The College of Wooster
Convocation 2007

Grant H. Cornwell

Liberal Education and Social Responsibility
in This Global Era

continued …

Responsibilities of Being a Student

In every culture, every age, being a student is a noble social position. But it comes with expectations. What are the responsibilities of being a student given what I have said thus far? I will mention three.

First, as students you have the responsibility to seek knowledge and cultivate understanding. These are not passive endeavors. A liberal education is not something we or anyone else can give you. It is not something you get just by showing up. Seeking knowledge and cultivating understanding are hard tasks and call for all of the focus, determination, and seriousness of purpose you can muster.

Let me comment on a couple critical dimensions of this work. You cannot overestimate the importance of your relationship with your faculty. I have deep and abiding respect for faculty and I encourage you to do the same. They have dedicated their lives – and their considerable intelligence – to the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of understanding, and through their dedication they have developed expertise. Their passion for their expertise – whether it is a body of literature, a period of history, a science, a theorem, or an art - doesn’t just mean they know a whole lot about it, it also means that they have deep insight into why it matters. Further, by pursuing their vocation at Wooster, they have signaled that they have a commitment to teaching. They are here to share their passion, knowledge, and insight with you, so that you can pick it up, carry it on, and contribute to it.

There is something a little misleading about the name of Wooster’s hallmark program, the I.S., or Independent Study. You see, on the one hand, an undertaking such as this calls for independent critical thinking, creativity, and motivation, but on the other hand it is an undertaking that cannot possibly be done by oneself. Epistemologically, there is nothing independent about study. It would be at least as accurate to call the program “Interdependent Study”, since all liberal inquiry is relational and dialogic.

Your I.S., as with all of your learning here, emerges from the network of relationships you have, not just with your faculty, though these are fundamental, but also with your peers, with the coaches and counselors and conductors and student life staff. But as a student you are also in a relationship with the authors of your books, your musical scores, your scripts, and the ideas, theories, postulates, facts and formulas you encounter in your studies. This is what is meant when we say that knowledge is socially constructed.

The social, relational nature of liberal inquiry is why diversity matters so much in our enterprise. The more homogeneous a community of learners, the less rich the ferment for inquiry. Part of the meaning of “liberal” in liberal education has to do with liberating oneself from the confines of one’s personal experience, and there is no better way to do this than by learning to listen and speak and collaborate with those who come to the project with different backgrounds, different identities, and different existential commitments.

We would not be able to go about our business of liberal inquiry if we had a campus of faculty and students who represent only one point of view. That is never the case, of course. But put in the positive, the knowledge we create together is made more complete and reliable with the more points of view we bring into the mix. It is through the very process of triangulating different points of view, understanding the differences and seeking the possibility of reconciliation, that new knowledge is created. This is why diversity is constitutive of excellence for a liberal arts college. And this is why we have an obligation as an institution concerned with excellence to strive to become a much more diverse and inclusive community of learners. The mandate is implicit in our mission.

It follows that there are correlate responsibilities of students. Since liberal inquiry is essentially social, and since social relations are possible only in and through communication, you have the responsibility to develop your skills in writing, in speaking, but perhaps most of all in listening. Listen for differences. Seek them out. Don’t surround yourself only with those who see the world as you do. Each person here knows things you don’t and has perspectives on things that will be new to you, that will challenge you. It is the multiplicity of points of view that makes truth a collaborative project.

We do not have good models of listening, of collaborative inquiry, in popular culture. Television talk shows, radio shows, even shows that represent themselves as news portray different points of view screaming past each other. The necessary virtue of real listening “is a disposition not to meet differences with a desire to win, to have one’s own point of view triumph over others, but instead to meet differences as a project” to be engaged.[4]

The second responsibility you have as students is to make meaning of your liberal learning. Meaning is the narrative that gives purpose to knowledge and understanding. If you haven’t, I encourage you to read Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. In this work of existential literature, the protagonist slowly comes to realize that purpose and meaning are not given; they are not inherent in reality. Unmediated reality is devoid of meaning; it is absurd. When the protagonist glimpses this realization, he is overcome with waves of nausea: vertigo caused by meaninglessness.

But the nausea is also a reaction to the burden of ultimate freedom. If meaning is not given, then if it is to exist, it is the responsibility of each person to create it out of nothing. Sartre talks about life as a project; it is the responsibility of each person to bring meaning to experience, to create a coherent narrative as an act of will.

This is how you should face the project of your liberal education. Without a sense of purpose, a project, you can move through the curriculum, checking off requirements and mistakenly think that you are fulfilling the mission of this college. There is a character like this in Sartre’s novel. He seeks erudition by reading his way through the library alphabetically. Perhaps my favorite book on liberal education is the edited volume of essays by bell hooks called, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Like Sartre, she sees the project of education as coming to terms with the full weight and responsibility of freedom, not to vote, or to speak, or to buy things, but the freedom to create meaning in a world that is otherwise meaningless.

The third responsibility of being a student is to put your learning to work in the world. This is how you justify the resources invested in your education. This is how you pay off on the privilege of these four years. You need not wait until you graduate. The College offers numerous opportunities for you to engage in service locally, nationally, and internationally. But in closing I want to share with you a couple of portals where you can put your learning to work right now.

I am encouraging you to become intellectual activists. I am encouraging you, by your own will, to reach beyond this campus community and engage in global, collaborative knowledge formation as a kind of activism to address the world’s most pressing issues.

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