The College of Wooster
Convocation 2007

Grant H. Cornwell

Liberal Education and Social Responsibility
in This Global Era

continued …

The Privilege of Liberal Education

Given what I have said, it follows that young people everywhere deserve the opportunity that liberal education provides, the opportunity to prepare themselves for effective participation in a democratic society, the opportunity to cultivate and nurture their humanity, mentored by erudite and caring faculty.

Liberal education should not be a rare privilege, but it is. These four years are a time set aside for rigorous, relatively undistracted inquiry, for reflection, for intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical development, in short for liberal learning. To be able to spend these years engaged in this project is a privilege a fraction of a fraction of your global peers have access to.

Consider some compelling numbers:

• There are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world today, and though it is tough to get a handle on this, probably around a billion of these are roughly your age peers, 18-22 years old. In the U.S. alone there are approximately 20 million in this age group.

• Out of this billion people, out of this 20 million people, how many have access to the kind of education you are now engaged in? Around 350,000. Perhaps that sounds like a lot, but it means that you are part of a very privileged group of your global peers.
• Let’s play with those numbers a bit in a little illustration. If all of the people assembled here today – look around - represented all of your college-age peers just in the U.S., how many of us would be attending a selective liberal arts college? Around two dozen of us, at most.
• If we think globally, it is hard to illustrate. Why? Because if those assembled represented the world’s college-age population, not even ½ of one of us would be attending a selective liberal arts college. Maybe – maybe – three of us would be pursuing some form of higher education.

What is my point? Luke 12:48: "to whom much is given, much is required.” With privilege comes responsibility: the responsibility to pursue this opportunity with seriousness of purpose, to use this time well.

Students, I know it doesn’t feel this way to you right now. I know many of you certainly don’t feel privileged; you worry about the debt you have taken on to pursue a degree, you worry about the competitive environment of your chosen career path, and as some of the first-year students have been reporting in their discussions of The Riverkeepers, your sense of political agency and efficacy is fragile. Still, compared to your peers, both national and global, the prospects you have, and the capacity for your choices to have influence, means that you occupy a position in the global order that you need to understand.

The world is a place full of problems to be solved, and they create a context of urgency for our work here. Your education isn’t just about you; it is about your role in the world’s affairs and your capacity to create positive change. In one of my favorite lyrics of Stevie Wonder he says: “Change your words into truth and then change that truth into love and maybe our children’s grandchildren and their grandchildren will tell.”[2] Each of these transformations, changing one’s words into truth and changing truth into love, is enormously difficult, but this is one way of describing our work here: discerning what is true and putting that truth to work in the world motivated by compassion.

Wooster is one of the finest, resource-rich liberal arts colleges in the country, and you will leave here with the knowledge, skills, and credentials to have what we might call “social access.” You will go on to graduate schools, and professional schools, and to jobs that situate you to have significant influence on this and future generations, not just locally, but globally.

When you graduate you will be part of an educated elite; I do not use this term as praise, but as fact. As graduates of Wooster you will be members of a transnational, multicultural cosmopolitan class. In time, you will have access to leadership positions, to the ranks of those conceptualizing and influencing the direction of globalization. Some of you will be stockbrokers, business executives, and corporate lawyers. Others will be U.N. workers, Peace Corps volunteers; some will work for NGO’s, or environmental or social activist groups. If history is any guide, many of you will yourselves be college professors. Others still will be teachers, lobbyists, artists, and writers. Whatever you do, you will be voters, consumers, and, yes, stockholders.[3]

What this means is that we all – students, faculty, staff - have a profound social obligation, to this and future generations, to graduate alumni who can and will use their access and influence to work for social justice, environmental sustainability, and world peace. Through our work, we are all accountable to the near and long term future of humanity.

View Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4