"GETTING LOST "
Millsaps College
Convocation Address

Thank you, Dean King, President Harmon, Faculty colleagues, ladies and gentlemen of Millsaps, and particularly, members of the Millsaps Class of 2000:

At the beginning of a new academic year, we gather here to renew our commitment to education at Millsaps. For Millsaps' entering freshmen, this year presents a new challenge, but one for which I suspect most of you feel prepared. After all, we have been told that you are the best and the brightest entering class that Millsaps has ever seen. Your collective A.C.T. score exceeds that of your predecessors and your high school GPAs set a new Millsaps record. Individually, you have held positions of responsibility and honor in your schools. You have accomplished much and have been recognized for it. You have pleased your high school teachers, you have pleased your parents, and you have pleased our director of admissions. You are now primed to embark upon your undergraduate education, a rite of passage, preordained for most of you at birth, that will culminate at the dawning of a new millennium.

Prepared though you may be, I suspect that many of you have not thought carefully about the four-year experience that you begin this month. In fact, I suspect that many of you anticipate that college will be a continuation of high school, only in surroundings that allow for a bit more behavioral discretion than you may have had under Mom and Dad's watchful eyes. You will attend classes, take good notes, cram for exams, regurgitate facts or repeat ideas in order to receive high grades that will get you good jobs after graduation. And, in doing so, you will please your teachers and your parents and earn the approbation of your peers and society.

A course nicely laid out, probably by others, along a predictable path leading to prosperity in an increasingly competitive job market. But given the many options available for fulfilling your undergraduate educational requirement on that predictable path, why is it that you have come to Millsaps, to a "liberal arts" college? I want to spend my time with you this morning to talk about that decision and its implications.

James 0. Freedman, the president of Dartmouth College, has written that "(t)he creation of knowledge is inherently threatening to the existing order. It disrupts the pieties of the settled past, the complacencies of a comfortable present, and the prognostications of an assumed future." If that is so, and I believe it is, what is Millsaps going to do to that set life scenario that you have arrived with?

Unlike the pedagogical nightmare inflicted on Mr. Gradgrind's children in Dickens, Hard Times - - they are to be taught facts, "nothing but facts" - - the liberal arts experience is not intellectual sausage stuffing, cramming young heads with facts to be categorized and memorized for recall and application later in life. No longer will it be sufficient to memorize, to parrot others' ideas and hew to the path others have laid out for you. This is a time to relinquish the hold of others on you and to discover your own intelligence, your own beliefs, your own understandings - - indeed, who you are.

The word liberal comes from the Latin word "liberalis" which means suitable for a free person. In other words, without a master, without having to act according to the dictates of another. A liberal arts education encourages you to detach yourself from enthrallment to others so that you may arrive at your own truths. Do not get me wrong, you may reach conclusions that parallel opinions of others, but now they will be your truths for your reasons, not mere repetitions of theirs. But be warned, you may reach some conclusions about issues and about your life that will not coincide with those of the people who, until now, you have been rewarded for emulating or pleasing. It will require personal courage on your part to address those conflicts and to resolve them. In doing so, you will define yourself to yourself and to the world.

An eighteenth century poet by the name of Edward Young said: "Born originals, how comes it to pass we die as copies?" The arrival of each of us into this world brings an original; we have our finger prints and DNA to testify to that. Thereafter, much of our experience, both in formal learning and in life, involves someone else trying to make us a copy of their idea of who we should be. We are instructed how to behave, indoctrinated as to what to think, told what courses to take to be marketable after college, and disciplined as to what to say and how to say it.

One hundred and sixty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville saw as one of the dangers in our democracy the pressure to conform to opinion, not because it is right but because it is the majority. More recently, the novelist/ philosopher Saul Bellow has lamented that "people in general in this country have lost the habit of debating questions . . . . People hold opinions," he said, "but the opinions are not derived from either thought or discussion. They are just acquired as an ornament, a decoration. It is like those Russian generals, their chests covered with medals. People wear their opinions like medals."

Several years ago, I was a participant, along with some other faculty members, in a teaching work shop. During one of the breaks, one of my colleagues was discussing a teacher who was no longer at Millsaps. My colleague had been told by one of her students that the now-departed teacher had told the student that she, the teacher, didn't care what the student's opinion was. Well, we all shook our heads and thought that was a brutal way to treat the student (and just as well that the teacher was no longer at Millsaps). But later I got to thinking about that teacher and decided she had been right. If the truth be known, I do not much care about students' opinions either - - but I and my colleagues on the faculty care very much about why they hold them. What that teacher was saying to her student was, "Don't tell me your opinion unless you also can explain to me why you hold it and defend it against contrary opinion. Otherwise, it is not your opinion; it is a mere shadow of someone else's opinion and that person is not here to defend it. To put it in lawyer's language, unsupported opinion is intellectual hearsay, no more trustworthy in the classroom than such evidence is in a court room.

The distinction between "knowledge received" from others and "knowledge created" by oneself is as old as Socrates. The Myth of the Cave, recounted in Plato's Republic, posits that what most men and women perceive as reality is really only a shadow of reality filtered through someone else's lens. Socrates' "philosopher kings" are released from their bondage to the shadowy existence of "knowledge received" and move upward by constructing unfiltered truths of their own. A liberal arts education is designed to coax you from the bonds of "knowledge received" so that you become free, liberated to create your own reality. Teaching is not giving answers - - it is provoking students to ask tough questions to which they will construct their own answers - - answers that satisfy the student and that can withstand critical scrutiny.

This process of disengaging from the comfort of the given is disorienting. One becomes lost, lacking the security of familiar reference points. Socrates says, "At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck around and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen as shadows."

For me, that journey to constructing one's own reality was, as Socrates suggests, difficult. My college years were four years of confusion. Like you, I had come from high school with academic and extra curricular honors and high expectations from those who knew me. Far from home, I was thrown into a community of students, most of whom came from backgrounds considerably different than mine. I was challenged by faculty members who kept holding out carrots and then yanking them back just when I thought I had gotten what they wanted me to learn. I was cut off from the security of childhood moorings, but I was not being provided with new ones.

In my last semester of college, in a political philosophy course, I was given the option of taking a mid-term examination or writing a paper on a topic of my own choosing. I decided to write a paper on The Federalist, the arguments of Hamilton, Jay and Madison in support of adoption of the unique federal system of government embodied in the Constitution. Thirty five years later, I still have that paper in my desk drawer at home. It is the only paper from college I have kept. I have kept it because it is a memento of a transforming experience. I remember becoming so excited while writing that paper that I had to pace around my room to calm myself down. In choosing the topic and in writing that paper, I discovered, finally, the power of my own mind to respond to my own questions in order to create my own knowledge. It wasn't the teacher who had the questions or the answers; I was master of the inquiry and accountable for the response.

On graduation day, I left the commencement ceremony in a state of depression. I remember walking across the town common and looking at the college library and feeling that I had really blown it. I had wasted four years. I wanted to start all over again - - but I wanted to do it right the next time. I did not realize then that I had succeeded. I had realized the objective of a liberal arts education. I had learned that knowledge and truth and one's own identity come not from others but from within. I had begun my own quest for self definition and I had a lifetime ahead of me to "do it all over again".

In his Walden, Henry David Thoreau embarked on his journey of self discovery by retreating from society into the woods. He says:

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost . . . do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. . . . Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

In order to discover yourselves, you must first become lost, untethered to familiar moorings not of your own making. Once lost, you also will be free. Free to look inward to your own resources and strengths from which you will create your soul's own secure haven in a chaotic world. Encouraging you to leave the false comfort of the unexamined status quo is an objective of a liberal arts education -- so that you may find your own way to your own home. At Millsaps, you will be pushed to examine your assumptions, to question your beliefs, to confront complexity, and to eschew solutions too easily reached. If you shirk from the challenge of the liberal arts experience, if you resist getting lost, you will miss the unique opportunity for growth and self-realization afforded by this college.

Robert Coles, the noted psychiatrist and social essayist, has said that "education" is what is left over after you have forgotten everything you learned in college. Think about that. Sure, you will have four courses a semester to master, reams of information to digest, and a GPA to maintain. But overarching it all will be "education" - - the process of liberating yourself from the hegemony of others so that you may realize your individual potential. Your final examination for that education is life itself.

The champion of liberal values, John Stuart Mill, said in his long essay On Liberty:

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.

Mill later observed:

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is, therefore, capable of being more valuable to others.

Look at the Millsaps College catalogue. You will see a striking similarity between the characteristics of Mill's "individual faculties and the "liberal arts abilities", the encouragement of which underlies the course of instruction on which you embark this week.

The next four years afford a cloistered opportunity, probably never again to be available to you, to explore, to discover and to create. But first, I trust that you will not take offense - - now - - if I send you on your way with an admonition to "get lost." Allow yourself to get lost, for only then will you be free to bring to us the "born original" who is you.


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