What a Liberal Education Makes of Us
The Commencement Address by James Freedman, President Emeritus of Dartmouth College

It is an honor to be with you today as you graduate from Whitman. Congratulations upon your achievement!

Now, you may already be thinking that those two sentences by themselves would serve admirably as an entire Commencement address - that you could do without the platitudes and pontifications to which Commencement speakers are prone, especially because they are usually the only remaining obstacle between you and your diploma.

James Freedman

The late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun used to say that a commencement speaker was like the corpse at an old-fashioned Irish wake: he was necessary to justify the occasion but no one expected him to say anything.

Indeed, as a faculty veteran of 35 Commencement seasons, I can testify that it seems to be in the nature of Commencement ceremonies to go on and on. A colleague of mine regularly begins his Commencement speeches with the following bit of doggerel:

The month of June approaches, and soon across the land
The graduation speakers will tell us where we stand.
We stand at Armageddon, in the vanguard of the press.
We're standing at the crossroads, at the gateway to success.
We stand upon the threshold of careers all brightly lit.
In the midst of all this standing, we sit and sit and sit.

But let me make bold to suggest that Commencement speeches serve the worthy purpose of reminding us one last time about the importance of the academic enterprise. I want to speak today about a subject closely identified with Whitman College: the value of a liberal education. All of you have been the beneficiaries of a liberal education at one of the finest colleges in the country. As I have come to learn more and more about Whitman, I have been impressed by the many notable features that distinguish this beautiful college.

Having been founded in 1859, it is one of the oldest private colleges west of the Mississippi, and it has been proudly coeducational from the time of its founding. It is the alma mater of one of the greatest legal figures of the 20th century, Justice William O. Douglas of the Class of 1920. It holds membership in Phi Beta Kappa, a sure confirmation of intellectual distinction. It has one of the most favorable student/faculty ratios in the country: a testament to a deep commitment to the nurturing of students as individuals. And in Tom Cronin, my good friend for many years, it has as its president one of the nation's outstanding academic leaders.

	Among summa cum laude graduates: Koan Mercer, Lubo Merkov, Anna Monders, Katherine O'Neal, and Robert Stenger.

Although the proportion of high school graduates who today go on to some kind of post-secondary school education has increased dramatically in recent decades, the percentage of those students who pursue a liberal education has actually diminished.

The greatest number of today's undergraduates major in programs other than the liberal arts. They study marketing and retailing, finance and real estate, journalism and social work, pharmacy and nursing - and the list could go on.

Those are worthwhile subjects, of course, especially when the pursuit of such immediately practical subjects is the alternative to full-time employment directly after high school. But we need to remember that while majoring in such subjects is a concession to economic reality, it is also a melancholy measure of the pressures of premature vocationalism.

Many families see liberal education as a luxury appropriate primarily for the affluent few, an entitlement for the fortunate minority who can afford to ignore, or at least delay, the necessity of having to earn a living.

And yet it is well to recall John Dewey's lifelong insistence that education is not a preparation for life, that education is life itself. Writing in 1897, at a time of widespread industrial change, Dewey observed:

With the advent of democracy and modern industrial conditions, it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be 20 years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions. To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself. . . . [Dewey, "My Pedagogic Creed," in John Dewey on Education 429 (Archambault ed. 1974)].

It is liberal education that, of course, instills precisely that sense of command. Those of us who believe in liberal education - who believe, in Alan Ryan's phrase, "that what makes higher education higher is its adherence to the verities according to [Matthew] Arnold" - must continue to resist the current momentum toward premature vocationalism.

Commencement speaker James Freedman, left, noted educator, legal scholar, and award-winning author, with President Cronin before Commencement.

Someone once asked Woodrow Wilson, when he was president of Princeton, what the function of a liberal education ought to be. Wilson replied, "To make a person as unlike one's father as possible." What he meant, I think, was that liberal education ought to make a person independent of mind, skeptical of authority and received views, prepared to forge an identity for himself or herself, capable of becoming an individual not bent upon copying other people (even people as persuasive as one's parents).

The kind of liberal education to which Wilson referred is more necessary today than ever before because the qualities it nurtures are more imperiled than ever before. We are immersed in a culture of constant and kaleidoscopic stimulation, significantly influenced by the mass media and other prescribers of opinion and feelings.

The omnipresence of television, telephones, fax machines, computers, the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, and other forms of instant communication too often creates a bewildering barrage of noise and movement. It is almost as if we have surrounded ourselves with such technology in order to avoid moments of silence and contemplation.

If we are to succeed in preserving our individuality, we must emphasize a form of education that helps students to establish a rich and imaginative life and a sturdy openness of mind. We need to enable students to maintain a private self, an interior self, so that they can resist the pressures toward conformity, convention, and banality that the cacophony of urgent voices creates.

But it is not just the omnipresence of the media and the compulsive urgency of the contemporary world that makes the reflective temper of liberal education more essential than ever before. Our society in general, and our political culture in particular, have descended into polarities and rigidities of thought that do not serve us well. They make social discourse and companionable community more awkward to sustain. They make consensus and compromise more difficult to achieve. They make us worse listeners than we ought to be. In short, they make us less thoughtful and less tolerant.

Liberal education urges upon us a reflectiveness, a tentativeness, a humility, an openness to other points of view, a desire to continue to learn throughout onešs life, that can mitigate these tendencies toward polarity, rigidity, and intolerance.

There is no more powerful example on this point than Abraham Lincoln. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln observed that both parties to the Civil War "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other menšs faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. . . . The Almighty has His own purposes."

After four years of military bloodshed, Lincoln spoke with an admirable moral tentativeness about the withering war effort. Despite his heart-and-soul commitment to the Union's cause, he could not discern or claim he knew the Almighty's purposes. If Lincoln could adopt such a tentative tone, surely we ought to be able to entertain the possibility in our own political and cultural life that we may sometimes be wrong and our adversary may sometimes be right.

That is why a liberal education seeks to impress upon students that one of the most important words in the English language is "perhaps," and that we would all do better if we could discipline ourselves to preface some of our most emphatic statements with that critical word.

	Will Washington, biology major, athlete, president of the Black Student Union, and recipient of a scholarship from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Liberal education teaches the importance of tempering profound convictions with a measure of tolerance and a judicious sense of humility. That is what Learned Hand meant when he said that the spirit of liberty is "the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." That is what Oliver Cromwell meant when he declared, "I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." The notion of tentativeness - of skepticism about certainty and conventional wisdom - is an important characteristic of a refined mind and of a good citizen.

A liberal education ought to equip students to deal with those dark moments in life that test our souls and challenge our moral foundations - those moments, as F. Scott Fitzgerald described them, when "in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning."

Life is inevitably a series of joys and disappointments, and some of those disappointments - in the raising of children, the breakup of marriages, the reluctant acceptance of limitations, the enduring of illness, the failure of businesses, the disintegration of friendships - are bitter and painful to abide. Liberal education fortifies students at those very moments when they perceive their lives to be, in T. S. Eliot's searing phrase, "fear in a handful of dust."

When the ground seems to shake and shift beneath us, liberal education provides perspective, enabling us to see life steadily and see it whole. By providing us with perspective, it nourishes courage and inner strength. It helps in that most human of desires - the yearning to make order and sense out of the perplexities and ironies of experience.

Liberal education urges us to be not only tentative in our opinions, but also skeptical of the dominant modes of thought. My own undergraduate years at Harvard (1953-57) were dominated intellectually by a number of doctrines: Marxism, Freudianism, Keynesianism, existentialism. Courses in the humanities or social sciences routinely celebrated the explanatory power of Marx and Freud and Keynes and Sartre. None of us today would accept so uncritically the broad-gauged, all-encompassing explanations that our professors attributed then to these larger-than-life figures. Something has gone wrong with liberal education when it does not sufficiently question such prevailing paradigms.

And that experience from my undergraduate days makes me wonder: what are the prevailing paradigms today, and are we questioning them sufficiently? Are we saying "perhaps" even as we rely upon them?

As powerful as liberal education so often is, I must be clear that it is not a surefire preventative against foolish emotions. Several years ago I read Elzbieta Ettinger's compelling book about the lifelong relationship between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Heidegger was the leading German philosopher of his time; he was also a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945. At age 35, despite having a wife and two children, he started a clandestine affair with Arendt, his student, who was 18 and Jewish. Arendt admired him beyond all of her other teachers.

The affair went on for four years. When Heidegger was inaugurated as the rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he infamously offered to enlist the university in the cause of the German Reich. He was an unapologetic Nazi who used his position as rector to block the promotions and careers of many worthy Jewish colleagues.

Graduate Rachel Hungerford and a young friend are showered by spray from the Skotheim Fountain. Hungerford, who is from Chandler, Arizona, majored in Asian studies.

Even after Arendt moved to the United States, she could not bring herself to break off her relationship with Heidegger. She spent a lifetime pursuing him - sustaining an emotional attachment for more than 50 years - traveling to Germany to visit him and his wife, popularizing and rehabilitating his philosophy in the United States, seeking until the day of her death to be his friend and colleague.

Ettinger's book asks many questions about human nature. How could an intellectual of Arendt's brilliance and exemplary moral seriousness, a woman who devoted much of her scholarly career to exploring the origins of totalitarianism, be so emotionally dependent upon Heidegger - so dependent that, for the rest of her life, she could deny his anti-Semitism and his ugly embrace of the Nazi party? How could Arendt permit her emotions to compromise her intellectual integrity? How could Arendt accept the noxious moral contradictions implicit in Heidegger's career?

What is it about human beings that makes even the most brilliant and morally uncompromising deceive themselves, unable to see evil that is all too visible to others, unable to accept in their heart what they must know by their intellect? It is essential to ask these questions if we are to make sense of ourselves and the human condition, if we are, in Stephen Daedalus' words, "to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience."

But liberal education is about more than understanding ourselves. It is also about understanding the foundations of a democratic society and appreciating the responsibilities of citizenship. It is about settling upon the delicate accommodations of federalism - the achievement of a more perfect union - and attaining equality for all of our citizens. It is about striking a proper balance between the opportunities for individualism and the demands of community and the common good.

A good example of the challenge that social issues present for liberal education is the role and condition of cities. Most historians argue that cities are the vehicles of culture. They are where art, dance, literature, music, museums, symphonies, and theater - the finest fruits of civilization - flourish.

And yet many of our cities today are in a precipitous decline. Much of the social life of urban centers is pathological - in terms of crime, drug addiction, homelessness, and poverty. In many significant ways the wealthy, who might be expected to be a disproportionately effective force for civic good, have withdrawn from the common life of cities, secluding themselves in exclusive suburbs and within gated compounds.

As Robert Reich has noted, the wealthy have created their own forms of security and transportation - private guards and private limousines - so that they don't have to rely upon municipal police and public transportation. They have established their own places of recreation - private country clubs and fitness centers - so they don't have to use public parks and public facilities. They have created their own educational facilities - private schools - so they donšt have to send their children to public schools.

These developments are a far cry from the reliance upon private associations for the betterment of the entire community which de Tocqueville noted as one of the distinguishing features of American civic life. They are the result of, and an escalating cause of, the decline of American cities, with serious consequences for the future of our entire society.

A liberal education ought to make us search for the relationship between cities and culture, and between cities and democracy. It ought to make us ask why cities don't work today in the fabled way they once worked in Florence and Paris and London. A liberal education ought to give students the historical and cultural breadth to grapple with questions of such significant social consequence, and the talent and imagination to craft solutions.

But I ought not suggest that liberal education is a panacea for all of our personal or social dilemmas. It does not answer all of our questions or solve all of our problems. It is no guarantee of goodness, as the occurrence of the Holocaust in one of the most cultivated nations in Europe - the nation of Goethe and Schiller and Mann - reminds us; it does not protect us from our worst selves, as the compulsion that governed Hannah Arendt's lifelong relationship with Martin Heidegger makes clear.

And yet, although liberal education is not perfect, it does have the redemptive potential to prepare us for both the glories and exhilarations of life as well as for its ironies and perplexities. It has the capacity to enable us, as I have argued, to see the world clearly and steadily, to be conscious of the desirability of qualifying what we say with the word "perhaps," to think deeply about the large questions of organizing our communal life, and to be whole human beings.

For this reason, the tradition of Whitman College in expounding the liberal arts will always be important - to the state of Washington, to the Northwest, and to the nation. As graduates of Whitman, each of you now becomes a part of that glorious tradition. I am confident that you will play your part effectively, and I wish each of you every success and satisfaction in the years ahead.