“Freedom, Piety, and the
Perpetuation of Our Institutions"
Keynote Address: American Academy of Liberal Education Annual Meeting
By Christopher B. Nelson, President,
St. John’s College in Annapolis , MD
June 28, 2004
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 ../web/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.
