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Residential
College
For Once, Then Something Dr. Murray Arndt |
It was my privilege several years ago to speak to the university graduates at the December commencement exercises. Because it was UNCG's centennial year I reminisced with them about the university's history. I recalled nostalgically and perhaps sentimentally two yearbook pictures from times nearly fifty years apart: one of a roomful of young women in long dark dresses sitting docilely before rows of Singer sewing machines, pedaling their way blissfully into the future; another of a similar room full of young women dressed more modernly but sitting equally docilely before rows of Royal typewriters, click-clacking away at a perfect present. My reaction then as it is now was to be a little concerned for the obvious regimentation represented by the groups, but much more surely to be excited for the individuals, those young women coming--probably the first in their families--from small town rural North Carolina to a place where, indeed, their dreams of beauty and discovery and wonder might come true. Today a different image haunts me, not from the past but of the future. It is the same room, perhaps, but now there are row upon row of students huddled before computers, their faces slightly eerie in the blue half-light of the screens, grinding their way along the information highway of life. And I am not nostalgic nor sentimental for them, but troubled and concerned. I am troubled that the very power of the machines before which they now sit, coupled with the veneration accorded them by society, will seduce these new young people to believe that facts are truth and that information is an adequate field for dreams. Indeed I have heard it said as recently as our last Founder's Day that unless it gets on-line, up to speed, and locked into the Internet, the University will become irrelevant in the information age of the 21st century. I think that that is the voice of darkness. Information and the transmission of information is not what defines or characterizes a university. The transmission of information is Bill Gates's business and Microsoft's, not Chancellor Sullivan's or ours. If the truth be told, our business is the restriction not the transmission of information. The university is a responsible entity not a neutral one. Information is neutral and can lead as easily to Hiroshima as to Utopia. It is surely one of the primary missions of the university to encourage its community of faculty and students to discern those differences, to distinguish destructive from creative information, to criticize rigorously and courageously what is false, and to profess with vigor and clarity what is true. In order to accomplish these things, a university must constantly recall that it is set aside and supported by the rest of the community to stand for value and quality and the questioning spirit. A university needs to commit itself not only to the discovery of wonderful new and helpful ideas, but also to the defense of ancient and helpless things and things too often dismissed as merely useless and frivolous. It needs to celebrate vigorously the beauty of its world and the ability of human beings to continue to make beautiful combinations of sound and color and light. High on its agenda must be a dedication to the leisure that alone makes possible such creativity. A university must encourage its faculty to be bright, smart, and articulate, but also caring and compassionate, to be scholars and teachers and even to be models of life lived generously and gracefully. And its students must be convinced that they are here for more than job training; they must be constantly curious and searching, encouraged that they can do better than simply parrot someone else, slowly, patiently, they must be educated to think for themselves. It is the crowning glory of the Residential College [at UNCG] that, for the most part, during the twenty-five years of its life it has remembered those things. If we could raise the echoes of what has happened just in this Ashby Parlor--the sometimes marvelous lectures, the arguments, the quiet conversations, the music, the questions, the cajoling and pleading, the questions, the beautiful noise--if we could raise those echoes that is what they would attest to: that we were true to what we should have been. We were never a business satisfying customers with wares. We were concerned with wherefores. We were in our best moments a true community of seekers, questioning sometimes quixotically, sometimes naively, but always questing for the something at the bottom of the well. I remember, for instance, a sunny afternoon toward the end of January maybe fifteen years ago now that Dick Whitlock in the quiet unassuming way he always had about him sat with us and described the symmetry of the universe. I was astounded. I had always known that the scientists among us were the plodders, the sort of boring guys who eventually explained why your faucet worked, and here was one of them making not only a poem but one of the most exciting and wondrous ones I had ever heard. There was a tantalizing moment when I almost regretted not knowing what a mole was. And then there were October days in too many early years when students went on strike--refused to go to classes to learn the things we were teaching in the ways we were teaching them. And Warren and Gene Pfaff and Charles and Bob and Linda and I would sit with them in slightly bemused numbness and listen to what it was they would have us teach. And within a day or two it would pass (that was signature 70's stuff) and w would return to the Greek Pollis or the Medieval Pope or the Depression, maybe not much different but much better. And I hear the music, singing and playing, poems being read, some awful, some nearly perfect, and plays enacted, Midsummer Night's Dream, Play It Again Sam, The Second Shepherd's, Everyman, Antigone, all tracing their lineage back perhaps to a rollicking Tempest done way back in 1970 something. There were a few occasions when we could do nothing but weep together and we did, here. An evening only a few years ago grieving the death of one of ours was achingly right and good. And there were Thanksgivings together in this room with turkey, sweet potatoes, gravy, and pumpkin pie all done together with a little real giving of thanks. And maybe more amazingly there were Hannukah-Christmases--trees, cribs, Santas, menorahs, hymns, psalms, and probably all against the law. Residential College has often, perhaps hyperbolically and hubristically, called itself a community of scholars. Better maybe a community of learners. But above all a community. We have learned to learn together, to be supportive instead of competitive, to be sympathetic instead of sentimental, to be convinced (at our best) that quality is far superior to quantity, thought to memory, and truth to fact. If Loren Eiseley is right that it is the ultimate task of every privileged human being to help create an endurable future and that for that task the indispensable gifts are the power to imagine something new and different and the compassion to understand that that vision must be extended to even the least of our companions on this fragile blue planet, then I think that Residential College has been and is still doing its part. To
return finally to Frost, it has always been our intention here to make
possible for students and faculty alike a different perspective, to offer
them the opportunity to get the angle of light just right so that at least
for a moment they can see through the glittery surface of information and
fact deep down to the bottom of the well. None of us perhaps know yet what
any of us will find there-- a pebble, the Grail, something monstrous, God--but
for once then (we think too) something.
Reproduced here with permission. Please do not duplicate
without the express consent of Dr. Murray Arndt and the Residential College
at UNCG (email paashby@uncg.edu).
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