1 20 8 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/39695cf7f6fba251f800e21839824ea6.pdf be1ef43e51ba5070c5614e2b67f3507a PDF Text Text January 2017 Convocation Speech by President Mark Roosevelt On behalf of the faculty, your fellow students, college staff and alumni – all of us – welcome to St. John’s. You have joined a community of learners who wrestle with bold and radical ideas in ways that are increasingly unusual in the American academy. We do our work with a searching temperament and with honesty tempered by civility. These values – honesty, a commitment to rigorous searching, civility, respect for and openness to the ideas of others – are largely lost in American higher education. But they still have a home here at St. John’s. And now, you have a home here as well. Looking at you this evening, I am confident that you know that you have chosen to make your home in a very unusual community. But I am not sure you yet know how unusual it truly is. (Perhaps it will give you a hint that I have – knowingIy – used the word unusual three times already and may well use it more, just for fun). How about this? St John’s is as different from other schools that describe themselves as small liberal arts colleges – schools such as Middlebury, Carleton, or Oberlin – as those schools are from Ohio State. There are many reasons that this is so. The most important are both basic and substantial. For example, after you chose this college, pretty much from here on out you do not get to choose what you study. Nor do your classmates. You are studying what other people – after diligent thought and in many cases a lifetime’s exploration – have determined will offer you the best platform on which to build your life. Not just your academic or intellectual life, your whole life. This curriculum is not designed to constitute the totality of your learning but, again, to provide the platform from which you will dive into a lifetime of learning. �To say that this runs against the trends in American higher education is to engage in understatement. Most schools – even small liberal arts colleges – allow, even encourage, students to design their own education. It is one of their selling points. And I suppose for some students, perhaps most students, it is what they would prefer. Students in these schools do not need to go places they do not want to go or have not already been. They can stay in their comfort zone. Increasingly, even within that zone, they can take courses they have handpicked from professors with whom they are already comfortable. And even in those courses – just in case students might still be caught off guard – many schools now offer what are called “trigger warnings” to alert students ahead of time to something in a reading that might make them uncomfortable. Do not mistake me, I am not mocking this path. I understand it. But I do not think it is a brave way to pursue an education nor an intellectually curious one. I think it begins from a place of woundedness, not strength, and it maintains that woundedness rather than seeking to overcome it. So let me warn you now, while you still have the chance to flee: St. John’s will not allow you to stay in your comfort zone. You will confront ideas and ways of looking at the world that are markedly different from your own. You will be uncomfortable, not just on occasion, but often. I mainly speak of what happens in the classroom, but I also speak more broadly about an open campus climate. Last year we welcomed Justice Sonia Sotomayor, perhaps the most liberal member of the Supreme Court, to campus. She dined with students, met with faculty and staff, and had an open forum for the St. John’s community and the public. In a few days we will welcome to campus for a Friday night Dean’s Lecture former George W. Bush Attorney General Mike Mukasey, who has recently testified in favor of some of President-elect Trump’s appointments. They are both from the Bronx and are both nice people, but that is where the similarities end – except for the fact that they are both welcome here at St. John’s. Compare this to the new college tradition of students protesting speakers even being permitted to speak on campus who happen to have views that conflict with their own. �Let’s talk about other differences. Is there another school that calls its faculty tutors? Well, there is one that I know of – but it is modeled after St. John’s. This is not just a semantic oddity. It represents something really important. And what is that? It is that the faculty at St. John’s will not “profess” the “truth” to you. And a question at St. John’s is just very different than a question at other schools. Tutors ask questions to invite you on a shared exploration, not because they know the answer and are seeking to find out if you do too. Think about that. Another major difference, and one that perhaps at times will not gain 100 percent enthusiasm from all of you, is that you will work very hard here. Ours is a challenging program that asks you to overcome your fear of being unable to do higher-order thinking in mathematics, science, philosophy, and literature. But unlike trigger warnings or avoiding ideas that you do not share, this will make you stronger. By learning you can do what you feared you could not do, you will become not just a stronger student, but also a stronger person. How different is this from many other schools? Just check out the recent book Academically Adrift, which examines how little work many college students do and how little many learn. One conclusion: about a third of the 2,300 college incoming freshmen tested on measures such as critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and other higher level skills had made no gains in those areas when tested again as outgoing seniors. Parents here: how would you feel about helping to pay for four years of that? Another difference worth mentioning: at St. John’s you will examine primary materials, not secondary sources. In many ways, you will make discoveries alongside and simultaneously with the authors, composers, scientists, and other thinkers whose works you encounter over four years. This is a fundamentally different way of learning. It, too, requires much of you. Since every student in your class will follow the same path, this, too, is very different. Your discussions will know few boundaries. Walking on this campus, you are more apt to overhear conversations about Kant or Jane Austen than about the latest episode of Game of Thrones. �In short, you are about to be immersed in an intellectually driven climate, the like of which you may never again experience in your life. Take advantage of it. Dive deep. That’s how discoveries – intellectual, personal, and otherwise – are made. That’s how a life is built. The work you are about to begin takes commitment. It takes maturity. It takes flexibility. You have shown great humility and courage in choosing St. John’s. Now you must show perseverance. Commit to seeing through the struggles that are up ahead. You will gain greatly when you do. You may also take comfort in the fact that we are a small school. You will come to know every face on campus – and others will know you. If our alumni are any indication, you are now sitting among some of the closest friends you will make in your lives. Your classmates will share with you, forever, an understanding of how challenging and transformational this education will be, and you will cherish them for that. And now, begin with confidence. You chose St. John’s for a reason. You will add great value to this college, and you will receive immeasurable gifts in return. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Spring 2017 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on January 16, 2017 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-01-16 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Convocation Graduate Institute January Freshmen https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/ec344a814047bc9a6d310b56be120ed7.pdf d8cdbf13d0f2a04b30401f905f6e49d1 PDF Text Text St. John’s Santa Fe New Student Convocation Remarks January 18, 2016 President Mark Roosevelt It is wonderful to welcome you – really, to welcome anyone newer than I am. This is my third week. I am not going to insult your intelligence by telling you about the value of a liberal arts education or that as a graduate of St John’s, you will be employable. I assume that you would not be here if you needed to hear that this evening. If you do your work here you will get an education that matters and that, yes, is increasingly relevant in a world where you will change jobs and even professions multiple times. The kind of work you will do here will make you highly sought after. Far more importantly, this education will help you open yourself to the world. New as I am, that is what I would like to talk about – briefly – this evening: what is distinctive about what is on offer here. I also I will try to distill a couple of things that you might keep in mind as you think about what you should be focusing on as you look at the years ahead of you. Some of my favorite research shows that people underline in books not illuminating passages that open up new ways of looking at life or a particular issue, but instead what they already know or believe. Seldom are we open to new ways of looking at the world. A St. John’s education is structured to fight that off, to help us not to be that way. Our country, as you may have noticed, is going dangerously in the other direction. Blue state residents and red state residents associate only with those who think and live as they do. And new ways of gaining information isolates people as well. You can choose which cable news station to watch; which radio pundits to follow; which websites underscore your view of the world. Now many colleges are heading that way as well – allowing students to isolate themselves, secure in the “rightness” of their way of viewing the world, even if they have not even entered it, really. Colleges offer so-called “trigger warnings” for materials that might be disconcerting. They allow students to pick and choose among courses so they can hear and read what they choose and already find comforting. This is profound abandonment of one of the most critical roles of a “higher education.” College should be disconcerting. It should be challenging. And not just in ways that you choose to be challenged. It should widen your horizons, not solidify what you already believe. It should shake zealotry, not reinforce it. Because St. John’s is different, your time here won’t always be �comfortable. St. John’s, by its very nature, its pedagogical vision, as well as its delivery system, will ask you to wrestle with many different ways of being. There is another way of expressing the same invitation to openness. One tutor and St. John’s graduate I met with this week told me that when he got to graduate school he realized that he “knew what a question was.” I pursued. He said a questions should “open a door to a new understanding, be an invitation to see things differently than you saw them before.” He said it was even more important to understand what a question at St. John’s is not. Most questions are not posed by a faculty member with an answer in mind that he or she hopes you will parrot back. Instead, a question is an exploration – a search. For this mode of inquiry to work, both parties need to be open. This is very different. This is very unusual. And this is very rich. Education at its deepest level is not about mimicking others’ answers but about exploring your own. With guidance. With access, both in your readings and in your seminars, to others who have grappled deeply with such matters. Let me add another view of what this education should do for you. It should help you understand why people do what they do, even when they do remarkable things. The nineteenth-century British romantic poet John Keats – whom you will read here – has a saying I love: “A fact is not a truth until you love it.” Facts are good to know. But they are limited until you add context and emotion and, yes, love, and then they can gain such drama that they can change the way you view almost everything. Take two of my own preoccupations – Gettysburg and Lincoln. You will read Lincoln in your senior year. And among the texts you will read are his Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg in November of 1863. You will not be asked to study the battle itself, but it merits your independent inquiry. You probably know that it was fought between Union and Confederate forces on July 2, 3, and 4 of 1963. The country you live in was shaped on these days. There were more than 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg, and the battle turned the war in the Union’s favor. And perhaps America’s greatest speech took place there four months later: Abraham Lincoln’s now famous 268 words. But those facts remain rather cold things. That is, until you start digging, even a little. Dig into Lincoln’s speech. You learn that this self-taught man wrote all his own words, that he was not even the featured speaker that day, that Harvard’s Edward Everett – not the President of the United States – was the main speaker, that Lincoln was used to being so treated, that he had lost his beloved son Willie to fever just one year before, that it is almost impossible to �comprehend what he bore to just keep going, that Everett spoke for two hours and Lincoln spoke for two minutes and sat down to silence, no one really understanding what had happened and that he was done, and that now his words may be the most famous ever spoken by an American, that this is true although he himself said and truly thought that unlike what happened at the battle of Gettysburg the world would take little note and not long remember what was said there on that day of consecration. “Consecration?” A heavy word meaning “to make venerable to hallow.” Lincoln called the battlefield “this hallowed ground.” And what were they consecrating? Thousands of individual acts of valor and so much agony, and so much courage. Now perhaps, if you are open to it, you begin to realize that there may not be much about life that you cannot learn by studying these three days. Now cold facts begin to take on a life of their own, and unless you are a rather cold soul, you begin to feel something akin to love. So many stories. How a union cavalry officer---John Buford---arrived at the scene before the armies had gathered at this little Pennsylvania town where all the roads seem to converge, and, looking down from a hill, somehow knew that a great battle was going to take place there. He was painfully aware that the Union had fought on the ground of the enemy’s choosing far too often, and aware of the cost in lives for that. He somehow knew–yes, he really did–that the fate of his country–not an exaggeration–might well depend on whether he and his cavalry could hold this ground until Union infantry could reach it. He had 2,748 men–horse soldiers not used to defending ground–and he faced nearly 8,000 confederates. And he held his ground for a few precious hours with men dying all around him. We will never know what might have happened had he not. Six months later Buford was dead from what doctors called exposure and exhaustion, perhaps typhoid. Delirious at the end, his dying words were exhortations to his soldiers to hold on: “Don’t let the men run to the rear.” Perhaps the best general at his level in the Union army, John Fulton Reynolds knew the cost of procrastination and had hurried to the field to reinforce Buford. He was vulnerable on his horse as he organized his infantry to repel superior members, and he was shot and killed. A young general, Winfield Scott Hancock, assumed Reynolds’ command. He was not the most senior commander at the location but had been told to take command and he did. He had the authority to leave the field–to retreat–but chose to stay and fight. The next day the Union’s defensive lines at Gettysburg were in the shape of a fish hook. To win the battle, the confederates had to break the lines and turn to attack from the rear. And on day two, Hancock found himself in the center of the confederate assault. At one point a gap opened in his defensive lines. �Hancock knew what this opening could mean and ordered his reserves to come forward, but he also knew that was going to take time–perhaps five to seven minutes. And that gap might be too long. One regiment was there. Hancock turned to its commander, Colonel William Colvill, and asked who they were. “First Minnesota,” Colvill replied. Hancock looked down the hill at the swarm of advancing confederates and pointed to the Alabama flag in their midst. He said, “Colonel, do you see those colors?” Colvill said that he did. “Then take them,” Hancock said. They had to know what this meant–all 262 of them. But they charged down that hill, bayonets fixed, right at that Alabama flag, and they disrupted the Confederate attack for not five but 10 minutes. They did not take the flag, but they held on to their own, and the 47 men who survived knew forever what they had accomplished. At least I hope they did. No longer cold facts. You have to wonder at Buford’s fierce determination, at the courage of the First Minnesotans, at what it took for Hancock to order other men to sure death, and, always in my case, to think about what Lincoln endured in order to see this deadly war through to its end and to meet his own end at 56, when he was feeling a sense of hope for the first time in years. I will never cease wondering what America lost in that death. “A fact is not a truth until you love it.” We do not know what the next four years will bring. But you will read many stories about what men and women will do for a cause. You will ponder why people will fight so valiantly, as did the Confederates, for causes we now see as unworthy, and why men in union blue would die for a more noble ideal–the freedom of others–that they were not really that comfortable with. I hope the years ahead bring you many moments when you will look deeply at things that really matter: how we spend our lives, what we love, what people have been willing to die for. I hope for you there will be moments when the prose and the poetry of life come together, when facts turn into truths. You may find that your life has changed. This is what transformational education is all about. This is a place where for many decades now people have transformed their lives. I welcome you to St. John’s College. I declare the College in session. CONVOCATUM EST � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Spring 2016 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on January 18, 2016 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-01-18 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Convocation Graduate Institute January Freshmen Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/9569dac38e441adb544f468221ae511c.pdf 32f96065c519322ed7ccca1ef1f83844 PDF Text Text Welcome to St. John’s. Your presence provides me with a certain amount of relief. First, every class that enrolls represents the endurance of St. John’s and its marvelous program of instruction – no small thing. And second, frankly, you are newer than I am. Compared to you, with eight months under my belt, I am a veteran. So thank you for that. What can I tell you about my first eight months that might help you navigate your first days and months on this campus? Well, I can’t explain St. John’s to you; others you will meet will do that much better than I can, and fortunately, that isn’t my job here today. My job is to help you think about two questions that I know are on your mind as you enroll in the college: “What will I do at St. John’s?” and “What impact will my work here have – on my life, and on the world?” You already know that you have come to an unusual place, and you may have chosen St. John’s because it is so different from almost every other college in the world. But here’s a word you may not have associated with this college: radical. Yet everything you are about to encounter, in your reading and in the classroom, should persuade you that radical is the best – and in some sense, the only – appropriate word to describe the St. John’s academic program. We study the greatest ideas in Western culture, posited by some of the most radical thinkers in history. We live largely in a world of their making, so it is difficult to grasp the extent to which they upended the conventional wisdom of their times – and the extent to which we are who we are because they lived, and thought, and wrote, and taught. The work you do at St. John’s will help you see that the progression of thought, great and worldchanging thought, is not incremental. In an expression we overuse these days, the insights with which you will grapple are of the “this changes everything” variety. Socrates, through his interlocutor, Plato, exploded the idea of received wisdom. He said, “Question everything.” The Copernican revolution removed humankind from the literal center of the universe. Descartes posited a distinctly new path to truth. Radical ideas indeed. The kind of ideas that could get a person killed. And here you are, now, about to plunge in and do some thinking of your own. You’ll surely wonder, at some point, how this education will serve you when you leave St. John’s and whether there will be a place for you in the world of work. I will argue to you, and deeply believe, that what we offer here is becoming more and more valuable to humankind and to this planet. I say this because, yes, what you will do here will help you grow as a person, and nurture what is in you that seeks to explore the most fundamental questions…of why we are here, why we are the way that we are and why we act the way that we do. Questions that come to all of us, rich or poor, privileged by access to academic learning or denied such access. Self-taught or just filled with the usual dollop of human longing, pain and questioning. We by our very nature as curious beings want to understand as much as we can. And importantly, and perhaps counterintuitively, this education will also help you recognize the limits of that potential understanding and therefore, as a by-product of that search, begin to �acquire the humility that is the platform on which so much that we must change about how we act will likely be best achieved. But although that is all very important, it centers the purpose of this education solely on your own personal growth. And I make even larger claims for this education even than that. I am not a classicist. I have run educational institutions and taught but, broadly speaking, I have spent most of my life in public policy. And – although I know enough about the past to know that every era has its challenges, I think the world you will inherit is fraught with more risks – and larger ones than – than well…arguably than ever before. And addressing these challenges will require complex skill sets and dramatically new – not just incrementally different - ways of thinking. Let me give you one example. I’ll choose what I believe is the largest of these issues – the effect that we as a species are having on the planet. Although it gets talked about very little the sheer number of us is rising so much faster than in earlier times. And few if any comprehend the implications…1 billion in 1800 and then it took 127 years until there were 2 billion. 33 years or until 1960 until there were 3 billion…Now just 56 years later we are nearly 8 billion and we grow by nearly a billion people every decade. What will come of this growth? The sheer numbers of us and how we live are affecting the planet in new and profound ways. 13 of the hottest years have occurred since 2000. There is 40% less ice in the Arctic than there was in the 1970s. At St. John’s you will read Darwin and see how 19th century man spent time cataloging species and discovering new forms of life. A century and a half later scientists spend their energies trying desperately to chronicle how many species are going extinct. And although they differ wildly on what the rate of extinctions might be, the consensus is that extinction is happening at 1000 to 10,000 times the rate before humans existed – with perhaps 30 to 50% of all species going extinct by the middle of this century. Because the effect of human activity is the dominant story, scientists are now increasingly calling this era…the Anthropocene. What to do? We will likely have to change the way we view almost everything. Including the methodology by which we evaluate human activity. Right now politicians of all ideologies preach growth as the answer to almost everything. So do most economists. It is growing clear to many, although not many in positions of power, that this will have to change. To change the way humans understand their place in the world is a profound undertaking. So if these problems are so worrisome why do I think that you all are in the right place? Yes, we do science here but you will not be studying climate change or population growth. And you will not study political science per se. You will not have your work broken down into the established academic categories as knowledge does not come in categories. �Some people view our program as conservative, whatever that means. In fact, as I have said the program is radical and seeks to enable us all to see man’s path to understanding as built on one radical overturning after another. Your encounter with Socrates is likely to be deeply transformative and will cause you to question the dominant conventional assumptions you have grown up with. You will begin to embrace a form of inquiry that will lead to many questions. You will study all kinds of subversions, upendings, overturnings and perhaps begin to see that the progression of western thought is a series of such. An idea gets presented, analyzed and accepted. Then a new idea is posited that answers more questions and the earlier idea is cast aside. We study a great deal of what has been proven incorrect so as to understand how theories are developed and how thinking evolves. Every book we study is in some large or small way opening up something that is new and was formerly closed. You will study Galileo, who was suspected of heresy and spent much of his life under house arrest, and you will see the price that can be paid for new thinking. In fact of all the works in the Program the Copernican revolution, the move from an earth centered cosmos to a sun centered one is perhaps the biggest “upending” and is a model for many of the revolutions that follow. What happens when we cannot simply assume that the world revolves around us? Our current situation has obvious parallels with the Copernican revolution. We really cannot understand the nature of our world until we start to see ourselves not as the center but as an active part that moves and influences and is influenced by all the other parts of the whole. We will at some point have to acknowledge the centrality of the photosynthetic biosphere, which, among other things provides all of our oxygen and most of the food for every living thing, and the power of nutrient and energy exchanges. And that this is all very complicated and deeply intertwined and yet also simple and profoundly important and that our hubris in continuing to act obliviously and otherwise is…well…at the very least very dangerous. But it is not just in science that you will see how it is radical thought changes that move things forward. As I prepare with some trepidation to teach the senior seminar – starting tonight - I am immersed in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That book is, of course, also an invitation to question many of the underpinnings of our thinking, including the underpinnings of the kinds of intellectual pursuit we do at St. John’s. In a sense a questioning of our questioning. Much that is truly great is an invitation – no, perhaps more of a demand – for greater humility. For example, the book’s most intellectual and searching characters are unable to use their intellect to shield them from the pain that comes with love – even love of that which is simply beautiful, flirtation and charm – and the clumsy groping that accompanies domestic life for most all of us. As I said at the start we are not like other schools and we consciously reject many of the trends that other schools succumb to. You cannot choose what you study here. You cannot create a path that leaves you unchallenged. This will not be a comfortable education. It is not meant to be. The students I talk with have all been made distinctly uncomfortable here. �The world is a devastating place. Acts of humankind will constantly assault your sensibilities and no one emerges unscathed and yet many now seek trigger warnings or alternative readings so they can avoid being confronted, even in literature, with depictions of the horrors that have been commonplace in human history. Many students come to college with a certain way of looking at the world and want to maintain it. They are not comfortable having it challenged. And now many colleges are helping facilitate that protection. To discover new lands you must accept that you will be out of sight of all land for a period of time. That is discomforting. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data paper Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Fall 2016 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on August 25, 2016 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-08-25 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived pdf Language A language of the resource English Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/1c70a5f14e122dea9f07140abb71e23f.pdf 3d88ddf2dfa8daf862178e7e328886f3 PDF Text Text Convocation Speech, Fall 2017 On behalf of the faculty, your fellow students, college staff, faculty, and alumni — all of us — welcome to St. John’s. You have joined a community of learners who wrestle with bold and radical ideas in ways that are increasingly unusual in American higher education. We do our work with a searching temperament and with honesty tempered by civility. These values — honesty, a commitment to searching, civility, a respect for and openness to the ideas of others — are largely lost in American higher education. But they still have a home here at St. John’s. And, now, you have a home here with us as well. You are here… so I am confident that you know that you have chosen to make your home in a very unusual community. But I am not sure you yet know how unusual it truly is. So, let me just say this: St John’s is as different from other small liberal arts colleges -- schools like Middlebury, Carleton, or Oberlin — as they are from Ohio State. There are many reasons why this is so. The most important are fundamental and substantial. After you have chosen this college, which is a brave choice, pretty much from here on out you do not get to choose what you study. You are studying what other people — after diligent thought and sometimes a lifetime’s exploration — have determined will offer you the best platform on which to build your life. Not just your academic or intellectual life, but your whole �life. This curriculum is not designed to constitute the totality of your learning but, again, to provide the platform from which you can move to a lifetime of learning. You have chosen a college that will prepare you to think, to synthesize, to create, and to make informed judgments. These habits of mind will last your lifetime and will take you anywhere you choose to go. But I am the president of the college; I probably would say that. So, as you sit there thinking about what your time at St. John’s will mean, and what it will prepare you for, it would help if I read a small section from a recent article titled, “The most forward-thinking, future-proof college in America teaches every student the exact same stuff,” by Peter Marber in the business journal Quartz. “Perhaps instead of reinventing higher education, we can give students what they need for the future by returning to the roots of liberal arts. Consider St. John’s College, America’s third-oldest institution of higher education...which has emerged as one of the most distinctive colleges in the country by maintaining a strict focus on the classics of the Western canon…. Marber then notes that St John’s asks you to read original texts and says, “This is crucial to the school’s philosophy; by freeing texts from context, St. John’s claims it frees students’ minds to ponder the multiple possibilities and meanings that are actually in the text. Those possibilities are then discussed and debated, and discarded when weak or specious, leaving better interpretations space to surface. St. John’s is not a cloister, and of course students and faculty are well aware of the history and social settings of their studies. But an attempt is made to focus on the texts themselves, and understand their content, meaning and �merit deeply through debate. This is what creates independent thinking. “…Sure, compared to the telephone book size course catalogs most colleges and universities offer in the 21st century, St. John’s curriculum may seem limited. But “Johnnies,” as St. John’s students call themselves, and faculty would argue just the opposite. This curriculum is carefully designed not only to build knowledge, but also to understand how knowledge is ultimately created; it is teaching students how to learn. “…We live in an age when 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day, with much being intentionally misleading, ‘fake’ or just plain wrong. What could be more valuable than developing an intellectual filter, cultivating the capacity to know what is important to know, distilling enormous amounts of information to form a rational position, or knowing how to listen and respond to—or perhaps integrate—someone else’s point of view? In this vein, St. John’s uses traditional texts taught in ancient methods to impart skills that have never been more crucial.” “Skills that have never been more crucial…” Here is a highly successful business person lauding the quality of education you will get here…what you will learn and study and how it will help you grow. All true. But the other point he is making is that the world needs — and will seek to employ - the skills you will develop here…because they have “never been more crucial…” As you embrace the Program and give your studies your full attention you will of course also be thinking about the larger questions behind it all — Questions such as, what is a good life, and how do we make one for ourselves? How do I want to live? What kind of life will satisfy my intellectual yearnings and my social needs as well as help me reach my professional and personal goals? �And what exactly are my personal and professional goals? These are huge questions, and they may seem at times overwhelming. But they are after all the key questions of our life here, and the right questions for you to be asking, even if – like all large questions — the answers are hard to come by, and are not easy. Your time here should give you the tools to grapple with these questions ….to gain glimmers of understanding. And your time here should change you…it will change you… you will not leave here with the same beliefs and the same way of looking at the world that you have right now. In a commencement speech at another college several years ago, the writer Richard Russo said that “sending … kids off to college is a lot like putting them in the witness protection program. If the person who comes out is easily recognizable as the same person who went in, something has gone terribly, dangerously wrong.” You have enrolled in a college that is unlike any other in the country, and second to none in its ability to prepare you for whatever comes your way. Your tutors could teach anywhere. They teach here, at least in part, because for them, to be a part of a community of learners is much more wondrous than to “profess.” That is why they are tutors and not professors. You are now their admittedly less experienced colleagues, here to offer your hard work and your insights that you will bring to your seminars, tutorials, and preceptorials. Your fellow learners, your classmates and your faculty and all of us, will benefit greatly from �what you have to offer. Be present. Share yourself. Get and give all that you have. You know what else? And this is sometimes hard for us at St. John’s: Have some fun. Not too much fun. Play with ideas. Tell terrible jokes. Hike. Kick a soccer ball. Help a kid in town to learn to read. Enjoy the incredible, sometimes almost preposterous beauty of this this wondrous place … the constant drama of the sky … the clouds and the sunsets. Take care of yourself. Sit in the Plaza downtown and think about the history under your feet and all around you. Whatever it means to you, make the most of these four years. Become you. Thank you for all for the bravery in choosing to join us in this incredible community. We welcome you to your new home at St. John’s College. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 5 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Fall 2017 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on August 24, 2017 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-08-24 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Roosevelt, M. Convocation 08-2017 Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/97c4c9532bff9e815b4f960c1e7890af.pdf 57d70f1d2221003a219466bd555de694 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 5 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Fall 2018 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on August 23, 2018 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-08-23 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Roosevelt, M. Convocation 08-2018 Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/b4ad7ef7293eaabc6df16ededfa62fcb.pdf e956c03c6a89def30d073751367c6b44 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 5 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Spring 2019 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on January 14, 2019 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-01-14 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Roosevelt, M. Convocation 01-2019 Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a156e762f412ddde898f2f4816cc2317.pdf ff85cc8d6a884ee44d500aecf1ec22ec PDF Text Text 2019 CONVOCATION SPEECH On behalf of the faculty, your fellow students, college staff, and alumni—all of us—welcome to St. John’s. You have joined a community of learners who wrestle with bold and radical ideas. We are searchers and do our work with honesty tempered by civility. These values—honesty, a commitment to rigorous searching, civility, respect for and openness to the ideas of others—are largely lost in American higher education today. But they still have a home here at St. John’s. And now, you have a home here as well. Looking at you this morning, I am confident that you know that you have chosen to make your home in a very unusual community. But I am not sure you know how unusual it truly is and exactly why we continue to choose to be so different. Older admissions materials explaining the college say “The goals of the St. John’s Program are not those of other schools, and the meaning of a liberal arts education at St. John’s is not what is thought of as a liberal arts education elsewhere. The standard questions and usual considerations about college barely apply.” That was true when it was written decades ago, and it is even truer today. St. John’s is as different from other small liberal arts schools—such as Middlebury, Pomona, or Oberlin—as these schools are from the University of Texas or Ohio State. But what does this difference really mean? It is part of the St. John’s approach that we do not figure things out for you. But I believe that exploring this difference a bit this morning, thinking broadly about what we are really engaged in here, will provide you with an important context as you begin your St. John’s journey. �If you look around you, you will see signs all over campus for our fundraising campaign. That campaign is entitled Freeing Minds, and that title was chosen by our alumni as the best way to describe what it is we seek to do. So, it is our claim that what we do here can help to free your mind. How do we do that? Our mission statement offers some help here. It reads: "The educational mission of St. John’s College is to foster searching consideration of the most important human questions through reading and discussion of great books…Through the study of these works, the College seeks to free human beings from prejudice and unexamined opinion, and to help students make thoughtful choices in public and private life." Of course, freedom is a complex concept with multiple potential meanings. By joining St. John’s you are actually forgoing many “freedoms” that others view as important and that you would experience at other colleges. For example, our ambition to help free minds clearly does not mean granting you the freedom to suggest and choose what you are going to study. No, we are talking about a different kind of freedom. A freedom that is not given, but rather earned. The Statement of the Program says that “St. John’s College is persuaded that a genuine liberal education requires the study of great books because they are both timeless and timely. These books are the most important teachers. They illuminate the persisting questions of human existence and they bear directly on the problems we face today.” To say that our all-required curriculum and the beliefs behind it run against trends in American higher education is to engage in massive understatement. Most schools now encourage students to exercise the freedom to design their own education. It is one of their selling points. And I suppose for some students—no, why not say it truthfully—for a vast majority of students, this is what they would prefer. Students in these schools are not required to study outside of their �comfort zone. They are free to hold their beliefs relatively unchallenged. They are not asked to go places they do not want to go or have not already been. At St. John’s you will be required to confront ideas and ways of looking at the world that are markedly different from your own. You will be uncomfortable, not just on occasion, but often. We believe a freer thinker comes from when you know how others think, what they believe and why. And when you learn to listen. Really listen. Ours is also a challenging program. We ask you to overcome your fear of being able to do higher-order thinking in mathematics, science, philosophy, and literature. By learning you can do what you might have feared you could not do, you will become not just a stronger student, but also a stronger and a freer person. We do not believe that it helps free your mind to spend time in a lecture hall writing down what someone else is telling you to think. It is not just a semantic oddity that we call our faculty tutors and not professors… It represents something really important. The faculty at St. John’s will not “profess” the “truth” to you. Because of that, a question is even different here. At most colleges a professor will ask you a question to see if you know something that they already have fixed in their mind. Here at St. John’s, tutors will ask you questions to invite you on a shared exploration, not because they know the answer and are seeking to find out if you do as well. Tutors are also searchers, open to the possibility that they might, alongside you, learn something new about the Pythagorean Theorem in Freshman Math or in the Graduate Institute mathematics tutorial, or while reading Genji in the Eastern Classics program. You, the less experienced colleagues of your tutors, and the equal partners of your classmates, are now going on a search together…you will be dissecting the texts together. Looking for insights together, and helping to understand together. Another major difference, and one that you may be only marginally enthusiastic about, is that you will work very hard here. How different is this from many other schools? Just check out the recent book Academically Adrift, which examines how �little work many college students actually do and how little they learn. One conclusion: about a third of the 2,300 college incoming freshmen tested on measures such as critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and other higher-level skills had made no gains in those areas when tested again as outgoing seniors. The freedom to not apply yourself, to be a passive participant in your college years, is another “empty” freedom you will not enjoy at St. John’s. By giving up these various so-called freedoms we believe you have the opportunity to attain a far greater, far more important freedom. And that freedom—to understand the most important thinking that brought us to be who we are and where we are, to be able as our mission statement says to free yourself from prejudice and unexamined opinion—is a hard-earned freedom. To attain it you must give of your self…you must open your mind and your heart to new thinking. And you must dive deep. That’s how discoveries—intellectual, personal, and otherwise—are made. That’s how a life is built. That is how a mind is made free. I am convinced that becoming a freer thinker is why you chose to come here. To those who know me even a little, they can tell you I do not flatter. But I have to tell you that I am impressed by you. By your courage. By your willingness to take a more challenging path. I believe that your presence here is an indication of how you are going to make your choices throughout your life. You have shown both great humility and great courage in choosing St. John’s. Now you must show another equally important characteristic in life— perseverance. Commit to seeing through the struggles that are up ahead. You will gain greatly when you do. We know a good deal of what makes for a successful experience at St. John’s. The most essential positives? Connect. Engage. Commit. Learn how to fail and how to recover. Learn what is truly important to you…what lights your emotional and intellectual fires. And please, seek help if you are in trouble. We—all of us—faculty and staff are here to support you. Seek us out. We are working hard to make sure you have all the support services, academically and personally, that you might require. But it is essential for you to have the courage to ask for help when you need it. �And seek beauty. We live in a very dark time. A time in which it is ever more apparent that we, as a species, are self-deluding and short-sighted. And yet…beauty is all around us. There is spectacular beauty in the mountains and ever-changing skies of Northern New Mexico and there is also beauty in what you will be reading and doing here, in our attempts to take stock of our condition— our stories, poems, and our songs…Our attempts to understand ourselves, they matter a great deal. And now, begin with confidence. You chose St. John’s for a reason. Remember that. And remember that we know that you bring great things to us. You will add great value to this college, and you will receive immeasurable gifts in return. Thank you for listening. And welcome to your new home at St. John's. I declare the College in session. Convocatum est. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 5 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Fall 2019 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on August 29, 2019 by Mark Roosevelt in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Roosevelt, Mark Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-08-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SF_Convocation_Fall_2019_Roosevelt, M. Convocation Presidents https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/a028246f9f6b773e23bb1a08b7060c26.pdf be436da5c199a2bf9f4c283238552435 PDF Text Text 1 Convocation Address St. John’s College, Santa Fe August 29, 2024 J. Walter Sterling, President Good morning, again, on this beautiful day here, on our Santa Fe Campus of St. John’s College, here over 7000 feet above sea level, in the foothills of Monte Sol and the Sangre de Cristo mountains. A beautiful day, and a significant day, ending one chapter, and opening a new one, for all of our new students — beginning this evening for you freshmen, with the terrible beauty of the Iliad and an opening question. Thus begins a new rhythm of life, as the bell rings, each Monday and Thursday evening, and you enter seminar. So, welcome to you freshmen, Class of 2028, and first semester graduate students. Welcome family and friends joining us, the faculty of the college, all of our staff, and our returning students. Welcome to low-residency graduate students and family members and others joining us online. A special welcome to Katarina Wong, president of the St. John’s College Alumni Association and member of our Board of Visitors and Governors. My remarks will seem aimed at our freshmen. For our new graduate students, including lowresidency students, please know you are just as integral to our community of learning, and the heart of all this is intended for you, too. What you are undertaking exemplifies, in its own extraordinary way, the convictions and aspirations of our college. I will explore two themes: First, to reflect with you a bit on what it means to join this “community dedicated to liberal education.” — Our most foundational document, modestly titled, “The Statement of the Program,” has long opened with the assertion that, “St. John’s College is a community dedicated to liberal education.” — Second, I will propose four sources of sustaining strength, for the journey you’ve begun. “A community dedicated to liberal education.” Who is this community? Let’s begin with you 90 freshmen. You come from all over geographically, and from all varieties of backgrounds. From 25 states, and from 6 countries abroad — Albania, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Nepal. From public, private, and homeschool educations. Some grew up right here in Santa Fe, some daring few have entered the United States for the very first time to join us here. Within the U.S., some have traveled very far: 3,500 miles from Palmer Alaska, 2,300 miles from Pownal, Maine. You discovered St. John’s along various paths: from a deep love of books, or the advice of a favorite teacher, from a Johnnie family member, or moved by the visit to campus or the Summer Academy, some thrilled by the people they met here, or the conversations they joined, some drawn to this bold vision of what a college education can be, some arriving after attending other colleges or being out of school in the world of work for a season. The community you join is small in a way — 400 undergraduates, 100, graduate students — but it contains more varied backgrounds than many larger communities, and, because of the shared �2 course of study, and the constant conversation together which you have already begun, you will experience more diversity and empathize with and learn from this wide range of backgrounds, beliefs, and perspectives more than is likely in the relative anonymity and dispersion of more conventional colleges. We are also a campus community, including our staff and faculty who are united by uncommon dedication to the program and to your and their own learning. Our constant practice of shared inquiry requires, and fosters, mutual civility and respect, inclining naturally toward empathy and friendship. Such civility and respect are modeled daily in the classroom by our tutors. We do not seek facile agreement or hard-edged debate. We seek to reason together and, as our Statement says, to learn from our differences and discover our shared humanity. Radiating out from our campus, you now join the community of all Johnnie alumni, whose education was shaped by the same program and community, if varying in details, over the years and decades. And you now live in this remarkable city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, a city in which this college has found a home for 60 years. To what are we dedicated? “Liberal education.” You know already you have chosen a college that aims to offer as complete an undergraduate education as possible in the most important respects, “a complete and generous education,” to borrow a phrase from Milton — that is, to go as deep as possible into the fundamental questions, to the roots and foundations of things, and to be as broad as possible in respect to the range of human faculties and fundamental domains of knowledge and life. You will be required to, or given the opportunity to, translate Plato and Sophocles from the original Greek, in which you will acquire basic competence, and you will be asked to work through Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity, equation by equation. You will sing and analyze music. You will draw flowers and conifers and dissect biological specimens and observe light’s wave-particle duality. You will study the works of Adam Smith and of Karl Marx. You will study Euclid’s Elements and the genesis of and techniques of calculus. You will begin tonight with seminar conversations on Homer and then as seniors explore the works of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison... and so much more! You may be challenged by those who see in the phrase “liberal education” neglect of the practicalities of life. But this is a mirage. Every college and university, all of what we call higher education today cannot avoid balancing three aims, simply put: the pursuit of truth or knowledge as an end in itself, preparation for citizenship or political life, and preparation for career or the practicalities and necessities of our work-life. Liberal education properly pursued advances all three aims, in a well-balanced way. The truth is that what distinguishes St. John’s is not that our aims and values are unusual; it is that we are able to pursue certain widely shared values in a more uncompromising way than most educational institutions. Most educators and academics, when asked, would love to have smaller classes (like yours), discussion-driven classes (like yours), and highly self-motivated and curious students (like you). They too believe all or most students would benefit from much more time with great works of literature and philosophy, read patiently and thoughtfully, and with deeper logical and mathematical study, and from many other areas that are too often neglected. But they and their institutions, for many and varied reasons, are not incentivized and not able to offer these things quite so well as we can. Most other institutions have added aims and added constraints. They must strike a different balance or have a necessarily narrowed focus. �3 You may also be challenged to explain the relevance of studying so closely classics of the past. I recall many years ago hearing our revered former dean Eva Brann answer a parent’s challenge to that effect in this pithy way, as I recall it: “Our world is technology and democracy. Those are Greek words, and to understand our world today you must ultimately understand its roots in Greek thought.” — Properly interpreted, you could almost deduce our whole program from that premise. We are not studying the past as past; we are studying the living roots or natural history of our present world. Liberal education, pursued in this broad and deep way, is not only relevant today, it is needed seemingly now more than ever. It strengthens you, where current society is weak or faltering. It cultivates the habits of mind and character that are needed now to face the dystopian trends of our technological society and the polarization and loss of civility in our political life and discourse. The remedy to these depends on and passes through a renewal of education, one that points strongly toward the heart of what we quietly pursue at St. John’s. I am convinced that there are more people today who see the need for that renewal than there were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. I offer those as some opening reflections on our community dedicated to liberal education. Now, “Noble things are difficult.” So goes a Greek maxim you will translate. You arrive here, I hope, eager and energized for the work ahead, curious, with senses sharpened. But you also know it will be challenging. You came here not for something easy but for something substantial, and therefore challenging. You will struggle at times. Let me point to what I see as four sources of strength and sustenance that seem to me well-suited to lift you up, to lift each of us up. My hope is that making them explicit can make them more available. The first, perhaps easiest for us to see on the surface, is not to lose sight of the seriousness or grandeur of the work itself, its height or excellence, its depth or gravity. The works we characterize as “great books,” and the kinds of questions you will pursue, are truly impressive, often enigmatic, often dazzling and elevating. Do not let their difficulty eclipse that vision. When the work of the day falters or becomes a grind, remind yourself that you really are doing that hard work and persevering, in order to illuminate the most fundamental matters, to cultivate the kind of soul that can dwell near and benefit from great wisdom and beauty and the works that express them. Second, you have, we have, one another: There is much in life that isolates us, and typically it is when things seem darkest or most difficult that we feel most isolated. Here, you are closer to many others who can offer empathy, understanding, and support, than most students out there are. The small size of this community, your daily study and life together, the common curriculum, the familiarity which your tutors have with what you are doing and with the members of their classes, the staff who know well the character of this campus, the program, and all the resources available for getting through times of difficulty, your friends, and your classmates and room and hallmates. There are truly always more folks you can reach out to and connect with, nearby, prepared to help — and likewise, you are there for them. Sometimes it’s �4 hard to see that — here and in life — but I really believe it can be very true here, for each of you — and you should be ready to reach out, open up, and rely on those around you. Third, let yourself experience this place: the city of Santa Fe and our natural setting. For some of you, this is familiar — home or like home — for many of you it may be unlike anywhere you have lived. The geography, climate, culture, and history here are truly extraordinary, and you would do well to cultivate actively an interest in and attachment to the place you are in. That is true wherever we are, but there is so much here that invites and rewards the effort of active attention and exploration. The world-renowned author, and longtime friend and supporter of our college, Scott Momaday — who passed away this January and whose Native peoples were of this land and its history — was one of the great thinkers and writers of place and land. I have thought about him often since his death. As he wrote, each of us, “ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk." This place, which seems austere to some, rewards our care and attention. The evening sky at sunset, the brightest stars most any of you will ever live among, the smell of the land after the rain. Likewise, the art, music, and history open to us, just in a two-mile radius. If you can really make this place part of what it means to be a Johnnie at this college, that alone will carry you forward like a wave. Finally, joy: Cultivate a spirit of joy. This does not mean carrying things lightly. What you do here is serious, but not at all grim. Avoid the temptation often pressed on us by the loud voices in the world, to dwell on what is melancholy in things, especially when facing hard work and challenges. Find joy in what you do here, in playful fun, in the deep wonder of insight, in exercising resilience in the face of adversity. Delight in the range of what you are undertaking and in the many flashes of beauty in these works. Find joy in perplexity, knowing it’s a precondition for learning. Find joy in cultivating your attention (against the great counterforces of this age of distraction). Enjoy physical exertion and moving your body in this wonderful setting. Delight in the landscape. Enjoy the company of your friends and companions. Success at St. John’s involves a blend of humility and audacity, as does a worthwhile and adventurous life. The program naturally elicits both, in different ways. If you can remain attuned to sources like these that can strengthen you, that can invigorate you and pull you up and over, through, or around the obstacles of the moment, each of you will, I am confident, flourish here. I declare the college in session. CONVOCATUM EST. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Addresses Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Meem Library Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Word doc Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 4 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Convocation Address, Fall 2024 Description An account of the resource Transcript of the convocation address given on August 29, 2024 by J. Walter Sterling in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Sterling, J. Walter Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2024-08-29 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Meem Library has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Sterling, W. Convocation 2024-08-29 Convocation Presidents