Looking Forward and Looking Back

Joanne V. Creighton, President
Convocation, Fall 1999

Students, faculty, staff: welcome. It's great to see you all here to launch a new academic year on this splendid afternoon. Special welcome to all newcomers on the faculty and staff and to the Class of 2003.

This afternoon I'd like to direct my remarks especially to our seniors, capped and gowned as is appropriate for their elevation to the rank of seniority in the student body.

Class of 2000, this, your final year on campus, is an auspicious time for you and for us: you will be our first class to graduate in the new millennium--and so you will set the standard for the next 999 years!

As this year progresses, you are bound to feel somewhat divided, thinking about how to make the most of your last year here, and at the same time trying to figure out what to do out there in the so-called real world when you leave. But, then, this is not a place apart from the real world that you just pass through and then leave behind. Your life will be a progressive unfolding of what you learn here.

When I think about how education shapes our lives, two fictional characters come to mind, an unlikely and incongruous pair, you may think: Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fairand Quentin Compson in Faulkner's The Sound and the Furyand Absalom, Absalom!

Becky Sharp, as she leaves her school at the beginning of Vanity Fair,throws out the window of the carriage her graduation gift, Johnson's dictionary, with the remark: "So much for the Dixonary; and, thank God, I'm out of Chiswick." The gesture is not difficult to interpret. Good riddance, she seems to say. I reject your teaching as so much excess baggage. I'm off to make it on my own wits. And, opportunist that she is, she does become a success, of sorts, in the Vanity Fair of the novel. Becky Sharp looks forward, not back.

Quentin Compson is just the opposite. A freshman at Harvard, he is a young Southerner in the early twentieth century, who is heir to the decaying fortunes of an old aristocratic family devastated by the Civil War. He feels himself to be "a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterwards" from the Civil War.

Quentin is enamored with all those "back-looking ghosts," with the honor and glory that was his family, with his sister's lost virginity, with a time that is simply over. In a futile attempt to stop time, he pulls the hands off his watch. When that fails, he plans the ultimate time-stopper: suicide. But before he jumps into the Charles River, he waits until the last days of his first year at Harvard. Thoughtful young man, he wants to make sure that his impoverished family gets their money's worth, one full year of study at Harvard, paid for by the sale of his brother Benjy's beloved pasture. Quentin Compson most decidedly looks back, not forward.

Well, not very edifying role models, you may think. Looking forward or looking back, neither Becky nor Quentin finds much sustenance in education.

Becky's education is nothing more a useful veneer, a set of ladies' manners, to help her better her fortune. Economic motivation drives her. She says, later in the novel after a checkered moral record, "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year."

We doubt it. She has admirable spunk and drive, but something is missing, something she did not learn at Miss Pinkerton's academy. Something is wrong, in fact, with the very world of Vanity Fair and with Becky's wholehearted acceptance of its values.

Yet we shouldn't take a holier-than-thou attitude. Surely most of us look at education as a key to a brighter economic future. Education as a means to upward mobility is a deep and respected American tradition, memorably articulated by Benjamin Franklin among others.

But it isn't only economic, this American dream of the better life. There is a hope that the next generation will have a richer, deeper understanding of the world. Parents send their children off to college knowing that their children may well grow beyond them, become different from them. "You can't go home again," Thomas Wolfe wrote. Sometimes it seems that by looking forward, through education, you can't go back.

It certainly seemed that way to me, if I may indulge in personal reminiscence for a moment. I remember vividly the day it seemed to me that I had gone beyond my self-educated father, always so smart, always such a reliable source for sticky homework problems. But then one day he didn't understand my homework at all. This unsettled me. It's disturbing when childhood authorities are shown to be vulnerable and limited and you see you can go beyond them. Indeed, education can cause doubt, anxiety, and stress for both you and your family. My grandmother, for example, became concerned when I seemed disoriented and different from the carefree girl who went off to college. "You can use your brain too much," she counseled.

You could say that Quentin Compson also uses his brain too much. In the novel Absalom, Absalom!,he and his Harvard roommate Shreve try to understand the past and the South through the fortunes and misfortunes of one man, Thomas Sutpen. The question is where did Sutpen, and by implication the South, make his mistake? Why did Sutpen fail? Why is the South in such ruins?

This is no disinterested pursuit of learning on Quentin's part; he is emotionally and intellectually engaged; he feels history viscerally, in his blood and bones. At the end of the novel, when he puts all the pieces together, rejecting the false from the true, he must conclude that what was wrong was that Sutpen's design at the very beginning was built upon an intolerable wrong, the callous dismissal of his son, Charles Bon, when he learned that Charles had some black blood. This act, of course, parallels the old South's intolerable first premise: the rejection and enslavement of its black children.

This discovery is hard for Quentin. He is confronted with the literal and moral black foundation of the past he so idealizes. Totally unnerved by what he's learned, he thinks: "Nevermore of peace, nevermore of peace. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore." Looking back for Quentin becomes painful; looking forward seems hopeless: he feels he can end this nightmare only by death.

Yet this is not the last word or the only way. William Faulkner, the author behind this self-absorbed character, has looked deeply at what he called "the human heart in conflict with itself." He has not come to this despairing conclusion. In his books and in his life he also portrayed the optimistic faith he articulated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in l950: "I believe that man will not only endure: he will prevail . . . because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, and sacrifice and endurance."

And, by the way, I learned that not only can man endure and prevail: so can woman. At any rate, unlike Quentin, I endured and prevailed over the sometimes painful challenges of my college education. And I learned in the process that there was no danger really that I would "go beyond" my father, as I had feared as a glib kid--the wisdom accumulated through decades of curiosity and Ben Franklin ingenuity and Emersonian self reliance, no danger of surpassing that. And hard to pass my grandmother, too, who was right about proportion and balance. You can use your brain too much, but then she used hers rather well herself, an uneducated immigrant who taught herself to read and write in English, a better linguist than I ever became after years of French and German.

Because education also teaches us that we're not nearly so smart as we may at first blush think: it teaches the limitations of preconceived ideas and the fallibility of the self.

Some commentators such as Allan Bloom, in a book called The Closing of the American Mind,worry that we are teaching in colleges and universities today a pervasive relativism, which leaves students with no moral values, no certainties. They fear that we are creating, in effect, either shallow Beckys: with no depth, or understanding, or appreciation of the history and traditions of our culture: young men and women whose only goal is "to get mine too." Or, if not that, then we are producing Quentins, unmoored from old values and not linked to any new ones, young people whose lives of quiet desperation embody Quentin's lament: "Nevermore of peace, nevermore of peace."

But what is closed-minded about Bloom and others strident commentators is their fear of uprooted values, fear of openness to other views, other traditions, other ways. Yes, we need to look back, to learn from the past, but we can't cling to it, as arch-conservative Quentin Compson and arch-conservative Allan Bloom try to do. We can't presume, especially in today's global community, ethnocentrism. Old certainties, old values may not hold. Our very conception of Western culture, like Quentin's of the old South, may be too elitist, too exclusive, too blind to otherness.

And just as there is closed-mindedness in this orthodoxy of the right, so too is there in a closed-mindedness in an ideology of the left. The repressive regimen of the so-called p.c., or politically correct, presumes and imposes an appropriately "correct" language and point of view for all issues, a totalitarian liberalism which censors thought and feeling and closes out the possibility of sincere and open discussion and reflection.

Rather than clinging to old orthodoxies or taking on new ideologies, we must maintain a healthy skepticism, a faith in free and open inquiry, however difficult the truths that we discover. This is the view Ralph Waldo Emerson put forth when he spoke to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837, and this Emersonian self-reliance, this intellectual honesty and independence of mind, is an important component, we hope, of the liberal arts education you are receiving here.

But it is only one part of what want we want you to learn.

In the same year that Emerson spoke at Harvard, 1837, Mary Lyon was founding Mount Holyoke: she added an important additional dimension to the idea of education. She said, "This institution is a great intellectual and moral machine and if you jump in you may ride very fast." Her yoking together of intellectual and moral is still the distinguishing feature of this College. In our mission statement we call it the linking of excellence in the liberal arts with purposeful engagement with the world.

In other words, this College is not and has never been an ivory tower, cut off from the world. No Quentin-like or Becky-like self-absorption is encouraged here. We invite all into a community of honor and, in a few moments, Class of 2003, you'll be asked to take the Honor Code pledge. Lily Tomlin was wrong, you know. We are not all in this alone. We are all in this together and we each need to be a contributor. Like Mary Lyon, we expect you to make a positive difference in the world. In remarkable numbers over the 163 years of our history, our graduates have done just that.

But you don't need to wait until you graduate to lead a life of purposeful engagement. There are plenty of opportunities to hone citizenship and leadership skills while you are here.

For example, our new centers, the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Center for Environmental Literacy, have teamed up this fall to focus on a critically important issue facing us all, environmental health. Carol Browner, head of the EPA, will give the keynote address on September 13. Meanwhile, the inclusiveness program will focus this year on the theme of race and science. What could be a more important, interesting, and neglected topic?

Our goal with these and many other similar activities is to reach out from the campus and connect to important public policy issues in the larger world. And our new speaking, arguing, and writing program will help you to develop the skills and the confidence to be an effective leader in that world.

There are a lot of opportunities to practice and hone those skills here on campus, both in and out of the classroom. Indeed, the wonderful paradox at the heart of a liberal arts education is that although it may seem so impractical--such as reading novels, for example, surely one of life's greatest indulgences--it turns out to be so highly useful, developing the skills, the insight, the analytical abilities, the moral perspectives that prepares you to lead a fulfilling and purposeful life.

So in sum, Class of 2000, may your liberal arts education give you the facility to reflect back on your family, on the lessons of history, on your time at Mount Holyoke, not with despair and anguish and regret like Quentin, but with compassion and understanding and imaginative insight like his creator, William Faulkner. And may it also give you the facility to look forward, with zest, with spunk, with skepticism, with self-reliance, like Becky, to brighter future, but you won't, I know, just accept Vanity Fair and its values, as Becky does. Rather, following Mary Lyon's lead, you'll question it, make it better. And certainly you will not throw out your books!