The following remarks were delivered by Richard Warch, president emeritus of Lawrence University and Ripon College honorary degree recipient (1980), to the Ripon College Class of 2011 at Opening Convocation, Aug. 28, 2007.

I was flattered when Jerry Seaman, your dean of the faculty and my former colleague, invited me to say a few words at this opening convocation of Ripon’s 2007-2008 academic year.  And I’m pleased to be with you this morning, not least of all because I possess what you undergraduates are here to achieve: a Ripon degree, the physical emblem of which is draped around my neck and shoulders in the form of the Ripon doctoral hood.  And today I get the chance to wear it.

For twenty-five years, I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at a convocation like this one to the students and faculty at Lawrence, though since I last did so in 2003, I may be a little out of practice.  But I do want to add my welcome to those extended to you already, and to offer a few observations and ruminations on the broadly conceived enterprise on which you embark, liberal education, and on the nature of the institution where this enterprise will be conducted, a liberal arts college, specifically this liberal arts college.

Now to begin, we might as well acknowledge that the term “liberal arts” is tricky.  A few years ago a member of the graduating class at Lawrence reflected on his intellectual odyssey at the college by noting that he had come a long way from the confusions of his freshman year. “When I came to college,” he said, “I really had no idea what the liberal arts were.  I just thought there would be a lot of Democrats here.”  He made the comment in good humor, but the remark has deeper import.  The liberal arts and liberal education are not widely or well understood, not only outside the academy but within it as well.  And while you are enrolled at a college located at the birthplace of the Republican Party, you may nonetheless share the confusions of that Lawrence graduate.

The lack of understanding about the liberal arts turns out to be nothing new.  The absence of “clear-cut notions of what a liberal education is and how it is to be secured,” the president of Cornell University noted at the beginning of the twentieth century, is “a paralysis affecting every college of arts in America.”  And the lack of consensus on interpretations of the liberal arts college, cited by the American Council on Education in 1921, is with us today.  Donald Kagan, professor of classical history at Yale, put it this way: “From Cicero’s artes liberales to the trivium and quadrivium of the medieval schoolmen, to the studia humanitis of the Renaissance humanists, to Cardinal Newman’s definition in his Idea of a University, to the attempts at common curricula in the first half of [the twentieth century], to the chaotic cafeteria that passes for a curriculum in most American universities today, the concept [of the liberal arts] has suffered from vagueness, confusion, and contradiction.”

It has also suffered, at least by implication, from being the object of humor and satire, as in the jaundiced and humorous view of college life offered a few years ago by Dave Barry, who wrote that “college is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things.”  Fundamentally, he went on, you learn two kinds of things in college: things you will need to know in later life (two hours) and things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).  “These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on.  The idea is, you memorize these things, write them down in little exam books, then forget them.  If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.” 

Barry’s advice to college students is to avoid choosing a major that involves Known Facts and Right Answers, hence, to eschew mathematics and the sciences.  If, for example, in a chemistry class you write in your exam book “that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you.”  Better, he thinks, to major in “subjects in which nobody really understands what anyone else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts,” like English, philosophy, and psychology.  In English, he suggests that the path to success lies in coming up with an interpretation of a text that no one has ever thought of before, like that Moby Dick is not a great white whale but the Republic of Ireland, which will dazzle your professor. 

Philosophy, he suggests “involves sitting in a room and deciding that there is no such thing as reality, and then going to lunch.”  Psychology is for people obsessed with rats and dreams, especially those who dream about rats.  I’ll spare you what he had to say about sociology.

As Barry’s humor reflects, the liberal arts are often seen as loosey-goosey subjects with no focus and rigor.  You have that point confirmed when you watch telecasts of Division I football and are told that an interior lineman is majoring in liberal arts, which doesn’t exactly convey the notion of tough-minded intellectual activity.  Or when the liberal arts are viewed as preparatory for something more serious, as when in some institutions students say that they have to get their “liberal arts” requirements out of the way before going on to more practical courses.  Or when people see the liberal arts as ornamental, as providing merely a kind of veneer of sophistication so that you can talk smart at cocktail parties.  At some places, then, liberal arts are a kind of add-on, meant to complement other forms of study.  But at Ripon, liberal arts and liberal education are what you get.  They’re not here to be “gotten out of the way,” but to experience persistently and fully.

So in light of this vagueness, confusion, contradiction, humor, and dismissiveness, what are we to make of this pursuit called liberal education and of this thing called the liberal arts?  Indeed, in trying to explain the liberal arts and liberal education, I’m often reminded of what Louis Armstrong said when he was asked to define jazz: “If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”   Scholars and college presidents—not always the same thing—have wrestled with and written tomes about this vexing issue for centuries, and I obviously do not have the time to offer you a full recitation of their many and often competing views.  But I do want to use this occasion to offer a few observations on aspects of the liberal arts and  liberal education for you to consider…and perhaps, as the year progresses, for you to discuss and debate.  After all, you have chosen—and been chosen by—a college that proudly professes the liberal arts; at Ripon, the liberal arts are at the heart of the enterprise.

To begin and to begin by simplifying, then, there are two great strands in the liberal arts tradition, the one focusing on the appropriate disciplines to study in order to train and expand the mind, the other on the personal and intellectual attributes possessed by and to be nurtured in the student in the educational enterprise.  To simplify matters further, we might argue that one centers on content and seminal texts, the other on process and analytical thinking.  The first may be found in Matthew Arnold's proposition that liberal education involved teaching "the best which has been thought and said in the world."  The second may be located in the arguments of Arnold's critic, Aldous Huxley, who asserted that liberal education should be grounded on "an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth."  One way you might think about these distinctions is to consider the first—studying the best that has been thought and said (and written down!)—as knowledge you receive, and the second—employing your reason to reach truth—as knowledge you obtain.  In your years at Ripon, I am confident that you will experience both modes of liberal learning.

Let me say a little about each of these.  First, you probably know, and you will surely hear in the course of your undergraduate years, that a liberal education was and is designed for a free people, an idea that emerged from the classical world and, over the centuries, an idea that has been adapted to and shaped by the perspectives of Christianity, scholasticism, humanism, and the Enlightenment, and enriched by new scholarship and learning into the present day.  For much of its two thousand year history, the liberal arts and liberal education were identified with a fixed number of subjects and hence texts; only in the last one hundred years or so have these multiplied and become diffuse in the form of the current and ever-expanding array of disciplines and intellectual approaches.  Even so, one abiding approach to liberal education has been identified with subject matter and significant works, variations on the argument forwarded by Arnold, as reflected in this quotation from a letter sent by some Cornell University professors to the president in 1976:  “If we prove to you that an arts and science student can now receive a B.A. degree at Cornell and thus be presumed to have acquired a liberal education, without having been required to read a line of Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, Marx, or Einstein, would you consider this to be evidence that there is a crisis in education at Cornell?”   The professors clearly believed the answer was yes.  So one way to think about the liberal arts is to think about subjects traditionally identified with them—English, Classics, foreign languages, philosophy, political science, the hard sciences, for example, as well as major texts and authors, subjects and works that may be viewed as direct descendents and expressions of the traditional liberal arts disciplines.

Second, in addition to a definition of the liberal arts college based on curricular subject areas and content, there is another predicated on what might be called intellectual process and style.  One of the principal proponents of this view was Henry Merritt Wriston, president of Lawrence and then of Brown, whose book The Nature of a Liberal College articulated his position.  Wriston emphasized that "liberal learning cannot be defined in terms of a standardized body of subject matter."  Rather, he argued, the values of liberal learning "arise out of familiarity with basic disciplines," and he went on to define discipline not as an academic field of study (like history or chemistry, for example) but as "the essential mode of thought in a field of study, the inherently characteristic mental method of attacking that kind of problem."   “If one has some mastery of the basic disciplines, he is in a position to attack a new field independently, as an adult should do."  Wriston's position, as he allowed, made "the curriculum less important than it appears under other definitions of liberal education."  By stressing the experience of liberal learning, this position leads to a holistic view of liberal education, accommodating not only how you as students approach the curriculum but also how you engage with and come to terms with information and knowledge.  Indeed, one might extend this notion to take into account your engagement with the entire collegiate culture.  Understood in these terms, liberal education is a matter of institutional style.  And that is precisely the point Frederick Rudolph emphasized when he wrote that historically, “liberal education was a matter of style more than it was of subjects.”

There are many attributes of that “style,” and you will do well to think about them as you pursue your higher education at Ripon.  One of the principal attributes—and one that Ripon can justifiably claim—is that liberal education is intimate and personal. Whereas many educational schemes and systems seem predicated on the notion that education is nothing more than some version of the old definition of a lecture—when ideas pass from the notes of the professor to the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either—liberal education attempts to connect teacher and student directly and to have them engage each other in spirited conversation and debate about matters of interest and import.  Again, Wriston put it well: “The difference between teaching in a college and in a university has nothing to do with mental ability; it is to be found in the relationship with students,” which, at a liberal arts college “is a much more personal matter.”  Ripon proclaims that here students “experience a richly personalized education” and can be proud that its students give professors high marks on this score.  One attribute of a personalized education is that the student cannot be anonymous and that the quality and frequency of interactions of professors and students are central.

The style of liberal learning that you will encounter and experience at Ripon cannot be boiled down to a simple recipe, but it will, I think, have at least two important characteristics: first, it will seek to instruct you in ways of knowing, not just in things to be known.  Mastery of information and familiarity with major texts and ideas are important, to be sure, but liberal education is concerned more fundamentally with the intellectual discipline involved in that mastery and familiarity and with the different ways of knowing or of seeking to know that we employ in examining evidence, forming judgments, and reaching conclusions.  In a rejoinder to an announcement from a college that “education is basically an information-transfer process,” Russell Baker wrote that “Education is not like a decal, to be slipped off a piece of stiff paper and pasted on the back of the skull.  The point of education is to waken innocent minds to a suspicion of information.”  And it is just such awakening that liberal education promotes by helping students learn how to access and assess information, how to make sense of it, how to connect it to other pieces of information, and how to apply it.

Second, liberal learning at Ripon will be challenging.  It will not—it should not—confirm what you already know, or think you know, but put what you know, or think you know, under some duress and at some risk.  One of my college professors talked about “uncomfortable learning,” those experiences that called into question long-held and perhaps cherished beliefs about oneself and one’s world.  So if you came to college to have your questions answered, I would suggest that you be prepared to have your answers questioned.  And that process, one that I think happens if not exclusively then certainly most effectively at a residential liberal arts college, will prove powerful to the extent that you participate in it.  Again, you are not here to learn what you already know; and you are not here passively to receive what you don’t.  You are here to be awakened.

Your awakening will take many and various forms, but I urge you to take delight in each of them.  Do not shirk from the joys of asking and pondering big questions about abiding issues as you tackle your several courses.  What is justice?  How have different societies and philosophers, over space and time, described it or expressed it?  What forms of familial and social norms and arrangements have been practiced by humans in different periods and places?  What is this business about nature versus nurture?  Why should I care?  What is the substance of major religions and how does that substance affect how people think and live?  What is great literature or great art or great music, and who decides and on what basis?  Are aesthetic judgments merely matters of personal opinion, or is there some set of criteria and principles that we should follow?  What do we know about the natural world?  What don’t we know?  How do scientists and how do we go about finding out?  What do scientists mean by the term “theory”?  Are scientific theories true and trustworthy?  These are simply a few of the kinds of questions you will be invited to confront and wrestle with in your liberal education at Ripon.  Relish  them.

Finally, let me offer some parting advice on how to succeed in college: “If someone denies it, assert it; if someone asserts it, deny it.”  In other words, argue and debate with professors and with one another.  Take seriously the words of David Denby, who wrote “The experience of confronting both new ideas and people who think differently from oneself has traditionally formed the heart of a liberal education.”  Let that experience be the heart of your liberal education.  Simply put, if in four years at Ripon you only converse with those who tell you what you already know, who agree with your every statement, praise your every utterance or written expression, and who like the same things you do, you’re likely to leave here pretty much as you came.  And whatever else you may be seeking in a liberal education at Ripon, surely it is not that.  Another of my college professors tells the story of a mother who approached him on Parents Weekend and exclaimed how happy she and her husband were with their son’s experiences at college.  “Why,” she said, “he’s turning out exactly as we hoped; he hasn’t changed a bit.”  To which my professor replied, “Madam, someone is perpetrating a great crime against your son.  Get him out of here.”

I hope no one at Ripon will perpetuate such a crime against you and that your experiences here will be stimulating and life-changing. Best wishes to you all for a robust and challenging academic year.