Convocation 2007: LIberal Education and Social Responsibility in This Global Era

Welcome to The College of Wooster as we launch the new academic year. I’m the new guy. Welcome Trustees, alumni, members of the community, and guests. Welcome faculty and staff of the College. Welcome students.

One of the wonderful things about college life is that we get to begin anew each year. For some of us here today, this is our first beginning. For the seniors, this is the fourth and final beginning of your undergraduate career (assuming all goes well). For some faculty and staff, as it is for me, this is the first Convocation at Wooster. For others, it is their 10^th, 20^th, 30^th, even their 43^rd new beginning. For The College of Wooster it is the 138^th new beginning.

What I want to do in my remarks today is talk about our mission. It is important at this time to reflect on our core purpose, our raison d’etre, our reason for being. What is it that calls us together, that warrants not just our attention, but our passionate commitment? What is it that justifies the significant investment of time and resources, not just from families, but also the resources donated to our mission from alumni, patrons, foundations, and the government?

Grant Cornwell at Convocation 2007 The answer better be good. And it is. The first sentence of our mission statement reads:

The College of Wooster is an independent residential liberal arts college offering a rigorous and comprehensive education to students with the capacity and motivation to become educated leaders in a complex society.

This is why we are gathered here. It is why The College of Wooster was founded in 1866 and why it exists today. Though we have a variety of roles in this undertaking, we are each here to engage in this noble work.

What does this mean, “liberal education”? Today, I will draw upon two scholars whose thoughts on this topic have inspired my own. For John Dewey the mission of liberal education is nothing less than the reproduction of democratic society. Drawing on a long lineage of thinkers in some sense going back to the Greeks, Dewey acutely grasps that for democracy to flourish a society requires a citizenry that is first, sophisticated enough to be able to engage in deliberation about public policy formation, second, skilled in the arts of communicating across differences, since that is the very nature of democratic deliberation, and third, sufficiently equal in power and access to social goods that deliberation can be fully representative. For Dewey, the goal of liberal education is the preparation of a citizenry for democracy.

The philosopher and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum, defines liberal education by reaching back to the Stoics. The project of liberal education is, as she says, the cultivation of humanity. In a book by that title and elsewhere, Nussbaum advocates an education designed to produce “citizens of the world,” people of cosmopolitan subjectivity, who see a world full of equally valuable human persons, all of whom have a claim on our sense of moral obligations.[1] Nussbaum believes that the task of liberal education is to enable us to imagine the realities of peoples distant in time and space, to understand both what humanity has in common but also the variety of ways in which it manifests itself. Through the reading of history, literature, and poetry, by the study of the social and natural sciences, liberally educated persons develop empathy without borders.

For these reasons Nussbaum believes our mission as a liberal arts college is to cultivate an ideal of cosmopolitanism and teach the critical reasoning skills that liberate one from ethnocentrism or from the kind of patriotism that says “My country, right or wrong.”

[1] Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard University Press, 1997)

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