Worn Paths
by R. Stanton Hales
President, The College of Wooster
Opening Convocation
Tuesday, August 28, 2001

Speech in PDF format

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this month defines convocation as follows: "the first of many opportunities for college freshmen to fidget and yawn through a lineup of speeches." The article continues with a sampling of senior recollections of their first convocations. One such remark was, "I remember nothing whatsoever about the speeches that were made." And another, "I remember that the president spoke and that's about all." With these sobering prospects fully in mind, I am tempted to sit down, but I shall press on.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a cowboy. In our home, during the years to which I refer as "BT," that is, "before television," the high points of every week on the radio were The Lone Ranger and Cisco Kid. These half-hour shows played back-to-back on Tuesday evenings, and they gave to my generation the well-known lines, "Hi-Ho Silver, Away", and "Oh Cisco, oh Pancho!" Neither wild horses nor domestic ones like Silver or Roy Rogers's Trigger could have pulled me away from our radio on Tuesday evenings.

Although ours was the last family on the block to do so, we did finally purchase a television, and the possibilities for my cowboy consumption broadened. Saturday mornings now came into play, offering three more unbroken hours of cowboy stories in glorious black-and-white. With few exceptions, the names of the western heroes my friends and I idolized strike no familiar chord with the current generation. Beyond Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy were many others so familiar then but virtually forgotten now: Crash Corrigan, Ken Maynard, Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, and Tim McCoy, among many. Perhaps only your grandfathers, plus a few of your fathers and a handful of my faculty colleagues, know these names. Those who do are kindred spirits.

Before long I had the full outfit: spurs, hat, chaps, and the slickest pair of Roy Rogers cap pistols that I could talk my parents into buying. Perhaps I should have kept them; they sell now for hundreds on e-bay. Then, they were my living room protection, my best partners, and if you close your eyes and concentrate you can picture my pals and me sitting on the living room floor in front of the television, in full costume, pistols holstered but ready to come out at the slightest hint of danger or need for self-defense. I liked to think of myself as the fastest draw on the street.

Finally, one day, my curiosity could stand it no longer. Seeing my cowboy heroes on television was exciting, but it was not enough. I got up my courage, walked into the kitchen, and said to my father, who was trying to read the paper over breakfast, "Daddy, please, please, can't we go out west; can't we go out west to see the cowboys?"

Geography was not my strong suit at the age of six. But I now understand that the pause from my father and the look of bemusement on his face arose from the fact that we lived in Los Angeles. About the only place to go further west was Santa Monica, and the chances of seeing real cowboys in Santa Monica were not much better, in fact, very slim, even then. Ever since that Saturday morning, I have tried to imagine what my father was thinking to himself:

"Will he believe me if I tell him that we are already out west?"

Or,

"How can I tell him that we'll have to go east to see cowboys?"

In his own considerate way, my father was finally able to tell me both these things. He let me down slowly and easily, calming my passion for this journey out west, and it was then that I learned my first lessons about place and context, about anachronism and the passage of time, and about the romance and heartbreak of a journey. To this day, I can send my body into a feverish anticipation simply by imagining the journey I imagined then, the trip I envisioned out to a wild frontier, along a worn and dusty path across the plains and desert, all in my mind.

These Saturday morning westerns were the first stories to capture my full imagination, the first real stories I remember. They were mostly simple morality plays, featuring strange and fascinating characters and dealing with good, evil, and the strengths and foibles of human nature. It might be said that, for my friends and me, they were visual literature and our first encounter with stories about adults. Their power, their emotional impact on us cannot be overestimated.

Many years later, as I became more familiar with the broader range of literature and came under the spell particularly of Katherine Anne Porter and James Thurber, I came to understand that, for me, the closest literary equivalent to the Saturday western was the short story. These movies were indeed short stories, visual short stories, and each episode's simple theme offered an escape from the everyday reality of our suburban life to another world, with more drama, adventure, and humor than we had found in our own. The variations on these simple western themes impressed us as being endless, if a bit formulaic. Author Joyce Carol Oates once offered her own more professional version of this amateur impression: "Storytellers may be finite in number, but stories appear to be inexhaustible." Her observation seemed certainly to be on the mark this summer, as book review sections in newspapers remarked on the flood of short story collections lining editors' shelves.

Alas, storytellers are finite in number because they are exhaustible, because they are mortal. That number dropped by one, a very big one, this summer when America lost one of its best storytellers and certainly its most prominent short fiction writer, Eudora Welty, at age 92. Eudora Welty is a significant reason for what some claim as the pre-eminence of American writers in the genre of the short story. The death in July of this Pulitzer Prize-winning author from Mississippi removed from our midst a writer who, in the words of Los Angeles Times critic Susan Salter Reynolds, held all the important cards in her "winning hand": "attention, desire, and memory;" or, by other names, "detail, passion, and story;" or "voice, arc, and metaphor." Reynolds saluted Eudora Welty as "a dreamer and an observer who saw the truth in small things."

Although it was one of Welty's five novels, The Optimist's Daughter, which won the Pulitzer for Fiction, it is the wealth of her short stories for which she became best known and most often recognized by awards and prizes. None other than Katherine Anne Porter herself praised these stories as offering "an extraordinary range of mood, pace, tone, and variety of material."

From the wealth of Welty's short stories, one story stands out as most frequently appearing in anthologies, most illustrative of her talent, and, happily, most appropriate for this morning's message. Writing 33 years after this story first appeared in 1941, Welty summarized the story in these words: "It tells of a day's journey an old woman makes on foot from deep in the country into town and into a doctor's office on behalf of her grandson; he is at home, periodically ill, and periodically she comes for his medicine; they give it to her as usual, she receives it, and starts the journey back." This delicate story about an old black woman's single-minded determination to complete, again and again, a single-track errand has made Phoenix Jackson one of the most recognizable characters in American literature, as recognizable as Thurber's Walter Mitty and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman.

Welty called this story, "A Worn Path." And on this path that Phoenix Jackson traveled, Welty admits inventing for her "some passing adventures -- some dreams and harassments and a small triumph or two, some jolts to her pride, some flights of fancy to console her, one or two encounters to scare her, a moment that gave her cause to feel ashamed, a moment to dance and preen -- for it had to be a journey, and all these things belonged to that, part of life's uncertainty."

Phoenix Jackson's errand may be simple, single-minded and single-track, with the grandson as the simple incentive, but the real story is the journey, carried out through what Welty calls "the habit of love." Because of her devotion, Phoenix will repeat the journey as long as she is able. Her persistence is all. To Welty, it is the strength of this emotion that gives dramatic force to the story. To her, and indeed to us, "The worn path is the thing that matters." Far from being a pejorative reference, the wornness of the path is the entire virtue, the only certain thing, the truth of the story.

Welty has said that "most good stories are about the interior of our lives." If so, there is good reason for each one of us individually to be a storyteller. As we make our own individual journeys, we create our own stories to tell, traveling our paths and carrying out our errands. And as she observed about writers, we work all our life to find our way, confronting the harassments and the shameful moments along the way but being guided by our dreams and our imagination. And as humans each of us travels worn paths along which we are guided by our own habits of love.

Yet, individuals are not alone in this. Institutions take journeys, too. Institutions too must choose the paths on which they will walk, the paths which they will make worn. And institutions have stories to tell.

Wooster's most fabled story is the rebuilding of the College following the Great Fire of December 11, 1901, the fire that destroyed Old Main, home of everything but the College's library. By 1902, after enormous efforts, there were four new buildings under construction. This frenzy of simultaneous building projects was a new path then, but we are adding some wear to the path this year, one hundred years after the fire. But rather than being in response to a real fire, the construction flurry of 2001-02 is the result of a fire of enthusiasm over the opportunities given to Wooster to advance its prospects, as it was able to do a century ago despite the emergency.

For one hundred and thirty five years, this College has walked and has worn its own path. With the single-minded determination of a Phoenix Jackson, it has set out on its annual journey each fall, climbed its hills, descended into its valleys. It has experienced its own passing adventures: triumphs, preening, and flights of fancy, as well as scary encounters and jolts to pride. Throughout, the dramatic force behind Wooster's story and behind its journey has been the emotion expressed no better than in these words by our seventh president Howard Lowry:

As Wooster looks ahead over the next few years to its ten year reaccredidation, a renewal of its five-year plan, and a capital campaign, it is fair to ask: what paths will we walk? what paths will we make worn?

• The world out there is not always friendly to the notion of studying the liberal arts, the path so well worn by us and for us that we take it for granted. Some would try to knock us off our path as a liberal arts college, just as Phoenix Jackson was temporarily tumbled from hers by an encounter with an unfriendly dog. The true purpose of higher education is often under challenge, and perhaps never more so than today when a combination of pressures is being exerted from several angles in society and the economy. The national secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, Douglas Foard, acknowledged that threat in a recent speech, saying "American high schools and community colleges, as well as four-year institutions, are under pressure to train a workforce rather than to educate a community." Concerned that because of technology needs education is "channeling more and more of our brightest students into the narrow field of technology," Phi Beta Kappa is partnering with the National Honor Society to counter the increasing numbers of students electing to enter career-training programs rather than pursuing liberal arts degrees. With the same concern that higher education has veered too far in the direction of technical skills and career preparation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching are likewise collaborating on a $7.5 million project to strengthen liberal education. At long last we are less alone on our path.

• We will also continue down the worn but often lonely path of preparing the nation's teachers. At a time when state requirements and national bureaucracies make it nearly impossible for small Education Departments like Wooster's to survive, much less thrive, we must remain devoted to teacher education. In this stand we are joined by Vartan Gregorian, former president of Brown University and now president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In a brilliant piece in this month's Chronicle of Higher Education, he argues that, given the crisis in public school teaching, teacher education must become the central preoccupation of colleges. The critical shortage of teachers for the youth of America justifies this urgency as well as the priority we at Wooster place on excellent teaching and on partnerships with local schools. Nothing is more important than this.

• Finally, at the most extreme, there are those who, in the interest of making money from their privately-held, profit-centered internet companies, claim that the computer is making residential institutions, the classroom, and the professor obsolete. "Let's face it," one such developer asserts, "a professor of history is probably not going to have a job in 20 years." We automatically bristle at such claims, but a simple knee-jerk reaction is insufficient. The challenge is real, and we must redouble our efforts to justify our deeply-held belief that the best education takes place in a residential community like this one, a community with both the scheduled, intense, face-to-face interaction of the class and the immense range of accidental, serendipitous learning at any hour of the day or night anywhere on campus.

It is only this sort of education that can both cultivate and satisfy the natural fire of curiosity, the sort of curiosity that so long ago drove my desire for a journey out west. Lucy Lillian Notestein, author of the College's history, Wooster of the Middle West, wrote to President Drushal 31 years ago:

We are all storytellers, and we are all travelers on our own odyssey. Our stories recount our journeys, but our stories also constitute those interior journeys that leave us forever changed. Each journey proceeds along its own path; some paths are worn, while some are untouched, beckoning the pioneer. With the expectation that individually we will find many paths to walk, but with the confidence that as a College Wooster will continue with the devotion and single-mindedness of Phoenix Jackson to walk its worn paths proudly, the 132nd year of instruction at The College of Wooster is hereby convened.