|
|
 |
Theodore E. Long, Elizabethtown College
August 22, 2002
All of us here today celebrate the arrival of Elizabethtown’s
class of 2006 – parents and family, faculty and staff, and certainly
you new students yourselves. As we begin our years of study and life together,
I want to capture some of the excitement and challenge of what we are
undertaking and what it will mean for all of us. In some ways, the educational
enterprise we begin today marks the renewal of an historic cycle of teaching
and learning energized once more by our new class. At the same time, we
must recognize that after “9/11,” teaching and learning can
never be quite the same. Old worlds and new worlds are colliding, and
the best education will embrace them both, with all their possibilities
and dangers.
Consider first the world of higher education you new students enter this
week. Outside the historic religions, this is the oldest institution of
our civilization, and just like religious institutions, these are hallowed
halls in many ways. While it is often very traditional, higher learning
is simultaneously liberating and expansive, opening the door to new life
for teachers and students alike. This new world of learning will change
your life – right now and forever. It will not allow you to take
for granted the ideas and assumptions you brought with you. It will challenge
you to consider things you never knew and things you previously disdained
– sometimes even things that were forbidden to you. You will be
scared, angry, puzzled and confused at times. But you will also be excited
and amazed, astonished and awestruck by what you encounter. And as you
plunge into this adventure, you will feel your world expanding, sometimes
at dizzying speed, but always toward something larger and more fulfilling.
Bart Giamatti, a classical scholar, president of Yale and commissioner
of baseball (he was the one who banned Pete Rose for gambling) captured
this experience well in his 1983 address to Yale freshmen:
I cannot tell you with certainty what it will be like; no one can. Each
of us experiences college differently. I can assure you that soon your
normal anxieties will recede and a genuine excitement will begin, a rousing
motion of the spirit unlike anything you have experienced before. And
that will mark the beginning of it, the grand adventure that you now undertake,
never alone but on your own, the voyage of exploration in freedom that
is the development of your own mind. . . . If you can experience the joy
that the acquisition and creation of knowledge…brings, the adventure
will last your whole life and you will have discovered the distinction
between living as a full human being and merely existing. (A Free and
Ordered Space, p. 119)
That is what it means to get a liberal education – not a specific
set of subjects but an attitude of mind, not a fixed absolute truth but
an ongoing “conversation of truth” (Parker Palmer); not a
disinterested and detached attitude toward the world but an active and
engaged exploration of the world. Moreover, that “pleasure in the
pursuit of knowledge,” as Giamatti points out, “joins and
is finally at one with our general human desire for a life elevated by
dignity, decency, and moral progress.” ( Giamatti, p. 123). A liberal
education, as opposed to mere training, he notes, leads “to some
sense of citizenship, to some shared assumptions about individual freedoms
and institutional needs, to some sense of the full claims of self as they
are to be shared with others” (Giamatti, p. 213).
A second important feature marks the world of higher education at Elizabethtown
– life outside the classroom, particularly residential life. Your
new world of is a place where co-curricular experience is a significant
aspect of your education. For it teaches you about life itself, and it
introduces you to the diverse array of others you will encounter in life.
Nowhere else but in a residential college like Elizabethtown will you
have the opportunity to live with those different from you, to learn from
them on an intimate basis, and to practice the arts of human relations
for real. In his study of how 1600 students “make the most of college,”
Richard Light gives a vivid example of how this happened for one student.
Freshman year we had a big mixture. We were six people: Jewish from
New York, Jewish from Boston, WASP from Orange County California, …
Indian from Florida, Chinese from California, and me. It was a real
mixture in terms of racial background, economic background and interests….
We became such a family. That’s been one of my most valuable experiences
here. I got sick in March and they treated me like my mother would.
One guy woke me up every two hours to give me medicine. They were running
all over the place, talking to my teachers. And they didn’t think
twice.
We were really a family. We had a big common room, and we would spend
a lot of time with each other, laughing, making jokes. We still have
reunions. It was a very meaningful experience. Diversity was central
to it all.
The guy from Orange county was conservative, traditional, came from
a WASPy family. We butted heads, so to speak. Politically, we’d
be battling. He had some religious right leanings. I’m pretty
liberal. We would argue or debate. I really liked him as a person. It’s
good to consider someone my good friend who has such divergent views.
Enlightenment about other cultures doesn’t often come in an epiphany
like that. (Light, Making the most of College. P. 41).
Here at Elizabethtown, your world will also be an arena for service,
where you learn that “the pursuit of knowledge is most noble when
used to benefit others” (Elizabethtown College mission statement),
not just to fill your mind, or to help you fill your pocketbook. In this
new world of learning, you will come face to face with what it means to
be human, what knowledge is for, and what life is all about in a very
personal way, not just abstractly.
Finally, your new world is distinguished by the character of this very
place. The landscape and buildings, the spaces where we live and learn,
will shape your collegiate experience in ways you will not fully appreciate
for years to come. This week, for example, we open a new campus center
that will change the pattern of interaction among students and faculty
dramatically for years to come. Believe me, that new place will enhance
your educational experience and our community in ways too numerous to
count. Now we turn to redesigning academic space, first in the sciences,
and then in business education. While you are here, we will complete new
facilities for both programs, changing the way you learn just as we have
changed the way you live.
That’s the “old world” – a residential liberal
arts education that transforms the mind and the heart in an education
for service. We have been doing that here at Elizabethtown for more than
100 years, and that is our continuing mission with each of you. While
it is an old world for us, it is new to you, and you will find it a transforming
place.
There is also a “new world” that confronts us all, a new
global order. That world has been developing for some years, but we became
painfully aware of it just last year when the twin towers and the pentagon
were attacked so dramatically. We will long remember what happened that
day, including the loss of so many innocent lives. But even, those events
have made us aware of the new world we inhabit and how much it impacts
us. Having seen that, there is no way education or life can remain the
same. For students and faculty alike, the events of “9/11”
drive us to reconsider our place in the world, and how the world operates.
We must now surely confront the reality that no liberal education –
and no professional preparation either – qualifies for excellence
if it does not engage students with this new global reality.
Whatever else it might be, the world is now “ a single place,”
as Roland Robertson has observed. “The world – that is “the
globe” -- now intersects all other worlds, Elizabethtown’s
included, in ways that we are still learning. We cannot hold it at a distance,
for it is literally here, not there, and we are part of the world as it
is a part of us. Scholars are not of one mind about the character of this
new global reality, but some things are clear:
- Business, communication, and transportation have created a global
web for our daily lives. E-mail connects us instantly to anywhere, and
even small family businesses in Lancaster county, not just multinational
corporations, reap substantial revenue from other countries. This global
infrastructure is often what people mean when they use the term “globalization,”
and it brings us great opportunities and stimulating encounters with
other cultures.
- Politically, the world has become “multi-polar following the
downfall of the Soviet Union,” with no stable balance of power
among nation-states. The United States remains the most powerful force
but much remains beyond our control and the balance of power may be
shifting, as Huntington notes, with Asian and Islamic nations gaining
greater influence. Indeed, as Kaplan observes, nation states themselves
may be losing their dominance as other forces occupy the global stage.
- One of the most important of those forces is cultural. Despite America’s
best efforts to make our culture universal, the globe is decidedly a
multi-cultural, multi-civilizational place, and as Huntington argues,
cultural differences increasingly drive global interaction. We cannot
understand the events of “9/11,” or oil markets, for example,
without understanding Islamic religion and culture and how others respond
to American culture.
- Global realities are driving in two directions at once. One stream
of globalization rushes toward a unified and integrated global system,
with a common language and homogeneous culture, universal human rights,
and market-driven economies governed by international political institutions.
The other stream swirls instead toward anarchy and conflict, with cultures
defending traditional truths, resisting homogeneity, rejecting the imposition
of universal principles by others, and attacking market dominance, often
with violence and terror. One version of this new reality is found Benjamin
Barber’s depiction of global life as Jihad vs. McWorld.
Life and learning in this new global age will be exciting and fascinating
as we encounter new cultures and experience the glories of other civilizations.
You who join us today should not leave without encountering this world
by learning the language of another culture, by studying abroad in a May
term or with BCA (newly headquartered on our campus), and by engaging
faculty and students who come from a different culture. Likewise, we who
teach should not fail to renew and extend global education this year as
we implement our new core curriculum and redesign many of our major programs.
At the same time, this new global age also brings some danger and uncertainty,
which may tempt us to withdraw from it toward some safe haven. But we
know that will no longer work, and those of us here have a special obligation
to do what we can to realize the best possibilities for global life. In
keeping with our founding Brethren heritage, Elizabethtown’s mission
declares that “the college affirms the values of peace, non-violence,
human dignity, and social justice and seeks to make those values manifest
in the global community.” Our vocation as educators is to nurture
in you the capacity to address the pressing challenges of the world in
a way that will preserve human dignity, civilize global society and advance
peaceful resolution to the conflict among cultures and civilizations.
For you will become the citizens of this new world, exercising stewardship
of the planet for decades to come.
Members of the class of 2006, you stand on the threshold of two fascinating
and challenging worlds of learning -- one the historic world of liberal
learning that will lift your spirit and reshape your life, the other a
newly emerging global arena which will be your home for life. Explore
both of them with a sense of adventure and purpose. Take advantage of
the opportunity they provide to extend your horizons and encounter the
unknown, to reach for what you might not have thought possible. As you
do, you will experience the power of an Elizabethtown education for your
life. Welcome to your new worlds of learning!
|
|
