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Thank
you for the invitation to say a few words.
The
AALE has been a gift to the spirit of liberal education, a gift to
the spirit of accreditation properly understood.
Of course, Jeff Wallin has been our torchbearer from the very
beginning and I’m pleased to thank him and the AALE Board for
giving so many of us the voice we needed to tell our story in
Washington and for reminding us all what a delightful example of
learning the accreditation process can be for the institution
undertaking a serious self-study.
We at
St. John’s
in
Annapolis
have just been
reinvigorated by this process, working with the AALE and the Middle
States Commission on a joint accreditation.
I
want to say a few things about what institutional renewal and
reinvigoration can mean, and why it is essential to the health of
any organization…but I also want to remove myself from talking
about rulebooks, manuals and guidelines.
I occasionally pray that the gods will wisk me off the
battlefield of educational politics and away from the exercise of
counting and accounting to justify the existence of our various
schools of liberal learning.
It
happens that such a prayer was answered for me this last weekend,
when I had an opportunity to study Virgil’s Aeneid with 15
other free souls…and I was reminded of the need for the leisure to
do this for no reason at all but the sheer delight of our learning
together. I mean to call
this a “need” for leisure, not a mere desire.
You know as well as I do that when you cease to learn, you
cease to be. You become
a slave to work, the imagination shrivels, and that part of you that
once experienced the exhilaration of new discoveries seems to die,
at least for a time.
So,
I was stirred up by the poet to refresh myself.
Of course, it was no accident that the Aeneid got me
thinking about institutions, their foundations and their futures,
the need for clear vision and good laws, and the importance of both
founders and refounders. The
founders get to start something fresh and new while all the creative
energy is ready at hand. Refounders
have a different task, but they get to recreate over and over their
own foundation myths to serve their further purposes.
Virgil
teaches us that we live somewhere between the ensnaring memories of
our past and the ineffable, fleshless imagination of our future.
We desire what we don’t have now and we remember what we
never quite had before. It’s
no wonder that the present is so filled with love and rage and fear
and war. We live in a
very messy, even precarious, present and always will.
Yet, we should not want it any other way.
My
candidate for this country’s greatest poet on foundings and
refoundings is Abraham Lincoln.
Many of you will remember his impassioned defense of the rule
of law in the face of a rising tide of mob violence, experienced in
this country at the time he delivered his address before the Young
Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois in 1838: The Perpetuation
of Our Political Institutions.
Citing, as a reason for the rising lawlessness, the passing
of the generation of this country’s founders,
Lincoln
said:
“They
were a fortress of strength; but, what invading foemen could never
do, the silent artillery of time has done; the leveling
of its walls. They are
gone. – They were a forest of giant oaks; but the
all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here
and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its
foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle
breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder
storms, then to sink, and be no more.
They
were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they
have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their
descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the
solid quarry of sober reason. Passion
has helped us; but can do so no more.
It will in future be our enemy.
Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish
all the materials for our future support and defense. –Let those
materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and,
in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.
So,
what has this introduction got to do with us?
I’ve wanted to awaken you and remind you of the fragility
of our own institutions – often threatened as much by internal
forces as by external ones.
We
honor our past and our visionary founders even as we dream about our
future. But our calling
to teach is concerned entirely with the present.
Learning happens in the here and now; our institutions exist
to protect the conditions of that learning.
It is not enough that we may have found ways to help our
students learn for themselves. It
is not enough, hard as it is, that we might even have helped to find
the cure for that great disease afflicting most schools, “the
passivity of the students” (cf. Eva Brann).
If we ourselves, as teachers, do not share in such
learning…if we ourselves, as institutions, do not have policies
and practices which encourage such learning to flourish…then we
will become antiquarian museums and libraries, rather than centers
of learning itself. [Let
us remember that libraries and museums are protectors of our
heritage and contain the means and equipment for learning in our
schools; they may even contain the whole world that’s worth
preserving, but they are preservative, conservative institutions,
helpful of our ends but not identical with them.]
Our
institutions of learning are, or ought to be, radical in relation to
our traditions. We ought
to know enough about our past to understand how we have been shaped
by it. But we also need
to be free enough to ask whether that past ought to continue to
shape our future, whether it holds enough truth that we should be
guided by it…or no longer.
Using
the language and images of Virgil, piety and duty toward our
origins, our forebears, our foundations, our works of art and our
society’s gods and totems are good but insufficient conditions for
liberal learning to take place.
Similarly, a notion or vision of the good, a map of the
promised land, is also a good but insufficient condition for the
activity of liberal learning to take place.
One needs both the desire and the freedom to question one’s
foundations and pursue one’s own ends, something that is radical,
dangerous and occasionally contrary to our society’s collective
interests.
How
to inflame that desire and permit that freedom, those are questions
that belong to us who exist to promote liberal learning in the ever
precarious present, threatened by the Scylla of institutional
atrophy and antiquarian tendency on the one side and the Charybdis
of the Sirens’
call to treat all students as consumers on the other side, where the
customer is always right and the institution exists only to sell
what the customer wants rather than help their students learn what
they ought to want because it is good in itself.
Let
me tell you a few brief stories that I think exemplify the kind of
dilemmas I worry about:
First,
I heard last month from a certain former member of an accreditation
team who visited
St. John’s
21 years ago. She thought
the college then was dying; it was defensive in its attitude toward
a good-willed outside team; it was engaged in a nasty internal
political dispute; it seemed to be growing old and its physical
facility was only a remnant of its former glory.
She thought the college was not going to survive because it
was unwilling to face the challenges of the world it was a part of.
Second,
I spoke two weeks ago with a member of the faculty of another very
fine college. He feared for the spiritual and intellectual health of
his college because it seemed to be headed into a mode of
retrenchment, a place of safety found in earlier times as a refuge
from the plagues of the present and the changes occurring on the
faculty.
Both
of these individuals may or may not have judged these institutions
rightly, but that is of no moment. The reason is that each of us
recognizes the issues. We know what it’s like to fight this battle
to preserve liberal education in a world that is increasingly
illiberal. For those of you at religious institutions, you may add
the problem of fighting your battle for liberal learning in a
tradition of faith in the face of a world that seems to have, at the
same time, both less concern with matters of faith and more strife
over differences of religious conviction. Each of us understands the
temptation toward defensiveness, the instinct to protect what is
ours when what we love is attacked or threatened.
We want to stick to our principles.
We
all understand this. And yet, sticking to principles runs a risk,
too. This risk is one I’ll call the problem with barnacles.
I
once read an article by John Gardner entitled “Personal
Renewal,” which opens with a story.
The article quoted by
Gardner
had this unforgettable
opening line:
“The
barnacle is confronted with an existential decision about where
it’s going to live. Once it decides, it spends the rest of its
life with its head cemented to a rock.”
It’s
not a bad image. The barnacle has solved a lot of life’s problems,
like where it’s going to sleep (or with whom).
Happiness for the barnacle is having a large, loving, caring,
close-knit family stuck to some other rock. And there’s no one
coming around telling you your head is stuck up some other part of
your anatomy.
But,
as
Gardner
notes, the barnacle builds
its own prison and serves as its own jail keeper. We each know a few
barnacles – people who have simply arrested the course of their
lives, who have given up the power to improve their world – people
who are stuck where they were years ago, slaves to the status quo.
They have lost the will and the imagination it takes to seek
happiness for themselves or others.
Yet
this is the work of everyone in this room, our very life’s work,
to help our students find happiness for themselves. We occasionally
lose sight of this in our need to stick to our principles, and we
can cement ourselves to our own rock of certainty, which is the
greatest danger to freedom and learning – particularly as our
schools begin to age.
Another
story: I’ve heard more times than I can count, over more years
than I care to remember, that every time some issue takes hold of
the staff of some congressman in Washington, some train has left the
station and we had better get aboard so that we can help shape the
direction rather than be bystanders.
I’ve got to say that this image has always bothered me,
because no engineer, conductor or passenger aboard any train has
ever determined where that train was going.
This was always determined by the guy who laid the tracks,
someone who never makes it into the metaphor.
And for good reason, because I can’t figure out why the
solution isn’t to place another train outside
Washington
on the very same track,
headed in the opposite direction and with the object of derailing it
altogether.
Last
week, I met with some 60 liberal arts college presidents just to
talk through common issues among us.
One of them confronted a common complaint voiced by
businessmen and public servants that we liberal arts colleges are
too small to be efficient and should strive for growth and greater
efficiency. He explained
our virtues, which included being small, residential
communities…real communities where community members share both
their ends and their activities…and then concluded with a remark
sure to be buried in a very dark corner by his PR people:
“Inefficiency,” he said, “we own it.”
Four words, good rhythm, right idea, but a very bad sound
bite for our commercial world.
At
this same meeting, someone noted that it was no wonder the general
public and our government representatives didn’t understand what
liberal education was, much less whether it was good, because we
ourselves couldn’t reach anything close to an agreement of its
meaning either. My
thought here is: “At last, we’re coming upon a comforting truth,
something that ought to assuage the concerns of all of us in this
room.” Why? Because we
are not a homogeneous amalgam of institutions of liberal
learning. And we
should not pretend we are. It’s
OK that we don’t have the answers, that we don’t all agree on
the particulars, even if we agree on the big problems of
undergraduate higher education and high school education today.
In
a nutshell, here’s the set of problems I’m trying to address. On
the one hand, our very virtues and strong foundation stories may
lead us to defensiveness and stagnation; we can become too convinced
that we’ve already found the answers that our founders set out to
seek, particularly when we see about us so many others foundering
without direction. On
the other hand, if we keep ourselves too open to the intellectual
fancies of our age, or if we so fear to fight the outside challenges
to our ways, we risk becoming the enemy, a mere cipher among the
indistinguishable mass of schools who do what they’re told (by
their governments, their students or their marketplace) rather than
what they believe to be right.
Here’s
my prescription, a set of suggestions for a way through this mess. I
hope this serves as practical advice for some of you:
1)
We stand for
liberal education, whatever that is.
Let’s not quibble and let’s certainly not try to find
one, broad, bland, expansive way of speaking of it so that we all
can reach agreement. We
should hail our distinctive voices and let them all be heard, each
his own. The more
distinctive, the better heard. The
better any one of us is understood, the better for all of us.
Dishwater doesn’t sell.
2)
Education is
expensive because it requires the giving of the life of one
well-educated human being to another, a devotion of time that cannot
be compromised without being cheapened.
Let’s not apologize for that.
Rather, let’s explain it and state our reasons for what we
do.
3)
Fight only
the fights worth fighting. There
are a thousand chimeras in the world.
a)
Some are
hideous but will never threaten: ignore them.
b)
Some can be
fought by us all collectively: join one of our lobbying or
accrediting associations, pay your dues, and give a few hours of
your time together with the rest of us to beat these down.
c)
Others
sometimes seem like annoyances or cause great expense but they
aren’t all bad; indeed they are mostly good, just not the highest
goods… things like
parental concerns about the quality of the living accommodations
when you’re doing all you can within your means, or student
demands for better food, or donor demands for faster service when
you’re stretched to your limit, or government demands for more
assessment data, or alumni demands for internet connectivity, or
business demands for student interns, or auditor’s demands for
more controls, or faculty demands for higher salaries, or just the
stress and wear of time on your buildings, grounds and
infrastructure. Now some of these will sound like greater or lesser
concerns to each of you depending on the decibel level of the
complaints, the number of issues, the competition you face, your
price sensitivity, and the distinctiveness of your mission or
curriculum. My answer
here is simply to be practical.
Engage your constituencies; prioritize your needs and their
demands; plan to improve your services and facilities within your
means; set goals and timetables that are reasonable; and then solve
these problems one at a time. Whether
or not they’re high on your list, all or most will need attention
eventually; your school will be stronger if you make such a plan (5
years, 10 years, even 20 years out).
Then, simply attend to it.
Make believers of your detractors by giving these little
things your attention. Altogether
they add up to a lot and will go a long way toward building
institutional confidence in staff, faculty, students, governing
boards, friends, alumni and donors.
d)
That brings
us to the last set of issues: those that concern the very identity
of your school, those that define your character or will help others
understand who you are, what you do and why you do it.
Do not compromise these.
Do not get on some train that has left some station unless it
is your train, on your track, with you in the engineer’s seat.
Be open to the demands from outside on the things that are
good or that can’t hurt. Be
very, very careful not to succumb to those demands that may destroy
your very being, your reason for being a learning community.
My experience here suggests that if in fact you know who you
are and what you’re up to, you will gain respect and strength by
raising a strong defense of the things that are of the essence. You
will gain respect by being open to change and responsive to
suggestions in all those other areas that are not essential
to your core. Such
responses are just as helpful in protecting against the dangers of
internal strife as of external attacks. My experience also confirms
that attending to the lesser goods brings much more financial
support than inattention ever will, that balancing budgets is
central to financial well-being and donor support, and that
principled opposition to outside attacks on the school’s central
core will also rally more alumni, friends and board members to your
cause because they will respect that you are standing on firm
ground, so long as you’re flexible when your first principles are
not at stake.
Corollary
#1:
Be concrete and specific in all your defenses.
Corollary
#2: Fear
not to tell others who you are and who you’re not.
None of us in this room should be trying to be all things to
all people. That’s as
much as to say that we stand for nothing.
4)
If
we believe in liberal education, we ought to own up to our
commitment to serving the interest of the individual soul.
Our duty is to the health of the individual, not the State.
Liberally educated people just happen to make better
citizens, we believe, but good citizenship and well paying jobs
should never be seen by us as more than useful byproducts of our
central activity.
5)
The
ability to make a quantitative count is a lower order skill than the
ability to make a qualitative judgment. Do
not fear to fight those silly ranking and so-called science-based
measurements that take no account of the liberal arts your are
trying to help your students acquire.
6)
The
quality of a student’s desire will better determine the
student’s ability to learn than his high school class standing,
GPA, or SAT scores. Work
on encouraging the desire to learn, rather than the mania to test
performance; the latter will follow the former as night does the
day. Build structures
and incentives that encourage the desire to learn for its own sake
rather than for the sake of the grade.
7)
In
your governance structures and leadership constraints, leave enough
room for the freedom to grow and change.
The alternative is defensiveness, stagnation, or unhealthy
strife. Remember that a
liberal education is founded in the notion that humility of
intellect and humility of spirit are required for wisdom.
We understand we are still seeking the answers we don’t
have and still aching for something we desire.
That combination, an understanding of our ignorance in the
face of the world and our love of something outside ourselves, is at
the root of all liberal learning.
What’s good for our students is good for our faculty.
Faculty who are not itself engaged in their own learning
cannot free their students. We
need to encourage intellectual freedom among the faculty, which
means that we must be open to some change notwithstanding our
founding myths and stories. We
need teachers to be every bit as alive to new learning as are our
freshmen. We need structures and governing procedures to replace the
tutelage of our founders as surely as
Lincoln
needed
them to replace his George Washington.
We need some space to rattle around in if we are to be free;
we need room for growth (some room, though, perhaps, not too
much of it). We need
funds and time for faculty development, so that they can come to
learn what they don’t know as well as what they do.
8)
Don’t
run away from institutional self-examination.
Just as we won’t relent with our students, just as we
exhort them to know themselves and discover how little they know, so
must we do the same with ourselves institutionally.
We should post regular reminders of all those things we’ve
studied that we know need improvement because we’ve come to
understand where we’re deficient.
This should be easy for we all know there is always room for
improvement. Let’s
just admit this and start identifying a few of these shortcomings.
We’ll be better for it.
Fear of seeking these out is a big obstacle to growth.
Have the courage of your convictions.
If it’s good for others to grow, it’s probably good for
us, too.
9)
Learning
is a social activity. Don’t
concentrate so much on building your facility that you kill your
spirit, which is very human. Attend
to the health of your community, your conversation among yourselves,
and your opportunities for learning together; faculty, students, and
staff. This way, you
remain vital and close to your core.
One way to attend to community health is to try to treat all
community members, students, faculty and staff as ends in
themselves, not simply means to your institutional purposes.
10)
Balance
is required in all things. Put
resources, money, time and attention where attention is most
required, but expect to have to attend to all sorts of things across
the board. The whole
organization improves best when all its parts are getting some
attention, not just those who’ve shouted the loudest, had the
greatest success, or have the greatest needs.
11)
I’m
not sure about this last because it may be the most threatening
piece of advice I have to give.
It’s this: anchor yourselves to unshakeable principles and
you fall. Concern
yourselves less with the principles for your actions while
satisfying yourselves that you have adequate reasons for
everything you do. It is
a principle of flexibility, and we at
St.
John’s
even
practice it when we consider whether to add a book to our
curriculum, or to remove one, too.
It is easier to make a change and easier to undo it if we are
giving reasons for our action rather than trying to find an
underlying principle for everything.
The
essential problem I’ve been talking about is how we, as colleges
and schools, organize ourselves best for the freedom we wish to
encourage. I don’t
know the answer to this, but I do know that it’s easy to become
more complex and hard to become simpler, easier to acquire things,
harder to give them up. I
also know that it’s better to be aware of all these tensions than
to be ignorant of them, and that simplicity is more likely to come
from an attitude that encourages freedom than one that is so rigid
that a rule is required for every move.
This suggests that conversation trumps paperwork, which
inevitably leads to more inflexible rules.
Where
is the mean? That is the
big question. And that
question has to be rediscovered and re-answered with each
generation. We should
not look back to our founders for anything but the big picture
because we have to live with our present condition.
We can’t live simply in the past and expect that we will
retain our most radical characteristic: that we value the question
more than the answer, the search more than its end…not because we
don’t want the truth or an end to our toil, but because our
experience is that the end of each search is the beginning of the
next, the answer to each question only raises another.
It
might be best to close quickly after all this advice with one more
appeal to the poet…this time to two sets of closing lines from the
fourth of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
What
we call the beginning is often the end
And
to make an end is to make a beginning.
*
* *
We
shall not cease from exploration
And
the end of all our exploring
Will
be to arrive where we started
And
know the place for the first time
(Little
Gidding)
To
rediscover our origins each day is to refound our institutions and
to remake our foundation stories.
That makes for a vital community of learning, top to bottom.
Thank
you.
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