Welcome to Ashby Parlor
Delivered by Dr. Robert M. Calhoon at RC's 2004 Commencement
May 3, 2004

             Welcome to Mary Foust; welcome to Residential College; “welcome to the company of more than 90,000 living graduates of this institution by whatever name she is known, whether it be the State Normal and Industrial School, the North Carolina College for Women, the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, or The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.” You will hear that last welcome in the Coliseum a week from Friday morning from the President of the Alumni Association. That phrase, “by what ever name she is known,” is the historic way this University signals to you that you are really going to graduate, just as “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered,” hushes expectation at the start of a wedding.

            In the Oxford English Dictionary, “welcome” means “a hearty greeting to someone arriving at a home or place,” and “hearty” implies something richly human: a salutation given spontaneously, unstintingly, gladly by the welcomer to the welcomee.

No one here ever did this better than the late Warren Ashby, in whose memory this room is named and who, more than three decades ago, welcomed the first one hundred incoming students to the Residential College along with teachers like Fran and Murray Arndt, Charles Tisdale, Jim Helgeson, Eugene Pfaff, and over the next few years Richard McFadyen, Bill Pruitt, Jean Gordon, Roy Schantz, Betty Carpenter, and me, and in years to follow a fresh crop of fifty some new students and a widening circle of instructors. All were welcomed to share, in this building and especially in this room, an intellectual feast.

So it is appropriate and fitting that at this RC Commencement we take a few minutes to consider what it means to be welcomed to an intellectual feast in the Ashby Parlor and to remember Warren Ashby.

            Not long before he died, Warren wrote an autobiographical essay to explain to  why he had devoted much of his life to the study of ethics, why, indeed, he intended to work until his dying day on his nearly completed History of Western Ethics. He had not intended to write about himself or to use the word “I” in that book, but only to leave his memories written down in a journal article where diligent, really curious readers might find him, pondering the meaning of the word, “ethics,” a term, a subject matter, an intellectual passion, a moral stance that is hard to define.

Warren had already explained to his family, specifically to his son Allen, that ethics concerns “what it means to be individuals who live in community, shaped by these communities as we try to give shape to them, in turn.” That’s not quite a definition of ethics, but it is a well-crafted concept. Living in community has moral implications for individuals and for the community itself. When Allen edited his father’s manuscript for publication, he described the book for its readers, in those terms; and, in a gentle disregard of the author’s modest preferences, he incorporated Warren’s autobiographical essay into the Conclusion of the book.

Warren remembered that “when I was a boy, until I left home for college, I lived with my family on the banks of the James River.… We picnicked at Jamestown Island, climbing about the ruins of the old church, playing that the Indians were coming through the swamp, remembering the first awful winter and malaria. We were heroes filled with hope; we were at home in our world.” The family bicycled to Yorktown where they could almost hear the strains of “The World Turned Upside Down” as Cornwallis surrendered; they visited Williamsburg where Thomas Jefferson danced with Belinda in the Apollo Room and where he studied mathematics and moral philosophy with his beloved teacher, William Small, whose guidance and friendship, Jefferson remembered, “probably fixed the destinies of my life.” On Sunday afternoons the family would drive to Hampton, Virginia and walk on the campus of Hampton Institute where Warren chose as his boyhood hero Hampton graduate Booker T. Washington.

The idea that the history of a place, albeit a place as drenched in the past as tidewater Virginia, could serve as the generous boundaries of a child’s consciousness; the further idea that such a sense of place could render people at home in the world; and the  realization that great destinies commenced with things as simple as schooling and friendship; all of these perceptions gave structure for the life of young Warren Ashby.

First at Maryville College in Tennessee and then at Yale University, Warren chose to study philosophy because that discipline promised to help him create “a passionate integrated life.” “We study ethics,” a branch of philosophy, Warren concluded, “in order to become good, that is, more fully human.” That was an uncertain enterprise, he knew, with no final, comfortable conclusion, but nonetheless, Warren liked open-ended uncertainty because it inculcated “the habit of active thought about life.”

The Residential College, which Dean Robert L. Miller invited Warren and Murray and a small group of other faculty and students to envision in 1969, was just such an experiment in community, in passionate integration of learning and experience, and in quiet, dedication to the task of actively navigating moral choices, human relationships, and daily intersections between personal experience and the needs of others.

How can we make Warren Ashby’s project of acquiring the habit of active thinking about individuals and their communities manageable in our lives? How, in the next few minutes, can we catch hold of his teaching and some of his learning. Clearly we need to catch him at just the right moment.

There were several such moments: at Yale studying theology in the late 1930s with H. Richard Niebuhr, disciplined and precise younger brother of Reinhold Niebuhr, as a pacifist Methodist minister during World War II surrounded by good people who could not understand or tolerate his moral aversion to war, years later attending the Silent Meetings of the Society of Friends, and earlier, in the depths of segregated Greensboro, as one of the few whites in Greensboro who spoke publicly about racial justice in the  tense months following the Brown decision.

But another moment when we can observe Warren Ashby observing people in community occurred in the late 1940s in his friendship with Frank Porter Graham—another North Carolinian whose name appears on a teaching facility on this campus.

Frank Porter Graham was the legendary President of the University at Chapel Hill from 1931 to 1949. A boyish figure who roamed the campus in shirt sleeves and opened the President’s home to students every Sunday night, Graham may have been sixty years of age when Warren arrived at Chapel Hill to begin his teaching career. But in spirit and manner Graham was still something of an eager and idealistic undergraduate. As the campus filled up with returning veterans in 1946 who were Warren’s contemporaries, Warren himself may have struck Dr. Graham more as an advanced student than as a professor. However the two men regarded each other, Dr. Frank, as everyone called him, took to Warren the same way he did to hundreds of other young people who came his way.

One thing that drew the two together was their political liberalism. As a young historian, who had grown up in a rural North Carolina, Graham studied the industrial revolution in England and speculated that, as the American South modernized and industrialized, the region might learn from British experience how to embrace change without blighting the lives of generations of industrial workers. As a history professor in the 1920s and university president in the 1930s and 40s, Graham was the foremost leader among social reformers in the South—and a courageous and outspoken foe of segregation and racial prejudice.

Watching Graham transform the University from a backwater southern institution into one of the three or four best and most progressive state universities in the nation—and all the while speaking out about poverty, discrimination, economic injustice in a state noted for its economic conservatism and racial hegemony—Warren Ashby saw close up

a man of moral values transforming the community in which he lived through the sheer power of moral principles.

Graham seemed inoculated from the bitter political passions of his time by his vast network of appreciative former students whom he had befriended and inspired and who had gone on, thanks to the quality of their university education, to careers in law, government, teaching, the church, and business. “I know I am often subject to misunderstanding and even misrepresentations,” Graham said of himself, “but I owe it to the great traditions of this University to take the blows as they come and as long as it is my responsibility to hold fast to those principles which are the very intellectual and spiritual stuff of her history and her life.” 

Watching Graham nimbly sidestep political hostilities and regularly subordinate his own ego to the well-being of the people of his beloved Old North State, Ashby appreciated that he was witnessing in practice what he had for more than a decade studied in religion and philosophy: an individual shaping a beloved community even as that community, with all its flaws and potentialities, shaped individuals within it for better or worse. “There was a mystical streak in him,” Ashby sensed in his mentor, “but it was not revealed beyond the advice he gave students to ‘follow the light within’ or his practice, when faced with a major problem, of arising early for a solitary walk.”

Ashby knew scores of students who had been told by Dr. Frank to follow their inner light and trust their own best moral intuitions. And he had doubtless seen Graham walking, deep in lonely thought, across the expanses of the campus at sunrise. The sight took him back to his doctoral dissertation research at Yale on David Hume and Adam Smith as moral philosophers.

Today, every student of the Enlightenment knows that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher before he was a political economist, but in the late 1930s and 40s Smith was simply known as the man who discovered and defended the marketplace as an economic mechanism. Warren’s dissertation was among a handful of early studies to connect the ethical and the capitalist sides of Smith’s thinking. Had Warren devoted his energies to that single idea, he would have become a durable footnote in the history of philosophy.

Instead, he realized that Hume and Smith represented more than a footnote. They had claimed high ground in western ethics—ground from which readers could see the whole sweep of moral inquiry. Warren therefore devoted the first decade of his teaching career to writing a book capturing that long sweep.

His wife, Helen, was chagrined when he told her he wanted to put the big, unfinished book on ethics aside to write first a biography of Frank Graham—not an ethical biography but rather a full account of Graham’s remarkable life that would, as an added bonus, reveal something special about a life rooted in ethical reflection and ethical responsibility.

 Together, his two books—on the history of western ethics and the life of Frank Porter Graham, southern liberal—reveal Warren Ashby’s great capacity for ethical reflection and ethical responsibility. The core of what Warren learned can be found in the paragraphs on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. What struck Warren when he first read that treatise on the eve of the Second World War, as millions of people seemed to be slipping into chaos, was what he called Smith’s theory of the neutral observer. Neutrality, objectivity, independent judgment were not, Smith cautioned counter-intuitively, were not virtuous actions in themselves. Instead, Smith concluded that the human mind was what we would today call hard-wired to be neutral—most of the time. We all have moments of prejudice and warped opinion, he conceded, but those lapses aside, we automatically see others as they may not see themselves. And we know we are being viewed by friend and foe alike by potentially neutral observers. That keeps us on our toes.

That profoundly simple philosophical concept, the idea of the neutral observer, Smith predicted, would be enough to civilize and tame human beings when they moved out of their private contemplation of the world and into that most charged of social environments, the marketplace.

Maybe, maybe not, but surely something to think about while surfing the web, making career moves, running risks, investing our best energies and talents, confronting personal demons, commencing a life after college. That was what a university education offered Scottish lads in the 1770s, what it offered Americans on the eve of their own revolution in Jefferson’s Virginia on the banks of the James River where Warren Ashby’s childhood reveries set him loose along currents of thought that would carry him here: into this room now bearing his name and filled then as now with his welcoming spirit.

 

Thank you!

Robert M. Calhoon, Residential College Commencement, May 3, 2004

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