USA > Connecticut > New London County > New London > Fiftieth Anniversary celebration publication, Connecticut College, 1911-1961 > Part 2
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College is Just Part of the Process
The teaching, of course, will be somewhat different too, because of this change in emphasis; more, I think, will be left up to you, and this is absolutely intentional. Most of us on the faculty think that we do not leave enough up to you at this point, and I think we are prob- ably right. Our great error is that we bring you up to feel that if you have not had a course in the subject, you cannot possibly know any- thing about it. As to that I would remind you of the very simple fact that you can all read a book, and you know better how to read a book now than you did five years ago, and you will know even better how to read a book in four years than you do now. You will need help at various times and the instructors are there to give it, but they do not want to see you become a person who thinks that, unless teacher told me to read it, it is not important for me to do it. In other words, we want you to feel that these four years here are just part of the educa- tional process which your whole life ought to represent, and unless you get a little bit of confidence in your own ability to find the ma- terial, to find answers, I am afraid you will go out from college and forget that you have the capacity to do it for yourself and therefore throw up your hands and say, "Well, I went to college for four years and we never learned that, so I cannot learn it now." If you con- sciously observe the way the teaching goes on in college, in this col- lege or any college, you will notice this attempt on the part of the in- structor to make you responsible for the process of education. You must expect long assignments and perhaps the instructor will not say, "I want this at nine o'clock on Monday morning." Perhaps he will not ask for it for a month, and then one day it will be relevant to a question, and you will be expected to know it. So be prepared to find the responsibility going back on you, where it will remain the rest of your lives. In some courses there will be a good deal of lecturing, and some of you will have had that experience before, and it will not rep-
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resent a problem for you. But I think most people are not accustomed to listening for fifty minutes to a reasoned discourse; it is not easy to give and not too easy, I think, to follow always. You do not have to write everything down, you will probably find out, and, if I may say this just privately to the students, if you catch the instructor saying it twice, the chances are that it is a pretty important thing. But that does not mean that they always say important things twice; they may say them only once. In other words, you have to be thinking as this discourse is presented. You cannot be just a mechanical recorder of sounds, and this again, you see, puts the responsibility back on to you.
Then there are such things as discussion classes. You are probably much more familiar with those, and there I would only say this: There are two evils. Do not just sit back and let the rest do it. On the other hand, do not monopolize it just for the sake of talking. There is such a thing as talking when you do not know. When I first got a dog, I wanted to know how to train it, so I said to the vet, "How do I begin?" He said, "The first thing is to be sure that you are smarter than the dog." Now in this kennel we have gone to a great deal of trouble to be assured that all the trainers are smarter than the dogs. There may be one or two very smart dogs we have not come across yet, but by and large you had better assume that it is the other way round.
New Aspects to Old Subjects
Now the last thing I want to say on this matter of method of pres- entation is that you will probably from time to time have to read or to study or to examine matters you have had before. It may be that the professor refers to the American Revolution-well, you know quite a bit about the American Revolution, so this seems to you pretty dull, and perhaps you do not notice in your complacency that there are some new angles to this Revolution. It is a wonderful ex- perience to have ground under your feet, such as you will have if the material is familiar, but because it is familiar, for goodness' sakes, do not think that it is the same thing over again.
In this first year, there are all these discoveries, discoveries of new subjects and discoveries of new aspects to old subjects, and of new ways of communicating between you and the instructor. And some- times the subjects will seem to you very full of challenge and other times they will seem rather boring. And so, I suppose, for all those reasons it is natural that in the second year a very interesting kind of
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phenomenon occurs. In the second year, toward the middle of it, there comes very often a kind of discouragement about college, a dis- couragement because students begin to be aware of how much they do not know. They begin to be aware how difficult it is to really learn anything that matters, and so sometimes the question arises, "Is it really worth it all?" This is a question you will not ask this year prob- ably, but you may begin to raise it in the next year. I think, there- fore, that this second year is the most important year at college, next to the first one, just because of the fact that this very basic question, "Is college worth it?" has to be answered.
College is Worth What You Put Into It
You must ask this radical question. If you have not asked it, I do not think you can really appreciate the experience that can be yours while you are here. If you raise the question, if you struggle with it, and if you look at the evidence, the answer is almost inevitable. It will not be for every single person, but it will be for most of you. Then you come out with something you can defend on its own merits and on your experience, not something someone else told you was important. And since I think that this is such an essential matter to settle early, I want to speak for the rest of my minutes here about this question of the value of college, because the other two years, the junior and senior years, are really not as difficult as these first two. They are calmer, more assured; the students have an idea of where they are going, even though they may tell you that they do not. It is a wonderful stage to reach; there are some different problems there but they can all be managed.
Let us consider now this basic question, then, of the value of it all. Of course, I start out completely prejudiced and so I will tell you that the answer to the question is, "Yes, college is worth everything you can put into it and a great deal more." The reason I say this is that life is not just making a living. It is also living a life.
Freedom from Provincialism
You have these four years in college in which to learn how to come to grips with this thing we call living, and you need, I think, training and insight so that you will have the greatest possible capacity to un- derstand the world in which you live, in case you never come back to it, and the greatest capacity to discover yourself, in case there never is another you. The traditional answer, and I think the right answer,
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is that the best training for this living of a life is to be found in what we call the liberal arts. Anybody who uses the term will immediately tell you that it is connected with freeing, with freedom. And I will do the same thing and say that basically these subjects, these liberal arts, so-called, have as their purpose the freeing of you from provin- cialisms-from provincialism in time, for instance. We know so very little of our own experience about what went before. You know a little what it was like when your mother was a young woman; you have a hazy idea of what it was like when your grandmother was a young woman. And beyond that you probably have no idea at all. And yet you know that there have been thousands of years of con- scious life on this planet and you are willing to settle for information about three generations, yours and your mother's and your grand- mother's. This is an extremely provincial kind of attitude. And so we say that important in these freeing arts is the study of history in any one of its forms. Science, I think one might say, is also a kind of free- ing, a freeing because it tells you about things in our world that are always true under certain given circumstances. This kind of knowl- edge widens your apprehension of the world in which you live. So the liberal arts, I maintain, do something about freeing you from the provincialism of time in which as definite, defined individuals we are all caught.
They do something too about freeing you from the provincialisms of space, by which I mean that you and I know very little about what it is like to actually be, shall we say, a Turk or a Greek or a Chinese. We know so little of the background, of the thoughts and the stand- ards and the hopes of these people who live in this same world with us today, separated from us, to be sure, by miles, but not separated in the actual clock time. Here again we suffer from a kind of provincial- ism, unless we are willing to struggle to understand these other civil- izations existing alongside ours, unless we try to comprehend what they stand for, how they can have significance. We study these things through language, and again through the social sciences-history and sociology.
And as a third possibility, the liberal arts are concerned with free- ing you from the provincialisms which come about because of a lack of scope. We, to be sure, are mostly concerned with what human be- ings think and do, but we live in a world, a large part of which is in- organic, as far as we know, without consciousness. We do not know, you and I, terribly much about rocks. We know a little bit about
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stars, but we do not know very much. We know that there are these strange things coming from outer space called "cosmic rays." We know a little bit about plant life and we have some ideas about animals. We are surrounded in our world by different kinds of life and are we right to limit ourselves, in our concerns, to what a human being can understand, apprehend, experience? Or is it not a part of being a human being to know something of the various kinds of life which share this world with us? These kinds range from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, and a study of them gives an understanding of the world and of yourself in most profound terms. Such an approach is just the opposite of the technical. Technical studies tell you how to do specific things, like running a typewriter, designing a piece of machinery, or taking a blood count. Technology asks, "How is it done?" whereas the Liberal Arts ask, "Why is it done?" or, what is even more basic, "Should it be done at all?"
Now you may say that at this moment you are much interested in certain of the liberal arts but can get along quite happily without some others. This is very much like a man who insists that he wants only to eat meat and does not want to bother with vegetables; such a character has not realized curious diseases are liable to plague him because there is no balance to his diet.
Spectrum of Subjects
So the faculty has specified that in order to qualify for your degree you are to have a general group of courses covering the various as- pects of the liberal arts, as well as special training in your selected field. It may help you to understand our reasoning if you picture these subjects as arranged on a spectrum, going from the most ab- stract and impersonal at one end to the most personal at the other end.
For instance, beginning at the abstract end of the spectrum, we can place mathematics and logic. These subjects will give you the rules by which any statement is said to be true any time and anywhere. Close to them comes science with rules which apply throughout the real world, whether or not you are present.
The social sciences come next, as somewhat less abstract, since they deal with the human sphere; but they still involve you relatively little. History, for instance, deals with how groups of people have be- haved in the past.
For the most part our courses in economics and sociology will be
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concerned with the way groups interact in present-day America. Here again what you think about it, whether you like it or dislike it, is not terribly important.
Then you come to this matter of language, which I list after history because it too is a kind of concern of groups of people. This involves you rather more because you can develop your own style of communi- cation. You have an opportunity to be an individual in this sphere with a personal involvement. But at the same time language is con- cerned with the way whole groups communicate with each other, and there must be a set of rules applying anywhere within that group.
Then you come to the fields where you are most definitely in- volved, into fields like music and art where the question becomes, "What can the College do about your reaction to works of art, or to non-works-of-art? What do we do about the person who feels that the Saturday Evening Post cover is the very highest sort of art?" All I think you would have to do is make such a person look at the cover every morning, noon and night and before long he will not be able to stand it, amusing though it is the first time. If you look at, for instance, a Dürer print at the Lyman Allyn Museum, you can look at that morning, afternoon and night, and it does not get boring. Or there is a nice Courbet landscape down there; go and look at that. It seems rather tame when you first look at it, but you can go back and see it again, and it does not get tamer. It gets more exciting. Or there is a nice head by Lehmbruck there. It will seem very queer at first. Now, why is this? Why can you go back again and again? The answer is in the area of your developing aesthetic taste, and the Col- lege is responsible to see you do develop, and so you must know some- thing about music and art.
Then finally we come to the areas where we are most deeply con- cerned, to the subjects of beliefs, your whole inward attitude toward reality, to the fields of philosophy and religion.
Now all these things have a kind of importance for you, because they show you what tremendous things the human mind, the human personality, has been able to achieve. If you could just somehow step back from these achievements of man, you would be filled with amazement every hour of your life that these things have been possi- ble to such two-legged little monkeys as we. At the College, we be- lieve you need to be exposed to all these areas of human knowledge, that you will want to major in one field, and that this should be your own and free choice. This idea of a major gives you a kind of home
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base in the midst of this great tremendous realm of learning; it gives you a home base from which you can work all through your life. One of our alumnae married a man who had majored in English as she did in college. And when I go to visit there, it never fails that the alumna will take me aside at some point quietly and say, "Now, is it not terrible that John has never read Clarissa Harlowe? What kind of education do they have up there at Dartmouth?" Then, later, he gets me aside and says, "Do you realize that at Connecticut they do not teach them about The Heart of Darkness of Conrad?" Here is community of interest, which they can share all their lives.
Actually, I think, the point of my whole talk is here: the kind of knowledge that we are urging upon you at College is the kind of knowledge that is for the rest of your life. Making a living, however, is a part of our concern for you too, and I feel very strongly that every girl who graduates from here ought to have a marketable skill. We do not put this down in the catalogue. Miss Ramsay, when she speaks to you, will emphasize it, I am sure. You ought to be able to type, shall we say. You maybe ought to be certified as a schoolteacher in some state. This is a way of making a contribution to society, as well as earning your living. Perhaps you ought to know something about accounting and statistics, or perhaps you ought to know about laboratory tech- niques. This is something which I think is essentially your respon- sibility, but it is our responsibility to keep reminding you. Find a way that will enable you to get your foot in the door of economic life when you graduate from here.
Now I have tried to sketch tonight the reasons for these degree requirements; if you see them, you enjoy the process, you enjoy the education through which you go much more.
A Mutual Kind of Process
All of this comes to you through the courses offered, which is an- other way of saying it comes to you through the faculty. And I want to say just one or two words there. A college faculty is an extremely interesting and original-minded sort of group. All of them decided, at some point in their youth, that the most important thing in the world was to be sure that the younger generation knew how to live, to live consciously, conscious of its past and conscious of the present. This is a tremendous decision to make and it is a difficult one to carry out. I do not want to get sentimental about it, but these people are dedicated people who feel strongly about this. Can you imagine what
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it is like to correct, year after year, the same mistakes on papers, on inches, feet, yards of papers, and every year the same kinds of mis- takes? Or think how you would feel if five or six papers, one after the other, say about a great play, "I do not like this book. It is too pessimistic." This is difficult to take when you perhaps yourself have thought of that book or play or poem as one of the great experiences of your life. So I am trying to show you that this is a mutual kind of process. There are difficult things for you in it and extremely diffi- cult things for us in it. Remember, you are not entirely a pleasure.
Now this is a small College, and the advantage of a small college, of course, is that you do have a chance to know the faculty rather more intimately, if you wish to. And I really emphasize that, If you wish to. If you are interested in something that they say, and you want to discuss it further with them, you will find that they will be glad to talk. Why not ask them over to dinner some time? Ask them to coffee. You will find they will be glad to come, but they are a little bit shy about saying to you, "May we come over to dinner?" So per- haps if you remember that, you will find that the finest relationships can be built up.
There is one further point though. College is a process of enlight- enment, and this process may be accomplished for you through a person, through a book, through a laboratory experience, in many ways. You will discover that, much as the faculty want to help you, and they do, they hope that you will discover above everything, above any relationship to them, there always exists what I will call the majesty of the subject-matter itself. We of the faculty, we care about you for the reasons I have indicated, but I think we can say without being sentimental that we care a lot more about truth, and we hope that you will want to learn and that you can learn that same kind of allegiance. We want you to know that, interesting as your reaction to a certain experiment or fact or book or person may be, it is not always important. You are here, I think, in a liberal arts col- lege to get out of your skin and not to freeze up in it, not to be suffocated by undeveloped tastes or brains or emotions. And in this whole process there will be days of profound discouragement for you and for the faculty.
But there are also days, and more days, of very great excitement, again for both of you, those days when you say, "Oh, I see." This is when the little boundaries that are you begin to give way, and you see or you hear something that you were blind to or deaf to before.
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We hope for this experience for you as you study with us for these years. We want you to know that this is an investment for you; it is something that pays off all through the rest of your life, and not only, I think, for you. But by becoming conscious of the past and the present and the possibilities of our world in all its forms, you live a civilized life. I suppose one could say that civilization is nothing but a mode of living in which there is a consciousness of the past and an awareness of the present and a general freedom from provincialisms. The barbarians, then, are the people who are still provincial. And it is important to realize that these barbarians are always encroaching upon us. So we have a joint responsibility in this business of educa- tion. You ask us to help you, and we ask you to learn as much, and as deeply, as profoundly as you can, so that together we can continue this process, this state of civilization which I honestly believe is al- ways under attack.
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Assembly April 27, 1961
ROSEMARY PARK, President
0 RIGINALLY this Assembly had been scheduled as the con- cluding one in a series of discussions with the Freshman class on the choice of a major. I should therefore like to say something about that to fulfill my original contract with the clock, and then I should like to report on some recent faculty action which will be of interest to all students in the choosing of their courses for next year.
Most of us in the Auditorium now have been in the position at some time or other of choosing a major field; and, if we could pool our advice and hand it over to the Freshman class, I imagine that we would all agree that your choice of major field depends upon what you think you are, or if I may put it more drastically it depends upon what you think you are good for or what you think you are likely to be good for. Unfortunately this is not a very helpful answer because it takes most human beings more or less all of their lifetimes to deter- mine who they are and what they may really be good for. So as in many occasions in life, you will have to make this decision on some- thing less than sufficient evidence. As a kind of working or operating answer I would say to the Freshmen, "Choose your major according to what you think you really like, and know that you may wish to make some changes as you go on."
In other words, your choice of major should be determined by a genuine interest. It should be a genuine interest; not just something that you find easy, something you think you may make money at, something you might get a job at, or something that perhaps your father or former schoolteachers have told you would be good for you to major in. Frankly I think they may not know you as well as they think or you think they do. Propinquity is not necessarily a guarantee of understanding. The job that you think you are going to train for may be gone in this age of automation before you are ready for it, and I personally think it takes a great deal more than just training to make money so that when I say to you "Choose as your major something that you really like," I believe I am giving you the most practical advice. We all know that we do better academic work when we study something we really like, and your prospective employer will be looking at your total college record. Sometime you should talk
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with Miss Ramsay, and let her give you some of the information she has in such tremendous amounts in her office about the girls who majored in what they liked and then got the most extraordinarily practical jobs. I always like to talk about the girl who majored in religion here and who was the only girl in one year that Macy's took to go on its training squad. This was because she had an excellent college record. There was the other girl who majored in German and later became the manager of Time and Life's Paris office. These things are related in a way that will become clear to you if you follow my advice. Anyway I think to major in what you like is an eminently practical suggestion.
But I do want to hedge this just a bit because of the times in which you are living and because of the country in which you are living. Very briefly what I mean is this. As I've had occasion to say to you before, you are the most healthy, the best educated youth of any in the world, and you are the citizens of the most powerful country in the world. I do not believe there is any reason to feel that you have deserved these advantages over the youth of other countries. There- fore it is fair to assume that society will expect to be paid back for the privilege which you enjoy of being a citizen of this country and even of attending this College. Now if you choose not to pay back, you will I am afraid be very likely to contribute to the economic or military disaster which, after all, we are on the brink of all the time in modern life, or you may be destroyed simply by having a life of utter frustra- tion because there is no meaning to it. So that I would urge you, after you have thought what you really like, to think what needs doing in the world today and there are many answers to that. Most of them you are familiar with.
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