47 20 5655 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3f3d9ae3e993fc35d4b34a6b6d22e128.pdf df296ffba96b91cf8f796dce9d3fd303 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2012 What Is a Segment? Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by looking at the graduate program, and asking ‘what is a segment?’ It is easy to be at a loss in the face of such a ‘what is?’ question, since it is not clear that a segment is one of the beings. Rather, ‘segment’ is the conventional name we give to the parts of the graduate program here at St. John’s, of which there are five: Philosophy & Theology, Politics & Society, Mathematics & Natural Science, Literature, and History. These segments can be taken in almost any order, though the History segment cannot be taken first; and completing four of five segments entitles the student to a Master’s of Arts in Liberal Arts. Given that the name ‘segment’ is a convention, we might at first think that the question ‘what is a segment?’ is an empty one: couldn’t these things just as well have been called parts of the graduate program? But once we recognize that the undergraduate expression of the St. John’s Program does not have segments – its parts are either the four years, freshman to senior, or the four classes, seminar, tutorial, preceptorial, and laboratory – we see that the name ‘segment’ marks something distinctive about the graduate expression of the Program. 1 �So the question ‘what is a segment?’ becomes something like ‘what were they thinking when they called the parts of the graduate program – parts in some sense other than the sense in which the different classes are parts – segments?’ And now we are not without resources, for we can ask more generally, ‘what do people mean when they use the word segment?’ The word means ‘part,’ certainly; but more strictly it means a part which has been, or can be, cut from a whole. A segment, in other words, is not a natural part, the way a finger is part of a hand, or a hand part of a human body. Rather, a segment is a part by violence: something that, were it not for the cutting, we might not see as a part at all. The particularly geometrical meaning of the term makes the need for cutting more clear. In definition six of Book Three of his Elements, Euclid tells us that “a segment [τµῆµα: the word means a part cut off] of a circle is the figure contained by a straight line and a circumference of a circle.” From this we get our more modern geometrical uses of the term, such as in the phrase ‘line segment,’ which means a part cut off by two points from an infinite, or at least endless, straight line. These particularly geometrical uses of the word ‘segment’ have two features in common. First, the part is a segment because it must be cut off from the whole to be distinguished as a part; and this is so because the whole is a homogeneous magnitude: a finite area in the case of the circle, and an infinite length in the case of the straight line. The homogeneity of the magnitude means that it has no natural parts, and that any part of it can be distinguished as a part by cutting. Second, the segment so distinguished, because of the homogeneity of its whole, can suffice as an indication of the whole. Given a straight line segment, we can produce it in both directions, or remove its endpoints, to find the whole modern straight line. And given any segment of a circle, no matter how small, we can find the whole circle too. 2 �Could these two intimations of the geometrical meaning of ‘segment’ hold true for the term as we use it in the graduate program? In calling its parts ‘segments,’ that is, could the intention have been to intimate that the graduate program is a homogeneous whole, cut arbitrarily into parts, each of which points back to the whole? I think the answer to these questions is ‘yes.’ Despite appearances, the graduate program here at St. John’s is a homogeneous whole – as is the undergraduate program, incidentally – and its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. To be convinced of this view, we need to look into, and try to see through, several other conventional terms that stand in our way. Chief among these are the names we give to the segments and to our classes. The names of our classes are easier to overcome, so let’s begin with them. I hope it will surprise no one here to learn that our seminars are not restricted to seminarians, nor are they literally seed-plots; nor do we bring in preceptors – that is, commanders or instructors – to teach our preceptorials; nor are we called tutors – that is, watchers or guardians – because our charges have not yet reached the age of legal majority. Despite their evocative names, our classes differ mainly in size, in the number of tutors and students in each. The activity of each, the pursuit through conversation of answers to fundamental questions, is the same; and even though in some tutorials the demonstration of mathematical propositions or the analysis of poetry is the chief technique, nothing in principle prevents a preceptorial or even a seminar from reading a text closely, or attending to a demonstration at the board. Even the composition of each segment out of a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial is not a matter of necessity – though it is, I hasten to add, a matter of strict policy. While there are practical reasons to entrust a smaller class with the tasks of demonstration in the Mathematics & Natural Science tutorial, and analysis in the Literature 3 �tutorial, it is not as clear that the readings of the Politics & Society, Philosophy & Theology, or History tutorials could not be assigned to a seminar, nor that the seminar readings from these segments would be ill-suited to a tutorial. There is nothing about Plato’s Republic, for example, that suits it to be discussed by twenty people, nor about Hobbes’s Leviathan that suits it to sixteen. We can even make much the same claim about preceptorials: that all of our seminar and tutorial books are worthy of the intense scrutiny of a preceptorial, and that only practical considerations should bar us from including our preceptorial books in the seminar and tutorial reading lists. The reason why our segments do in fact consist of a seminar, a tutorial, and a preceptorial seems mostly to have to do with our judgment that each segment should consist of a required and an elective component: the elective component is the preceptorial, while the required component is shared between the seminar and the tutorial, in various ways, depending on the segment. Sometimes the ampersand marks the division of labor: in the Philosophy & Theology segment we have a largely-philosophy tutorial and a largely-theology seminar; in the Mathematics & Natural Science segment it is the tutorial that takes mathematics, and the seminar natural science. But sometimes this is not the case. If there really is such a thing as society, it is not clear whether the Politics & Society seminar or tutorial treats it more fully. Where there is no ampersand in the segment title, by contrast, the division of labor between the seminar and tutorial is that the seminar in some fashion takes the ancients and the tutorial the moderns. The Literature seminar is unapologetically Hellenic, while the tutorial handles the rest of literature. The History seminar reaches as late as Gibbon among its authors, but as late as the fall of the Roman Empire among its subjects; the tutorial picks up with Augustine and the rise of Christianity. 4 �I hope this is enough to convince you that the different names we give to our classes – seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial – are no barrier to understanding the graduate program as homogeneous. The names we give to our segments, on the other hand, present more of a challenge. Everywhere we look in higher education today, we see these names and similar ones written above the majors and departments: Philosophy, Theology, Political Science, Sociology, Mathematics, Physics, Literature, and History. But we should not infer from our adoption of such titles for our segments that we agree with the thinking that leads to majors and departments. Elsewhere, the title of a major often amounts to a compressed, predetermined answer to a series of predetermined questions. It tells students what they will be studying, and sometimes even what kind of profession they will have when they are done. It asserts the existence of the kinds of beings that the discipline studies, that they are somehow knowable, and that they are worth knowing. Perhaps most importantly, it reassures students about what they will be doing when they study: physics majors can evade essays, and philosophy majors escape problem sets. For us, by contrast, the titles of our segments should stand as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder that is the opposite of reassuring. Is there such a thing as a life lived under the sole guidance of reason, or under the authority of revelation – and ought we to think that one or the other of these lives can make us happy? Is there a distinct realm of politics, or does it always reduce to philosophy or to theology? Are there beings that are characteristically knowable, and if so, what sort of beings are they? Are the natural beings among these beings, and so knowable as well? Is there a place for poetry or music in a happy life, and do they provide something that reason and revelation cannot? Is there such a thing as history, does it involve novelty or progress, and will it end? We must not take these titles that we use merely to name the segments – numbering them would also have been confusing – as 5 �grounds for thinking that we know in advance what sort of questions and answers can be asked and given in our classes, and hence that we know in advance the limits of what we might learn. Now to say that each of our segment titles points to a fundamental question is not yet to show that the graduate program is homogeneous, nor that it is a whole. Could there not be a series of fundamental questions, perhaps even an infinite series, each of which has nothing to do with the other, and so each of which indicates and demarcates its own field of inquiry? I can almost imagine such a series; but as soon as I require that these questions have nothing to do with one another, they cease to be meaningful to me as questions. Our experience in preceptorial, the experience that some of you will soon have for the first time, gives good guidance here. Most of the preceptorials offered this term count toward all three of the term’s segments: Philosophy & Theology, Politics & Society, and History. And yet very few of the fundamental and interesting questions asked in these preceptorials will present themselves exclusively as philosophical, theological, political, or historical questions. It will occur neither to students nor to tutors, while pursuing these questions, that there are certain directions the conversation cannot take because a disciplinary boundary would be crossed. And it will not be evident which segment each student is taking, from the tendency of his or her remarks to reside in one discipline or another. To the contrary: while the interesting and fundamental questions we pursue in our classes can originate in the concerns of many, perhaps infinitely many, disciplines, as interesting they all indicate a relation between the thing asked about and us, the questioners and answerers; and as fundamental they all point to the central questions of what we are as questioning and answering beings, and how we should live. So it is precisely the interesting character of the questions indicated by our segment titles, and pursued in our classes, that indicates the wholeness of the Program in both its undergraduate and graduate expressions – and 6 �in doing so, indicates the problematic and aspirational wholeness of the human being. And similarly it is precisely the fundamental character of these questions that indicates the problem that we are, the human problem that constitutes the Program’s homogeneity. What, then, is a segment? For us, here in the Graduate Institute, a segment is three classes in which we read great books, gathered under a title which is meant to provoke interesting and fundamental questions, all of which point back to the first and characteristic question for a human being: ‘how should I live?’ I do not mean by this conclusion to deny that certain questions are more likely to be pursued in the classes of one segment than in those of another; in the Mathematics and Natural Science tutorial, for example, we would be remiss if we did not discuss Euclid’s definition of a straight line, whereas this definition is not a frequent topic of conversation in the Literature seminar. But I do mean to insist that our segment titles, and the segments themselves, ought not to be taken as signs of deep differences, natural kinds, among the books that we read and the questions that we ask. The St. John’s program is a whole, not a heap. But why this insistence? Why ask ‘what is a segment?’ Just as graduate students have a special practical need for a segmented program, since the pace and order of their studies are not as regular as those of undergraduates, they also run special risks once the segments have names, as ours do. For some of you may already have studied, may have degrees in, may even have advanced degrees in disciplines that share the names of our segments. I insist on the questionableness of these names in part to point out that no matter your previous education, you haven’t done this before. Our task in our classes is to make the most familiar books and authors unfamiliar and newly challenging. I also insist on the questionableness of our segments’ names to discourage the practice of worrying about which segments to take, and in which order. While 7 �it is respectable to have reasons to want to read particular books by particular authors, we should keep in mind that what we find in the pages of every great book is human being, and human being more wonderful, and less reassuring, than we can imagine. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Shakespeare’s Roman plays: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. We will read Titus Andronicus during the summer term. This term, the group will meet on Thursday afternoons, from 3:30 to 5:30, in the Hartle Room, beginning on January 19th. Watch your email accounts for a schedule of readings. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. The spring 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland January 4, 2012 Delivered January 9, 2012 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2012 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-01-09 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2012_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Segment?" Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/21728bc8e5804ac1e4ba9f33090e4138.pdf 3422446ae400052799a58cfa00cf3282 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2013 On Liberal Education as a Commodity “Education is the only commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.” I don’t know how this maxim strikes you, but I remember vividly how it struck me, as a young undergraduate sitting in an introductory economics lecture: with the shocking combination of strangeness and rightness that is the sign of a new truth. The circumstances which led my professor to pronounce this maxim have faded from my memory: perhaps he was peeved that his lecture was ill-attended, or perhaps he was dismayed at his students’ poor performance on a recent exam. But the force of the maxim has not faded for me, over the intervening quarter-century. It seemed then, and it still seems now, to capture almost perfectly the puzzling combination on the part of most human beings of an eagerness to be educated, and an unwillingness to do what is needed to become educated. Hence, “education is the only commodity that people are willing to pay for and not receive.” Reflecting on my professor’s maxim from the perspective of the graduate and undergraduate Programs at St. John’s, it’s easy to say that things here are different. And justice demands that we acknowledge that, with respect to this maxim, things indeed are different at the College. We have no ‘ten-minute rule,’ for example – no mythical rule that claims to determine how long students are obliged to wait after the beginning of a class for a late professor to arrive, before they are within their rights to disperse. To the contrary, one of the most concrete implications of our saying that the great books, not the tutors, are the teachers here at the College is that our classes begin on time, whether the tutor is present or not. The tutors assist students 1 �with their learning, and they witness this learning; but their presence is neither necessary nor sufficient for learning to take place. And this is as it should be: for ‘ten-minute rules’ and similar legalistic evasions are fundamentally thoughtless. From the perspective of learning, either what a professor has to say is likely to be helpful, or it is not. If the former, then one should be willing to wait as long as is reasonable, and surely longer than ten minutes; if the latter, then why wait that long – indeed, why come to class at all? So we should acknowledge that students at St. John’s, and perhaps especially graduate students at the College, become members of this community of learning because they are willing to do what is necessary to learn, and so to receive the education that they have paid for. But justice also demands that we press beyond this moment of self-congratulation, to see as clearly as we can how we relate to our education, as graduate students and as tutors here at St. John’s. Can we really say – speaking as students, for example – that we have never chosen to cut a class, nor wished that we could do so, for the sake of some other activity that, if pressed, we would acknowledge has less likelihood of educating us? Can we really say that we have never forgone the opportunity to work on an essay for the sake of some apparently more pressing or pleasant activity, in the vague hope that there will be time enough to write the essay later? Or, speculating more cautiously, from the perspective of a tutor, isn’t learning at St. John’s sometimes like being forced to consume a delicious meal at gunpoint? Sure, we all love to read Plato, or Aristotle, or Rousseau, or Nietzsche – but must we do so right now? And must we rush to be finished by 7:15, and ready with our opening question? Certainly some of the feeling of constraint that comes with education is due to our membership in a community of learning, with all the compromise and limitation that entails. But could there be something about learning 2 �itself, about education itself, that makes perhaps even the most willing and self-selecting among us seek to evade its demands? My professor’s maxim is helpful here, by framing its insight in the language of economics. It begins, “Education is the only commodity…,” and it acquires its force with the concluding image of a thoughtless consumer who pays for this commodity but neglects to receive it. But is education a commodity? My economics textbook from that same introductory class defines a commodity as “any item of use to a consumer or producer.” And though it is fashionable, especially in our circles, to say that a liberal education above all is not useful in this way – it is, rather, for its own sake – this seems to me to go too far. None of us would be here if we suspected that becoming liberally educated would make no difference to our lives, or that it would change them for the worse. Each of us hopes that education will change us for the better; this is its use. For this reason, education is a commodity: it is an item that both producer and consumer agree is of use, and that they try to price based on their mutual sense of its usefulness. But education differs from other commodities in one crucial respect: it is the only commodity about which its producer and its consumer necessarily disagree about what the commodity itself is. The reason for this disagreement is straightforward. To desire education, one must lack it, and know that one lacks it. But to lack education means to be ignorant to some extent of what it means to be educated – which also means to have opinions about education that are to some extent mistaken. Conversely, to provide education one must be educated, and know what it means to be educated. Therefore there is a necessary misunderstanding between those who would ‘produce’ education and those who would ‘consume’ it, as to exactly what is being produced and consumed. Now economists are familiar with versions of this misunderstanding that arise by accident with other commodities. Consumers might be unaware of the supply of a 3 �commodity, or of the demand for it in neighboring markets, and so they might end up paying a price that is too high or too low. Such misunderstandings are inefficiencies in the operation of the market that should be removed by better communication. But only in the case of education, I would submit – and especially the most comprehensive kind of education, liberal education – is it impossible to remove such misunderstandings in advance, because the understanding of the commodity is the commodity. This is what makes it possible for the hapless student in my professor’s maxim to pay for an education that he does not receive. The student pays for an education that he wrongly understands in terms of grades and a degree, and he fails to receive the education that his professor rightly understands in terms of the more comprehensive insight that comes only with long labor. I hope it is by now clear that the puzzle that I raised with my professor’s maxim, and pursued using the language of economics, is really the same puzzle about learning that arises in Plato’s dialogue Meno. In perhaps the most famous of his many attempts to evade the labors Socrates is trying to impose on him, Meno – the ‘poster child’ for those who pay for their education but fail to receive it – makes the following claim: it makes no sense to labor to learn what one does not know. Either one knows a thing fully, Meno reasons, in which case there is no need to learn it; or one does not know a thing at all, in which case there is no way to learn it. For how would you begin to learn, let alone finish learning, something of which you are utterly ignorant? Socrates’ solution to Meno’s evasive puzzle is to insist that there is a condition other than either knowing or not knowing: a mixed condition in which we have opinions about the things that are, some of which are true, and some false. This mixed condition is the human condition, according to Socrates: no human being ever finds himself on either horn of Meno’s dilemma, 4 �either knowing something fully, or being utterly ignorant of it. And as the dialogue continues, Socrates is able to explain on the basis of this mixed condition how it is that human beings learn: by juxtaposing our opinions with one another and with the things in the world, we first come to know in a determinate way what it is that we do not know, and then – often with the help of a teacher – we learn these things, to the extent that human beings can know them. Socrates’ name for this human kind of learning is ‘recollection.’ What I have said so far about the Socratic doctrine of recollection in the Meno is commonplace, and overlooks several interesting details. But there is a less commonplace connection between the doctrine of recollection and another famous Socratic doctrine, advanced in the Republic: the doctrine of the well-born falsehood, or the noble lie. Socrates introduces this falsehood into his conversation about the best regime because he needs it, to give all the citizens of the regime – or failing that, at all the citizens but the rulers – a natural attachment to their city and to the land on which it is built, as well as a pious attachment to the city’s caste system. Now the language of the falsehood is language that Socrates earlier calls tragic, and associates with the style of Gorgias. (Interestingly, it is also language for which Socrates’ interlocutor at the time, Glaucon, has no taste.) It replaces things that are simple and knowable with things that are complex and mysterious: the rearing and education of the citizens, for example, become their fashioning beneath the earth, and the discernment by the rulers of the virtues of the citizens becomes their discernment of metals placed within the citizens by a god. These replacements make the falsehood persuasive, and the attachment of the citizens to their regime more firm. But in the Meno, Meno himself is said to be a lover of tragic language, which is associated there too with Gorgias. Meno also prefers the complex and mysterious to the simple and knowable: a definition of color, for example, as “an emanation of shapes commensurate with sight and hence 5 �subject to perception,” rather than a definition of shape as “that which alone of the beings happens always to accompany color.” And in that dialogue, Socrates also comes up with a wellborn falsehood, one that makes use of Meno’s preferred, tragic language to describe our mixed human condition, and to claim on the basis of this condition that learning is possible. I take this connection between the falsehoods of the Republic and the Meno – their common use of tragic language – to indicate the following. First, where important matters are concerned, we are all to some degree resistant to learning. Our resistance comes from our attachment to opinions that make us feel that we know more than we do. Learning always feels to us at first like losing something; and losing something hurts. This pain marks the distance between the learner and the teacher, and explains why they necessarily misunderstand one another. But second, and more hopefully, wise teachers can use the very source of our resistance to learning – our faith that we already know what is most important for us to know – to encourage us to endure the pain of learning, and to face this pain again and again. One consequence of these claims is that our teachers and administrators should not be ashamed to speak of a liberal arts education as a commodity. Not only is this required in order to be understood in our commercial society, in which as many things as possible have their price; it is also recommended as a way of encouraging students to learn. There is something tragic in the claims that a liberal arts education will produce skills in speaking, writing and thinking; or that it will prepare students for the workplace of the future; or that it will guarantee a lucrative career; or that it will produce better citizens of a democracy; or that it will make students happy – something tragic, and so something false. But these are well-born falsehoods: they are false only because they are partial, they resemble the truth, and they do more good than harm. 6 �Lastly, the members of our community should not be ashamed to speak in this way because this is how the great books have always spoken to their readers: by knowing how to speak and how to keep silent when they ought; by knowing just what to say. In his greatest work, Emile, about the education of an imaginary child, Rousseau tells a beautiful story in this vein about one such great book: Plutarch’s Lives. A young boy who has just read the “Life of Alexander” is made by his foolish teacher to babble at a dinner party about the episode in which Alexander dares to drink a potion given him by his friend Philip – despite having just received intelligence that Philip means to poison him. This intelligence turns out to be false, and Alexander lives; but the guests at the party disagree about whether Alexander’s action is courageous, or foolhardy. “After the dinner,” Rousseau writes, suspecting, on the basis of several bits of evidence, that my young doctor had understood nothing at all of the story he had told so well, I took him by the hand and went for a turn in the park with him. Having questioned him at my ease, I found that more than anyone he admired Alexander’s much-vaunted courage. But do you know in what he found this courage to consist? Solely in having swallowed at a single gulp a bad-tasting potion, without hesitation, without the least sign of repugnance. The poor child, who has been made to take medicine not two weeks before, and who had taken it only after a mighty effort, still had its aftertaste in his mouth. Death and poisoning stood in his mind only for disagreeable sensations; and he did not conceive, for his part, of any other poison than [medicine]. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the hero’s firmness had made a great impression on the boy’s young heart, and that, at the next medicine he would have to swallow, he had resolved to be an Alexander. Without going into clarifications which were evidently out of his reach, I confirmed him in these laudable dispositions. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term. Two will meet on Monday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on January 14th: one on Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and one on three of Shakespeare’s plays: All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. A third group, on the French language, will meet on Mondays from 3:30 to 5:00, but beginning on January 21st. A group will meet on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 5:00, beginning on January 10th, to read 7 �the last part of Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, and the whole of Dawn. And a group will meet on Friday afternoons from 4:00 to 6:00, beginning on January 18th, to read Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures. Schedules for these groups will be circulated by email. Also, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to tutorial. Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. The spring 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 4 January 2013 Delivered 7 January 2013 Note Those who would like to see just how many interesting details I have overlooked should consider Meno 75b-77b and 80d-81e in comparison with Republic 413a-415d. The story about Alexander taking his medicine can be found near the middle of Book Two of Emile. 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2013 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-01-07 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2013_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On Liberal Education as a Commodity" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d7a436da44840d74aefb8bce0a66dae6.pdf 4d4a0f08bdcde0e877ae64d19889a937 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2014 On the History Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining the readings of the History segment. The subject of this convocation address – the third of five, each treating one of the segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names that determine the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each segment. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘History’? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that the threads I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are 1 �present in the segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘History’? Those of you who recall my procedure in my last two convocation addresses will be relieved to see that this time, our segment title contains no ampersand, and so makes no questionable claim that two things are properly understood as one. But the required portion of the history segment is still divided into a seminar and a tutorial; so we can wonder about the principle of this division. In the History seminar, we read the Books of Samuel and Kings from the Hebrew Scriptures, Herodotus’ Histories, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, several of Plutarch’s Lives, Tacitus’ Annals, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; in the tutorial we read parts of Augustine’s City of God, Vico’s New Science, Kant’s Idea for a Universal History and Contest of Faculties, Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Marx’s German Ideology, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life by Nietzsche, Husserl’s Vienna Lecture, and Heidegger’s Age of the World Picture. Were it not for the puzzling presence of the interloper Gibbon, who wrote in the eighteenth century CE, around the same time as Kant, we could conclude that the division between the seminar and the tutorial, like the organization of many classes in our graduate and undergraduate programs, is chronological by author. But Gibbon’s membership among the History seminar authors suggests that the division between seminar and tutorial is actually chronological by subject – by time period depicted historically. In Samuel and Kings we read of events that are to have happened before the tenth century BCE, and the seminar readings extend from there to the portions of Gibbon that we read, which cover events in the first and second century CE. The tutorial readings pick up with Augustine, who wrote in the fifth century CE, and run through to Heidegger’s attempt to characterize the historical spirit of the twentieth century. 2 �There’s something to this interpretation of the division between seminar and tutorial, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. For as soon as we turn to examine the subjects of the tutorial authors, we discover that they don’t concern themselves with historical events later than those treated by the seminar authors, but with all historical events, with history as a whole. To steal some terms from the titles of their respective works, the seminar authors write Inquiries into particular events – the Greek word ἱστορία, whence we get the word history, means inquiry – whereas the tutorial authors write Universal Histories, or Philosophies of History. The beginnings of the first readings in each class exemplify this difference. I Samuel begins simply, artlessly, in the middle of things: “And there was a man…” [I Samuel 1:1]. The City of God, by contrast, begins: Most glorious is the City of God: whether in this passing age, where she dwells by faith as a pilgrim among the ungodly, or in the security of that eternal home which she now patiently awaits until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment’, but which she will then possess perfectly, in final victory and perfect peace [Book 1, Preface]. The former work begins with a particular, a man; the latter by looking back to the whole passing age and forward to the perfect end of eternity. Perhaps we have discovered an ampersand in our segment title after all, and this difference between the seminar and tutorial readings ought to lead us to call the segment ‘Inquiry & Universal History,’ or just ‘History & History.’ To get a better sense of the causes and extent of this difference, let’s let more of the History segment authors speak for themselves. Here’s how Herodotus begins his book: Here is the showing-forth of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that neither what human beings have done might disappear in time, nor the deeds great and admirable, partly shown forth by the Greeks and partly by the barbarians, might be without fame: his inquiry shows forth both other things and through what cause they warred against one another [Book I, 1]. Herodotus inquires into the deeds of human beings, and in particular into the great and admirable deeds of Greeks and barbarians, for the sake of memory and fame, and for the sake of knowledge 3 �of causes. The deeds in question – which are chiefly deeds done in war – are worthy of memory and fame, and knowledge of their causes is worth possessing, because they are great and admirable, with a greatness not solely Greek, nor barbarian, but human. Likewise, Thucydides begins thus: Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed, this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately precede the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or in other matters [I.1.1-3]. Thucydides also justifies his inquiry by the human greatness to be discovered in the event, another war, into which he inquires. This view, that history means inquiry into particular events that disclose a lasting human greatness, and so are worth remembering, runs through the readings of the History seminar. Plutarch modifies it in his “Life of Alexander,” but only to insist that lasting human greatness is not necessarily seen only in war: “For it is not histories that I am writing,” he says, “but lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities” [I.1]. And Tacitus modifies this view in his Annals, but only to insist that partisan passions distort inquiries into lasting human greatness, which must be dispassionate to be worthy of memory: The Roman people of old, however, had their successes and adversities recalled by brilliant writers; and to tell of Augustus’ times there was no dearth of deserving talents, until they were deterred by swelling sycophancy. The affairs of 4 �Tiberius and Gaius, as of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through dread while the men themselves flourished, and composed with hatred fresh after their fall. Hence my plan is the transmission of a mere few things about Augustus and of his final period, then of Tiberius’ principate and the remainder – without anger and partiality, any reasons for which I keep at a distance [I.1.2]. In the History seminar it is only with Gibbon, writing sixteen hundred years after Tacitus, but about the same events, that a deep challenge to this view of history first comes to light. In Chapter XV of the first volume of Decline and Fall, our last seminar reading, Gibbon turns to “a candid but rational inquiry into the progress of Christianity,” which he holds to be an essential part of the history of the Roman Empire. But here Gibbon confronts a problem. The Tacitean law of dispassion – what Gibbon calls “the great law of impartiality” – requires the historian to confess the imperfections of the believers in the Christian revelation; but faith in its divine origin requires the historian to profess the perfection of this revelation. “Our curiosity,” Gibbon writes, is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favorable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church [487-488]? According to Gibbon, then, the belief in divine providence poses a deep challenge to the view that history is an inquiry into the natural causes of lasting human greatness. This challenge is so deep that Gibbon is forced to invent a distinction between the first, divine causes of the growth of Christianity, and the secondary, human causes of this growth. The historian, as distinguished from the theologian, is restricted to the study of these secondary causes. But we might wonder, given the extent of divine power, whether these secondary causes are in fact necessary, and whether, if they are unnecessary, they are in fact causes. 5 �This view of history, as the record of divine providence, extends throughout the readings of the History tutorial, and distinguishes these readings from those of the seminar. It is found in explicitly religious form in Augustine, who writes, the City of God of which we speak is that to which the Scriptures bear witness: the Scriptures which, excelling all the writings of all the nations in their divine authority, have brought under their sway every kind of human genius, not by a chance motion of the soul, but clearly by the supreme disposition of providence [XI.1]; and it is found in more secular forms in the works we read by Vico, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Vico envisions a “new Science [that] must therefore be a demonstration, so to speak, of what providence has wrought in human history” [section 342], while Kant writes in his Idea for a Universal History, “the history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature” to perfect the natural capacities of mankind [Eighth Proposition], so that history thus understood is a “justification of nature – or rather perhaps of providence” [Ninth Proposition]. For his part, Hegel grandly offers a Philosophy of History that is guided by “the simple conception… that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process” [9] – a conception that consorts with the belief that “a Providence (that of God) presides over the events of the World” [13]. And Marx sees history as a necessary dialectic of material conditions, ending in a heaven on earth where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic [53]. You may already have noticed, even from these brief indications, that a strange note has crept in to these developments of the view that history is the record of divine providence. Since this view of history is based on the Christian scriptures, and these scriptures give an account of 6 �the world from its beginning in God’s creation to its end in God’s kingdom, the histories animated by this view are necessarily universal as well as providential. Accordingly, every tutorial author that we have so far mentioned takes as his subject human history as a whole. Moreover, since the Christian scriptures tell the story of the fall of man and promise his eventual redemption from sin, these universal histories are necessarily progressive: each points to an image of some perfect human end, whether in this world or in the next. But to the extent that these universal providential histories are also held to be rational, strange conclusions result. Vico, for example, struggles to preserve the eternal necessity of his science in the face of the historical contingency of providence. “Since [human] institutions have been established by divine providence,” he writes, “the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now be, and will have to be such as our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case” [section 348]. In the Contest of Faculties, Kant points to the French Revolution as evidence that the human race will enjoy continual progress [section 7]. Hegel goes so far as to say that history teaches that “the real world is as it ought to be” [36], while Marx makes human nature depend on the material conditions that determine production [42]. In short, the attempt to transform the mysterious operation of providence into a rational process, visible in history, compels the universal historian to equate what is at each moment with what is best at that moment, and so to deny that there is such a thing as lasting human greatness, into which we can inquire. Of our tutorial authors, Friedrich Nietzsche is the first to call into question the aspirations of universal history, by subordinating history and its scientific truths to the standard of life. Husserl and Heidegger follow Nietzsche in this, each in his own way. But I shall pass over how these thinkers accomplish this, so that my convocation address not be as long as human history 7 �itself. I will only say that, in subordinating history to another standard – whether it be life, or the infinite task of philosophy, or the disclosure of being – it is by no means clear that these thinkers return to the ancient view of history as an inquiry into natural events that disclose a lasting human greatness. But from this conclusion to the tutorial readings, at least one of the wonderful questions raised by the history segment should be clear. Is history an inquiry into lasting human greatness, or is it the record of a necessary progress that denies the possibility of such greatness? Since the second of these alternatives especially claims the name ‘History’ for itself, this wonderful question could also be put thus: is there such a thing as ‘History’? Lastly, it should also be clear, from everything that is at stake in this question, why, of all the segments in the graduate program, Graduate Institute students are prohibited from taking the History segment first. By basing our program almost entirely on the reading and discussion of great books, we depend, perhaps more than members of any other community of learning, on the belief that there is such a thing as lasting human greatness. To conclude, let me announce that there will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: on Plato’s Republic, on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, on Arabic poetry, on Greek tragedy, and on Richard Feynman’s Quantum Electrodynamics. Schedules and meeting places for all five of these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The spring 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 14 December 2013 Delivered 6 January 2014 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2014 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-01-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2014_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the History Segment" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/3ca114bffc2ee795a3834076ee9bc9c9.pdf 8bae7618cb3712fb8b020decca52ce6a PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2015 What Is a Tutor? (Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution) Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. For the past eleven terms, in just as many convocation addresses, I have tried to shed light on various aspects of the graduate program here at St. John’s. But in this, my twelfth and final address as Associate Dean for the Graduate Program, I mean to shine the light of inquiry closer to home – at the risk of doing what Coriolanus refused to do, and displaying my wounds. I mean to ask: what is a tutor? This question may seem perverse. How can someone who professes himself a tutor ask, in public no less, what a tutor is? To this I reply: there is no guarantee that the names we use all the time are the correct ones. In the Theaetetus, Plato’s Socrates claims that “those who spend their lives in philosophy” are almost ignorant of whether their neighbors are human beings. This should remind us that we too run the risk of using the wrong words for the things we encounter in the world. Consider the word ‘tutor.’ While nowadays it takes some digging in the College’s website to verify the fact, here at St. John’s, faculty members are indeed called ‘tutors,’ in order to distinguish them from professors. On the Annapolis page for prospective faculty, we find this claim: “We use the title ‘tutor’ to highlight that learning is an ongoing, cooperative enterprise in which some are at different stages [from] others.” Professors, we are led to infer, downplay or even deny – by their reliance on lectures – the ongoing, cooperative, and individual character of learning. 1 �We could be forgiven for further inferring that, by calling themselves ‘tutors,’ the faculty at St. John’s means to indicate not just their difference from professors, but their superiority to them. Any such pretensions are quickly punctured, however, by none other than the Oxford English Dictionary. As it archly informs us, the particularly American meaning of ‘tutor’ is “a teacher subordinate to a professor” [my emphasis]. But it also gives us the etymology of the word, which gets us off to a helpful start. ‘Tutor’ comes from the Latin verb tueri, which means ‘to watch’ – and so, derivatively, ‘to take care of,’ ‘guard,’ or ‘protect.’ A tutor in the original sense protected a child and his estate in the absence of his father. But this purely defensive sense of the word has become obsolete. In its modern meaning, the prophylactic sense is combined with a pedagogical sense. Nowadays, a tutor is “one employed in the supervision and instruction of a youth in a private household.” Why this pedagogical addition to the work of a tutor? It must have come from the sense that for the young, protection and supervision are not enough. No lesser a defender of the sufficiency of human nature – or in his formula, “the natural goodness of man” – than Jean-Jacques Rousseau is compelled to acknowledge, in his educational treatise Emile, that nature can at most be entrusted with one-half, or perhaps only one-third, of the education of a human being who is meant to live in society. Since even the best-guarded young can turn out badly, no one should employ a supervisor who is not also an instructor, who in addition to protecting the young from malign external influences, takes care to expose them to benign ones. To be employed, then, a tutor must also be an instructor, which is to say, a teacher. Until so-called competency-based education rules the land, no student will receive a college degree for having been left to herself for four years, provided only that she has been adequately supervised and protected. Professing via lectures is not required, nor perhaps even recommended, but teaching and learning are necessary. So to be a tutor in this modern sense, one must teach. 2 �Here, then, is a first answer to our guiding question: a tutor is a teacher. How satisfying is this answer? To test it, let’s turn to one of the books we read in the Philosophy & Theology tutorial: Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the first section of the fourth part of that book, a part titled “Epigrams and Interludes,” we find this warning: “Whoever is a teacher from the ground up, takes all things in earnest only in relation to his students – even his own self.” To want to teach is to want another human being to learn, which, absent an omnipotent speech, is to want to accommodate oneself to the conditions of another human being’s learning. To want to accommodate oneself wholly in this way, even in one’s own ground – to be willing to say anything, so long as it produces a change in the listener – is to take one’s own self seriously only in relation to one’s students. It is, in other words, to place a higher value on the one who does not know than on the one who knows: to judge that the student’s unknown genius has a higher value than the teacher’s known teaching. The limit of this willingness to bend oneself into whatever shape the student needs, this faith that each student has an unknown, and perhaps unknowable genius, is an education that stresses form rather than content, and that judges, not what a student has learned, but only that she has learned – which is to say, changed. What is worse, this subordination involves the thoroughgoing teacher in a contradiction, since one has a right to teach only if knowing is more valuable than not knowing. So Nietzsche hints that we cannot be wholly satisfied with the thought that a tutor is simply a teacher. But he has much more to say on the question. While this playful epigram is his first mention of teachers [Lehrer] in Beyond Good and Evil, and his only substantial one, he devotes the whole of Part Six of the book to those who, literally, have been taught: “We Scholars [Wir Gelehrten].” Though as a former philologist Nietzsche identifies himself as a scholar, experience has given him access to a higher ideal than the scholarly, and to a ground from which to criticize scholars, those who are wholly what they have been taught. Objectivity is the scholarly ideal, 3 �Nietzsche writes, and to the extent that a scholar achieves this ideal he becomes a precious instrument, like a mirror: he lives to submit before everything that wants to be known, without any other desire than for that which knowing, “mirroring,” gives, – he waits, until something comes, and then spreads himself delicately out, so that even light footsteps and the slipping over of ghostly beings not be lost on his surface and skin. In the light of his ideal the scholar squints at the subjective aspects of his person; he has time for the objects of his study, but none for himself, and he demands of others the same submission. He is industrious and patient, measured and even in his capacities and needs, dependent on the approval of others, familiar, egalitarian, mediocre, and envious. As a thoroughgoing learner, he is the ideal match for the thoroughgoing teacher. Like a mirror, his face remains empty until something like a book – any book – is put in front of it. Nietzsche grants that scholars have very serious reasons for pursuing this objective ideal. The extent of human knowledge is vast and growing, all the more so now than in Nietzsche’s day. To want to learn everything is to risk exhaustion; to want to learn only some things, before one knows everything, is to risk either dilettantism or an arbitrary, ignorant choice. None of us wants to be deceived in the things that are most important to us to know; and this intellectual conscience demands that if we learn anything, we should learn it well. So we succumb to specialization, for the sake of our self-respect, and the respect of others. The ideal of objectivity recasts this necessity as a virtue, by dignifying our careful submission before anything that wants to be known, our careful cultivation of our scholarly patch of grass. But the price of the objective ideal is high, for we scholars become skeptical and envious of everything that is not objective: of everything that can judge with a clear conscience for personal, subjective reasons. Indeed, we must be skeptical of philosophy in particular, wherever we detect that it is not objective – that is, not scholarly. So through a combination of intellectual conscience and exhaustion, we scholars end by putting ourselves in the place of philosophers. Those who are skeptical about the possibility of judgment 4 �displace those responsible for making the most comprehensive judgments. This, in Nietzsche’s account in Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, is the consequence for students of learning from those who are teachers from the ground up. Wholly selfless teachers produce students wholly lacking in selves. It’s time for a brief summary: a step backward for the sake of a leap forward. A tutor cannot simply be a guardian, since this presumes that the young need nothing but protection to turn out well. But a tutor cannot simply be a teacher, either, since wholehearted teachers educate young who are nothing for themselves. What meaning of ‘tutor’ remains, on which we can wholeheartedly pride ourselves? I once overheard a colleague of mine say something on this score that I find helpful: “a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical.” Lest I be suspected of just now having taken my leap too far into the subjective and personal, let me explain what I take this colleague to mean. When times are good, and circumstances ordinary, each faculty member at St. John’s College receives a sabbatical every seventh year of her tenure. We say that this respite from teaching is for the sake of study, rest, and renewal of spirit, in anticipation of future teaching. But we require from tutors neither a plan for a proposed sabbatical, detailing the studies to be pursued and the rest to be taken, nor a report on a completed sabbatical. We do not test the spirits of our returning tutors, to see whether they truly have been renewed. All that we require of a tutor returning from sabbatical is that she resume teaching, for at least two more years. Now a practice designed and described in this way, as a matter of instruction and not of compensation, rests on two presuppositions. First, it presupposes that a tutor’s teaching will be benefited by study that is not dictated by teaching. It acknowledges that, however much we may learn while we teach, the learning that is incidental to teaching is not enough – even from the perspective of the demands of teaching. Second, and more importantly in my view, by requiring neither a plan nor a report for a 5 �sabbatical, our practice acknowledges that the tutor, and not the College, is the best judge of what counts as study, rest, and renewal of spirit – and that allowing tutors to exercise this judgment will benefit their teaching. Our practice acknowledges that tutors are not teachers from the ground up; we could say, with a wink at our modern arithmomania, that they are six parts teachers, and one part something else. But this one part is the important part, for it is the ground of the rest. And here is where the aptness of my colleague’s dictum becomes clear. A tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical, because a tutor, in the precise sense, is someone who can be trusted to make independent judgments about the ground of her teaching. A tutor is someone whose own work is the work of the College, not because she pursues it always with an eye to the needs of the College, but because she knows that the activity of her own intellect and imagination is the source of the life in her teaching. The College depends on such tutors to constitute its community of learning – to make it more than a community of teaching. No array of scholarly specialists, however wisely selected, can take their place. To add some detail to this vision of what a tutor is, we can turn back to Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, to the ideal that Nietzsche opposes to the scholarly. “In the face of a world of ‘modern ideas,’ which would banish everybody into a nook and ‘specialty,’” Nietzsche writes – and we should interject here that this is our world, to an even greater degree than it was Nietzsche’s – a philosopher – supposing that today there could be philosophers – would be compelled to place the greatness of the human being, the concept of ‘greatness,’ precisely in his comprehensiveness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in manifoldness. He would even determine worth and rank from this, how much and how many things one could bear and take upon oneself, how far one could stretch his responsibility. Let’s heed Nietzsche’s warning that what a philosopher is cannot be taught [nicht zu lehren], and give the anti-scholarly ideal a more modest name, one more suited to saying what a tutor is. Let’s call this the comprehensive ideal. Far from being scholarly mirrors who submit themselves before every thought that comes along, who wish to do nothing more than understand each author as 6 �he understood himself, who are Platonists because it is Monday afternoon, and monotheists because it is Monday night, devotees of the comprehensive ideal seek to place everything they comprehend into an ordered whole in which they can live. They are skeptics, not in the sense that they try to bend every exclamation point into a question mark, but in the sense that they test every thought to see whether it is solid and shapely enough to be of use. They are courageous, deft, and methodical critics, not in order to anatomize every idea they touch, but in order to be able, when called on, to stand alone and give an account of themselves, and of the world they are trying to be. Seen in the light of the comprehensive ideal, it is clear why a tutor is someone who deserves a sabbatical. A sabbatical is the appropriate conclusion to the creation of a world. But what can a tutor striving for the comprehensive ideal be for her students? At the root of the German word for teacher, Lehrer, is the word Lehre, or ‘instruction’ – a word closely related to Lehr, or ‘model.’ We see something similar in the etymology of ‘to teach,’ which can be traced back to the Greek word δείκνυµι, meaning ‘to show.’ We are accustomed to say here at the College that tutors are model learners, but we should remember that they are also models of having learned, of living with learning. Tutors who aspire to the comprehensive ideal model this ideal for their students, and show them that it can be lived. They show them that their learning is neither for its own sake, in that morally humble but metaphysically proud phrase, nor for the sake of some job, family, institution, or community to which they must subordinate themselves, or into which they must fit. Rather, their learning is for the sake of the wholeness in manifoldness of the being that longs to comprehend a world – the wholeness in manifoldness that is the true end of liberal education. It is by protecting this possibility, in tutors, staff, and students alike, that our remedial community earns the right to be called a community of learning. It is through this wholeness in manifoldness of the human being, in the highest sense of the term, that our two programs of instruction, the graduate and the undergraduate, win the right to consider themselves wholes. And it 7 �is in pursuit of this wholeness in manifoldness that liberal education, our bookish, freeing, childlike education, becomes what it is: the consummation of practice and a courageous confrontation with what is most real… the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom that they do not desire… an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. There will be five Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: one on Homer’s Odyssey, one on Euclid’s Elements, one on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, one on Shakespeare’s Henry plays, and one on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Schedules and meeting places for these groups will be circulated by email soon. By way of conclusion, let me invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The spring 2015 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 5 January 2015 Note In my beginning, I have Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in mind, but also the beginning of section 204, in Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil. Socrates’ remark can be found at Theaetetus, 174B. For “the natural goodness of man,” see Rousseau’s note for philosophers in the Final Reply; the passage of Emile to which I refer is on page 38 of Bloom’s edition. Nietzsche’s epigram about the teacher from the ground up is section 63 of Beyond Good and Evil; the translation is my own. Part Six of that book had a strong influence on the whole argument of this address: I quote from sections 207 and 212, making my own translations there too; but the aspects of Nietzsche’s argument that I do not mention are more interesting. The final quotation is from my Summer 2012 convocation address, “What Is Liberal Education? Part I.” 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2015 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-01-05 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2015_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Spring 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is a Tutor? Or, On the Future of Our Educational Institution" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fe4ecd6ba0599f9e27cfab6711a225a9.pdf 48fc689af65338226f51e16ddceabb49 PDF Text Text St. John's College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2016 Emily Brooker Langston Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. In particular, welcome to all of you who are today becoming members of the Graduate Institute. In an attempt to connect these talks to life in the Graduate Institute, I try to make each a reflection on a text I read with students over the past semester – and so I found myself wondering what to say about the text we studied in my most recent preceptorial, Thomas Mann’s extraordinary Magic Mountain. It is a novel in the classic tradition of the bildungsroman - which is only to say a novel about education – so that would seem to make it a likely candidate for a convocation address. However, what intrigues me most about the novel is that it is also about time. And doesn’t it makes sense to consider time and education together? We all know that education, even in the most basic sense of training, takes time; and education in the more profound sense, the education that (as the motto of the college puts it) would make “free adults out of children,” continues through time and is never complete. Mann’s novel doesn’t simply draw our attention to time, however; it �confronts us with time as a mystery. The novel tells the story of Hans Castorp, a “perfectly ordinary young man” who goes to a sanatorium in the high Alps for a visit he intends to last for three weeks, and somehow stays for seven years. We are informed that it is a story which should be told in verbs of the “deepest past” – but “it does not actually owe its pastness to time.” (All quotes taken from the Vintage John E. Woods translation.) And what is time? Mann’s narrator explicitly and insistently raises the question. It is, (quote) “a secret – insubstantial and omnipotent. A prerequisite of the external world, a motion intermingled and fused with bodies existing and moving in space. But would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion, if there were no time?” At this point, you’ve probably started to wonder where this could be going. Has someone really raised the question “What is time” in a convocation address? Don’t worry, in the short time I have for this address, I am not going to try to answer it. I am only going to look at one particularly important definition of time, and at one powerful image from the novel, and attempt to make a few observations. My first observation is that asking questions about time – in time – causes one to interrogate one’s own speech. What do I mean, for example, when I speak of “the time I have for this talk?” If you ask me how long the talk is, I might respond - about 15 minutes. But of course the 15 minutes are not the talk. They are only some sort of measure of one quality of the talk. �Those who have taken the Mathematics and Natural Science segment (and I will confess, parenthetically, that one of my subsidiary goals in this talk is to leave those of you who might have some hesitation about signing up for a segment with that title intrigued about the questions we discuss there) or who have had some other opportunity to read Aristotle’s Physics may not be surprised by the famous definition of time to which I will now turn. Both Mann’s questions about the relationship between time and motion, and my observation relating time to measurement, echo ideas we find there. “Would there be no time if there were no motion? No motion, if there were no time?” asked Mann. Aristotle actually proposes a quite definite answer to Mann’s question about the relationship between time and motion, and which has priority. It is motion. What is primary both in our experience and in itself is not something we call time, which we can never seem to grasp, but change. And all change, whether it be growth, decay, or change from place to place, is at bottom motion. So where does time come in? “Time,” says Aristotle, “is the number of motion with respect to the prior and posterior.” (quotes are taken from the Hippocrates G. Apostle translation of the Physics.) Time then doesn’t exist in the in its own right as a thing; rather, it is a sort of measure; a measure brought to change by counting. According to Aristotle the primary motion upon which all others are based is the rotating motion of the heavens; and the most inclusive �notion of time, which encompasses us all, is the number of this regular, circular, motion. Aristotle is bold enough to say that if there were no Counter, no intellect or Soul to do the counting, then although there might be motion, there would be no time. And how might we bring Aristotle’s understanding of time to an examination of education? Whatever else we may say about education, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to me to say that education is a process of change, and thus a motion. In fact, in the Physics, Aristotle uses education – divided into teaching and learning – as an example of a particular sort of motion or change that can look different depending upon the direction from which it is approached. Teaching and learning are not the same, any more than acting and being acted upon are the same, or going from Athens to Thebes is the same as going from Thebes to Athens - but (quote) “that to which they belong, the motion, is the same.” (202b 20) It takes the same amount of time for someone to teach me something as it does for me to learn it because teaching and learning, though they are not identical on one another, belong to the same motion. Thinking about education along with Aristotle’s definition of time suggests more about the sort of change we take education to be - at least insofar as it changes us in the direction of what we should hope to become. Remember that, to the assertion that “time is the number of motion,” the definition added “with �respect to the prior and posterior.” This last part might raise the suspicion that the definition is circular; don’t prior and posterior smuggle a sense of before and after, of time, right into our definition of time? But “prior and posterior,” rather than making the definition circular, are pointing toward a distinction Aristotle makes between violent and natural motions. All change that is natural is a change from potentiality toward actuality (book VIII ch. 4) The education that makes free adults out of children is just this sort of change - a natural change, or motion, for human beings. The posterior is implicit in the potential of the prior; the before is taken up in the motion, the change, that takes us through the present to the after. The free adult is potentially present in the child. Stopping for a moment to take stock, what can we say so far? Education seems to be a kind of change in a human being, toward a greater actualization of human possibility. It occurs in time, but as time is merely the measurement or number of the change, the time itself is not the point; one doesn’t undertake an education, at least not usually, in order to fill time - but out of a desire for growth and change. And yet, consigning time to the status of a mere epiphenomenon doesn’t feel entirely right. It seems to me that although I cannot point to time or grasp it, I in �some way experience it; it may have qualities – may be, for example, fast or slow. Though it may be the number of change, I also wonder whether it can change me. As I consider my own experience, and particularly as I read Mann, I have a sense of time as elusive and mysterious, and not without power. Can I even say that, though? If time has some power, doesn’t it have to be some thing? Mann’s narrator says at one point that time seems less like a noun than like a verb, like an activity. Looking back to our Aristotelian definition, I think we can safely say that it is at the very least closely related to an activity. If time is the number of motion, and would not even exist without a subject that counts or numbers, then we cannot think of time without also thinking about the activity of counting. In its broadest sense, as I said earlier, the motion numbered is the rotation of the heavens; and the time that encompasses us all is the number that arises from the activity of the soul or intellect eternally counting these revolutions. But not all motions are the prime motion. The universe is full of motions, natural or unnatural, internally or externally caused. Likewise the activity of applying number to motion is something we engage in on different and more local levels. In some communities we count the return of seasons and the growth and decay of crops, in others the rhythm of tides. Events like this one mark the regular return of periods in the life of an academic community. And if we engage consistently in the �activity of numbering motion in a particular way isn’t it likely to be true that this activity, like any other regular activity, bends back and shapes us, the actors? For an example of the way we humans are shaped by our own numbering, I will turn from Aristotle back to the Magic Mountain. One of the recurrent themes of that book is the difference between life in the flatlands and life on the mountain, and much of the difference comes down to a difference in the sense of time. At the International Sanatorium Berghof, each day is marked by no less than five sumptuous meals and three “rest cures,” which divide the motion of the day into periods such as “between first and second breakfast.” Then, although the day is so closely divided, other units of time to which we flatlanders are accustomed have lost all meaning; the next smallest unit of time of which anyone is aware is said to be a month. This unusual method of counting has a profound and disorienting effect upon Hans Castorp. With days that seem full, and without weeks to hold onto, months slip away almost before one notices that they have begun. Mann offers another extremely rich image for the lived experience of time that confirms our intuition of its formative power – the image of music. Music also puts number to a kind of motion. As the narrator puts it, music “measures and divides,” and presents itself “as movement toward an end.” (531) Like time, at least as I experience it, music has qualities, shape, moves now more quickly now more slowly. It may be pleasant but insipid, like the light music that a concert band �provides to the citizens of the Magic Mountain every other Sunday, making the lightest of marks halfway through the monthly unit. Or it may be grand and inspiring, stretching and extending the soul as the listener attempts to take in all that transpires. In either case, it affects those who live in and with it. The chapter of the Magic Mountain that arguably presents the apex of Hans Castorp’s educational development is entitled “Fullness of Harmony,” and describes his extended emotional and intellectual engagement with several great works of music. One of the most important source books for anyone thinking about education, Plato’s Republic, has much to say about how music may mold the soul of the individual and the shape of the polis. I’m reaching the end of my 15 minutes, - and so, remembering that this is a convocation address, I must ask - what do these musings about the formative power of the activity of numbering motion, leave us able to say about the activity we engage in together here in the Graduate Institute? We don’t make music together in the GI (though they do in the undergraduate program), but we do have our own peculiar ways of numbering motion together. You are joining a community, entering into a local time you will share with your classmates and tutors, in which we number weeks, and find that within each week the Mondays and Thursdays have a particular accented quality that shapes our perception of the other days. In which a seminar, which measured by the movement of the hand of �your watch around a circular path takes two hours, is a unit recognized by all that may sometimes fly, very occasionally may creep. It’s still true, of course, that the shape of the week and the movement of a seminar are not the point of what we do. For this education, the books we read and the conversations we share are the critical elements. It takes time to read and to talk, but time, as we looked at Aristotle’s definition, seemed to dissolve in our hands. Still, there is an activity implied by the giving of number to motion and that activity, like all activities we engage in regularly, affects us. The way we number time matters. Our common way of experiencing time is part of what creates a powerful and cohesive sense of community, a community with periods of intense activity but also, we hope, with time for reflection. And this community provides the context which creates the possibility for our other activities and for the change we experience together – the development toward a more fully realized and free humanity which is liberal education. So again, welcome. Welcome to the beginning of to an unusual motion of development and change – counted in four segments, in 12 classes, in set numbers of seminars and tutorials, but numbered more variously with respect to weeks and months, according to the different paths we take – Welcome to the Graduate Institute! THANK YOU. � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2016 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-01 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Spring_2016_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Spring 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6122927ba94b348bfccd28c0f74f2b56.pdf 551cc67843e49f56d45ea561f59f0a77 PDF Text Text 1 St. John's College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2017 Emily Brooker Langston Living in the In-Between Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. In particular, I’d like to welcome you who are today becoming students in the Graduate Institute. The year 2017 marks the 50th year of the GI. We’ll be celebrating this anniversary at events through the year, so it seems appropriate to say something today, at the beginning of this year of celebration, about the beginnings of the institute, especially as its beginnings reveal something of the community you are about to join. As those of you doing the mental math will have figured out by now, the first GI classes were held in 1967. To be precise, The Institute came into being in the summer of 1967, on St. John’s brand new campus in Santa Fe New Mexico. Then-president Richard Weigle obtained a grant from the Carnegie Foundation offering support for five summers to found a summer graduate program in the liberal arts. The initial sketch of the curriculum was drawn up by Lawrence Berns, in consultation with many of the members of the Santa Fe faculty at the time, for a �2 program originally called the “Teachers Institute in Liberal Education.” That initial summer saw an enrollment of 33 students. It wasn’t as many as the founders had hoped to attract (though it seems to me like an impressive accomplishment!)but aside from that the program was regarded by all as a great success; every student who enrolled for that first summer elected to return in subsequent summers; there was NO attrition. . To quote a report by Robert Goldwin, the institute’s first director, students were “Like (people) too long in the desert suddenly transported to an oasis. This was just what they had always hoped for but had never really seen.” I won’t move forward now with a year-by-year account of the emergence of the program, though I would like to mention Elliott Zuckerman, who took over the leadership of the Institute from Robert Goldwin after that first summer, and Geoff Comber whose persistence is largely responsible for bringing the GI to the Annapolis Campus. A lively account of the history of the GI has been written by Larry Burns and is available online in the college digital archives. Instead, I’d like to return to talking about the students. Even in that first year, there was some surprise at the variety of students to whom the program appealed. At the end of that first summer, Goldwin suggested changing the name from the Teachers’ Institute to the Graduate Institute, to make it clear that this education was for anyone who desired to undertake it. That first diverse group of �3 33 did include a number of teachers - nine from inner-city schools in Baltimore as well as various residents of Santa Fe, Los Alamos and a places further afield. Some came straight from college, but most already had some graduate work in their backgrounds; many even had advanced degrees. Which is to say, that the first GI student body looked in many ways like the student body we have today - a substantial number of teachers, but also retirees, recent college graduates, people working in other professions, in the military, government agencies, and NGOs. They were also like current GI students in another, more significant, way; they, like you here today, were willing to make a deliberate and unusual educational choice at a time of life when it is neither expected nor convenient. Such a choice must arise from a real and serious desire for the activity we engage in together at the college. At its core, this activity is the same in the Graduate Institute as in the Undergraduate Program. We are all engaged in liberal education, in an education that we believe will render us more free. But making the choice to undertake this education- in medias res as it were- necessitates a different relationship with or stance toward your studies than that of the typical St. John’s undergraduate. Very few undergraduates here attend part time, and most of them live on or very close to campus. They are able to separate themselves, not entirely but somewhat, from the world – forming a tight-knit community in what you will sometimes hear called the “Johnnie Bubble.” But members of the �4 Graduate Institute can’t live in a bubble (no matter how much some of us might wish to from time to time!) Whether you come in the summer or during the academic year, you have commitments – careers, families, the multitudes of obligations of adulthood- that can’t and shouldn’t simply be put aside. Of necessity you find yourself living in the in-between, engaging with these texts and this community as you remain engaged also with what is called, with greater or lesser degrees of irony, the “Real World.” This in-between-ness puts demands on you, and in turn on the educational Program. Some of the differences between the forms the Program takes at the undergraduate and graduate levels – such as the ability of GI students to take a preceptorial, which is to say an “elective,” every semester – I think can be simply put down to a sense that students who are older and more experienced may be offered a modicum more choice. Other differences, though, were originally the result of rethinking the Program in light of what it meant to offer a program of liberal education, that would be rigorous and true to the mission of the college, to students with unavoidable ongoing commitments. A couple of these differences have become defining features of the Graduate Institute program today. The most significant is certainly the division of the program into segments. The founders of the GI considered this a concession – not so much to an academic culture obsessed with marking out territories of expertise, �5 as to the fact that they needed to divide the program into coherent chunks that could be offered in eight weeks of intensive summer study to students who would have a substantial break between terms. Evidence that it is a concession is found in the very term we use for each of these chunks; we call them “segments.” The word segment comes from the Latin, secare, to cut; a segment is something cut off. So “Politics and Society” for example, the segment that some of you will be taking this semester and that was offered during the first GI summer, is not considered to be a subject-area unto itself but instead something cut off from a larger, integrated whole. The fact, again, that although we adhere to a strict order within the segments, the segments themselves may be taken in almost any order was also a concession – this time to the fact that we can’t offer every segment every term, but we need to bring in new students every term, and so students need to be able to start with whatever segments are being offered. And this again has necessitated that we focus less on technical subjects such as mathematics and foreign language study where a certain amount of expertise must be developed cumulatively and in order. The majority of our students earn the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts degree without engaging in any foreign language study – and it is possible to do so without without taking any mathematics (Although I urge you not to! Many GI students, and especially those who were most hesitant to take it, find the Math and Natural �6 Sciences segment find it the most freeing of all.) What emerged from all this necessary adjustment, however, was not simply a cut-up, truncated version of the undergraduate program; rather, as my predecessor in this role Jeff Black made clear in an address entitled “Liberal Education for Adults,” it is a version of the St. John’s program with its own integrity and distinctive features. For instance, reading the books organized into segments means that certain questions arise more persistently over the course of a semester, and it is easier to trace a strand of thought or a question from an ancient to a modern thinker. The fact that both new and returning students are likely to be present in any class means that the discussion of the class remains more focused on the books in that particular segment, rather than ranging widely over a long list of books that everyone can be presumed to have read. The fact that we do less math, science, and foreign language study means that we have more time in tutorial to devote to a close reading of key texts within a segment. These differences help make a program in the liberal arts that is particularly appropriate for older students living between worlds. Finally, though, no educational program, however well-conceived, could ensure the success of this endeavor. What sustains the community of learning in the Graduate Institute year after year, as students and faculty alike negotiate the tension between engagement in liberal education and engagement with the world? �7 It’s a pressing question not only for students of the Graduate Institute, but for all of us. For (assuming that we remain engaged in learning at all after leaving school) the space within this tension is where most of us spend our lives. I won’t attempt to answer this question fully in my remaining few minutes, but I think even to begin to answer I must return to what I was saying about you, the students of the GI, and the unusual choice that brought you here. As I said earlier, it is a choice that evidences a strong desire to undertake the project of liberal education. What can we say about such a desire? The desire to become more free through learning, already requires both the self-knowledge to admit that we are less than fully free and at least the hope that we might become more free by pursuing knowledge about essential things. We admit that there is something about this undertaking of being human in the world that we don’t fully grasp. But of course, realizing that there is something we don’t grasp is only the first step. To know that we only have to look at Meno- rich, good-looking and well-connected, certainly engaged with his contemporary world - who, when his ignorance about virtue is exposed, responds with bluster and threats – then throws up his hands as he makes the debater’s argument that it is not even worth trying to know such things. I think I can safely say that most of you, unlike Meno, at some level already believe that it IS worthwhile to seek what we do not know. But the task is not easy. It requires that we be, in the words of Socrates to Meno, “energetic and keen on the search.” �8 Without a continual recommitment to the search this life in-between would be impossible. We rely on this quality in you, this resolve to resist the claims of the immediate and return again and again to search with us for what we do not know; we rely on it, and I think as a community we can encourage it in one another – but as the example of Meno again makes clear we can’t simply instill it where it isn’t present. Socrates tells us that this belief and this search will make us “better, braver and less idle.” It is something very close to virtue; and as with virtue, it is hard to say where it comes from. - Maybe, as is suggested regarding virtue in the second half of the dialogue, it is a gift from the gods. - May we for the next 50 years continue to be blessed with students so gifted. �9 I would like to conclude by mentioning four study-groups that will be taking place this spring in the Graduate Institute, open to all members of the college community. There will be one on Don Quixote; the quantum physics group will be reading Gamow’s Thirty Years that Shook Physics and Bohr’s Discussions with Einstien on the Epistomilogical Problems in Atomic Physics; one on Krishnamurti’s The Awakening of Intelligence, ; and one on several of the works of Hannah Arendt. Information about all the study groups is available in the GI office and will be circulated in an email. I invite you now to enjoy the refreshments at the back of the Great Hall before going to your tutorials, which will begin at 5:15. The spring 2017 session of the Graduate Institute in Annapolis is now in session. CONVOCATUM EST. �10 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. 10 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2017 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston in January 2017 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "Living in the in-between". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker 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 Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2017-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 Convocation Address Spring 2017 Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d97a468065b2625d433c3171eed74689.pdf c954cc9654368f04b3ddaa7af7ef54a5 PDF Text Text St. John's College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Spring 2018 Emily Brooker Langston Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends, and tutors – to the spring term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. In particular, welcome to all of you who are today becoming members of the Graduate Institute. I’ve spoken a couple of times in the past about the seal of the college. Are those of you who are joining us today for the first time familiar with it? You can find it in many places around campus - for instance, it is embedded in the brick section of the quad, before the steps descending toward the playing fields and college creek. The seal is circular and features a picture of a balance-scale, surrounded by seven books representing the seven liberal arts. Inscribed around the edges of the seal is a motto in Latin: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or, less alliteravly, in English, “I make free people out of children by means of books and a balance.” In earlier talks I’ve wondered about the applicability of the seal to the Graduate Institute, and what it might mean to assert that students in the GI come to the program as “children.” Today, though, I want to take a different tack and push back a little against the motto on the seal. I want to think about what it means to �learn as an adult. To explore this, I will talk about an adult I spent a lot of time thinking about with my literature seminar this past semester – the “man of many ways,” Odysseus. It is clear from the very beginning of the Odyssey that this will be the tale of a man at or even past the prime of his life, not a character in formation. He comes to us already with a back-story, one we know primarily through the Illiad. Even there we encounter him as one of the older, more experienced warriors. He is not a prodigy like Diomedes or Achilles, but a man whose value to his companions comes even more from his experience with stratagems and his sagacity than it does from his prowess as a warrior. The opening lines of the epic read as follows (all translations are Richard Lattimore’s): “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was Driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, Many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, Struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions.” So right from the start we are told that this is a complex man, a man “of many ways,” who has already lived through great adventures as part of the sack of Troy. And we are told that the story we will hear now is not one of going out, winning a great battle, and gaining glory but a story of returning home. It almost goes without saying that a story of a homecoming of this sort, a homecoming through great trials after long years and a great adventure, is a story �of an adult. The characteristic story of a young person is a story of setting out, launching oneself into the world. We have such a narrative in the Odyssey, in the story of Telemachus’ quest to find his father; it is part of the incomparable beauty of the epic that the story of Telemachus’ setting out and Odysseus’ coming home are intertwined. Classes in the undergraduate program are full of young people launching themselves with greater and lesser degrees of bravado, trepidation, curiosity, and ambition. Like Telemachus in the court of Menelaus, they encounter the adult world with wonder and with a longing to be recognized and welcomed, and it is a delight to converse with them. In the Graduate Institute, though, students bring to their classes a wider range of human experience. Some around the table are still setting out, just out of college, reaching for what they will become. Others however bring to the discussion decades of experience in a wide variety of professions, in families and communities, in peace and in war. These are students who have made an unusual and deliberate choice to seek this education as adults. One of the great joys of classes in the Graduate Institute is experiencing the interaction of the perspectives that students of differing ages and experience bring to our discussions. So, to continue my inquiry, Odysseus returns home not to find out who he is, but to re - establish himself as husband, son, father, and king. There is, as my �colleague Margaret Kirby noted in her fine lecture on the Odyssey earlier this year, a motif of recognition running through the epic. Odysseus must know again his wife, son, father, and faithful retainers, and be known again by them, as well. This recognition is only possible because - although he returns to Ithaca decades older and disguised as a beggar - he remains recognizable. The interplay between the aspects of Odysseus that are complex and fluid and that within him that, through it all, remains recognizably Odysseus is brought to our attention by the epithet that is most frequently applied to him. He is “polutlas”, often translated by Lattimore as “much-enduring.” “Much-enduring Odysseus” The phrase certainly emphasizes the suffering Odysseus has undergone, the adventures he has lived through, and the disguises in which he has appeared, but it is also indicates that there is an enduring center to this man. Let’s look, very quickly, at a couple of instances in which the epithet occurs. When, after leaving Calypso’s island, Odysseus is on a storm-tossed raft and is in sight of shore, the sea nymph Ino appears to him telling him to leave the raft and swim for it. She gives him her veil to tie around himself, saying it is immortal and will not allow him to perish. Instead of immediately taking her advice, however, “much-enduring Odysseus” consults himself and decides to stay on the raft as long as it will carry him, swimming toward shore with the aid of the veil only after the raft has been dashed to bits. In a second example occurring at �the very end of his journey: when he sees his father Laertus, Odysseus desires to reveal himself, weep, and tell his father everything – but surpressing that first impulse “much enduring” Odysseus decides instead to approach his father in disguise and test him. The point I am trying too hastily to make with these examples is that the epithet is often associated with moments when we see the interplay between his self-knowledge and his ability to use his experience to judge and adapt himself to circumstances; between his enduring self and purpose, and the many-ness of his schemes and courses of action. In the two examples I have chosen we see him question the advice of an immortal and gauge his own chances in a battle with the sea; and we see his ability to evaluate and hold in check his own first impulses. In each situation he endures not by being unyieldingly inert but through a prudent adaptability that demands both knowledge of the world in evaluating the situation and settled self-knowledge in determining his way forward. This sort of knowledge, I submit, is characteristic not of children but of (at least some but not all!) adults. Returning now to the subject of education, I will ask - what does any of this imply about the ability to learn? Doesn’t learning imply a self that is not settled but that is formed by the learning process? There surely there is a sort of learning that is mostly formative. Returning to the example of Telemachus, we can see that he is engaged in this sort of learning – gaining skill in speaking in public assemblies, �and in planning and fighting, as he grows to become a leader and man like his father. Odysseus learns too, however. We actually hear it in the first lines of the epic, that I quoted at the beginning of this talk. Lattimore’s translation of line three reads: “Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of.” [The Greek word is a form of “gignosko”, to learn or recognize, and in past tenses to “know”] His skills as an orator and warrior are unquestioned, his experience of the world is vast, but about the deepest questions, including about the minds of men, Odysseus learns. And some of that learning may be most effectively undertaken by one who questions, judges, and evaluates knowing something both of the world and of the self she or he brings to inquiry. Thinking about these different types of learning may give us insight into the difference in curriculum between the undergraduate program at St. John’s and the program of the Graduate Institute. Note the distinction between liberal education (an education that is freeing) and the liberal arts (the seven subject areas of the trivium and quadrivium represented by the books on the seal… grammar logic rhetoric arithmetic geometry, astronomy, music) which are the tools of that education. As the seal puts it, we are educated into freedom “by means of” books and a balance. In the undergraduate program fully half the classes are devoted to learning skills associated with these seven liberal arts. Students have tutorials in language, mathematics, and music. In the Graduate Institute, on the other hand, we �assume a student comes to the program having some level of competence in these arts. And so in our tutorials we spend almost all our time not learning techniques associated with one or another of the liberal arts but reading more slowly and discussing with one another some of the books that, in our judgment, contain some of the greatest thoughts that have been conceived by human beings – or, echoing the opening lines of the epic - by the minds of men. This is an education that, although it may help form children into adults, is also completely fitting FOR adults – for anyone, in fact, who desires wisdom and greater freedom. I want to conclude by noting that an indication of the wide-ranging backgrounds, skills, interests of the students in the Graduate Institute may be seen in the huge variety of student-led study-groups that spring up every semester. I usually list those I know of at the end of this talk, but I won’t even attempt it today since as far as I know there are currently TEN in formation. I will simply tell you that information about these groups is posted on the bulletin board downstairs in this building and will be circulated in an email, and that the groups are open not only to GIs but to all members of the college community. The spring 2018 semester of the Graduate Institute in Annapolis is now 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. 7 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2018 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston in January 2018 in Annapolis, MD. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker 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 Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-01 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 Convocation, Spring 2018 Langston, Emily Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/7e5807d3072efca7e278abcfe9c41a3c.pdf 2034038ab6ad27270a051228d07d7067 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. 7 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Spring 2019 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the Graduate Institute convocation address given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Spring 2019 semester on January 7, 2019 in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "The Joy of Recognition". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker 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 Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-01-07 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this publication. 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 GI Convocation 2019 Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/dfaf8e411c395552c4443bc9d1f26e2e.pdf cdb1035d5d4d4994b961bfc47e6e30c2 PDF Text Text Graduate Institute Annapolis Convocation, Summer 2010 Welcome to new and returning Graduate Institute students, friends, family, and colleagues. Aristotle says in the Ethics that, “all knowledge and every intention desire[s] some good.” (1095a15) I propose to try today to articulate the good at which we are aiming in our discussions here at St. John’s. Though you have, no doubt, seen various statements of the College’s goals in our literature and on our website, I would like to approach this question from the inside, and ask what we experience as fulfillment in our best class conversations. This is a difficult, perhaps hubristic, project for two reasons. First, as you know, we aim at no particular result in our conversations. To be sure, we limit ourselves to one particular author, one particular shared reading, in each class. But it can truly be said that we set off on uncharted waters (at least uncharted by us), with no real captain on the ship, and propose to meet whatever adventures befall us with only our native wit, our general goodwill toward each other, the courage we are able to summon in the face of the unknown, and whatever guidance we can coax from the otherwise static words before us. I do not believe I am overstating the situation. Tutors are not professors; we have no fixed interpretation to which you must subscribe. The questions we pose are as sincere—and as puzzling—as we can discover. And the eccentric idea of a conversation among 20 �people with no agenda and no authority resists any simple characterization of its form and spirit. The second difficulty is that even tutors have varied interpretations of our own activity. Each of us individually and repeatedly examines our ends and means. In this endeavor, we must set aside our idiosyncratic desires and goals: both the questions most urgent to us (whether they be “What is virtue?” or “Is language merely conventional?” or “Is God good?”) and also any personal ambitions we may have. We each must try to discern the common goals of the common activity. For the experience of a shared project is definite and incontrovertible. Now, often when we state our joint purpose, we—like many other liberal arts institutions—speak of the cultivation of various skills. Active learning in the public context of a classroom does indeed hone one’s ability to reason, improve one’s recognition of cogent arguments, develop clear and forceful communication, train one in careful listening, and stimulate one to probe beneath surface claims. These are many goods that arise from and are necessary for our mode of learning. We set high standards for each other with respect to these arts of apprehending, knowing, and understanding. I feel sure you will be aware of your own progress in these regards, and I have no doubt you will benefit from acquiring these skills, universally acknowledged as useful. But, when I said I wanted to ascertain the good we aim at “from the inside,” I intended to ask whether the act of conversing has its own good. To say we converse in order to acquire skills is to treat conversation as merely a means to an end. Now, I do not minimize its usefulness as a means for these purposes. But Aristotle has persuaded me to set a higher standard than the useful. He says, “that which is pursued for its own sake is more perfect than that which is pursued for the sake of something else.” (Ethics 1097a32) Now this thought may be a bit foreign to �some of you. We’re all inured to encountering the question, “What will you do with that?”—especially when people discover our involvement with St. John’s. This question betrays a supreme emphasis on usefulness—often the crudest sort of usefulness, that guaranteeing career advancement or a significant increase in earning power. But surely money itself is the paradigmatic means, only useful to assist one towards some other end. The really fascinating question, the question anyone truly interested in us ought to ask, is: “What do you think fulfills you, what is your end?” Apparently, learning is not an activity people generally think of as fulfilling. I find this attitude hard to understand. Surely, learning is often difficult; it requires energy, attention, discipline, selfawareness, and openness to change. But many fulfilling activities are difficult (playing piano, running a marathon, cooking a gourmet meal). And, unlike those activities, our classes provide occasions to clarify important issues such as: what priority to place on family or philanthropy, whether love requires selfsacrifice, how to identify a friend. Seeking answers to such questions is a noble pursuit. At least one of the goals of learning is the ability to live and act well; and we can glean much wisdom from the deepest thinkers of the Western tradition and from our joint inquiries into their profound thoughts. Learning in this way can help us discern the principles most conducive to a good life and can help us to deliberate well about the “proper object and the proper manner and the proper time” (Aristotle’s Ethics, 1142b28) consequent to such principles. Moreover, this end, of acting so as to lead the best life, seems to be an end in itself, simply choiceworthy. However, once again the good I’ve descried is not really the good inherent in the conversation. Whatever clarity we achieve may be provoked by discussion, and certainly the proposed actions �themselves would not be complete without this clarity of purpose. But if action is the goal of our conversations, then the real good is external to the classroom. And those of you about to study the Ethics will be reminded forcefully by Aristotle of the crucial role of habit and character in such action (1095b6, 1103a25-b22, 1152a31-33); intellectually grasping what virtue is may not even amount to “half the battle.” So, if we do learn in order to act, the value of the learning itself only fully manifests through yet more effort of a different kind. Even more importantly for my purpose here today, our conversations at St. John’s do not necessarily result in shared conclusions about such matters. Is there any good we strive for together as we engage in our communal activity? Earlier I found the acquisition of arts inadequate as a candidate; perhaps the other half of the phrase “liberal arts” helps. Our education intends to be liberating; our mission statement formulates this purpose as “...seek[ing] to free human beings from the tyrannies of unexamined opinions, current fashions, and inherited prejudices.” (Liberal Education in a Community of Learning, Annapolis, St. John’s College, 2003, p.1) To this end, we follow Montaigne’s advice: Let the tutor make his charge pass everything through a sieve and lodge nothing in his head on mere authority and trust...he will choose if he can; if not, he will remain in doubt. Only the fools are certain and assured....For if he embraces Xenophon’s and Plato’s opinions by his own reasoning, they will no longer be theirs, they will be his.” (“On the Education of Children” from The Complete Essays, translated by Donald Frame, p. 111.) As we read the books which have been the original source of many of our opinions, we become more self-aware. Seemingly self-evident ideas often appear strange and unfamiliar when confronted directly in their unmediated state; their shadowy nature as opinion accepted on mere authority is revealed. Sometimes, �as we consciously evaluate the integrity of our ideas, we also become conscious of “having been wrong.” This experience is not always pleasant, but discomfort at the disagreeableness of truth may nevertheless be good. In the world outside the college, being wrong is condemned; there we’re taught to be ashamed at it, and a posture of confident, all-knowingness is cultivated. Here, instead, we cultivate a pleasure in “having been wrong.” (It takes some time to develop this pleasure.) We recognize this moment of “having been wrong” as learning. The Greek word Plato uses for this moment is “aporia.” Often translated as “perplexity,” its etymology reveals a connotation of placelessness. We see this unrooted state in Meno’s slave boy when he realizes his assumption that he could easily name the line that forms double a square is unjustified (Meno, 84a). Naturally, a certain discomfort attends the moment—the kind of discomfort that has Meno calling Socrates names and trying to block every line of inquiry with his “captious argument” (80a, 80d). To the extent that we agree with Socrates that it is better to “feel the difficulty [we] are in,” (84a), we at the College actively pursue such discomfort as a good. We encourage the open and honest “Well, by Zeus, Socrates, I for one do not know” of the slave boy rather than Meno’s obstructionism. Of course, the slave boy has little status to lose, and perhaps his opinions about geometry are not as deeply held as the ones we need most to be liberated from. Deeply held opinions can require a mighty convulsion in order to be overthrown. Such a convulsion may not derive only from conversation. When Achilles’ advice at the general council of Greeks in Book I of the Iliad is spurned, he is shocked and wounded. They refuse to heed him, not because his advice is unwise, but because Agamemnon’s status (he is the titular authority of the whole Greek army) trumps Achilles’ (I.281). Until �that moment, Achilles seems to have assumed that his recognition by all as the best warrior warrants also the honor due the best man. The council’s violation of his assumption provokes not only volcanic wrath in Achilles, but also a retreat away from the battle and into extended meditation about his realization that the world is not as he had perceived: What has he accomplished? Why is his excellence seemingly not honored? Is there a better way of life? Why should he care about other Greeks? (IX. 315-343, 393-409, 608-619) Perhaps such cataclysmic events are more effective than conversation in freeing us from whatever opinion fetters us. However, I think it is no accident that Achilles experiences his revelation during deliberation in council rather than during the press and urgency of hand-to-hand combat. No question about first principles can truly be entertained as one is facing “invincible hands spattered with bloody filth.” (XX. 504) And some version of this problem of capitulation to urgent concerns and accepted societal orders faces us all. As Montaigne points out in his essay “Of Custom,” The principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within our power to get ourselves back out of its grip and return into ourselves to reflect and reason about its ordinances. Life requires action; action requires choice; choice requires a principle; custom supplies the requisite principle. The needed perspective for questioning the community of opinion to which we belong comes only when we are forcibly removed (as cavedwellers in Plato’s Republic must be) from that community or when we voluntarily withdraw from it (and enroll in the Graduate Institute). Rather than be at the mercy of chance events that may or may not liberate us, if we are to improve our ability to judge wisely, we need to withdraw ourselves from the crowd, consult �our best selves, and begin a process of winnowing the contents of our understanding. To this extent St. John’s is something of a “magic mountain”—like the retreat referred to in the title of the Thomas Mann novel some of you will be studying in preceptorial. The novel takes place in a sanatorium in Switzerland. People are there to undergo a cure for tuberculosis. But their struggle with sickness removes them from the everyday struggle for existence and frees them to engage in conversations about intellectual, human, emotional, political, moral, and philosophical matters. The main character Hans Castorp, while visiting his cousin, decides he wants to be ill, is attracted to the liberating, holiday atmosphere. There is also a pleasing rigor to the curative regimen, but more importantly there is time to cultivate an examination of the meaning of life in this retreat from the everyday world of capitalism. Now, I’m disturbed by the analogy just sketched between St. John’s and a sanatorium; the connotation of illness implies the need for a cure. Unfortunately, I suppose that the way I’ve depicted the liberation of a liberal education corresponds with this idea. For I’ve analyzed the process, I think consistently with Socrates’ depiction, as a freeing from falsity and illusion. Such liberation is more a negation, the destruction of an undesired state, than a positive, healthy activity to be pursued. Even if this “freedom from” is still a goal worth pursuing, when put in terms of health, it seems incomplete in a radical way. Not surprisingly, the self-aware, self-searching characters of Mann’s Magic Mountain address this issue. At a certain point, Naphta, one of Hans Castorp’s mentors and a fellow inmate, defends illness as follows: “Disease was very human indeed. For to be man was to be ailing. Man was essentially ailing, his state of unhealthiness was what made him man...” (Magic Mountain, p. 465, Vintage International). �This justification gives insight into the possibility that the mountain is in fact a way of life. But don’t we all long to walk upright, breathe deeply without coughing, stride boldly with no shortness of breath? I cannot turn Naphta’s defense into an inspiring affirmation of a positive good—only a cheerless attempt to make a virtue of necessity. Of course, to the extent that we feel delight in the very process of being cured, of being liberated from an opinion masquerading as truth, the magic mountain is positively good. But, to the extent that the falsity cries out to be replaced by the healthy and true, our conversations, like those of Socrates himself, often remain inconclusive and bereft of the particular intellectual satisfaction attendant on clear and pure knowledge. Such unimpeded vision more properly belongs to the act of contemplation as depicted by Aristotle in Book X of the Ethics, an act which depends least of all on other people (1177a28-33) and which is most self-sufficient in the sense that it can be carried on quite apart from conversation. Is there a positive good, a real health, achieved through conversation? It seems to me that a kind of intermediate state exists between the self-sufficient, positively good state Aristotle describes as political or communal (a state that is an end and not merely a means, a state achieved through ethical action in accordance with reason 1097b8-11, 1098a16-19) and the almost divine but isolated self-sufficient state he describes as achieved through true knowing (a state that seems more appropriate to Mt. Olympus than it does to the Magic Mountain—1141b8). I claim a third kind of self-sufficiency exists which is a hybrid of the communal and individual. The best conversation forces us simultaneously to live well with others—to practice the forms of courage, justice, moderation appropriate to conversation—and also to exercise what Aristotle calls the highest, most divine part of our individual nature (1177a20, 1177b28)—namely, reason. When, in the course of a conversation, we feel ourselves �guided by some principle external to us even while we are most vitally awake to our own thoughts, then a kind of austere and noble harmony (both interpersonal and intrapersonal) comes into being. I suppose this harmony depends upon the acknowledged incompleteness of our wisdom, but the negative aspect is alchemically transformed through our energetic, dynamic activity. The completeness of attention involved, the fullness of self which must be brought, the purification of extraneous goals and motives necessary for such a moment—all produce an independently choiceworthy activity. So, while many useful goods may be aimed at in our conversation, I think I am willing to argue that THIS is the good proper to conversation, the one we really want to experience inside the classroom. I’m even willing to say that it is an end in itself, for I myself feel truly alive, truly fulfilled at such moments. Marilyn Higuera � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Higuera, Marilyn Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2010 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2010-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2010_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Marilyn Higuera for the Summer 2010 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2360a121283e202cb270d9377317f930.pdf a0170f3d4a7e008a94f53c1d2ba848f2 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2011 What Is Graduate Liberal Education? Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time turn the searchlight of inquiry on ourselves. So I mean to take this occasion to ask: what is graduate liberal education? Now as citizens of, or visitors in, a democracy dedicated not to the achievement of happiness but to its pursuit, everything around us commands us to preoccupy ourselves with means, with procedures, and with methods. We feel a need to apologize for any way in which we might depart from the common run in how we live our lives. Our danger is that an excessive self-concern will place obstacles in our path – obstacles like seminars on seminar, conversations about conversation, questions that ask ‘what is a question?’ – and hide from us the things themselves that ought to be the subject of our studies. My apology, then, is that I mean my remarks this afternoon to be a temporary inoculation against this danger: a short bout of the disease that will leave us, perhaps after some discomfort, with a clear conscience, and in energetic good health. So what is graduate liberal education? It suits this occasion for me to begin with the word ‘graduate.’ This word stands for what binds together all of us here today. Students come to the Graduate Institute at different times in their lives, from different backgrounds, and with different goals. Some mean simply to continue their education, others mean to become better 1 �teachers, and still others mean eventually to pursue more advanced degrees elsewhere. But all come having completed some form of undergraduate education. (The same is true, incidentally, of the tutors, not just in the Graduate Institute, but at St. John’s as a whole.) And yet, notwithstanding this publicly-acknowledged completion, each student and each tutor is brought to the Graduate Institute of St. John’s College by an opposite feeling, one of incompletion: a feeling of need, for example, or a sense that one’s education is not finished, or an anticipation of pleasure at the thought of learning more. To give this feeling of incompletion its due, think of this: while in many quarters it has become a matter of routine expectation that young people will complete an undergraduate degree, this expectation has not yet been extended to the graduate level. The feeling that brings each graduate student to St. John’s, like the sense that brings each tutor here, is not bolstered by routine. To the contrary: many of us pursue our educations here just when the demands of career and family are at their height, and so very much against common expectation. This feeling of incompletion, whatever its form, has from time to time been taken, or rather, mistaken, for a sign that the undergraduate education that precedes it has been a failure. This false inference has in turn even led to the allegation that the program of the Graduate Institute is really a ‘second chance’ at the St. John’s undergraduate program – the Program, as we sometimes call it – and that, in view of its relative brevity, the graduate program is ‘St. John’s lite.’ But this allegation is unjust. It makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s undergraduate were to say on graduation day that she wished that she could have had a preceptorial on Plato’s Republic, or another chance to work through Euclid’s Elements, then her undergraduate education was a failure. Indeed, it makes just as much sense to claim that, if a St. John’s tutor were to be eager to reread Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for his Politics and 2 �Society tutorial, because he hoped to learn something from his reading, then both his undergraduate and his graduate educations were failures – to say nothing about the time he spent as a tutor at the College. So in the question ‘what is graduate liberal education,’ the word ‘graduate’ does not mean ‘failed undergraduate.’ It means something more affirmative. The best way to get at this more affirmative meaning is to infer what we at St. John’s think ‘graduate’ means from a comparison of the graduate and undergraduate programs. The first differences that come to sight in such a comparison are quantitative. Undergraduates attend four classes a semester for eight semesters; graduates attend three classes a term for four terms. The undergraduate classes are seminars, tutorials, laboratories, and preceptorials; the graduate classes are seminars, tutorials, and preceptorials. Undergraduates have two tutorials a semester, language and mathematics; graduates have one a term, and its content depends on the segment. So with respect to quantity, it does appear that the graduate program is to the undergraduate as shorter is to longer or less to more. But here at St. John’s we know that quantitative measures are laconic, if not wholly mute, unless they are informed by qualitative judgments. And it is the qualitative differences between the graduate and undergraduate programs that begin to shed light on the affirmative meaning of the word ‘graduate.’ Notice that while each of the undergraduate classes, and above all seminar, proceeds roughly chronologically through its readings, over all four years of the program, each of the graduate classes is roughly chronological only within its segment, and more strictly so only within each class. Since the chronological order is the default order in the undergraduate program, adopted when no other ordering theory is at work, the curtailed chronological order of the graduate program is a sign that some other consideration intrudes. That consideration, clearly, is choice. Within certain limits – not every segment is offered every term, and the 3 �History segment must not be taken first – graduate students are allowed to choose the order of their studies. Perhaps more importantly, since the master’s degree is granted after four segments have been completed, graduate students are allowed to choose which segment to omit from their studies. The same consideration informs the place of the preceptorial in the undergraduate and graduate programs. While students in both programs choose their preceptorials from a list of offerings, undergraduates can choose two, and the choice is a privilege reserved for juniors and seniors, whereas graduates can choose four, one for each segment. This qualitative difference, that the graduate program affords more scope for choice, indicates that by ‘graduate’ the College means, in part, someone who can be entrusted with more choices in her education. But why can graduates be entrusted with more choices? And more importantly, to what end is their greater scope for choice? Another qualitative difference between our two programs is helpful here. Notice that, in the place of the undergraduates’ four mathematics tutorials and three labs, the graduates have a mathematics and natural science segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial is the liberal art of mathematics cultivated through regular demonstration; the preceptorials for this segment only occasionally involve demonstration or practica. Instead, our graduate students study mathematics and natural science chiefly by reading and discussing great books. Harvey, Newton, and Darwin are read in the undergraduate tutorial or laboratory, but in the graduate seminar. Likewise, in the place of the undergraduates’ four language tutorials and one music tutorial, the graduates have a literature segment, with a seminar, tutorial, and preceptorial. Only in the tutorial, again, are the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic cultivated through the study of poetry and prose. Instead, our graduate students study literature chiefly by reading and discussing great books. More tellingly, in the place of translation, which is the central activity of many semesters of the four language 4 �tutorials of the undergraduate program, our graduate students can choose to take a Greek preceptorial that is ancillary to reading a great book in its original language. More so than in the undergraduate program, in the graduate program most of the classes are centered on the reading and discussion of great books, as distinguished from the cultivation of the liberal arts. The tutorial schedules in each of the five segments show that only in the literature tutorial is there latitude for variations in scheduling and content – variations associated with the cultivation of the liberal arts in the undergraduate tutorials. The strict schedules and settled content of the other four graduate tutorials make them resemble seminars and preceptorials in the graduate, and undergraduate, programs. Indeed, only one of the five segment titles even names a liberal art; the others name fields of study, such as are often used to order books in a bookstore. (I will say something about the dangerousness of our segment titles in a subsequent convocation address.) This comparison of the two programs that express the Program, each of which combines in its own way the study of the great books with the cultivation of the liberal arts, makes the qualitative meaning of their quantitative differences clear. Graduate students at St. John’s College cultivate the liberal arts less than do their undergraduate colleagues, but they can thereby devote proportionately more of their time to a more focused study of the great books of the western tradition. By ‘graduate’ the College means someone who can be entrusted with more choices in his education, because he can be presumed to have cultivated the liberal arts enough in his life to study at the graduate level, and to make good choices of subjects for his study. This, then, is the end of the greater scope of choice afforded to graduate students by the Program: to permit them to focus on a few great books of a few kinds, so as to study them in greater depth, with greater intensity. It is no accident that, while the seminar, as the class in which the liberal 5 �arts are exercised on the great books, is the heart of the undergraduate program, the heart of the graduate program is the preceptorial, as the class in which one or a few great books are read with the greatest focus. So the conclusion, for the moment, of my inquiry – the answer I suggest to my question ‘what is graduate liberal education?’ – is the following: graduate liberal education is not so much the continued cultivation of the liberal arts, as the more focused study of the great books of the western tradition. Of course, like so many other answers to ‘what is?’ questions, this answer is itself a riddle that poses another question: ‘what does it mean to study a great book?’ Common sense tells us, after all, that we study not the books themselves but the things that the books are about, human being and the world. Perhaps it would be better if we could get the books out of our way, and go straight to the things themselves. As an epilogue to my inquiry today, I would like to suggest a solution to this riddle – one that takes seriously the thought that the great books are the things themselves. When we at St. John’s College say that we study books, we mean that we study what is essential about them, rather than what is accidental. In part, this means that we are not primarily concerned with accidents of translation, or edition, or substantiation. The ways in which two translations of the Republic or two editions of the Federalist Papers might differ are only interesting to us insofar as they illuminate what is essential about these books. And it makes no difference to us whether the books are written on parchment, printed on paper, or displayed on an iPad, provided that what is essential shines through. But we are concerned to spend our limited time on certain books, those whose essential content is great. What, then, do we mean by ‘great,’ with respect to books? 6 �At first it might seem that by ‘great’ we mean ‘the cause of great effects.’ This is not a bad way to begin. For how else would we first suspect that a book is great, if not by hearing, among everyone or among all those whom we admire, the opinion ‘this book is great’? And to produce such an opinion among so many or such admirable people is surely to cause a great effect. But it doesn’t take much reflection to see the problem with this view. How do we know that the book in question is really the cause of, that is, really responsible for, this great effect? The difference between the accidental and the essential is helpful here too. We are not interested in books that have great effects by accident – for example, by being misunderstood. Such things are in the territory of the intellectual historian. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially cause great effects. For the same reason, we are not interested in books that fail to have great effects by accident – again, for example, by being misunderstood. Rather, we are interested in books that essentially intend to cause great effects. The objection that books do not strictly speaking have intentions should not confute us. Like every product of human art, a book has an intention only to the extent that the human being who authored it had an intention: the rest is accident. (If your thoughts have just strayed to numberless monkeys and the works of Shakespeare, I encourage you to try the experiment.) If we are interested in books that essentially intend great effects, we are necessarily interested in books whose authors also intended such effects. What we encounter in these great books is their authors preserved and perfected, made young and beautiful. But what is the greatest effect an author can intend? For surely there are effects greater than merely spreading the opinion ‘this book is great.’ Here we are at the heart of the matter. To foster and educate human beings, to help a human type become actual from among those potentials that compose human nature; and, concomitantly, to take what is given to us in some 7 �disorder and illuminate a world, ordered in terms of first and last, foreground and background – this is the greatest effect an author can intend. This, too, is what it means for the great books to be the things themselves: that in the light of the human types they foster and the worlds they illuminate, the things themselves also emerge. The traditional subjects of the liberal arts – the words that are the fundamental beings in grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the magnitudes and multitudes that are the fundamental beings in arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy – are first illuminated by the more comprehensive relation of human being and world articulated in a great book. Such books furnish the minds of whole epochs of humankind. Such books, regardless of the genre in which history has shelved them, are all products of their author’s love of wisdom. And so they are worthy of our focused study, here in the Graduate Institute at St. John’s College. I would like to conclude this epilogue by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Machiavelli’s Prince, held on Tuesday afternoons at 2:30 in the Hartle Room, beginning on July 5th. I would also like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. The summer 2011 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff Black Annapolis, Maryland June 20, 2011 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2011 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2011-06-20 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2011_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2011 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Graduate Liberal Education?" Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/34b284da6cb16649780fc36ca6e13d0b.pdf c2fa92f258e68f6fa862d03d5a63038a PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2012 What Is Liberal Education? Part I Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by asking ‘what is liberal education?’ Now let me reassure you that I don’t mean to try to answer this question in the next fifteen minutes. My somewhat more modest goal is to divide the question into two parts, and today to ask only ‘what is liberal?’ I mean to save the second part of the question, ‘what is education?,’ for my next convocation address, in the fall 2012 term. Still, this modesty doesn’t get me entirely out of difficulty. For now I find myself asking a ‘what is?’ question about an adjective, ‘liberal’ – as if a quality of beings could itself be a being. Perhaps there is a noun that gives meaning to this adjective? It turns out there could be as many as three. There is a tradition here at St. John’s about this word, ‘liberal,’ that is a helpful place to begin. It dates from the foundation of the New Program in 1937, when Scott Buchanan, the new dean of the College, outlined its Program in a document titled “In Search of a Liberal College.” To introduce his reader to the liberal arts, Buchanan begins with the etymology of ‘liberal,’ which he traces to three different Latin nouns: liber, or book; liberi, or free human beings;1 and liberi, or children. Add a fourth Latin noun – libra, or balance – and a dash of alliterative 1 �whimsy, and you get the College’s motto: facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque, “I fashion free human beings out of children by means of books and a balance.” Let’s leave aside libra, the balance, which stands for laboratory science and which does not have a prominent place in the graduate Program here at the College, and inquire instead into the meaning of ‘liberal’ through the other three words. First: liber, or book. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then the education we pursue here is indeed liberal education, for perhaps even more than those who pursue the undergraduate version of the Program – as I claimed in my convocation address last summer – we in the Graduate Institute learn together chiefly by reading great books and discussing the questions that arise from our reading. Before we congratulate ourselves on our bookish education, though, we should acknowledge that the term ‘bookish’ is pejorative to some. You may have heard the disapproving phrase ‘book smart,’ which is sometimes contrasted to a more approving phrase, like ‘street smart.’ The thought behind these phrases and this contrast is that a bookish education is concerned with things that are unreal, because abstract, or theoretical, or fictional. ‘Street smarts,’ on the other hand, come from lived experience with things that are real, because concrete or practical. The people who use these phrases and make this contrast are probably thinking that only the ‘school of hard knocks’ can equip us for a life well-lived; a liberal, bookish education only equips us for a life well-read. If ‘liberal’ means ‘bookish,’ then, we are compelled by their disapproval to wonder whether a liberal education is what we want. It is fitting to grant in reply that the content of the books we read is abstract, or theoretical, or fictional. We might even be tempted to sharpen the criticism: since we read the great books, what we read about is most abstract, most theoretical, the greatest of fictions. But we should also ask these critics what they mean by ‘real.’ The concrete or practical content of 2 �the real experiences they advocate are deeds, rather than thoughts; ‘put down your books and live a little’ could be their motto. But deeds are accompanied by thoughts, guided by thoughts, and even magnified by thoughts. When we act we often begin by thinking; when we are kept from acting we often argue; and when we are asked why we act, we often give reasons. When we want to act with the assistance of others, we give them reasons. Moreover, every deed aims at a state that is not yet achieved, which is to say, at a fiction. It turns out that the real, if it is characterized by deeds, is shot through both with thought and with fiction. All ‘street smart’ human beings, we might say with a twinkle in our eyes, stretch out toward ‘book smarts.’ Their stretching out is an inadvertent desire for liberal, bookish education. Now we may have convinced our critics that deeds are embroiled with thoughts, and reality with fiction. But isn’t it still the case that a bookish education is somehow more pallid than real life experience? Don’t people read to escape the real world, to evade their responsibilities? We can find a kind of reply to these questions near the end of Plato’s Phaedrus. Having just invented a myth claiming that written speeches are good only as reminders to those who already know – which is to say, that learning cannot come from books – Socrates imagines a different kind of speech, one that is “written with knowledge in the soul of him who understands, with power to defend itself, and knowing how to speak and to keep silent toward those it ought” [276a-b]. He envisions, in other words, a writing that behaves like a living being, a writing the reading of which is like interacting with a living being. The great books that are also our teachers are such writings. Because they are written with knowledge, each time we turn to them they speak to us in a way commensurate with our capacities. If conversation with a living being is a real life experience – as our critics of bookish education would claim – then so too is reading such a writing. Indeed, since they are purged of the mute, the everyday, and the accidental, 3 �reading the great books is more vivid than much of real life experience. Far from being an evasion of the real world and its responsibilities, our liberal, bookish education confronts this world directly and courageously. Let’s turn to the second noun behind the adjective ‘liberal’: liberi, or free human beings. It points to the meaning of liberal education that is perhaps most congenial to us, as participants in a modern liberal democracy: liberal education as education of the free, as education to freedom, as the education that most supports our political regime. But there are complications to this meaning of ‘liberal’ that demand our attention; and it is a principle of education to be most suspicious of what is congenial. First, is liberal education an education of the free, or an education of the unfree to freedom? The great documents of our democracy tell us the former: that we are endowed by our creator with an unalienable right to liberty, which government must secure for us. But our motto tells us the latter: that the College, not the government, makes free human beings – presumably out of those who are not free, despite being citizens of this great republic. The government tells us that we are free to do what we want; but the College tells us that we are not free until we know what we should want. Now St. John’s is supported in this bold claim by one of the greatest of the great books that we read: the Republic of Plato. In that dialogue Plato has his Socrates depict “our nature in its education and want of education” through the image of a cave in which human beings are imprisoned “from childhood” [514a-b]. Human beings may be born free, Socrates’ image tells us, but most or perhaps all of us become unfree as children, and we then need education if we are to become free again. If Socrates’ depiction is right, then a liberal education begins with the realization that we are not free; and the belief that we are free is an obstacle to such an education. 4 �But this complication goes further. In Plato’s dialogue Meno, as we all know, Socrates spends a lot of time trying to get a recalcitrant Meno to offer a satisfying definition of virtue. At one point near the middle of the dialogue, after Meno has evaded Socrates’ demand in a variety of ways, Socrates says that he will let himself be ruled by Meno, “since you don’t even attempt to rule yourself – so that you can be free, I suppose” [86d-e]. By the end of the dialogue, the freedom-loving Meno has learned nothing; the one who has learned the most from Socrates is Meno’s obedient, nameless slave. If Socrates’ diagnosis is right, then liberal education not only requires that we grant that we are not free; it also requires that we give up our desire for freedom. We must become slaves of the speeches, following wherever they lead. Can this be right, though? According to still another meaning of ‘liberal,’ liberal education is education for free human beings, as distinguished from slaves, because it begins by requiring that we have the leisure, the freedom from necessity, to pursue it. This freedom makes liberal education an end in itself; to the extent that education is not an end in itself, to the extent that it is not free from necessity, it is not liberal. This sense of ‘liberal’ reminds us that we diminish liberal education when we talk only about the skills that accompany it, or the careers for which it prepares us. But Socrates’ warning from the Meno about the desire to be free, and about the need for us to rule ourselves, also reminds us that even activities for their own sake are subject to rules, and not simply free from necessity. So how can it be that liberal education, the education that is fitting for free human beings because it alone is for its own sake, nonetheless requires that we acknowledge and accept that we are not free? This brings me to the last of our Latin nouns: liberi, or children. According to our motto, children are the raw material on which the College works, out of which to fashion free human beings. This claim makes some sense for the undergraduate Program, but not for the Graduate 5 �Institute: since we require our students to have earned bachelor’s degrees, we cannot say that they begin with us as children. But there is another respect in which the word liberi, or children, could be applied to graduate students – and perhaps more so than to undergraduates. There is an ancient accusation leveled against inquiry into fundamental questions, one that is at least as old as Plato’s Gorgias: that such inquiry is childish. In that dialogue a young Athenian named Callicles, angered by the claims Socrates makes about justice and punishment, bursts into the conversation with a long speech, during which he tells Socrates that he feels about philosophy the same way he feels about mumbling and playing around childishly: For seeing philosophy in a young lad, I admire it, and it seems to me fitting, and I consider this human being to be a free man, whereas the one who does not philosophize I consider illiberal, someone who will never deem himself worthy of any fine and noble affair. But whenever I see an older man still philosophizing and not released from it, this man, Socrates, surely seems to me to need a beating [485c-d]. We find an echo of the same view in Paul, who writes in his first Letter to the Corinthians, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” [I Cor. 13:11]. Knowledge or faith about fundamental matters is fitting for an adult; inquiry into fundamental matters is childish. So what are we doing, inquiring at our age? The best response to this accusation of childishness comes from a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It tells of a man named Zarathustra who wants to give his happiness meaning by giving humankind a gift, and so descends from his mountain to the valley and the town below. There he speaks to the townspeople, but he fails to convince them of the value of his gift; so he begins to travel in search of companions, and while travelling he makes a series of speeches. The first of these, spoken during his stay in a town called ‘The Motley Cow,’ is titled “On the Three Metamorphoses.” In it Zarathustra describes three changes 6 �of shape in what he calls “the spirit”: “how the spirit becomes a camel, and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child” [ASZ, 137]. The first metamorphosis, into a camel, occurs when the spirit first wants to bear the most difficult burdens; the second, into a lion, occurs when these burdens force the camel into the loneliest desert, and it must oppose the command ‘thou shalt’ with the demand ‘I will.’ If its opposition is successful, the lion wins freedom for itself, and it can undergo the third metamorphosis, into a child. About this final form of the spirit Zarathustra says: “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’” [ASZ, 139]. With Nietzsche’s help, then, we can correct those who accuse liberal education of being childish, by saying that in its highest form it is instead childlike. Continuing inquiry into fundamental questions is innocent, because it asks ‘what is?’ without regard for the practical consequences, and because it is deaf to the adult demand that its questions be settled for the sake of action. It is forgetting because it sets aside the authoritative answers to its questions. It is a new beginning because it seeks to ask about what is first for human beings, what is given. And perhaps most importantly, childlike education is a game in the highest sense. It combines the freedom from necessity that distinguishes play from work with the willing subjection to necessity that distinguishes play from rest. It combines the camel’s readiness to shoulder the greatest burdens with the lion’s fierce demand that the burdens be of his own choosing. The result is a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes’: something that is for its own sake, but that can be yoked to other things, and so give rise to a world. Let this be the conclusion, for now, of this inquiry into ‘what is liberal?’ Liberal education is bookish education, freeing education, childlike education. As education through conversation with the great books, it is the consummation of practice and a courageous 7 �confrontation with what is most real. It is the education of the free who know they are not free into a freedom they do not desire. It is an education that forgets and begins again, that plays at the most serious things, and that thereby gives us a world in which to live. This is liberal; so what, then, is education? I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be a study group this term on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which will meet on Tuesday afternoons, from 3:00 to 4:30, in the Hartle Room, beginning on June 26th. We will read and discuss one act at each meeting. Also, tomorrow at 2:00 there will be a writing workshop, also in the Hartle Room. Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to preceptorial. The summer 2012 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 17 June 2012 Delivered 18 June 2012 Notes 1 Actually, Buchanan wrote liberus, free human being; but I can find no evidence of this substantive form of the adjective liber, or free. 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2012 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2012-06-18 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2012_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2012 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "What Is Liberal Education? Part I" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/350132b48541f427adc9feda526aa114.pdf e5856f46705cedf725c5519c1d01d75c PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2013 On the Philosophy & Theology Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is joining, or returning to, a College that describes itself as a community of learning, and that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time shine the light of inquiry on ourselves. Today I mean to do so by examining the readings of the Philosophy & Theology segment. The subject of this convocation address – which I mean to be the first of five, each treating one of the segments of the Graduate Institute – follows from a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled “What is a Segment?” I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names for the distinct subject matter treated by the readings in each. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title “Philosophy & Theology”? And before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution that the threads that I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I 1 �only insist that these threads are present in the segment readings, and truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by “Philosophy & Theology”? Let’s begin with the ampersand. It suggests that there is something dual about the segment, and prompts us to wonder what this duality is. The things joined together by the ampersand, of course, are philosophy, which any good dictionary will tell you comes from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom,’ and theology, which comes from the Greek for ‘an account about the god.’ In what way, then, are the ‘love of wisdom’ and ‘an account about the god’ two? It’s tempting to answer this question summarily, by noting that three of our segment titles have ampersands in them, and that each segment has two classes whose readings are required: the seminar and the tutorial. Could it be, then, that the dual segment titles reflect the duality of the seminar and tutorial readings? Not every segment title has an ampersand, admittedly, whereas every segment has a seminar and a tutorial. But we could attribute the exceptions, the one-word segment titles, to exhausted imaginations on the part of the graduate Program’s architects. We could then correct the title of the Literature segment, calling it the Greek & English Literature segment. The History segment would become the Ancient & Modern History segment, and our work would be done. At first glance, there seems to be something to this somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘division of labor’ theory. For if we survey the readings of the tutorial and the seminar, we see that the former is full of great books ordinarily taken to be works of philosophy – Plato’s Meno, Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and On the Soul, Descartes’ Meditations, Hume’s Enquiry, Kant’s Prolegomena, and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil – whereas the latter is full of great books ordinarily taken to be works of theology: the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, and Augustine’s Confessions. The presence of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica on the seminar reading 2 �list could be taken as conclusive evidence in favor of the division of labor between seminar and tutorial, were it not for the disappointing fact that Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments is also among the readings of the so-called ‘theology seminar’ – not to mention that, with the Prolegomena in tutorial and the Groundwork in seminar, Kant seems to be playing for both teams. Indeed, the more one thinks about this division of labor theory, the more problems appear. Take the very first reading from the so-called ‘philosophy tutorial’: Plato’s Meno. It begins, as we all know, with Meno challenging Socrates to say whether virtue comes to be in human beings by teaching, by practice, by learning, by nature, or in some other way [70a]; and it ends, as most of us know, with Socrates claiming that virtue comes to be by “divine allotment” [100b]. In between, we find an account (logos) about divine matters (ta theia), one that claims that “what we call learning is recollection” [81a-81e]. Is the Meno not in some way, then, a theological dialogue? If we are tempted to dismiss this thought, on the ground that Socrates is being playful when he speaks about the gods, what should we say about Aristotle’s account of the unmoved mover, or about Descartes’ proof of the existence of God, or about Hume’s discussion of miracles, or Kant’s theological Idea, or Nietzsche’s reintroduction of Dionysus? Are these really not accounts about the god? What is worse, if we consult Aristotle’s discussion of wisdom (sophia), found in the Nicomachean Ethics – which we read, alarmingly, in the Politics & Society tutorial – we find that it is “the science of the things that are valued most highly” [1141a20-21]. How could the love of such a science not include an account about the god? How could philosophy not include theology? From the perspective of the so-called ‘philosophy tutorial,’ then, it seems that the ampersand in the Philosophy & Theology segment title only marks and apparent duality, a hendiadys, a two that is really one. 3 �Problems arise from the perspective of a so-called ‘theology seminar’ too; but they are more grave, and more interesting. Should we seek a definition of theology, we can find one, but unfortunately, it is also in Aristotle. In two passages in the Metaphysics that we don’t read for tutorial, Aristotle calls theology the kind of contemplative philosophy that concerns things that are eternal, separate, and motionless [1026a10-20; 1064a30-b5] – should such things exist. By contrast, the term is not found in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. It first appears among the seminar authors in Augustine’s City of God – parts of which we read in the History tutorial – and then among the seminar readings, most obviously in the title of Aquinas’ magnum opus. So the Greek term ‘theology’ seems applicable to at best half of the so-called ‘theology seminar’ readings, in the sense that the authors of roughly half of these readings were aware of, or made use of the term. Since the authors of the other half of these readings had a different name for, or a different understanding of, what they were doing, it seems like the so-called ‘theology seminar’ is in fact composed of theology, understood as a branch of philosophy, and something else. What, then, is this something else? Another look at the first readings for tutorial and seminar will be helpful here. In one of the most memorable passages in the Meno, Socrates says that while he will not insist very much on the other parts of his argument, he would do battle, if he could, for the view that it is better, more courageous, and less lazy to inquire into the things we don’t know, rather than supposing that it is impossible to discover them, or that we ought not to inquire into them [86b-c]. (By the way, I take Socrates’ conditional here not to imply that he can’t battle for this view, but to provide an opening for Meno, who is very interested in what Socrates can and can’t do, to ask him to battle for this view. It’s an opening Meno fails to exploit.) Socrates does not outright say 4 �that we can know all the things we don’t know; but he does imply that he has reason to think that we should try – that the attempt will be neither fruitless nor dangerous. Now contrast this beginning with the beginning in the first Genesis reading from the Philosophy & Theology seminar, where we learn that God created heaven and earth, and what he created was “very good” [1:30]; but Adam and Eve nonetheless ate of the prohibited tree of good and evil knowledge, and were punished for it [3:1-24]. Leaving aside the more sophisticated – we might say, more theological – interpretations of these events, which try to interpret this punishment in accordance with the presumed characteristics of God, the serpent, Eve, and Adam, the naïve message is clear: we ought not to inquire into at least some of the things we don’t know, namely the prohibited things, as the attempt to do so could be both fruitless and dangerous. The first readings of the Philosophy & Theology tutorial and seminar thus make opposite claims. And we should not let our prejudices in favor of one or the other of these claims muddy the wonderful, terrifying question that wants to rise to the surface through this opposition. There are things that we don’t know. It is good to try to know them? Is knowledge possible, and is it good? With these questions we have at last gripped two threads that run, in my view at least, throughout the segment’s tutorial and seminar readings. In the tutorial, the Meno is followed by Aristotle, who in the Metaphysics practices theology as the science of the intrinsically most knowable and best things; by Descartes and Hume, whose reasoning about God is calculated to protect the possibility of knowledge; and by Kant, whose reasoning about knowledge is calculated to protect the possibility of God. This tutorial thread terminates, after its brief Kantian crossing into the seminar, in Beyond Good and Evil, with Nietzsche’s alarming claims that knowledge in the Aristotelian theological sense is neither simply possible, nor simply good. 5 �The seminar thread, by contrast, runs through the Hebrew scriptures, with the examples of Abraham’s exemplary fear [Genesis 22:12], which makes him a worthy father of multitudes and a blessing for nations [22:17-18]; the Israelites’ exemplary law, obedience to which is wisdom and understanding in the eyes of peoples [Deuteronomy 4:6]; and Job’s exemplary ignorance, which in the end confesses that knowledge of God is impossible, and so speaks rightly [Job 42:2-8]. It is found also in the Christian scriptures, for example in Jesus’ claim that the most needful knowledge depends solely on revelation – “no one knows the son except the father,” he says; “and no one knows the father except the son, and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal it” [Matthew 11:27]. But with the rise of theology, starting with the writings of Paul, this thread becomes tangled. Paul, who confesses himself a debtor just as much to the Greeks as to the barbarians, to the wise as to the unwise [Romans 1:14], is willing to claim that “the invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” [2:20]. And Augustine and Aquinas both find themselves in the same boat, using the philosophical arguments of theology as paths to belief in the Christian God, all the while denying the sufficiency and even doubting the necessity of these paths. In Book Ten of his Confessions, for example, Augustine laments the soul’s “vain and inquisitive greed” for experience, which “cloaks itself in the name of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’” [10.35.54]; but soon thereafter he qualifies his lament, saying that he has been able to curb his “curiosity for superfluous knowledge” [10.37.60; emphasis added]. For his part, Aquinas begins the Summa by insisting that sacred doctrine is a science in the Aristotelian sense, even though it is beyond human knowledge and may not be sought by human reason [q.1 a.1]. This seminar thread finally becomes untangled, and then terminates, with Kierkegaard, who asserts in the Philosophical Fragments that thought wants to discover something that thought 6 �cannot think [IV.204]: namely, the, eternal historical moment of god become man [IV.227], the faith that is different in kind from, and infinitely more needful than, any knowledge. Having traced these threads in this way, what can we say about the meaning of the ampersand, and the duality of the Philosophy & Theology readings? The apparent duality of the love of wisdom and an account about the god is only apparent: every lover of wisdom, every lover of the science of the most valuable things, will seek an account about the god. But behind this apparent duality is a real duality, between the love of knowledge – with all the sometimes irrational attachment that the word ‘love’ can connote – and doubt about knowledge. The drama of this duality comes from the encounter between these two views. Since doubt about knowledge nonetheless wants to insist that its doubt is grounded in knowledge, it is easily seduced by the appeal of love of knowledge, tries to incorporate it, and is corrupted by it. Once this corruption is understood, attempts are made to recover the original insight, the original tension between love of knowledge and doubt about knowledge. Beyond Good and Evil, with its consideration of “The Religious Being,” its assertion of the necessity of religion to a flourishing society [61-62], and its Dionysian conclusion, and the Philosophical Fragments, with its radical rethinking of the meaning of Christian faith, are two attempts to restate the original questions – is knowledge possible? Is knowledge good? – in their originally wonderful and terrifying force. I hasten to repeat that the story I have told here about the readings of the Philosophy & Theology tutorial is not a history, and certainly not a Hegelian one. There’s no necessity, to my mind, that Kant follow Hume, nor that Jesus follow Moses; there’s no necessity that the threads I’ve tried to grasp begin and end untangled. (Indeed, they seem quite tangled to me in our contemporary, everyday world.) But there is a necessity that the authors of the great books that we read confront, in more or less clearsighted ways, what it means to be the kinds of beings that 7 �we are: beings that both stretch out, and stretch out toward knowing. It is this durable necessity that ensures the connection of these threads to the threads that run through the readings of the other Graduate Institute segments. The scope and character of political and social life depend, for example, on our answers to the questions of whether knowledge is possible and good, as do the scope and character of mathematics and natural science. And the durable basis of this durable necessity is human nature itself, that homogeneous though multiple subject matter that is the true content and concern of the graduate Program here at St. John’s. Without some account of the whole that lies behind the graduate Program, without some attempt to follow the threads that run through and between its segments, the education we are all pursuing in the Graduate Institute will not acquire its full value. I would like to conclude by announcing that there will be two Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term. One group will meet on Tuesdays, from 3:00 to 4:30, beginning on June 25, to read Xenophon’s Memorabilia – his recollections of Socrates. The other will hold an organizational meeting in the Hartle Room this Tuesday, June 18, from 2:00 to 3:00. The purpose of the group is to study techniques useful for the math section of the GRE. Schedules for these groups will be circulated by email. Lastly, I would like to invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to preceptorial. The summer 2013 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 13 June 2013 Delivered 17 June 2013 Note The numbers cited in the text refer in each case to the standard divisions of the work in question, never to page numbers. 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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 digital Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2013 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2013 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Philosophy & Theology Segment". Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- 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 Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2013-06-17 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Annapolis_GI_Summer_2013_Convocation Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/fb859f114184725ba710853e19c3fe66.pdf ebc6e86a5bf7a2e7b4950c64f3cfe7e7 PDF Text Text St. John’s College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2014 On the Politics & Society Segment Welcome, new students, returning students, and tutors, to St. John’s College, and to the Graduate Institute. Today each of you is beginning, or resuming, your membership in a community of learning, at a College that dedicates itself to inquiry: to asking fundamental questions, and to pursuing answers to these questions. As members of such a community, we must from time to time inquire into ourselves. On this occasion I mean to do so by examining the readings of the Politics & Society segment. The subject of this convocation address – the fourth of five, each treating one of the segments in the graduate Program – is informed by a claim that I made in an earlier address, delivered in Spring 2012, titled ‘What is a Segment?’ I said then that the program of the Graduate Institute is a homogeneous whole, and that its segments represent arbitrary divisions of that whole into parts. Accordingly, I claimed that the titles of these segments should be taken as compressed questions in need of answers, and as opportunities for wonder, rather than as names announcing that each segment treats a distinct subject matter. Now I hope to make good on these claims in detail. So what, then, are the wonderful questions raised by the segment title ‘Politics & Society? Before I proceed to answer my own question, I should caution you that the threads I mean to follow for the next few minutes – threads that run through the tutorial and seminar readings of the segment, and that are connected to threads that run through other segments – are by no means the only ones worth following. I only insist that these threads are present in the 1 �segment readings, and that they are truly worth following. So again, what are the wonderful questions raised by ‘Politics & Society?’ I hope that you will humor me as I begin, one last time, with what at first looks like the least meaningful element of our segment title: the twisted and enigmatic ampersand. For what brand of ‘and’ does this old-fashioned symbol stand? Does it stand for the ‘and’ of a hendiadys, making ‘Politics & Society’ like ‘might and main’ – a phrase composed of two elements that mean one thing, a phrase that is therefore superfluous and redundant? Or does the ampersand stand for a genuinely additive, and therefore divisive, conjunction – one that links two things perhaps ordinarily found together, like ‘flotsam and jetsam’: the one present by nature, the other by art? Are ‘politics’ and ‘society’ one thing or two? Let’s try to say what each of these words means. ‘Politics’ comes first, and is perhaps the easier of the two. The English word comes to us from the Greek politikē, meaning ‘the things of the polis’: that is, the things of the city, understanding the city as the body of the citizens. One form of this word appears as the title of one of the books that we read in the Politics & Society seminar: Aristotle’s Politics. At the beginning of that book, Aristotle tells us that every city is some sort of community, and every community aims at some apparent good. The community that aims at the most authoritative and comprehensive good, he continues, is called “the city or the political community” [1252a1-6]. In the next chapter, Aristotle clarifies his point. The city is the complete or self-sufficient community, so to speak, such that while it comes into being “for the sake of living,” out of need and fear, “it exists for the sake of living well,” without need and without fear. If the other incomplete and insufficient communities are by nature, like the family, the household, and the village, then this complete and self-sufficient community is also by 2 �nature, as the first to achieve their ends. Evidently, Aristotle concludes, the city exists by nature, and man is by nature a political animal [1252b25-1253a5]. Aristotle picks up this thread at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, which we read first in the Politics & Society tutorial. If politics concerns the partnership whose end is the most comprehensive and authoritative good – presuming that there is such a good – then if there is a science of politics, it will be a science of this most comprehensive and authoritative good [1094a15-1094b]. Everyone agrees that this good is happiness, Aristotle continues [1095a1520], but not everyone agrees on what leads to happiness: some say pleasure, some say political activity, some say contemplation [1095b15-20]. These claims launch him on the main project of the Ethics: to examine pleasure, moral virtue, and intellectual virtue to see to what extent each of these merits the title of comprehensive and authoritative good – and so to what extent each of them is of concern to politics. We find a similar pattern near the beginning of the other Politics & Society seminar text that has a word related to politikē in its title: Plato’s Politeia, better known to us by its Latin title as the Republic. In this book, Socrates’ long defense of the goodness of the virtue of justice begins with the construction of a city in speech, within which he and his companions hope to see both justice and the good that comes of it writ large [369a]. This city begins as a “city of utmost necessity,” composed of four or five men [369e], but under pressure first of the principle of specialization and then of the desire for luxuries, the “city of utmost necessity” balloons, according to Socrates, first into a “healthy city” and then into a “feverish city” [372e]. In the eyes of Glaucon, one of Socrates’ young companions, by contrast, the healthy city is a “city of sows” [372d], and only the feverish city is fit for people “nowadays” [372e]. Socrates and his companions end up seeking justice and its consequences in this feverish city. Once again we see 3 �an investigation of virtue, as a candidate for the comprehensive and authoritative good, against the backdrop of a complete and self-sufficient association, as opposed to an incomplete and insufficient one. (That Socrates and Glaucon seem to disagree about what constitutes sufficiency is only one of the interesting details I’m passing over.) The more familiar Latin translation of politeia, or ‘regime,’ as res publica, or ‘public things,’ helps by reminding us that the regime, constituted by a claim about the authoritative and comprehensive good, is the animating principle of all things public and political, as opposed to private and pre-political. The political realm, we can conclude, is the public realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive human good. There are several such claims, and politics is their contest with one another for the right to rule. But what, then, is society? The English word ‘society’ comes from the Latin socius, meaning ‘companion.’ Any group of companions, this etymology suggests, constitutes an association, and so a society. Society seems, then, to be the genus of which politics is a species. But the first use of this Latin term in the Politics & Society segment comes in one of the tutorial readings: Aquinas’ “Treatise on Law,” questions 90 through 97 of the first part of the second part of the mammoth Summa Theologica. One occurrence of the term is particularly striking for our purposes. In question 95 article 4, Aquinas asks “Is Isidore’s Division of Human Laws Appropriate?” In his answer he remarks in passing that it is proved, in Book I Chapter 1 of the Politics, that “man is by nature a social animal [animal sociale; emphasis added].” Lest we think that Aquinas takes the political and the social to be synonymous, he continues: “But those things which are derived from the law of nature by way of particular determination belong to the civil right [ius civile] according as each political community [civitas] decides on what is best for itself.” Though Aquinas does not use Latin terms etymologically related to politikē, other than to refer to Aristotle’s Politics, he 4 �does not lack a term to distinguish politics from society: politics is the realm of the civitas, and of civil right. And for someone as familiar with Aristotle as Aquinas clearly was, it’s easy to detect in Aquinas’ distinction between the social and the civil something like Aristotle’s famous distinction in the Ethics between what is just by nature and what is just by convention [1134b171135a5]. By this distinction, Aquinas suggests that the social is the sphere of natural human association, and is governed by natural law, which is the same everywhere. The civil or political, by contrast, is the sphere of conventional associations, and is governed by civil right, which differs from place to place. Two other passages from the Treatise on Law support this interpretation of Aquinas’ meaning. In question 94 article 2, Aquinas asks “Does the Natural Law Contain Several Precepts or One Only?” His answer is that it contains several, and because human beings have “a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society,” two of these precepts are “to shun ignorance, [and] to avoid offending those among whom one has to live.” Later, in question 96 article 2, he asks “Does It Belong to Human Law” – the source of civil right, remember – “to Repress All Vices?” And he answers: human laws do not forbid all vices from which the virtuous abstain but only the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained; thus human law prohibits murder, theft, and suchlike. In introducing the idea of society into the Politics & Society readings, and distinguishing this idea from the idea of politics, Aquinas thus redefines the political. It is no longer the public realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive human good. Rather, it is the realm of conventional legal prohibitions against offense, also known as civil rights, which vary in their particular character from place to place. Instead, society is the realm of authoritative claims about the comprehensive good, based on the natural law. This law is comprehensive because it 5 �pertains to human beings as rational; it is good because all law aims at the common good of those it rules; and it is authoritative because it comes from God. By distinguishing society from politics in this way, Aquinas refounds, and so reorients, the fundamental political question. No longer does the determination of the best regime depend on the adjudication of claims about the best way of life, and so on the investigation of pleasure and the moral and intellectual virtues. Now reason discovers the best way of life in the social dictates of natural law, and politics need only determine which civil rights are required for us to obey these dictates in each case. To a great extent, the political thinkers who come after Aquinas accept this reorientation of the fundamental question. Among the readings in the Politics & Society segment, for example, the first occurrence of the word ‘society’ in English comes, unsurprisingly, in Hobbes’s Leviathan. But listen to how he uses it, in a famous passage that demands to be read in full: Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the Earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short [XIII.9]. Hobbes lists society among those commodious things that only a commonwealth, with its common power, can secure. As his argument develops in subsequent chapters of Leviathan, we learn, as in Aquinas, that reason can discover the best way of life in the social dictates of natural law – dictates such as “seek peace,” and “defend ourselves” [XIV.4] – and that politics need only determine which civil rights are required for us to obey these dictates in each case. But notice Hobbes’s striking innovation on Aquinas. The natural human state is the original human state, 6 �and the original human state is a state of war. Man is not naturally social according to Hobbes; rather, society is always and everywhere the artificial product of the science of politics. The tremendous gravity of the state of war requires a draconian allocation of rights to resist its downward pull: all for the sovereign, and next to none for the subjects. And there is no ground for disagreement with this allocation of rights, since there is no other comprehensive and authoritative human good whose provision will guarantee peace [XI.1]. Though the political thinkers who follow Hobbes, like Locke, Rousseau, and the American founders, disagree about the precise allocation of rights needed to constitute society, they agree that this is the goal of politics: to make naturally asocial human beings social through the political art. In the words of our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.” Time does not permit me to wonder whether one seminar author I have not yet mentioned, Friedrich Nietzsche, also falls into this Thomistic-Hobbesian scheme. Instead, let me close by pointing out some of the implications of the thread I have just followed. First, the difference marked by the ampersand between ‘politics’ and ‘society’ does not correspond to the difference between the readings in the segment’s seminar and tutorial. We do not have a ‘Politics seminar’ and a ‘Society tutorial,’ for example. Instead, the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘society’ in each class seems primarily chronological, corresponding roughly to the difference between the ancient and the modern readings, or perhaps more accurately, to that between the polytheistic and the monotheistic ones. Second, we can now see, I think, some of 7 �the wonderful, terrible questions the segment raises. Is the political realm comprehensive and self-sufficient? If so, are the alternative claims whose contest constitutes that realm – claims on behalf of pleasure, or moral virtue, or intellectual virtue – irreducible alternatives? Or is the political partial and derivative, because it is dependent on some higher social principle, like the natural law, or some more fundamental social principle, like the fear of death? If so, is there one such principle, or many? Finally, if the political is comprehensive but plural, or if it is not comprehensive but depends on plural extra-political principles, does this herald nothing for humanity but ceaseless war? And if, on the other hand, the political is dependent on a single social principle, does this dependence promise peace – and how can we distinguish it from universal tyranny? There will be not one but four Graduate Institute-hosted study groups this term: on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, on Rousseau’s Social Contract, on the short plays of Samuel Beckett, and on Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Schedules and meeting places for all four of these groups will be circulated by email when they become available. Let me also invite you all to take part in the refreshments provided at the back of the Great Hall, before going to class. And new students are reminded to visit the IT department in the basement of Randall Hall between preceptorial and tutorial to set up their email accounts. The summer 2014 term of the Graduate Institute is now in session. Convocatum est. Jeff J.S. Black Annapolis, Maryland 16 June 2014 Note For my citations from Aristotle’s Politics, I have used the Second Edition of Carnes Lord’s translation. Citations from his Nicomachean Ethics are from Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins’s translation. My citations from Plato’s Republic are from Allan Bloom’s translation, also in its Second Edition. For Aquinas I used the translation found in the Hackett collection titled On Law, Morality, and Politics. And for Hobbes’s Leviathan, I used the Curley edition, also published by Hackett, which modernizes Hobbes’s spelling and punctuation. 8 � 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2014 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2014-06-16 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2014_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Black, Jeff J. S., 1970- Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Jeff Black for the Summer 2014 semester in Annapolis, MD. Entitled "On the Politics & Society Segment" in Annapolis, MD. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/84646e95f312919924c69f9890635598.pdf f348036da9690584447c8f8ec52d9a00 PDF Text Text St. John's College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2015 Emily Brooker Langston Good Afternoon and Welcome – New and returning students, families, friends, and tutors – to the summer term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. Today, the new students among us are becoming members of the St. John's community, a community dedicated to liberal education - to an education that is freeing. That the goal of this education is to make us free is proclaimed on the seal of the college. You don't see the seal around quite as often as we did at one time, but you may still find it in many places. For instance, it is embedded in the brick section of the quad, before the steps descending toward the playing fields and college creek. On the seal is a motto in Latin: “Facio Liberos ex liberis libris libraque.” Or, less alliteravly, in English, “I make free adults out of children by means of books and a balance.” I've chosen to begin with this motto, (and in fact I will only talk about the first half of it: “I make free adults out of children..”) both because it offers a succinct summary of the aim of the college and its program – and also because of part of it that might be particularly interesting to us as members of the Graduate Institute. “I make free adults,” it says... “out of children.” This reference to children seems roughly appropriate when we apply it to the 17 and 18 year-olds who will walk across the stage of the Francis Scott Key auditorium when the undergraduate program welcomes a new class in �the fall. But for many years now, the college has also offered a Graduate Program. Can the aims of the Graduate Institute be understood in the terms proposed by the motto? Looking around this room – where are the children here? All of you have completed a Bachelor's degree, many of you have spent years in a career or more than one, you have raised families, you have other educational attainments and professional accomplishments. Do we fit within the purpose set forth on the seal? If so, how? So: “I make free adults out of children.” Reading the phrase again, what might we notice? Firs, the motto asserts that freedom is not something simply given to us, either as human beings or as members of a particular political society. We do not come into the world as free. And this should make us wonder what is meant by “freedom.” Certainly one popular understanding of the term would have us suppose that we are MOST free when we are children, and become less and less so as we enter into the responsibilities of the adult citizen. The motto, however, claims that free people – whatever we may mean by that - are not born, they must be formed. Accepting, for the purposes of the address, this rather bold assertion I will then focus on the question - But what does it mean to say that these free people are formed “OUT OF CHILDREN?” Are we all are somehow children, no matter our age, until we have undergone some process of education? Or is there perhaps something special about children, such that only out of “children” can free people be made? Both possibilities are worth thinking about, and I will say a little about each. �In order to consider this question farther, I will turn now to a text we now all have in common; some of you may have read it for the first time in preparation for yesterday's orientation seminar. I mean, of course, Plato’s dialogue Meno. I think I can find in that dialogue at least three characteristics of what it might mean to be a child, or at least to be childlike. Two highlight ways in which we are all children in so far as we are not educated, while one demonstrates a sense in which we must be childlike in order to become educated. You all know that in this dialogue, Socrates makes the young man Meno admit (quite grudgingly) that he cannot give an account of something he had thought he understood. Stunned by the torpedo fish Socrates, Meno finds himself unable to define “virtue” - a topic about which he himself says he had “made many speeches ... before large audiences – and very good speeches I thought.” Meno has been exposed. Not only does he not know what virtue is, until this very moment he did not know that he did not know! He has assumptions about virtue, and about other things as well no doubt. These assumptions are based somehow on examples he has encountered of men, women, children, slave and others who are called “virtuous.” But he has never held these assumptions up and looked at them or questioned them. He has left them unexamined and so he does not know the shape even of his own thoughts on the matter, much less how to conduct an inquiry into whether or not these thoughts are true. In this way he is like a child, and like all of us in so far as we lack education. We move comfortably �through the world, even perhaps thinking we know a great deal - but it is only because we cannot really imagine anything about anything beyond the swarm of examples we encounter in our immediate experience. We are full of unexamined, and quite possibly false, opinion that we mistake for knowledge. At this point in the dialogue, Meno, frustrated at having been made to look foolish, challenges Socrates with the idea that one cannot seek for knowledge that one does not have – for not knowing it already, how would one recognize it when one had found it? Socrates in response tells Meno something he has heard from “wise men and women… whose care it is to be able to give an account of their practices.” According to these, and I quote: “As the soul has been born often, and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things. …searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection.” So, Socrates suggests that we have already learned everything in a time before our births, and that learning for us now is a sort of remembering. Thus when we find what we have been searching for, we can recognize it – much as we can recognize a name we have forgotten when someone else mentions it. It's an odd story, and aspects of it may strike us as not very plausible. Socrates himself says he would not insist on every detail. But note what it essentially asserts. Learning is not simply filling up a void called ignorance by pouring in content called knowledge. Real learning has not taken place until the child, or student, checks the new �information against something within herself. In other words, we are able to learn because of something that is already within us. In order to be a child capable of being educated, and thus of being made free, we cannot come simply with our unexamined opinions; we bring something else, too. The account Socrates gives here suggests that what we bring is in some way the knowledge itself already in us, and that learning is recollection, almost a sort of “matching.” Other texts we read will suggest different ideas and images for what we bring to the process of learning and how it takes place; I do not want to recommend one or the other of them to you today; I simply want to note that we have hit upon a second aspect of what we all have in common as children who can be formed through education: as children, we are ignorant and full of unexamined opinion– but we also have that within us that makes us educable. Continuing now through the dialogue - in order to demonstrate that learning really is a form of recollection, in the sense that it makes actual something that was in the learner all along, Socrates asks to interact with Meno's slave boy. According to Meno, the boy knows Greek but has not otherwise been educated. You all know what happens. The slave boy first misidentifies the side of the double square. But then, when Socrates shows him his error, he genuinely desires to know the truth of the matter. And when Socrates points him in the right direction, he is able to recognize for himself the line that was sought. Like Meno, he begins by not knowing – and not even knowing that he does not �know. Unlike Meno, however, when his ignorance is revealed to him, rather than defending his initial intuition, or becoming obdurate or threatening, he begins to seek for the truth and is able to learn. He began as childlike in the ways that we all are childlike before we have begun to inquire. However, over the course of the conversation with Socrates he evidences a childlike attitude in a different way. The dialogue doesn't give us much to go on, but I like to imagine the slave boy shaking his head in puzzled wonder when he realizes that the double side does not make a double square – then eagerly following Socrates' diagram, and smiling with satisfaction when he sees the answer for himself, or “recollects” it. Of course, there may be a different type of “showing” involved in revealing virtue than there is in pointing to the side of the double square. The example itself inspires a multitude of questions. However, my interest in the analogy here is simply in what it shows us about the attitude of one who genuinely makes progress in an inquiry. The slave boy is teachable. He is not angry or ashamed when his ignorance is exposed; instead, he begins to wonder. It is this attitude that I want to call childlike in the third sense. We are all children in the beginning, accepting as given the presuppositions that define our world- but also somehow equipped with that which will make us able to learn, to recollect the truth for ourselves. All free people are made out such children - necessarily. But as the example we have just seen illustrates, it is only when we are childlike in the third way, when we pursue knowledge openly and courageously, with wonder and delight, that we are able to educated, and thus to be made free. �It may seem like I have veered a little from speaking about free adults being made from children, to urging us to become children. There are certainly some books on the program at St. John’s that do urge this. Jesus says to his disciples that to such as these little ones belongs the kingdom of heaven. Nietzsche's Zarathustra presents the child as the third metamorphosis of the spirit, a “sacred Yes.” It is deeply true, though I don't have time to address it here, that in some ways the condition of being childlike may come, if we are fortunate, at the End of our explorations, when, as Eliot puts it, we “arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.” For the moment, I not recommending the state of being childlike as an end, but as a necessary part of the beginning. It is in order to become Free Adults mentioned that we must begin as children – not only as ignorant, and as essentially teachable, but as ardently desiring to learn. But of course, in recommending to you here this ardent desire to learn, I am preaching to the choir. Your status as students in the Graduate Institute I think puts a special emphasis on your desire to learn. As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, each of you has a Bachelor's degree, the culturally accepted credential of a generally educated person. In differing arenas, you have found a way the world. And yet, here you are, some of you probably confounding the expectations of those around you who would propose that there are more practical ways you could spend your time. Here you are, wanting to learn and to know. �Although you are all probably tired of hearing about it by now, I want to return one more time to the phrase that was the beginning of these reflections: I make free adults out of children. A couple of weeks ago, a friend and former Associate Dean asked me what I was writing about for my first convocation address. I replied that it would be some sort of reflection on the motto of the college, referring to Meno. My friend said that he, too, had once written a convocation address reflecting on the motto, but that he had criticized it. The part he had criticized was the phrase “I make.” And of course, he was right to be critical here. I think our example from Meno, and the third way we have identified of being childlike, point to this. One thing the dialogue makes clear is that no one can force another person to learn. Socrates can expose Meno’s ignorance and leave him stunned, but he can’t make him go any further. It may be possible to help another person to learn, as Socrates helps the slave boy to discover the diagonal, but unless the person has a desire to learn and a willingness to submit to the process of inquiry – unless the person is childlike in the third sense we have identified - nothing will happen. Whosever may be the voice that is speaking through the motto, the “I” of “I make,” (is it the voice of the college? Of the Program?) that I cannot claim simply to make free adults out of children through education. The college, and the program, may provide the opportunity for leaning to occur; but in the end you, the students, through the course of study set before you and your own real effort, shape and make yourselves. I’ll note in closing that the very structure of the activity we engage in together �stresses this fact. Your tutors (who are not, after all, “professors”) will not stand in front of the room and dispense information to you. Instead, you will sit together around a table, with your attention focused on a different teacher, the text – and on a conversation that moves from one to another as each of us picks up portions of what the text brings to us, compares it to our own assumptions, and allows ourself to be challenged and even changed. It is in this way that we come really to know our world and to be able to inhabit it as free adults – choosing, rather than accepting unthinkingly, the way we inhabit it. So I invite you now to come, to read and to talk with us as we all grow more fully into our freedom – together. Thank you. Before we disperse, let me announce that there are two Graduate Institute study groups taking place this summer. One group is reading classic texts of psychoanalysis; the other is reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Both groups are meeting on Saturday mornings from 10 until noon. For information on the psychoanalysis group, contact Mr. Maxwell; for the Kant group, contact Mr. LaFleur. Also, this Wednesday night at 7:30, here in the Great Hall, we will host the first in our Wednesday night lecture series – Mr. Abraham Jacob Greenstine will speak on “The Problem of Absolute Knowing.” Please join us now for the refreshments waiting at the back of the Hall, before your preceptorials begin at 2 o'clock. The 2015 summer term of the Graduate Institute is now 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2015 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2015-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2015_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Summer 2015 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/214e4361b8d7e09725e2fed41da6eb34.pdf 00de036c8e34de627081a4376128973b PDF Text Text 1     St. John's College Graduate Institute Convocation Address Summer 2016 Emily Brooker Langston Good Afternoon and Welcome – students, families, friends, and tutors – to the summer term of the Graduate Institute at St. John's College. Welcome especially to those of you among us who are matriculating into the Graduate Institute, and today become members of the community of St. John’s College. I had occasion to think about this wonderful community from a different perspective this past semester. Usually, I try to keep my topics for these talks varied by basing them on something I’ve read together with students in the Graduate Institute over the past term. But this past spring, my work for the college took me in other directions and so I wasn’t able to teach. I made an effort to be a part of a study group on Thucydides, but my schedule was erratic and I couldn’t make it work. I felt guilty and regretful when the emails about the weekly assignments – often accompanied by short comments about how great last week’s discussion had been- arrived in my inbox. So, I wasn’t reading and talking in a sustained way about a text with any of you. And I missed it. �2     This made me ask myself though: what was I missing? For of course I can read and think when I am by myself, and I did. I read essays, dialogues, short stories, poems, and most memorably for me, as preparation for a senior oral in the undergraduate program, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece 100 years of Solitude. And I wasn’t short on human interaction and conversation either, not even on conversation about relatively serious topics. I was traveling a lot, and everywhere I went, I met interesting people who were interested in St. John’s. I often ended up having conversations with them about questions arising from some great work. Yet still I found that, compared with my usual life as a tutor at this college, it was a strangely solitary existence. But why should that worry me? After all, one could say that there is something almost essentially solitary about intellectual life, about the life of thinking and learning. Since I do like to talk about things I’ve read recently, I’ll borrow an image here from Marquez’s strange and wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude – a book which doesn’t at first glance appear to be so much about solitude as about a large family living in a small town, often in the same house. But we find at the heart of the house built and shared by the tumultuous , mulitgenerational Buendia family a closed-off place of silence and solitude Melquiades’ room. It isn’t there from the beginning. It is built after the parts of the house necessary for daily living have been established, for Melquiades - the �3     traveling gypsy who first awakens wonder (according to Aristotle the beginning of philosophy) in the mind of the patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia. This wonder spins him off into a sort of solitude in which the founder of the town and former leader of men is rendered “useless” and even to many “ridiculous” by his obsession with scientific and philosophical questions. Melquiades’ room is at times over the course of a century shut off entirely, entered by no one, and then rediscovered. It is seen very differently by different characters in the book. To the embittered revolutionary Colonel Aureliano Buendia, it is full of cobwebs and dust, ravaged by time. To his grand-nephew Aureliano Bablionia on the other hand, who withdraws into the room to attempt to translate and interpret the strange manuscripts it contains, it is untouched by time and full of sunlight. The room then is an image of a solitary place in the midst of things yet apart, of turning inward for reflection and study. Not for the study of practical things - it is to those with that turn of mind the room seems simply a place of silence, cobwebs, and decay. It is a place for the study of things that are timeless and luminous. Of course, the image I’ve borrowed from Marquez’s novel only underlines the question I asked earlier; if we desire to think and read and learn, isn’t what we really need our own place of withdrawal and solitude? Why do we need other people? Why come together in a community like this one? �4     The answer that would seem obvious in most other educational contexts is that we come together in a place like a college or graduate school because we want to learn from experts who will teach us things we don’t know. The experts are gathered in one place, say at a university, and the students flock to them eagerly, hoping to receive knowledge. However, this is explicitly what we say we DON’T do at St. John’s. Our faculty are called tutors rather than professors to call attention to the fact that they make no claim to be experts in the subject areas in which they lead classes. They don’t lecture or dispense information. Instead, we read and learn from the books together; and the tutors may – or may not – be the most experienced learners in the room. Our studies together are in the spirit of a claim made by Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Meno, the one book I know we all have in common – the remarkable claim that, although learning takes place, quote: “[T]here is no teaching.” (82a) But if it is not to gather around teachers who dispense information, why gather in a community to read and learn? And why does this community come to mean so much to many of us? Although it is true that in some ways learning is solitary – it is something that happens to me or in me – it also requires an important sort of openness. When one learns, one is affected, changed. It may be that the possibility of the openness needed for learning is connected to the withdrawal I’ve spoken of. When the patriarch Jose Arcadio Buendia is caught up �5     in leading people through the jungle and founding a town, he doesn’t have time to wonder about magnetism or whether the earth might be round, like an orange. In the Meno, we see the young titular character to be vain, desperate to impress, and (as his various attempts to define virtue reveal) consumed by the struggle for wealth, power, and reputation. It seems likely that it is partially the slave boy’s very distance from Meno’s preoccupations and ambitions that enables him to be open enough to see his error about the side of the double square and to be genuinely interested in figuring out the truth of the matter. I think the connection between the openness needed for learning and a sort of separation from the world suggests at least one possible reason that it’s important for those who value learning to be a part of communities like this one. It isn’t easy to maintain that openness. In our everyday lives, in what some call the “Real World,” it can be hard to maintain the strong desire to learn. Like various members of the Buendia family, we may be caught up in the cares and tasks of home life, driven by the desire for erotic or material possession, caught up in the machinations of the practices of politics and war. Or, like Meno, who as you will remember attempts to close off the search for the definition of virtue with a logical paradox about the impossibility of learning, we may simply tire and grow frustrated with an endeavor that is quite strenuous and doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of what is often called “Return on Investment.” If we want to persist in �6     our “useless” inquiries, it helps to be a part of a community that supports that commitment in the face of the pull toward other, more “practical,” activities – a community that says to us – no, maybe the Real World is over here, in our conversation; or maybe both worlds are real, but to think about this and understand the different ways in which this might be so, we need a perspective that can only come when we have created through withdrawal the possibility of moving between worlds. Of course, even with the support of a community, maintaining openness and continuing to learn requires effort. Learning is an activity. I can’t simply withdraw into Melquiades’ room or some other place of solitude and wait for learning to happen to me; once I am inside, I have to get to work: questioning, reading, translating. Nor can I approach a teacher and expect knowledge to be poured into me as though I were an empty vessel. Returning to Meno, we hear Socrates exhort his interlocutor: One must search for the things one does not know. It is an arduous activity. And any stories that we tell each other to encourage one another in the active search will make us (to quote Socrates again) “better people, braver and less idle.” �7     I think this matter of stories touches on another value we might find in a community like St. John’s College. We are part of a community in which we tell one another stories – by which we encourage one another in the search for what we do not know. By this I don’t of course mean that we all accept the details of the myth of recollection. The stories we tell take many forms. But they all inspire us when we are already eager, and urge us on when the work becomes tiring. They speak to the better part of our natures and even hold out the hope that engaging in the search will somehow make us better people. One of the things I missed most when I was away from our regular discussions was being in a place where stories like this are constantly in the air. One final thought about what makes engaging in this search together so precious. In a true community of learning, our searching, our striving, is common. And remarkably we find that what we are striving FOR is common as well. This is very much unlike our experience of striving for things in the “Real World.” Questions, theorems, forms, the objects of the intellect – these are universally available, and unlike material goods, and for that matter unlike power and reputation, they are not diminished by being shared. Phaedrus, in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name, famously says that “the things of friends are common.” One could spend a long time unpacking that, but one upshot of it seems �8     to me to be that common intellectual inquiry is one of the most natural bases for friendship. So welcome. Welcome to this place in the midst of but slightly apart from the world. Join us as we tell one another stories the encourage us to seek, and as we strive together as friends toward the things that remain common even as they become more fully our own. Before we disperse, I’d like to let those of you who are new to us know that the love of communal reading and learning that I’ve been talking about overflows the classroom into a variety of student-led study groups; some spring up spontaneously among friends, while others are more organized. There are five “official” Graduate Institute study groups taking place this summer. One Group is reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, one is studying Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West”, there is one on Quantum Physics, one on Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and one that will be both thinking about and making music. Information and reading schedules for the study groups are available in the Graduate Institute office, and have been circulated in an email. �9     Also, the GI is delighted to host the SJC summer lecture series. Please join us this Wednesday night at 7:30, here in the Great Hall, for the first in our Wednesday night lecture series and a following question period. St. John’s tutor Mr. David Townsend will speak on “Imagination and Leadership.” Mr. Townsend asks that we read Marilynn Robinson’s wonderful essay “Imagination and Leadership.” We will circulate a link to an online version of the essay. And please join us now for the refreshments waiting at the back of the Hall, before your preceptorials begin at 2 o'clock. The 2015 summer term of the Graduate Institute is now 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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. Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 9 pages Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital 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/. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker Title A name given to the resource Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2016 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-06 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Annapolis_GI_Summer_2016_Convocation Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Language A language of the resource English Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Brooker Langston for the Summer 2016 semester in Annapolis, MD. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/8b235e6cee5713a6a46d2fb1ac767a99.pdf 6813f2fd6aea1851bd68f75fc86147d8 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation 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 Microsoft Word document Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 8 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 Convocation Address, Graduate Institute, Summer 2018 Description An account of the resource Typescript of the convocation address for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Langston on June 11, 2018 for the Summer 2018 semester in Annapolis, MD. The address is titled "Parts and Wholes." Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker 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 Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-06-11 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College 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 Convocation Summer 2018 Parts and Wholes_Emily Langston Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3926" title="Sound recording">Sound recording</a> Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/d6dc1b51038c57d733d5a5eb16b67595.jpg ad1e57f180ff839c4fc1185c611dfb4a 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource <p>The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials.  The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. </p> To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-0961 Title A name given to the resource Convocation in Iglehart Hall Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/25/1941 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) -- Students. Iglehart Hall (St. John's College, Annapolis, MD) Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Convocation Iglehart Hall https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/4d504e55706b3935aec266eaea3a882d.jpg b00787395a35e3a73016080348644a8a 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource <p>The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials.  The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. </p> To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-0960 Title A name given to the resource Convocation Procession Led by George A. Bingley Description An account of the resource 1 photographic print : b&w Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 9/25/1941 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Unknown Subject The topic of the resource St. John's College (Annapolis, Md.) -- Students. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still Image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph. Convocation https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/aa429ad60fa13b1a86a12140be7a597a.mp3 7826101bd2c906ff9111bb202175ce10 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 Convocation Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Description An account of the resource Addresses given at convocation ceremonies held at the beginning of the semester at St. John's College. Includes both the undergraduate and Graduate Institute commencements. <br /><br />Click on <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=43" title="Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection">Items in the Convocation Addresses Collection</a> to view and sort all items in the collection. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context convocation Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data wav Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:19:05 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 Convocation, Graduate Institute, Summer 2018 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of the convocation for the Graduate Institute given by Emily Langston for the Summer 2018 semester in Annapolis, MD. Introduction by Panayiotis Kanelos. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Langston, Emily Brooker 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 Annapolis, MD Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2018-06-11 Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SummerConvocation2018 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kanelos, Panayiotis Relation A related resource <a href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/3927" title="Typescript">Typescript</a> Convocation Deans Graduate Institute Presidents Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c5c088c217d759369f14b65562cf652e.jpg f39d4ded89664248356d8d963cf5eb28 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 Image Collection—Annapolis Description An account of the resource <p>The Greenfield Library Image Collection houses over 5,000 photographs, postcards, drawings, and other graphic materials.  The images in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. </p> To learn more about the Greenfield Library's archives use policy or to obtain high-resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Image Collection Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Image Collection Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Image Collection—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Greenfield Library Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context imagecollectionannapolis Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Physical Dimensions The actual physical size of the original image 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data black-and-white photograph 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/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context SJC-P-2154 Title A name given to the resource Copy print of a lithograph of Annapolis, Maryland, from the State House and the east Description An account of the resource Copy print of a lithograph of Annapolis, Maryland, from the State House and the east The original lithograph is in the collection of the Maryland State Archives and dates from circa 1850. Versions of the image were used in the book, "A Complete & Generous Education" 300 Years of Liberal Arts, St. John's College, Annapolis (Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1996). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource E. Sachse & Co. Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Annapolis, MD Type The nature or genre of the resource Still image Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource jpeg Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource No known copyright. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource circa 1996