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“Some Assembly Required”
Opening Convocation
The College of Wooster
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
As 50th anniversary celebrations go, this one was more
unusual than most. Within the past year, this particular 50th anniversary
celebration came and went with only modest fanfare, despite the
fact that actress Morgan Fairchild played a leading role in the
festivities and despite the fact that the celebrant had been honored
just five years before with a star on Hollywood Boulevard, in the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. The honoree of this anniversary celebration,
whose name has been literally a household phrase since the mid-1950s,
was none other than the Swanson TV dinner.
It was just after Thanksgiving in 1954 when Clark and Gilbert Swanson,
sons of the founder of C.A. Swanson and Sons food company of Omaha,
discovered that the company had committed a slight miscalculation,
an overly optimistic estimate of its holiday sales, and was left
with unsold turkeys, lots of unsold turkeys, 260 tons of unsold
turkeys. With no warehouse storage facility sufficiently large to
hold such quantities, the Swansons loaded the turkeys onto 10 refrigerated
railroad cars which, with 52,000 pounds in each, roamed the country
while the company sought ways to make some good use of them. Meanwhile,
Swanson salesman Gerry Thomas was paying a visit to the food kitchens
of Pan American Airways in Pittsburgh, where PanAm’s cooks
were experimenting with changing to hot food on their flights with
the help of an aluminum foil tray with a single compartment. In
a burst of insight and resourcefulness worthy of an independent
study thesis, Gerry Thomas considered the trends in American popular
culture at the time–in particular the growing domination by
television and the first coast-to-coast live color television broadcast
on 8" screens; he then designed a three-compartment foil tray
and convinced the Swanson brothers to make up, as an experiment,
5,000 frozen turkey dinners–complemented by corn bread dressing,
bright green peas, and sweet potatoes. His argument was this: that
these dinners would sell as convenience items to housewives entranced
by post-War, time-saving modern appliances, that they would sell
to families now accustomed to gathering around the new television
set to watch I Love Lucy. To this end, Thomas also designed
a clever package that included a TV screen complete with volume
knobs and channel knobs printed on the front.
And sell they did. At 98 cents each, Swanson TV dinners registered
10 million units sold in their first year, and the rest, as they
say, is history. Gerry Thomas received a 50% increase in pay–from
$200 per month to $300 per month, plus a $1,000 bonus and eventual
promotions to sales manager, then marketing manager, and finally
director of marketing and sales before retiring to Arizona in 1970
and being elected to the Frozen Food Hall of Fame. In 1955 Swanson
added fried chicken, Salisbury Steak, and meatloaf to its line.
Gerry Thomas’s three-compartment aluminum foil tray was placed
in the Smithsonian in 1986, the same year that Swanson replaced
aluminum foil by plastic–crystallized polyethylene to be precise–in
order to accommodate microwave use. And Swanson, which had dropped
the term "TV" from its dinners in 1962, was sold in 2001
to Pinnacle Foods Corporation, which promptly added the term ‘TV’ back–albeit
briefly–for the recent 50th anniversary celebration.
How deeply did Swanson TV dinners permeate American life? Throughout
the 1950s they were touted by public figures ranging from President
Eisenhower to Howdy Doody. What broader significance did they have
for American cultural and social history? One piece of evidence
is the hate mail received by Swanson from men who, in addition to
resenting the freedom that such time-saving devices gave their wives
complained in particular that their meals were no longer being made "from
scratch." Indeed, since the 1950’s families–with
the help of TV dinners and other frozen foods–have been traveling
along a meal spectrum that begins on one end with "preparers
from scratch," and moves past "assemblers of pre-prepared
items" along the way, and finally ends with "pure consumers."
Not surprisingly, this gradual growth in demand for instant, ready—to-consume
products is one that has increasingly shown its face in other parts
of American life, even in education, even in higher education. One
cannot help but sense a growing impatience just to have the product
and a disinclination towards the effort required to produce it.
One senses a greater interest in the quick and slick and superficial
end result and less in the quality of the raw materials that should
comprise it. But more on this concern in a few minutes.
For just another moment, let us consider the existence of a counter-trend
in public demand. The TV-dinner trend has in fact over the years
been met with a counter-trend–witness for example the periodic
(and current) popularity of cooking shows on television whose central
feature is, in fact, cooking "from scratch." The
late Julia Child comes to mind. This counter-trend has spread more
broadly too. At the same time that demand grew for other "ready-to-consume" products,
also increasingly popular from the 1950s on were such things known
as "kits," do-it-yourself items perhaps born out of a
reaction against ready-made items, born out of a desire for the
satisfaction of making some things oneself. For the most ambitious,
there were Heathkits for stereo systems, requiring the soldering
of hundreds of capacitors and resistors on printed circuit boards.
But while these sorts of kits proved attractive to some, they struck
fear into others. Consider the millions of conscientious American
parents who found themselves on Christmas eve wanting to put Susie’s
new bicycle or Jimmy’s new bicycle under the Christmas tree
but who broke into a cold sweat in reading on the carton, "Easy
to assemble; no tools required" or even "Easy to assemble;
tools included." More disquieting was the phrase, "Easy
to assemble; tools required." Where would one find the necessary
tools on Christmas eve? Most off-putting was the somewhat vaguer
challenge, "Some assembly required." And this was often
accompanied by an instruction manual thicker than the phonebook.
From personal experience, I know that it could be well past midnight
before anything resembling the desired final product was ready for
the Christmas tree.
As an aside, you should know that one branch of this industry,
the ready-to-assemble furniture business, was founded right
here in Ohio–Archbold, OH to be precise–by the Sauder
Woodworking Company, still the dominant player in the business,
earning $700 million annually.
Now, assembling bicycles or furniture is of course a far cry from
truly building these items "from scratch." Someone has
done a great deal of preparation: designed the product, made the
parts, and outlined the procedure, leaving just the assembly to
you, the eventual consumer. Some consumers want only the final product,
while others–often the more resourceful–relish the satisfaction
of completing the process, the knowledge of how the product is put
together and really works, and the resulting ability to repair
the product when necessary.
So, here we have two trends: one seeking a slick, ready-to-consume
final product requiring no effort, and now another born out of a
do-it-yourself impulse as long as the work is not too hard. Once
again, one cannot help but notice an analogy with recent trends
in education, in particular higher education. And one cannot help
but notice that the problems that can arise do so especially when
that education is valued only as vocational preparation, only as
a means to a first job. Vocational pressure encourages short-term
thinking and only immediate value, too often ignoring the fundamental
principles essential to the last job, at the peak of one’s
career.
There are more than 3800 institutions of higher education in the
United States. Both the number of institutions and the variety of
institutions in this country are unique among the community of nations.
These institutions have grown out of many impulses and many circumstances
over the last 368 years–that is, since Harvard’s founding
in 1636–and as a group they still pursue a wide range of purposes.
As a nation, we pride ourselves on this variety, but there are trends
that continually work against the success of this variety and indeed
of the entire higher education enterprise. We find the following
results stemming from the increasing vocational expectations and
the resulting pressures to guarantee entrance to the job desired;
- We find the belief that education is something that is delivered,
like a product, rather than personally constructed;
- We find the belief that an education is–or should be–a
finished product at graduation, able to be pronounced a success
or a failure at that point, rather than seeds that have been planted
and need to be carefully cultivated to blossom over a lifetime;
- We find, in an atmosphere of increasing mistrust and a desire
for accountability, a resulting reliance on uniform standards
and standardized tests for standardized outcomes, one size fits
all, whether the education concerns hotel management, atomic physics,
or continental philosophy; and
- We find the willingness to accept the superficial and the short-term,
rather than insisting on true fundamentals, on the need to start
with raw materials, on the value of learning "from scratch."
Few have expressed concern over the vocational issue more eloquently
than Vartan Gregorian, former president of Brown University and
of the New York Public Library, and now president of the Carnegie
Corporation of New York. In a challenging essay in the June issue
of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Gregorian says bluntly
that "a major failure of our higher-education system is that
it has largely come to serve as a job-readiness program…. College
has become a chaotic maze where students try to pick up something
useful as they search for the exit: the degree needed to obtain
decent employment." A contributing factor, he writes, is "the
fragmentation of knowledge itself." In deploring the educational
effects of "dividing knowledge into subdisciplines and subsubdisciplines–smaller
and smaller unconnected fragments of academic specialization"–Gregorian
calls for colleges to lead the way in "integrating and synthesizing
the exponential increases in information" available to us.
Yet, Gregorian, rather than being concerned that students are being
presented with a perfect, consumable final product requiring no
effort, actually expresses the counter-concern that students are
left too much on their own, that curricula have become like
superstores, with courses "stacked up like lumber," that
without guidance it is nearly impossible for students in this entirely "do-it-yourself" project
to assemble anything into a meaningful whole.
Even Isaac Newton recognized that total self-sufficiency is impossible.
He wrote: "If I have seen further than others, it is because
I have stood on the shoulders of giants." No one, even Isaac
Newton, can do it all alone.
It seems to me that a higher education worth its salt, and indeed
worthy of the name itself, is one that seeks a balance between unguided,
do-it-yourself anarchy and pre-fabricated perfection.
Moreover, it seems to me that a higher education worth its name
is one whose sole aim is to assist students in addressing the most
fundamental questions about self, and about nature, and about society,
one that continually seeks the most fundamental ways to understand
nature, and culture, and the institutions that we create. It is
reasonable to expect that fundamental questions require fundamental
answers. Moreover, the ability to find one’s own fundamental
answers arises only from having fundamental knowledge. Where is
one to obtain fundamental knowledge? Unfortunately, in fewer and
fewer institutions of higher learning. My own field, mathematics,
makes no bones about it. Most subfields of mathematics contain what
is called a "fundamental theorem:" the Fundamental Theorem
of Algebra, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Whether explicitly
or not, most if not all disciplines truly in the liberal arts tend
to identify, and organize themselves around, their most fundamental
ideas, expressed in a form appropriate to that field.
A fervent plea for a focus on fundamental things comes from James
Billington, Librarian of Congress. In a recent address at St. Norbert
College, in focusing on a concern over electronic media–specifically
the internet rather than television–he argues that the need
has never been greater for "knowledge navigators amidst the
sea of illiterate chatter, untreated sewage and undependable information
and "infotainment" that is increasingly flooding the internet
and confusing our minds." The best higher education, the best
educations in the liberal arts, I believe, are those that neither
leave students to sift through this sewage all alone with no guidance,
nor present them with a fully sifted final product to be accepted
without question.
The best educations in the liberal arts are those that ask students
to assume responsibility for their own education, to undertake this
exploration as a personal challenge, but not to do so abandoned
and all alone; rather to do so with guidance from those more experienced
who provide just the right amount of pre-preparation. The best such
educations are not TV dinners, quick and easy to consume but having
little substance or flavor; nor are they construction projects with
no instruction. Rather, the best educations are those, epitomized
by programs like Independent Study, that honestly caution and challenge
the student and the faculty member alike with the caveat, "Some
Assembly Required."
With the confidence that this college nurtures the spirit of productive
and collaborative assembly every day in a thousand ways, the 135th year
of instruction at The College of Wooster is hereby convened.
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