chance to think about who they are, and who they will be, and how they will fit into this world. This decision, it seems to me, is a significant responsibility, requiring a certain maturity.

 But I also wonder whether the shouldering of this responsibility is also reflected in their highly politicized campuses. The walls are covered with handmade posters offering student viewpoints on government policy; most frequently, the students target educational policy and, of course, funding. But they also express their views on such issues as government policy toward labor. About human rights, a sensitive topic in countries still bearing the wounds of dictatorships that ended just as these students were born. And they are concerned about international relations, particularly those with the United States and the world economy.

 These are likely all thoughts far from your minds today. And that is one of the ways in which Whitman students are privileged. You do not have to think about these issues as you enter the protective space that often is referred to as the “Whitman bubble.”

 So what exactly do we expect you to do in this bubble? Why do I believe that it is the liberal arts college that will produce tomorrow’s leaders?

 Let’s go back to the original Greek conception of the liberal arts: the project of education for free citizens. Let’s move forward in time to the Enlightenment, when the sense of the liberal became the liberating of the mind, removing prejudices and unjustified assumptions. 

 And then there is liberal in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sense of the market, summed up by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919 as the “marketplace of ideas,” an open encounter and competition in which truth will emerge.

 Justice Holmes’ metaphor is all the more salient in the 21^st century, when it seems that marketplaces have grown and come to rule seemingly every aspect of our lives. Yet simultaneously the one market that has not grown is Holmes’ marketplace of ideas, which is continually reduced with each media merger, with each distance learning program that brings students skills but not thoughtful debate, with a trend that has been called McUniversity.

 The purpose of a liberal arts education is to create that marketplace, the space to debate ideas. Difficult ideas. Sometimes distasteful ideas. Ideas that make you uncomfortable. Ideas that make you stretch your mind. Because, as Holmes said, “[one’s] mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”

 And that is the transformative power of the liberal arts education. In Holmes’ view, now nearly a century old, the truth would emerge in the clash of competing ideas. Few of us today would argue that there is one Truth with a capital T that will emerge. But, indeed, truths, with an all-important S, will emerge. And your newly stretched minds will be able to encompass them.

 To stretch, you need to be flexible. You need the ability to think, to be broad, to be creative, to be expressive. And you get to spend four glorious years just stretching out.

 But there is a price to pay for this opportunity that goes beyond the hefty tuition price tag – that price is your hard work and intellectual curiosity. That means that getting the reading done for class is the bare minimum of meeting your responsibility. You need to engage with the reading; think about it; challenge it. Figure out what it means.  Consider whether you agree with it. Come to class with something thoughtful to say about it.

 The liberal arts education is heavily dependent on that marketplace of ideas. That means you have to launch your ideas into the classroom space and see who buys them. You have to listen to and consider the competing ideas that are offered.

 This is not a passive business. Without your active engagement you are cheating yourself, your classmates, and the faculty.

 You need to bring to class a genuine intellectual curiosity. Learning should be exciting. The life of the mind should be seen as an adventure. In short, you must have a genuine desire to learn, not just to get good grades.  

 You are, unfortunately, the products of educational systems that are increasingly teaching to the test, with the emphasis on grades. Here we are more interested in your active input than in the outcome. It is the process, the journey, that really matters; the wanting and striving to know.

 And here’s the kicker – it is not going to be easy. If it is easy, then we are not doing our jobs. Our job is to challenge you, to push you to think in new ways and about new things. 

 In the movie “A League of Their Own,” the character Jimmy Dugan says of baseball: “It's supposed to be hard! If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great!”

 The hard is what makes Whitman great. And it’s not just the professors and what we throw at you.

 You are probably used to being the best in your class. Here, everybody was the best in class. My first year here, I asked a student to tell me what it was like to be a Whittie. He said that when he sat down to dinner with four other guys from his dorm, he found that all of them had been their class valedictorians.

 We are going to push you. And if you are participating in the way that a liberal arts education demands, you will all be pushing each other, and pushing us.

 Out of this, you will learn how to think. I don’t mean what to think – that’s for you to figure out. But we will teach you how to be critical in the best sense of the word: how to analyze issues, take problems apart and find answers. We will encourage you to think outside the box, to come up with new answers and solutions. We certainly need them. 

 We live in a world that is increasingly dangerous, increasingly interconnected, and increasingly unequal. I study Latin America, which is the most unequal area in the world. The richest one-tenth of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean earn 48 percent of total income, while the poorest tenth earn only 1.6 percent. But before we all get too smug, keep in mind that in the United States, the top tenth receive 29 percent while the bottom tenth earns only 2.5 percent; the top 1 percent earns more than the bottom 40 percent. It is a clearly unequal world.

 It is also a highly connected world, but I certainly don’t need to tell you students about that. In Latin America, old women in traditional indigenous clothing carry cell phones, and even remote villages have internet centers. But technology not only makes it possible to quickly move information – it is also possible to move finances, weapons, disease, environmental degradation.

 We will need all the educated people we can get to ponder these problems and find the solutions. We will not need just people who know the latest technology and how to use it. After all, technology quickly becomes obsolete.

 We need people to think about technology and whether to use it. We need to think about what we will use it for. We will need people who can see the big picture and how to improve it. We will need people who have thought about what it means to be human, and what a human present and future should look like.

 You are among the 1 percent of United States students who will have the time and support to dream and imagine. You are a minority within a minority – only 27 percent of people 25 years and older in the United States have a bachelor’s degree, and 15 percent still drop out of high school.

 You are very privileged, and I refer not just to the substantial economic resources supporting so many – though certainly not all -- of you. You have the privilege of four years to think, study, question, analyze, before you have to figure out your place in the world.   

 You have your work cut out for you. Of course, you don’t have to face these problems in the next few weeks. You do not have to decide yet how to be in this world. You have to decide how to be in this college. 

 And make no mistake about it.  This college is a community. An intellectual community. And that is what we convoke today.

 So I want to welcome you to the Whitman Bubble. Soon enough, we will blow that bubble out into the world and burst it. We are nurturing you here, because we need you out there.