Convocation 2008
Grant H. Cornwell

Global Citizenship in an Election Year

Welcome. Welcome Trustees, alumni, members of the community, and guests. Welcome faculty and staff of the College. Welcome students. Today we begin, officially and in earnest, a new year of liberal inquiry. It is an honor, a privilege, and a joy to launch our noble work together.

Let me extend a special welcome to those students, faculty, and administrative staff members for whom this is their first new beginning at The College of Wooster. Know that you are joining a community of learners that has been committed to the enterprise of liberal education for 139 years.In my own case, this is the beginning of my sophomore year; this means that I have been around just long enough to have opinions, but that I still have a lot to learn.

What I want to do in my remarks today is talk about our mission, our common purpose as a liberal arts college. I think it is important to remain mindful that our work here together is a social investment into the future, not just of our students, but of global civil 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.

Students quite often refer to "the Wooster Bubble," the phenomenon of feeling isolated in our small campus community, which can seem self-sufficient and disconnected from the larger world. In one sense, this is both true and intentional; liberal arts colleges were founded in small, rural towns, often in bucolic settings, with the idea that these four years were a time to be removed from the distractions of modern society for the purpose of being immersed in liberal learning.

In another sense, though, this gets it all wrong. As our mission statement says, we exist to be educate "students with the capacity and motivation to become educated leaders in a complex society." The world beyond our campus is complex indeed, and an essential element of our mission is to help you make sense of it, not just for the purpose of abstract understanding, but for the purpose of engaging that world - to help guide its direction, shape its future, and solve its problems.

Liberal Education for Global Citizenship

The title of my reflections this morning is “Global Citizenship in an Election Year.” Don’t worry, I am certainly not going to spend my time trying to tell you how to vote.  There is enough of that around. And it is a good thing, really; it is how democracy works, and I encourage you to listen to the arguments of others and to offer your own in return. That, too, is how democracy works. My project this morning, however, is something larger in scope. I would like to offer some thoughts on the immediate and urgent business of liberal learning, on the larger global context within which this American presidential election is taking place, and to offer some things to think about as you reason about how to vote.

Let me begin with the very concept of liberal education. There is not a person here who does not want, or value, a good job, a meaningful and prosperous livelihood. The good news is that an outstanding liberal education, while it is a substantial investment by any measure, is the best preparation for working one’s way to the most meaningful and prosperous livelihoods in today’s global economy. But our work here is not about job training, but rather about something much more fundamental and profound. This is something of an irony of liberal education; it is the most effective launch pad for access to leadership and a rewarding career and yet that is not the first purpose of our mission.

As you may know, I often find myself drawing on the work of the contemporary philosopher and legal scholar, Martha Nussbaum. The project of liberal education is, as she says, nothing less than 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 obligation. 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, through the study of the social and natural sciences, liberally educated persons develop empathy without borders.

This is one way to describe our mission. I want to spend some time probing what it means to do be engaged in this work in our particular moment in history.

Global Shifts: The End of the American Imperium

Fareed Zakaria writes in his most recent book, The Post-American World, that

There have been three tectonic power shifts over the last five hundred years, fundamental changes in the distribution of power that have reshaped international life – its politics, economics, and culture. The first was the rise of the Western world, a process that began in the fifteenth century and accelerated dramatically in the late eighteenth century. It produced modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It also produced the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the West. (Zakaria, 1-2)

This rise was financed by the juggernaut of European colonialism, which, fueled by avarice and arrogance, rolled over the globe claiming land and souls. Plantation slavery and the wealth produced within the colonialist economy played a huge role in the rise of Western global hegemony. It is important to be mindful of this as we seek to comprehend our moment; we are each, individually or collectively, the inheritors of relative privilege, power, and opportunity not because we deserve it, or because we have earned it through some superior effort or brilliance, but because we are accidentally located in a history that has favored some with fortune built on the misfortune of others.

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