One of my most vivid college memories is of a warm spring evening my classmates and I spent at the home of our Latin professor, Mary Moser. Classes had just ended, and we were celebrating with a dinner prepared by Prof. Moser herself, complete with Romanesque dishes such as poached cabbage and pickled young tuna garnished with rue leaves (!). After recollections of the past semester, sprinkled with the requisite complaints over the difficulty of translating ancient Roman authors, discussion turned to campus politics. As a student, I spent most of my time studying, working or worrying about my future, and I viewed the few political statements made by faculty members in my presence more as curiosities than inspirations (such as when a professor, during a lecture on Roman social attitudes, had extended his middle finger and wagged it at the administration building, cursing its Puritanical views). In the midst of our conversation, however, Prof. Moser suddenly grabbed my arm and exhorted us to get involved. “You’re so apolitical. You need to assert yourselves, to care.” Stunned into an awkward silence, I saw her then as the student she might have been in the early 1970s: a witness to Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War and our nation’s growing intervention in Central America–understanding that college was an inevitable part of that larger world. Hers was, in other words, the kind of student activism that we, as undergrads in the late 1980s, too often associated with the past rather than the present.
Looking back, I think it was not so much that, as students of the ‘70s and ‘80s, we didn’t care: we just didn’t know what we could care about. Rather than seeing the world as process, as something always in the making, we saw it as something preceding us, fully formed and inevitable. Our choice lay not between changing the world or adapting to it, but rather in how we would choose to adapt to it.
That difference is embodied in the very notion of a “liberal education” as expressed many years ago now by John Henry Newman in “The Idea of a University” (1854). Throughout his life, he worked to define what he called “liberal knowledge,” which, of course, one received through a “liberal education”—and he meant “liberal” in the sense of “broad” or “wide,” not in its common current political sense. Or, in his own words from “The Idea of a University”:
Surely it is very intelligible to say, and that is what I say here, that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence.
Newman’s point was that the student would be “transformed” by higher education through the development of a “clear conscious view” of his or her own “judgments.” As a result of this process—after this “liberal education”—the individual will “be at home in any society” for
He* has common ground with every class; he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon…
Most of all, graduates would understand the need to apply that “clear conscious view” to the world around them, most especially to their local and national communities, the issues important to those communities and the selection of those who would represent the people who make up those communities.
Like Cardinal Newman, I believe Prof. Moser was motivated that evening those years ago by a desire to instill in us a sense of urgency, to make us understand that we had both an obligation to develop that “clear and conscious view” and to exercise that view in the world around us.
Two important events occurring this fall come to mind in which we each have the opportunity to fulfill this obligation, one on a campus and one on a local and national level: a discussion about the structure of our own university and, of course, the upcoming elections on Tuesday, Nov. 8. I’ve already met with your Student Government Association, the Faculty Assembly, held a forum on the topic and sent information to the entire campus about our opportunity, this fall and winter, to reorganize the structure of your administration and its offices and organizations. I’ve asked that two students representing SGA serve on the Task Force in charge of this process. In turn, they’ll be organizing focus groups and forums to solicit and document your thoughts and input. I exhort you all to be an active part of this process—please don’t hesitate to contact me directly if you wish further information, as well as, of course, talking to your SGA officers!
Likewise, the elections on Nov. 8, as weary as many of us might be from what seems like a particularly l-o-n-g and divisive national debate, are an important opportunity for you to apply your informed views to a process that will shape each of our futures. And making those futures better ones.
*And apologies for Newman’s gender-specific language—a relic of a day in which most students who attended college were, unfortunately, men.
