Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/04/07/a_commonwealth_of_liberal_learning.php
Friday, April 7, 2006
Editor’s Note: In his anugural address, President James O. Freedman delineated his vision for Dartmouth, focusing upon the obligation of sons and daughters of Dartmouth to give back to the world from which they have benefitted. Between the lines, however, one detects both a discontent with the College as he found it and a desire to transform it. Emphasis has been added to items of particular interest.
Dartmouth has changed greatly during the 218 years since its founding. But it has remained steadfast in its commitment to excellence in educating students for lives of leadership in their communities, their nation, and the world; for lives of contribution to the arts, the humanities, the sciences, and the professions; and for lives of personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
A compact to maintain and strengthen our commonwealth of liberal learning is essential to achieving this purpose. It is essential if we are to preserve the noble principles of due process and equal protection of the laws embodied in the Constitution. It is essential if we are to continue to appreciate the important stake that the strong have in protecting the civil liberties of the vulnerable. It is essential if we are to continue to envision this nation as a harbor of fairness and opportunity for human beings of both sexes and of all races, religions, and nationalities.
Dartmouth College will be strengthened by continuing to follow truth wherever it may lead. The great issues, educational and moral, that face Dartmouth—indeed that face the nation and the world—must be debated and discussed fully. No one doubts that Dartmouth will thrive upon differences of opinion among those who love it.
But maintenance of the sense of community that unites Dartmouth College will depend upon the civility with which we express those differences and the respect and tolerance that we show for those holding opposing views. In the end, we will be judged not by the shrillness of our rhetoric or the self-dramatization of our actions, but by the quiet, measured force of our reason.
And so I appeal to the entire Dartmouth community—in its stimulating diversity of people and points of view—to be guided by what Learned Hand once called the spirit of liberty, “the spirit which is not too sure that ‘is’ is right.” I ask, as we pursue our common goal of a stronger Dartmouth, that we recall Judge Hand’s frequent citation of Cromwell’s exhortation, “I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.”
Let me turn, now, to speaking more specifically of the College’s mission as we chart our course toward the twenty-first century.
Society’s need for liberally-educated men and women has never been greater than it is today, as we ponder still the transforming horror of the Holocaust, as we live daily with the existential possibility of nuclear annihilation, as we experience the awful anguish of failing to meet the simple imperative of feeding all the people on our planet.
By stressing the value of a liberal education, we encourage students to seek the infinitely precious affirmation of their most authentic selves. We set in motion a process of critical examination and imaginative introspection that leads students toward personal definition. And we help them to develop an independent perspective for reflecting upon the nature and texture of their lives.
We inspire them as well to delineate the foundations of their moral identity, and to seek a sense of balance and proportion in the conduct and shape of their personal lives. We offer them an opportunity to develop the humane empathy and moral courage required to endure uncertainty, anxiety, and suffering. And we challenge them to make a difference in the world they inherit.
A liberal education acquaints students with the cultural achievements of the past and prepares them for the exigencies of an unforeseeable future. It provides them with standards by which to measure human achievement. It engages them intellectually and fires their minds with new ideas—powerful and transcendent ideas that will trouble them, elevate them, and brace them for new endeavors.
A liberal education stirs students to probe the mysteries of the universe, to reflect upon the rise and fall of cultures, to find meaning in the enduring achievements of western and eastern civilizations, and to consider the ambiguities and arguable lessons of human history.
And it awakens them to the power of art to shape, question, and impose order upon the human experience and human destiny. For it is art—the language of words, of paint, of sculpture, of music—that enables us to express the hopes and despairs, the dreams and nightmares, of the human condition.
We are fortunate that Dartmouth College, in its wealth of academic diversity, has retained a scale that permits it to function as a collegial institution. Dartmouth has been and must continue to be more than merely an association of fragmented academic specialties. It must be one commonwealth of liberal learning, and its task must be to preserve and convey the indivisibility of human experience and knowledge.
We must emphasize the importance of creating new bonds between the arts and the sciences, new alliances between undergraduate education and professional preparation, new opportunities for synthesis between liberal education and advanced research. For it is this emphasis upon the unity of knowledge and experience that enables our students to grasp the connectedness between their private selves and their public selves, between their personal lives and their professional careers, between their discrete personhood and their common humanity. And it is this connectedness that, in the end, gives coherence to our entire mission as an integrated commonwealth of liberal learning—a commonwealth in which the contributions of every scholar, every discipline, and every professional school are essential to achieving the intellectual wholeness for which Dartmouth must always strive.
As we emphasize the role of Dartmouth College as a commonwealth of liberal learning, we must pay special attention to helping our students develop an international perspective on their lives.
During the decades since the conclusion of World War II, the United States and the other nations of the world have become increasingly interdependent, through political and military relationships through international trade, through exchanges of technology, and through scientific, educational, and cultural cooperation. This process has been accelerated by the fact that, during the same period, the developing nations of the world have assumed greater political prominence and asserted greater independence of thought and action than in any prior time in our history. For this reason, the need is urgent for citizens and professionals with an understanding of other nations, other cultures, other literatures, other modes of thinking, and other languages.
Dartmouth has been farsighted in developing an impressive set of international programs. We must continue to offer our students an opportunity to widen their angles of vision on the world, by infusing our curriculum with an international perspective and by emphasizing the study of foreign languages. We must support teaching and research programs that hold special promise of enlarging the global dimension of the College. We must facilitate the enrollment of students from foreign countries, in order to increase the cultural and ethnic diversity of the College. And we must encourage the appointment of visiting professors from foreign universities, in order to expand the intellectual breadth of the College.
By helping our students to comprehend the complexities and subtleties of the international environment, to see themselves, as it were, as inheritors of only one among many different cultural traditions, Dartmouth can continue to make a special contribution to meeting an essential education and national need.
Dartmouth College is one of the nation’s outstanding institutions of liberal learning. It is worthy of our love and of our respect—not only for what is has been, but also for what is it capable of becoming. Indeed, I believe Dartmouth is just beginning to reach the fullest measure of its rich potential and that its greatest opportunities still lie before it.
Our primary goal in the years ahead must be to enhance the intellectual distinction of our academic enterprise. That will require us to strengthen our undergraduate programs and to give thoughtful consideration to a responsible and selective development of our graduate programs. As we make these decisions, we must be guided by a commitment to maintain this institution’s hard-earned emphasis upon excellence in teaching. We must achieve a mutually nourishing relationship between undergraduate education and graduate education and professional education. And, above all, we must preserve “the Dartmouth Experience,” at the heart of our enterprise.
The fulfillment of these aspirations for the future will depend most centrally upon the people of Dartmouth—upon the talent and imagination of our faculty and the quality and ambition of our students. As this College approaches the twenty-first century, we will need to continue to attract to our faculty men and women who are distinguished scholars and extraordinary teachers—those very special human beings whose intellectual power will move them steadily toward the leadership of their disciplines and whose brilliance as teachers will illuminate the lives of our students. In addition, we must attract our full share of the most gifted, most academically qualified students in the nation—diverse, idealistic, imaginative students with the motivation and promise of making significant contributions to American life and thought. And we must hold them to the highest expectation of academic rigor.
We must strengthen our attraction for those singular students whose greatest pleasures may come not from the camaraderie of classmates, but from the lonely acts of writing poetry or mastering the cello or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus. We must make Dartmouth a hospitable environment for students who march to “a different drummer”—for those creative loners and daring dreamers whose commitment to the intellectual and artistic life is so compelling that they appreciate, as Prospero reminded Shakespeare’s audiences, that for certain persons a library is “dukedom large enough.”
Dartmouth graduates have made distinguished contributions to the public and professional life of this nation for more than two hundred years. We now enter an era in which I hope that Dartmouth graduates will enlarge even further the contributions they make to the intellectual life of the nation, as novelists and painters, as critics and composers, as scientists and historians, as explorers of the human experience.
As our students gather at this special place on the Hanover Plain, we must lead them to appreciate that ideas are instruments that strengthen the bonds of social communality, that heal the wounds of political discord, and that stimulate the development of cultural and economic institutions. There is no more propitious time to emphasize the essential role of intellectuals and scholars in shaping American culture than in 1987, the year in which Dartmouth celebrates the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of its Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
In the beginning and in the end, higher education is an experiment. Our society and our culture have staked much on the success of that experiment. Whether that experiment succeeds in the future, as it has in the past, will depend, finally, upon our commitment to the values of liberal learning.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once wrote, “I have always thought that not place nor power nor popularity makes the success that one desires, but the trembling hope that one has come near to an ideal.” I embark upon my tenure as President of Dartmouth College with “the trembling hope” that in the years ahead we will come near to the ideal of maintaining and enhancing the intellectual distinction of this commonwealth of liberal learning.