An ancient Roman poet once oddly admonished his readers to "make haste slowly," and a modern American one asked above all to learn "to sit still."  I would like to use their suggestions as motifs for my remarks today.  Make haste slowly and learn to sit still.

     It is traditional and altogether appropriate that we should on occasions like today's cast our eyes backward and celebrate the achievements of the past.  The courage and imagination of those who, a century ago, opened to young women of North Carolina an opportunity to pursue a college education that can hardly be over-praised.  What this place in the early part of the twentieth century offered its students was until then an almost inconceivable richness-- the possibility to value themselves as whole persons, women who, given some room of their own, could think and create and even wield power.  McIver and Foust and the others wrought a revolution in Carolina to rival any before or since, an revolution that set her women free.

     We ought to remember too with admiration and gratitude those daring souls who at mid century and just beyond began to see an even larger vision.  Though both developments were intensely dramatic, the admission of men into the then fledgling university pales beside the racial integration that followed.  This was, after all, the South in the turbulent Sixties.  The issue of educational integration was both volatile and violent.  But there were heroes in those days too-- Ferguson, Mossman, Ashby, and others-- who with great patience saw through another revolution that offered freedom to all comers.

     And not all great leaders are dead.  There are those among us now devoting their lives and energies to finishing the work, to making of this once small "normal" school a great university.  They are in the business of driving one more revolution of the wheel, and in the process, enriching the many who have been set free.

     It is equally traditional and appropriate at celebrations like this to look at the extraordinary possibilities of the future.  It takes little imagination to grasp the idea that our civilization stands on the bring of extraordinary promise.  Like the explorers of 500 years ago, who finally dared the roundness of our world, we are now only coming to terms with the wonder of the great space within which our fragile planet whirls.  There are suddenly and mysteriously hugely untold oceans of space to dare.  And like the biologists who, not too long after those world navigators, discovered the rivers of blood that ran through each of us to feed and heal every cell, we now stand in awe before genetic information that may change- everything.  What we face may indeed be a brave new world, though it will take wonderful courage and vigor to live in it.
  
     But sometimes our eagerness to celebrate the past or dream of the future is done at the expense of what is most precious of all-- the present moment, this time, these days, this year.  I would ask you for a few moments to slow down, to direct your attention to our own experience together now, in an effort to understand what it is we are about, why it has been worth the lives and dreams of so many before us, and how indeed the quality of future life may depend on it.  Slow down; for the moment there is nowhere to go but here and now.

     I may have dismayed in recent years at the pervasiveness of haste and superficiality and greed in university life.  It often seems as if quantity has become the ultimate measure of quality.  My colleagues find themselves adding up grant money and refereed pages as if they were truth.  Students, even some of the best I know, are obsessed with double and triple majors, grade point averages, and marketability.  And others, still, sit in high offices counting, ever counting, things that in the end don't really count.  What is the matter with this picture?

     Well, one of the things that is the matter with it is that these things are not what a university is about  If a university is distinctly about anything, it is about the life of the mind, a life not easily, if ever, quantifiable.  What a mind's life needs more than haste, or productivity, or numbers is stillness, a stillness in which the truth and beauty and goodness that a place like this offers can sink in.  What really matters must be absorbed, not glanced off or casually recorded.  What is the point of speed-reading poetry or seeing all the pictures in the National Gallery, if nothing of beauty is encountered?  The life of the mind is not a pie-eating contest.

     Slow down.  It is inconceivable that those men and women who spent their lives making this place could have intended it only as a place to do stuff, a place to go to get somewhere else, just another hoop to jump through on the way to nowhere.  I believe, instead, that what they intended was a sanctuary of sorts, a place where we could be quiet enough to be and to become wholly ourselves.  A place where we could read and think of serious things, where we could learn to distinguish the true from the false, the substantial from the superficial.  A place where we might truly speak to one another, not just chatter mindlessly.  I believe they intended to create a place where we might have the leisure to listen and to see beautiful things, perhaps make them ourselves.  I even believe they intended to create a place where persons, becoming whole, might leave aside for a time competition, manipulation, and meanness of spirit and begin to see and love the goodness in one another.

     But these activities of the mind's life no longer are very natural to us.  There is something uncomfortable and suspect about the still silence that breeds them.  It is a vacuum we need to fill with boom boxes, cell phones, and e-mail.  We seem born into our world trailing clouds of fear, not glory, fear that like the latter-day Cotton Maters we won't do enough or say enough or in the end make enough money.  Slow down.  The life of the mind certainly needs bravery and courage, but it needs time and patience and practice first.  Perhaps a moment or two of stillness is where we must begin, a few minutes of being quiet enough to see and listen to and feel the world in which we live-- to let it sink in.  In the beginning maybe Aristotle or Marx or Coleridge is too much for our attention; try a friend.  The point is that we need to slow down and lie quiet and open before truth and beauty so that our minds may live.

     The mind's life and the stillness it demands are, indeed, habits that want practice.  But, Lord, it's October in Carolina, and there is no time and place more perfectly wed than these.  Find a meadow or only a leaf of grass, one lovely tree, or some running water, and be there with it.  Let what is lovely sink in, slowly seep inside you; encounter it; witness it.  In one of her early books Annie Dillard entertains the old speculation whether a tree falling in a forest where no one hears it makes any sound.  She goes on to think of all the beauty in the world, natural and human, that isn't witnessed, that no one sees or hears or feels-- flowers blooming in some unvisited place, a star geysering in an unknown galaxy, a voice singing, lonely, in the night-- and she wonders if it too may be wasted.  So much of beauty goes unwitnessed, she thinks, for our haste or inattention.  The least, the very least we can, she says, is to try to be there.

     Perhaps that is something of what the two poets meant, what they were warning of.  For all the beauty and truth and goodness in the midst of which we live and can move, it is critically important that we make haste slowly.  That we have some care.  That we spend, for instance, these months or years together not like some slippery plastic, but as if they had value.  The least, the very least we can do, is try to be here.

Dr. Murray Arndt
10/00 

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