“Horses and Carts, Chickens and Eggs”
Opening Convocation
The College of Wooster
Tuesday, August 26, 2003

From the title of this morning’s address, one might be led to believe that this is a talk about barnyard animals. Admittedly, such a belief is a natural conclusion, given the rural nature of Wooster and given the College’s acronym, which itself has a distinctly bovine connotation. However, if this is your belief, you are, at least for the most part, wrong. This is not to say that I might not wander from time to time into the barnyard, but I promise to get out of the barnyard often enough and in time to make a few points.

The year was 1561. England had emerged from its medieval doldrums sufficiently to be concerned about giving important lessons to its young, and there began to accumulate a diverse set of writings on family life, proper behavior, and principles of living. An accurate description of these writings is "Manners and Meals in Olden Time;" this in fact is part of the title chosen more than three centuries later for a compilation of these writings, a compilation edited by the 19^th century British philologist, Frederick J. Furnivall. Furnivall happens to be the man who in 1857 first proposed the idea of the Oxford English Dictionary, and he also was the founder of the Chaucer Society and the New Shakespeare Society. In 1868, undertaking an assignment for the Early English Text Society which he had also founded, Furnivall edited and published a volume called The Babees Book: Manners and meals in olden time. This compilation, in later editions also referred to as Early English Manners and Meals and Manners and Meals for the Young, contains treatises from the 15^th and 16^th centuries covering a broad range of topics, including home economics, etiquette, social life and customs, domestic education, and child rearing. Among the pearls of common sense wisdom dispensed in this collection is a familiar idiom, perhaps the first expression of this idiom in the written English language, an idiom still with us in full use today:

"This methinks is playnely to sett the cart before the horse."

The author of this specific written version was Sir Nicholas Bacon, reputed father of Sir Francis Bacon; and he used it to accuse Queen Elizabeth’s court of rearing the wards of the court with the wrong emphasis; not "mynde," then "bodie," then estate, in that order, but rather in the opposite order.

I suspect that all of us have, at one time or another, been accused of putting the cart before the horse. Lest the anglophiles among us become too culturally proprietary about this saying, it must be acknowledged that the idiom has its counterparts in other tongues. Indeed, there are interesting variations in other languages, but they carry a similar message. It is not surprising that close to each other in form are the French, Spanish, and Italian versions:

French: "Mettre la charrue devant les boeufs."

Spanish: "Echar el carro antes de los bueyes."

Italian: "Mettere il carro innanzi ai buoi."

All of these translate pretty directly as, "To put the cart before the oxen." In German, there are two interesting variations. The first one,

           "Die pferde hinter den Wagen spannen,"

translates as, "To harness the horses after the carriage," and a second,

           "Das pferd beim Schwanz aufzaumen,"

translates somewhat more loosely as, "To harness the horse at the rear."

The idiom is thus a widespread one, cutting across cultures, its little piece of wisdom recognized to have significance and value in many settings.

Now, just what does this well-known saying really mean, or, rather, what are its possible meanings? Its most literal meaning is of course the spatial one, namely that of placing two things in the wrong physical order for the purpose at hand. The horse is supposed to pull the cart, not push it. Another meaning, perhaps one more commonly intended, is the temporal one: to reverse the right or natural order of things in terms of timing. To book a wedding chapel before one has met one’s fiancé is to put the cart before the horse.

But it has always seemed to me that the most significant interpretation of this saying deals with something more abstract than just physical position and more compelling than just time, namely significance itself. To me, this idiom is really about priorities, about setting them in either the right order or the wrong order. And it is this interpretation that brings to mind perhaps the most contentious period in the history of this College.

The year was 1914. The University of Wooster faced a growing crisis of identity and a controversy over priorities. The institution was nearly 50 years old and had already dispensed in 1896 with its 28-year old medical school and in 1912 with its School of Art, begun in 1895. Yet still remaining, in addition to the regular Collegiate department, were the Graduate department, the Bible and Missionary Training School endowed by Board Chair Louis Severance, the Conservatory of Music, the Academy (or Preparatory department for high school age students) including a Commercial department offering elementary clerical and business instruction, and, most vexsome to the faculty, a quasi-independent Summer School of more than modest proportion.

In its first year, 1895, the Summer School had enrolled only 49 students compared to the normal collegiate enrollment of 244. Already by 1900, Summer School had grown to 350, exceeding the Collegiate enrollment of 227; and by 1914, to 1529, 3 _ times the Collegiate enrollment of 433. It is no wonder that the regular collegiate faculty had become concerned and had persuaded the Board of Trustees by 1911 to consider bringing the Summer School under greater control by the Board. President Holden was in agreement with the faculty and had joined with them to persuade the Board by October 1914 to change the corporate name of The University of Wooster to The College of Wooster, in order to emphasize the institution’s main purpose as a liberal arts college and to avoid the pretentiousness and the inflated ambitions of the term, "university."

But despite this move, the Board of Trustees chose to stoke the controversy at its next meeting, in February 1915, by stating their intention to add programs in domestic science and agriculture and, most alarmingly, to establish a Junior School of Education to offer a two-year degree course for those who wished to teach in rural elementary schools. And this new program was to be run hand-in-glove with the Summer School, quite outside the purview and control of the faculty. This was the final straw: President Holden immediately tendered his resignation, dismayed that the Board would act so directly in opposition to the opinions of the president and the majority of the faculty; he called it "educational suicide" to compete with the state’s normal schools and to risk crowding classes with under-prepared students and the resulting lowering of the value of Wooster’s diploma. He insisted on acceptance of his resignation and would not reconsider.

For its part, the faculty responded in June 1915 with its own statement speaking directly to the "horse and cart" of the matter. It was not enough that the name had been changed to "College;" it was the substance of the place that counted; and the faculty thus laid out for the Board’s consideration its outline of educational policy for the future:

It is hard to imagine a statement that, for its time, could be more in keeping with Wooster’s current aims. This is nearly a paraphrase of the College’s current mission and purpose, albeit without yet the overlay of independent study. This approach to education is the horse that has rightfully pulled the College cart for almost ninety years.

In quick succession, the Board appointed a committee to consider the faculty proposal, rescinded the establishment of the Junior School of Education (though partly also on legal grounds–there was some question as to whether the Board had the authority to establish such a separate program), and took up the challenge of incorporating the Summer School into the College. But the blow had been struck. Although substantial structural changes were made in the Summer School, its enrollment peaked at 1551 in 1916, fell to 1281 in 1917, and was eliminated altogether after 1918. Moreover, the Preparatory school along with its commercial department was terminated in June 1918, and gradually the Bible school and the Conservatory of Music were recognized for what in reality they had essentially been all along–departments in the College. By 1920, Wooster was both in name and substance what it truly was intended to be–a liberal arts college.

But this came at a cost, not only of Holden’s resignation, but also of friendships and some high ideals held by others. Jonas Notestein, one of the professors of longest standing and highest respect and one of Holden’s closest colleagues, reflected bitterly,

Thus, the legacy of years of tumult: the horse finally before the cart, in the minds of the majority at least, but with a true sense of loss in the minds of others.

Let us now take our horse and cart idiom a bit farther back in time. For the Latin version, we return to the barnyard:

"Currus bovem trahit praepostere,"

which takes a more judgmental stance on the matter: "Preposterous that a cart pulls the oxen." And

finally, leave it to the Greeks to eschew the barnyard entirely and put the notion most elegantly and efficiently in two words:

"HYSTERON PROTERON,"

which simply translates as, "Later earlier."

Yet, given that the daily life of so many people revolved around the barnyard well past the 15^th and 16^th centuries, it is not surprising that its animals figured frequently in many if not most popular sayings. Beyond horses and oxen, we might also turn our attention to two other well known barnyard citizens, chickens and eggs. They are the subject of old idioms still in frequent use despite the distance between our normal daily lives and the barnyard:

And then there is the age-old question, which of these came first? Or the slightly more sophisticated question, which of these caused the other? It is this latter, more elevated perspective that is often inherent in characterizing a situation as a "chicken-and-egg situation:" which of two items is truly the determining one? Which item is the original, actually leading to the other? This is simply another way of posing the question about priority. And it brings to mind a question that now faces every modern college.

The year, now, is 2003. The College of Wooster has just undergone its review by the North Central Association and has earned re-accreditation for another 10-year period, the longest term possible. Despite receiving praise for the strength of its programs, both academic and co-curricular, for its campus, and for its financial resources, Wooster has been found to be making slower progress in one area increasingly important to accreditors and to state and national governments: assessment of student academic achievement. Now, this sounds simple enough, particularly when it comes to evaluating individual students. All capable professors possess a whole battery of techniques with which they can accurately evaluate how well individual students are performing in a course, how far they have come from the start of a course to the end, how well they have met the goals of the course. But this is only one of four levels on which assessment is now required to be pursued. An institution is required to develop further techniques, as quantitative as possible, to assess how well the entire group of students has met the goals of the course, how well a whole group of majors has met the goals set by the department for that major, and finally how well an entire graduating class has met the general educational goals set for the overall curriculum. Certainly such purposes are laudable, and any institution worth its salt is continually asking how it’s doing; good institutions have been doing so for decades, even centuries.

But the problem now is that an entire industry is growing up around this requirement. In the name of accountability (certainly a laudable goal in itself), many leaders of this new industry are maintaining that few if any of the techniques already in use by colleges and universities are quantitative or objective enough, and hence few if any are valid. An increasingly heavy burden is being placed on institutions to implement an increasingly complex web of measures that are designed to prove that students, when they graduate, have learned something. Now, asking that question is not a bad idea, but, and this is my primary objection, the implication given by this whole growing mass of this process is that this is all that matters, that the entire end of higher education can be met by this instant snapshot at the end of four years.

Higher education is not building a house. One cannot do a final inspection with a punch-list and city inspectors in order to certify that the outcome is excellent, even satisfactory. The time frame just does not work that way. Higher education is, rather, planting seeds. To pretend that one can evaluate the success of such planting only shortly after the planting is absurd. Here in Ohio, one does not judge the success of a corn planting in the spring; one waits for the full life span of the plant to make that judgment, not knowing before hand what heat may come and what rain may fall, and how that plant may handle both.

But both the time span and scale of corn from seed to mature plant is too small for the point. Take instead for example the giant sequoia, the Wellingtonia sequoia gigantean. Its seed is no bigger than a flake of oatmeal, perhaps 3 mm. wide and almost without weight. Yet over 3000 years it can grow into the earth’s largest living thing, 270 feet tall, 30 feet in diameter at the base, containing 1875 cubic feet of material, _ million board feet of lumber. Who would dare to cast summary judgment on the success of a giant sequoia even ten years after planting?

Of course, we don’t have 3000 years to evaluate the success of our teaching. But the educational establishment must have the wisdom to resist pretending that immediate, simplistic, quantitative measures tell the tale. For any particular educational approach, one needs evaluative experience over the span of a full career and lifetime to make meaningful judgment. I would posit that institutions having, say, over 50 years of experience with, say, something like independent study, are in fact best equipped to recognize and assess successful educational outcomes.

With confidence that The College of Wooster will always have its horse way ahead of the cart, that we will be able to convince the accreditors not to put all their eggs in one basket, and that from our distinctive approach to higher education through independent study we will never chicken out, the 134^th year of instruction at The College of Wooster is hereby convened.