Drop Dead Intelligent

This is a story of beauty, brains, and the marking of time. Despite the title, it is not really a story of death. We have had at Wooster entirely too much death in the past five years, five students to be precise. May we all continue to hold the families of Kate Risley, Phil Yontz, Tom Taraba, Mark Kiper, and Rashad Burnley in our thoughts as we begin this new year.

In his book entitled The Mind’s Adventure Wooster’s seventh president Howard Lowry posed to himself and the College community in 1950 two questions that were very natural ones at that moment in time: "Where are all of us halfway in the century? What things have brought us, mid-century, to where we are?"

President Lowry began his reply to his own questions by looking back 100 years to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London, noting the unbounded pride with which this 1850 Exhibition celebrated mankind’s glorious advances. It was, as Lowry put it, a triumph of international production, industry, and art. Standing out as both example and metaphor was the vast exhibition hall itself, the Crystal Palace, a masterpiece of four hundred tons of glass, four thousand tons of iron, and six hundred thousand cubic feet of lumber.

Lowry acknowledged that in 1950 it would indeed be possible for the world to outdo the 1850 exhibition, to dwarf its grandeur with an impressive "list of wonders" demonstrating the "genius and industry" of his modern day in the middle of the 20^th century. But he quickly cautioned that there was a darker side to this situation, and he revealed his cynicism in his observation that in 1950 it would have to be called the Plastic Palace Exhibition. The undeniable technical progress over the intervening century was overshadowed by a cheapening of values and by what he called a "deep crisis in human affairs." The confidence of 1950 was infected by post-war anxieties; the grandeur of that time was mocked by its own superficiality and by regrets about a half century of lost opportunities in international relations.

The time is approaching for us to ask such questions, questions about the fifty years which soon will have passed since 1950: "Where are all of us at century’s end? What things have brought us to where we are?"

In 1950, Lowry bemoaned the serious extent to which religion, which had brought forth most of this country’s higher education in the nineteenth century, had since then yielded its place to the secular intellectual spirit. In particular, he worried that colleges and universities had "concentrated on means, to the disregard of ends." In his book, he set out to review the "leading trends and contending influences" affecting education in his time. Perhaps we would benefit from considering such influences on our time, for here in 1999 there are those in the world of education who have already put their oar in the water regarding the years since 1950. Let us consider three such claims as they might pertain to Wooster and our mission as an institution.

Paul Neely, publisher of the Chattanooga Times and trustee of Williams College, was a contributor to the recent issue of the journal Daedalus dedicated to residential liberal arts colleges. In his Daedalus essay on threats to liberal arts colleges, Neely argues that the most dangerous is a full blown utilitarianism and vocationalism. His concern, somewhat analogous to Lowry’s, is that at the end of the century the intellectual spirit which has inspired higher education for a good part of the hundred years, has nearly yielded to a vocational spirit:

• a single-minded focus on landing the first job;
• a frantic concern over salary and status; and
• a desire to escape from, rather than be engaged in, thoughtful inquiry and the life of the mind.

Fifty years ago, the majority of vocational preparation was undertaken in high school; colleges and universities could attend primarily to the study of ideas in traditional fields. But the demand for increasingly sophisticated technical education has engulfed colleges and universities, submerging if not drowning the original spirit of higher education. Software crowds out Shakespeare, so to speak.

It is not a solution simply to move all that we value in the liberal arts to graduate education, leaving the undergraduate work to the vocationalists. A basic responsibility of liberal arts colleges is to preserve as a major province of the undergraduate experience an education based on the fundamental ways in which we understand our world, our institutions, and ourselves. Neither is it not a solution to yield to the temptation to change institutional mission; many of the adaptations that may look attractive in the short run would shatter the model that animates us over the long. Neely urges us to stick by our guns, choosing permanence over fads, substance over image, values over money, and meaning over market.

A second claim comes from Eva T. H. Brann, formerly dean and currently tutor at St. John’s College of Annapolis. To her, the chief casualty in this half of our century is nothing less than the search for truth, and she dwells on this loss in her Daedalus essay, "The Place of Liberal Education." Brann first lists five examples of what she calls "illiberal tenets of education," guidelines currently in vogue as "educationist wisdom" but in her opinion deleterious no matter how humanely intended. She proceeds to identify as the most powerful, pervasive, and problematic of these five tenets the exclusion of truth from learning, or more accurately the exclusion of the search for truth.

Despite the current emphasis on validity, factuality, relevance, influence, and interpretability, and especially on the construction of persuasive arguments, she agonizes that the natural questions, "Is this true? Do I believe this?" are no longer admitted in many academic quarters. She argues that the result has been devastating, diluting students’ passion for deep and difficult reading and turning their studies into only a high-class game. Brann, and I suppose many others, want these questions put back at the center of the enterprise.

Now, from his contemplation on a Grecian Urn, Keats tells us that "Beauty is Truth, and Truth, Beauty." And thus it is natural that, given scholarly concern over the loss of the search for truth, there is likewise concern over the status of aesthetics. Indeed, just as truth has gotten a bad name in some intellectual circles, so has beauty. Just as the notion of truth has been given short shrift, so too has the concept of beauty.

In a recent essay, sociologist Craig Lambert chronicles how several decades ago the notion of beauty, as explored in literature, art, and music, also fell into disfavor in the scholarly community and went into exile, the victim of cultural studies, deconstruction, and semiotics. His Harvard colleagues, literary scholar Eileen Scarry and psychologist Nancy Etcoff concur. Scarry explains that while the humanities and arts were not emptied of beauty, talking about beauty was declared off limits. Only recently, both Lambert and Scarry emphasize, has there been a revival of discourse on beauty, through new books and a growing number of conferences.

The notion of human physical beauty is also receiving a revival of focus and conversation. However, Lambert admits that questions of physical beauty are even more emotionally complex and contentious. In response to writer Naomi Wolf’s assertion that "human beauty does not exist," psychologist Etcoff asserts that cross-cultural studies prove the existence of universal standards of human attractiveness. To ignore them, to deny their importance, or to dismiss them as only cultural constructs, she argues, is succumbing to "the real beauty myth." However, Lambert, Scarry, and Etcoff do all acknowledge, however, that judgments about beauty can be dangerously ill-used, and this thought leads us to the movie theater. For while beauty may be making a comeback in literary studies, it has been thoroughly drubbed in a 1999 film.

Midwestern life and its alleged hypocrisy are a popular brunt of American satire. This summer’s theatres offer, in a most unusual film "Drop Dead Gorgeous," a savage satire—a truly dark comedy—of a Midwestern tradition: the teen-age beauty contest. Reviews of the film are mixed: Roger Ebert says that what may have been a funny screenplay did not translate to the screen, while James Brewer (World Socialist Web Site) says that it is more successful than the producers intended it to be. Sam Adams (Philadelphia City Paper) calls it a stupid, ugly, awful movie, while Mark Welch (BigScreen Cinema Guide) calls it the funniest movie of the year. Others have called it outrageous, wicked, and vicious. Be thankful that it is not necessary for me to describe all the reasons for these judgments. Suffice it to say that every aspect of The American Teen Princess Pageant is skewered by "Drop Dead Gorgeous," a film which also manages to offend whole other segments of the population.

But, of course, the film is as much about winning, and the hypocrisy of winning by any means necessary, as about beauty. It would be of less interest were it not for the vast incongruity between the theme of beauty, ideally a virtue, and the deplorable behavior of those who compete for it and those who judge it. The ambivalence one naturally feels about admiring physical beauty—in that it gives value to static, superficial characteristics as well as to random genetic outcomes—is deepened into outright loathing [and detestation] by the images in this film.

And this would be of less interest to us if in recent years the College itself had not unwittingly been involved in what amount to a whole slew of annual beauty contests. For that is what, in too many ways, is the nature of the college rating game. The U.S. News & World Report rating of colleges is a beauty pageant. Our measurements are taken, spun out into a statistical labyrinth, and arranged in order to determine the winners. "Drop Dead Gorgeous" becomes "Drop Dead Selective" and "Drop Dead Nationally Recognized."

We know better. We know that our measurements do not tell the whole story of the body inside. We know that such things as Independent Study, inherently unmeasurable, may not win beauty contests but will win us a place in competitions that count. We know that static measures, being only a snapshot, can never tell the whole story of a lifetime. The goals we set are goals with a time span vastly different from that of a snapshot.

In the study of political science, for example, the goal is not to dabble in the field just long enough to impress a Capitol Hill interviewer with one’s acquaintance with politics of the day. The purpose is to plant and cultivate seeds which will grow into a passion for law, civic responsibility, and the public life, a passion which compels one to set schedules for reading and study throughout one’s adulthood, for delving more deeply into Rousseau one year, Hamilton the next, and perhaps Machiavelli the third, and so on, so that at the age of 55 the accumulating knowledge, understanding, even wisdom have prepared one to emerge from one’s cohort as the leader most capable of addressing a community challenge from which others back away.

In studying science, the goal is not to develop a fast and shallow facility with technical jargon sufficient to conduct polite banter at receptions. The purpose is to ignite a curiosity about how the natural world works, a curiosity which leads one, even if not a scientist, to become a regular reader at least of Scientific American, of Nature, and of the scientific pieces in the New York Times so that when a government agency finds itself in dire need of, say, an attorney who is truly knowledgeable about the genetic code, free radicals, and the relationship of mutations to environmental hazards, one stands out at age 55 as the only professional competent to address the entire breadth of an issue.

In the study of art or music or drama, the goal is not to dabble at a level just sufficient to check off a general education requirement, as one prepares to enter business. The purpose is to fire one’s artistic imagination and encourage a lifetime of critical visits to galleries, concert halls, and theaters so that an otherwise pallid life will be lit with knowledge of and appreciation for the full range of human artistic creativity.

In short, it is not enough in one’s undergraduate education simply to rack up measurements. It is essential to develop the firm intention to spend a lifetime pursuing answers to the questions of what and when and why and in what way, and for what purpose.

The faculty at this College have these plans for you, and you may not yet recognize it. The sooner you grasp this fact, the better. Yet, despite the great value of Independent Study, it too runs the risk of eventually being the static piece of data. And we run the risk of acting like beauty pageant directors, even with Independent Study, if we let it go at that and do not attend to the lifelong intellectual development that we believe to be integral to our purpose. Simply giving grades and awarding graduation honors is not all that much more long-lasting than evaluating contestants and crowning the queen.

Should we not ask each student, as part of the Independent Study experience, to make an initial outline of one’s independent plan of study, of general reading, and of specialized reading, for years into the future? Surely, an I.S. that is five pages shorter will not suffer irretrievable damage, and those five pages of planning could mean the difference between forty years of intellectual growth and forty years of pabulum.

In this way, we would be giving fuller weight to the notion of the life-long pursuit of truth, as trite as that may sound to some. Not truth simply as pithy aphorism or religious dogma or simple scientific fact; but truth as a journey, an ever-deepening understanding of our world and all that is in it.

For students, this reduces to an accountability to yourself and a responsibility to others. If you take lifetime responsibility for developing your ideas, you will also learn to take lifetime responsibility for your actions. Each one of us, at one time or other, has failed in this challenge. As students at this college, you have the opportunity to practice taking this responsibility in numerous arenas. In fact, you have the opportunity to do this until you are good enough at it to lead others to do the same. One might see this as accepting the call to independence. Indeed that is what education at this institution is all about.

When all is said and done, Wooster resonates best with Eva Brann’s preferred message to parents of prospective students:

"We offer an education that is, to be sure, extended, expensive, nonutilitarian, uncertain (and certainly unquantifiable) in outcome, and possibly destabilizing. But here we love learning and are ready to help your children love it, and we are, moreover, prepared to tell you in detail why we do what we do, what the good of it is, and why we think that these four years are the proper completion to the upbringing you gave your children and the best insurance for a good life."

With enthusiasm for the sort of education that we embrace and with confidence that it is the "drop dead intelligent" thing to do, the 130^th year of instruction at The College of Wooster is hereby convened.