Being Part of a Larger Picture
Honors Convocation Address, May 6, 2004
(Click here for Part II, by President Dale Rogers Marshall.)
Part 1
By Carlton T. Russell, Professor of Music
I felt surprised but pleased and privileged by Provost Woods' invitation to share the speaker's podium with President Marshall today. As Dale and I, both approaching retirement, discussed what we might say, we decided that some combination of autobiography and reflection might be most helpful to you, our last and therefore very special senior class.
The common topic we came up with˜"Being part of a larger picture" or, as Dale recently said it so well in the Wheaton Quarterly [Spring 2004, pdf file], "being dedicated to something larger and more lasting than one's self"˜captures what my education, as student and professor, has meant for me. I hope it will speak to you.
As the fourth child of middle-class American parents, neither rich nor poor and neither college-educated, I grew up seeing myself as part of a larger picture, but one restricted by my traditional small-New-England-city, white, Protestant ideals. My brother fought in World War II and, as a result, forged European connections, as I was to do much later and under different circumstances. Those connections opened him to a broader worldview. But I was too young during that world war and the subsequent American euphoria to grasp the deeper implications of a new global interdependence dramatized by Hiroshima, American military occupation and the Marshall Plan.
Keene, New Hampshire, where I was born and educated through high school, had in its population of 16,000 a grand total of one African-American family and one Jewish family. We had a Greek Orthodox church in Keene, along with a dozen or more Protestant ones; but as with the one large Catholic church (literally on the other side of the tracks), I wouldn't have thought of entering it. As for Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, or adherents of any other world religions, having known no living examples, I could have told you nothing about them.
It was when this "New Hampshah" boy arrived at Amherst College that he began to realize existentially just how large was the picture of which his cherished self was a particle. To start with, my freshman roommate was Jewish and another friend and tennis partner was Korean. One of my soon-to-be-best friends was not only Black but gay, although we didn't talk about sexual orientation in those days and I only learned of his when we both ended up at the same graduate school some years later. Those college years saw a radical expansion of my religious, social and sociological worldview. I suspect that Wheaton's expansion of your worldview was in most cases not so radical, you who entered college already equipped with wider perspectives, beginning with the experience of growing up, as I did not, with television bringing the world visually and vividly into your homes.
My college education of course broadened me in the academic ways expected of an undergraduate curriculum. Being an organist and organ student and one of only three music majors in my class provided specialization and also needed identity amid a large number of gifted young men (most of them more gifted than I, or so I thought). It was at Amherst that, inspired by the breadth of the curricular panorama as well as by a particular professor, I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in college music teaching, a decision I have never regretted. Besides the courses required for the music major (which comprised the study of Western classical music only), I had exciting and horizon˜expanding glimpses into European history and languages, philosophy and art, American literature and religion, to mention only those perspectives that most influenced my subsequent teaching and learning. And so it was that my "picture" became larger in college, intellectually as well as socially.
Because I never left college after my own graduation, I've had forty-four post-graduate years to experience and ponder the significance of the liberal arts education. My perspectives have, naturally, evolved and I have never stopped learning. My students have taught me much. And now, as I am about to retire from my forty-eight years in college, I find myself thinking yet again about what such an education can and cannot contribute to the living of human life in these troubled times.
A liberal arts curriculum can make us more flexible thinkers and more effective communicators. It can make us more knowledgeable about ourselves and our world - its nature, its peoples and their history, its artifacts, cultures and societies. But neither our formal studies nor their social setting can of themselves transform us into better, more loving and less fearful persons. The pages of history we study, not to mention the news we receive every day, abound, as you know, with examples of educated persons treating others in cruel, often murderous ways. The Wansee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1941, at which fourteen Nazi leaders, eight of whom held doctorates from prestigious universities, finalized plans for the systematic genocide we refer to as the Holocaust, is but an extreme and infamous example of horrible actions taken by educated people against other people considered enemies. The Holocaust was not what Matthew Arnold described, in his poem "Dover Beach", as "ignorant armies clash[ing] by night": it was a meticulous plan drawn up and put into place by tragically unevolved - many would say "evil" - but thoroughly educated Germans.
While education is not sufficient for making us better (more just, more loving, less fearful, less callous and abusive) persons and is in fact not even necessary to that end, it does provide an unparalleled opportunity to broaden our horizons, to see the larger picture of which every woman and every man is a part.
But even your formal education, enriched with globality, is not in my view sufficient equipment for your journey out of this place, into the larger society. Your picture needs to be yet larger, or at least more sharply focused. For, whatever our vision, we your educated elders are passing on to you a world in crisis. If you are concerned to help, in small or large ways, to set our warring world on little-traveled roads to peace, global awareness alone, even if coupled with first-hand global experience, is not enough to change the course of humankind's accelerating rush toward destruction. If you are to join with others in curbing that rush, I feel that you need not only to see globally; you need to sense in the depths of your being the universality of all persons. If you are thus spiritually as well as educationally equipped, then you can with conviction teach by word and example what the world must learn: that true peace, equality and opportunity cannot be achieved through retributive violence and war, but only through justice tempered by mercy, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation.
Members of the Class of 2004˜my and Dale's and Dee Grimm's last class: your education has been far more consciously global than mine was; and your documented commitment to serving those in need, before and during your college years, in this country and in other countries, is impressive. It is my hope that you will want to move through knowledge to understanding; beyond self-enrichment and success and a mere tolerance of those different from you˜beyond all of these to compassion, to that sense of universal humanness that comes, as Br. Gregory Norbet says, from "walk[ing] in the shoes of your brother [or sister] for a while" [Weston Priory, 1972]. It is my hope that you will want to turn, or continue to turn, your education˜your minds and your hearts˜toward nothing less than the renewal of the world. In that crucial task, you have my utmost confidence, warmest wishes and fervent prayers.