If this society, this culture, is to produce the visionaries, the leaders, the 'personages' whose demise Peter Drucker himself has lamented, it will depend, I argue, precisely on the existence of those institutions that he predicts will vanish.

During a meeting of college presidents this summer, one of our discussions was led by the eminent Adam Yarmolinski, presently Regents Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. The conversation somehow turned to course syllabi, faculty responsibility, and eventually to course evaluation forms. With great innocence one of my colleagues around the table made reference to a canonical questions on such forms, that staple, that all-purpose question, "Did this course meet your expectations?"

"That is precisely the wrong question!" Yarmolinsky bellowed. (For the moment, I was quietly glad that Wooster's forms don't include the question.) He went on to explain: it may not so much be the wrong question, but that the conventional use of the question is always accompanied by an expectation for precisely the wrong answer. "What intellectual value is there in a course," he argued, "that blandly goes about meeting your expectations?" The best courses, he said, are those that do precisely the opposite -- disregard your expectations and carry you off to the unexpected. Where is the stimulation, the intellectual growth in getting just what you expected? Why even take a course in which everything gotten is expected? In question after question, Yarmolinksy sliced away at the conventional wisdom of course evaluations. "The best courses," he concluded, "are often those that explode your expectations."

The picture, the image of exploded expectations has stayed with me since. In quiet moments, I play word games with some of the numerous other assonant or alliterative equivalents: aborted assumptions, burst bubbles, punctured preconceptions.

The intellectual confession made by a member of the class of 1998 in last spring's Voice [Wooster's student newspaper] is delightful evidence of a series of exploded expectations. Looking back on what he had learned at Wooster, he summarized his intellectual growth this way: "I found that psychology was really biology, that biology was really chemistry, that chemistry was really physics, and that physics was really mathematics."

There he stopped. As a mathematician, I am tempted to claim that, of course, he had to stop there. But many of you would go on to say, "and mathematics is really . . . ." No matter; what counts is that this student's view of the sciences, perhaps knowledge in general, was forever changed.

Encouraged by Yarmolinsky's passionate argument, the expectation I wish to explode today belongs to Peter Drucker, who has established himself, nearly worldwide, as the foremost authority on management and on business success. He has been called "the most perceptive observer of the American Scene since . . . de Toqueville."

In early 1997, Drucker began to paint an expectation which, in the words of the president of the American Council on Education, sent a shock wave through the higher education community. In an interview in the March 10, 1997, Forbes magazine, Drucker predicted, "Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. The current set-up is doomed. The college won't survive as a residential institution." Over the past year, he has returned repeatedly to this theme: In a June 1997 Forbes article on the emergence of the cyberuniversity, he is again quoted as saying "Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast." And most recently, in a new Forbes article on "The Next Information Revolution," he comes closer to home with the assertion that, "Long distance learning...may well make obsolete within 25 years that uniquely American institution, the freestanding undergraduate college."

So that is the future of higher education: distance learning, the new technological combination of television and computers making a virtual classroom out of dozens of different individual locations scattered widely.

Now distance learning may be ideally suited as a tool for what John Henry Cardinal Newman sees as one sort of education - instruction in the mechanical as opposed to cultivation of the philosophical. It overcomes space, even time, to bring instruction, particularly instruction in particular skills, to those who require those skills and whose own lives do not allow any other means to gain them. Even for liberal arts colleges, distance learning may eventually allow certain instruction, say in less widely-spoke languages like Arabic, that would not be available otherwise.

But Newman, in his still powerful 1853 piece, The Scope and Nature of University Education, correctly identifies the true value of the university precisely as a way of life, a real place, a place where 24 hours a day, seven days a week one is immersed in an atmosphere of philosophical habit, encountering daily the great outlines of knowledge, absorbing by a sort of "osmosis" an enlarged range of ways of knowing and thinking, even if one does not formally study them all.

And Alfred North Whitehead makes the telling argument in Universities and their Function that if imparting information is all that constitutes education, no university has been justified since the invention and popularization of printing in the 15th century. Colleges and universities, as whole places, as learning communities, as dedicated battlegrounds of ideas, are the most effective, if not the only, instrument with which, through constant confrontation of philosophy and oratory, the real leaders of a society can be fully formed and tested.

And this leads to the particular explosion I wish to ignite, one that Drucker sets himself up for, within his own arguments. In an article last January in Society, Drucker laments two 50-year reversals in education. Fifty years ago, he argues, colleges and universities were not power centers but only marginal institutions, because the B.A. was not a necessity. Yet the individual professors in these institutions were opinion leaders, visible, prominent, under constant demand. All coming from the great liberal arts tradition, they mattered because their disciplines mattered.

Now, he argues, there is a double reversal. With the B.A. a virtual necessity for upward mobility, the colleges and universities have become power centers, yet there remain few if any true, recognized public "personages" in their faculties, the faculty having abandoned societal leadership for obscure scholarship.

Regardless of how we individually view this leadership-scholarship debate, I would argue that the "personages" of our society, the leaders that every society needs in every field, will of necessity come from the focused, intense experience of a broad education at a place, a campus, rather than from the haphazard experience of narrow instruction a few hours a week, sandwiched in between a work shift and other responsibilities.

In their new book, Passionate Minds: The Inner World of Scientists, Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards reveal the source of inspiration and passion that drove a key collection of senior scientists to stunning discoveries. The role of passion and inspiration is dominant in science. How is this passion best transmitted to students: a few hours a week over the screen and speakerphone, or side by side, day after day, together in a laboratory?

Distance learning is claimed as being magically able to bring the learning to the student. How does one bring the true learning of teamwork - such as in an athletic team or a marching band - to individuals scattered far and wide. How does one bring the essential experience of living and learning together in a consciously diverse community to people who do not live together?

There is no more important outcome of a real education that the steady broadening from being merely technically competent practitioner of some skill to becoming a real citizen. Education taken a bit at a time, by one's self, without the opportunity to carry on immediately after class an important debate over lunch or dinner hardly gives one the ability to do what Todd Gitlin calls out for in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: to "anchor a high-velocity, reckless, and lightweight culture." In what setting is one enabled to "take one's time...and learn about what endures." A place of quiet beauty, filled with intellectual activity, or in one's kitchen with the TV?

If this society, this culture, is to produce the visionaries, the leaders, the "personages" whose demise Drucker himself has lamented, it will depend, I argue, precisely on the existence of those institutions that he predicts will vanish.

What expectations do you have for your life, and for this year? Which expectations need to be nourished and which need to be exploded? The magic of a human, intellectual community like this one is the richness and the excitement that accompanies the giving of nourishment and the igniting of explosions, figuratively speaking of course!

With hope that each of us will have the generosity to nourish the expectations that require it, the courage to explode the expectations that deserve it, and, of course, the wisdom to know the difference, the 129th year of instruction at The College of Wooster is hereby convened.

References

Gitlin, Todd. "?????." The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Newman, John Henry. Discourses on the Scope and Nature of University Education, Addressed to the Catholics of Dublin. Dublin, James Duffy, 1852.

Whitehead, "Universities and Their Function." The Aims of Education & Other Essays. New York, The Macmillan company, 1929

Wolpert, Lewis, and Alison Richards. Passionate Minds : the Inner World of Scientists. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1997.