The Chance of a Lifetime:
Some Thoughts on Starting College

- Prof. Robert Paul Wolff -
Dept. of Philosophy and
Director of African-American Studied
Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Presented at the Opening Convocation of The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
September 9, 1999

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Each Fall, at about this time, several million young men and women begin their college careers. This Fall, it is your turn. In the next twenty minutes or so, I would like to make a few suggestions about how you might approach this experience. I began my college career forty-nine years ago, so my advice, if not new, is at least ripe with age. Some of the things I am going to tell you directly contradict what you have been told in the past several days. That is as it should be, for more than anything else, college is a place where you must begin to think to yourself, and stop taking advice from people simply because they are older, or have titles in front of their names.

Thus far, most of you have done pretty much what you have been told to do, or required to do, at least when it comes to education. Kindergarten, Elementary School, Middle School, High School-Pre-Algebra, Algebra, English I, English II, English III, Social Studies, Biology, Chemistry-it all has been laid out for you and handed to you regardless of how you felt or what you were really interested in. Now you have come to the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and once again, people are telling you what courses to take, what to study.

Fulfill your distribution requirements, you are told, before you do anything else. Many of you, I would bet, have programs filled up with courses like Math 101, English 101, Biology 101, Spanish 201, and Sociology 100, plus one of the really interesting First Year Seminars.

Frankly, that looks to me like a fifth year of high school, not a first year of college! You have done high school. It is time to move on -- challenge yourself, to explore realms of ideas that you may not even have known existed before you arrived here. You must resist with all your might the effort by well-meaning advisors to track you into a set of requirement-satisfying courses! According to the information I found on the web, you have two weeks to drop or add courses, so my first piece of advice to you is this: as soon as you leave this Convocation, look through the course catalogue until you find a course that strikes you as really fascinating. Don't worry about whether it satisfies a distribution requirement. Just sign up for it, and then drop the most boring course on your schedule. The time for you to begin the great journey of exploration and self-understand that is a Liberal Education.

These next four years are the only time in your entire life during which you will be free to explore the universe-both physical universe and the social and cultural universe. This is your time to wander freely through the realms of ideas. Until now, it has been lockstep schooling. Once college is over, you will have to get a job or prepare for a career through some sort of graduate education. But these precious four years offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to let your minds run free. I know that you are under tremendous pressure from your parents to choose a major that is "good for something" -- by which they mean, good for a job. And you are under just as much pressure from College advisors to satisfy the various degree requirements that they have, with the very best of intentions, imposed on you. But this is your college experience, not your parents', or your professors' or anyone else's. And you must fight to make it a moment of freedom, of growth, and of exploration.

In preparation for you first year of college, you have all been asked to read A Hope in the Unseen, the extraordinary account by Ron Suskind of Cedric Jennings' successful battle to wrest a genuine education from the disastrous schools in which he was trapped as a teen-ager, and his triumphant arrival at Brown University. I read the book this past summer, in preparation for visiting with you today. There are many lessons we can learn from the book, not least important being the intolerable burdens that poor Black kids must bear if they simply want a decent education. But I want to focus on something else -- the intensity of Cedric's commitment, the strength of will and determination he exhibited as he persevered in High School, in the Summer MIT program, and finally at Brown. There were a hundred moments when it would have been perfectly understandable for him to just give up his dream and settle for something less, but he didn't, because he understood that for him, as for all of you, true education is the one indispensable prerequisite for a full and meaningful life.

As I read Suskind's book, I was reminded again and again of the struggle of another Black man whom I know quite well: Bhekisizwe Stanley Ndimandel, or Stanley as he is sometimes called, comes from a Black township called Daveyton near the South African city of Johannesburg. He grew up not in a house but in a corrugated tin shack in a squatter settlement that South Africans call a "location." Orphaned at the age of eleven by a car crash, Stanley was raised by relatives, without electricity, running water, or toilets in the shack they called home. Somehow, Stanley managed not only to finish Elementary School -- itself an extraordinary accomplishment -- but to attend and complete High School. Against all the odds, he did well enough on his school leaving examinations to earn the right to attend University. Of all the young Black men and women in South Africa his age, only about two in a hundred have managed to get that far with their education.

I met Stanley in 1992 during his first year as an undergraduate at the University of Durban Westville, a university in the port city of Durban established for non-white students under the apartheid regime in South Africa. I run a small charitable organization that raises money here in the United States and gives partial scholarships each year to eighty or one hundred desperately poor Black men and women attending universities in South Africa. With the help of my organization, but always on the brink of being forced to leave school for the lack of money, Stanley actually managed to earn an undergraduate degree in education. After a post-graduate Honors year, he won a grant to come to the University of Massachusetts. In June, he was awarded a Master's Degree in Education, and right now, he is beginning his doctoral studies at The University of Wisconsin at Madison, one of the leading American universities. Eventually, Stanley will return to South Africa to help younger Black men and women along the path to a university education. Like Cedric Jennings, Bhekisizwe Stanley Ndimande refused to allow apparently insuperable obstacles to stop him from. I hope you will learn from the example of Cedric and Stanley how valuable a college education can be.

Two years ago, this institution changed its name from North Adams State College to the Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts. This was no trivial name change. It was the formal recognition of a fundamental reorientation of the educational mission of the college. In the few minutes that remain to me, I should like to address the deeper significance of this change of name. What is a Liberal Education, and what is its true value?

The traditional rationale for a liberal education is that it is the appropriate education for a gentleman [not, please note, for a gentlewoman - that consisted of skill with the needle, a bit of music, and the appropriate education for a gentleman [not, please note, for a gentlewoman - that consisted of skill with the needle, a bit of music, and the elements of economics, which is to say the management of the household.] A study of the classics, it was thought, would give young men of high estate the proper finish, or patina, that would allow them to move gracefully in polite circles. It was even hoped that a familiarity with ancient tongues and literatures might deepen a young man's understanding of human affairs, although that was, to be sure, more of a tutor's hope than a realistic expectation.

There is a competing justification of liberal education that has co-existed all along with the aristocratic rationale in its many versions - liberal education as the road to integration into the mainstream of American society and economy, as the engine of upward mobility in a competitive American society, as the step stool that would enable the smart, the ambitious, and the hard-working to begin to climb the pyramid to its favored upper reaches.

Recently, the defense of liberal education as the key to upward mobility has fallen on hard times. With fully half of each age cohort attending college, there is obviously not enough room in the upper quarter or third of the pyramid for them all, no matter how high their grade point averages. If every young man and woman now enrolled in an American college catches fire and commits himself or herself heart and soul to the pursuit of knowledge, the only economic tasks of upper middle class life. Mastery of the traditions is merely a device for separating the few from the many, so that the few may be advanced up the pyramid and the many blocked lower down.

We are left, therefore, with the question with which we began: What good is a liberal education?

Genuine knowledge is a rational understanding of the principles, evidence, and inferences upon which true beliefs are grounded. Wisdom is the ability to distinguish the true from the false, the solidly based from the unsound, the eternal from the ephemeral. And this distinction between appearance and reality, between knowledge and mere opinion, exists in what we today call the humanities and the social sciences, as much as in the natural sciences. There are truths to be discovered about the principles of right conduct, about the healthy condition of the human psyche, about the just arrangement of the social and economic order, and about the criteria of beauty in the arts.

Each of us is dangerously prone to the temptations of appearance, to the surface allure of what looks pleasing, feels good, seems true. Never is this more true than when surface appearances confirm our prejudices and privileged position in the social order. The illusions of surface appearance contribute to result - whatever the spiritual gains that might ensure - would be an escalation of the credentials required for the elite jobs.

Indeed, we have already seen this trend developing. Two generations ago, young men entered the ranks of junior corporate executives straight out of high school. With the advent of universal secondary education, a bachelor's degree came to be the entry ticket, preferably, but not necessarily from an elite college. Now, a master's in Business Administration is more and more required for a shot at the best corporate entry-level jobs. Since the shape of the pyramid has not changed, there are proportionately no more jobs than there have ever been. It is just the entry-fee that has been raised.

Clearly, there is something distinctly accidental, rather than essential, about these defenses of the liberal arts, if I may invoke a familiar philosophical distinction. The aristocratic justification of liberal education explicitly portrays it as consummatory rather than constitutive, as a graceful addition to the life of a man whose social position and role are determined by his birth. A boorish aristocrat is no less an aristocrat, after all. The social mobility justification may appear to be less adventitious, but in fact is equally so. There is no inner connection between the study of our cultural traditions and performance of the mystification of social reality that Georg Hegel and Karl Marx named Ideology. The great contribution of the nineteenth century to our understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality was the explicit recognition-'discovery' would be too strong-that the surface appearances of social and economic phenomena are systematically mystified so as to conceal the privilege, domination, and exploitation on which social reality rests.

There are three major spheres in which this ideological mystification plays a role: religion, politics, and the economy. In our society, indeed in all societies, church, state, and corporation cry out for critical examination and unmasking. If we are to see ourselves and our human world in we truly are, then we must throw off the illusions of religion, deflate the pretensions of the state, and see through the meretricious justifications of the capitalist economy.

Here we find a clue to the real justification for a liberal education. Liberal education cannot be defended as a device for sorting the young into the lower, middle, and upper middle classes. Nor can I possibly explain to myself and to my sons that I have been engaged, these past forty years, merely in providing the finishing touches and social graces to America's version of the jeunesse d'oree. Surely it cannot be the highest purpose of a familiarity with Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, Marx, and Dickinson merely to serve as a flash of color by which upper class birds identify their partners during mating season, or as the body language allowing corporate executives to call, each to each, across a crowded cocktail party.

No, there is indeed a deeper rationale. Virtually without exception, the great works of philosophy, history, literature, art, sociology and political theory-even, if we choose our texts carefully, of economics-teach us to penetrate the mystifying surface appearances of society and human nature, and to look for the liberating reality that lies beneath. Through encounters with these treasures of the western and other civilizations, we learn to achieve ironic distance from our social condition, to call into question the claims of authority, to subject to critique and reevaluation every element of the culture that has been handed on to us, including even the very supposition that these works deserve to constitute a canon of immortal texts and artworks.

This is a political claim, please note, and not a trivial one at that, for it rests on the conviction that the world as we find it is badly in need of critique, badly in need of radical change. Were I fundamentally satisfied with present social arrangements, I could perhaps embrace the view that the liberal arts are no more than a supererogatory grace. But with so many oppressed, so many exploited, with so much unnecessary misery and injustice in our society, we cannot afford to cast aside the liberating potential of the liberal arts.

To those of you who are students, I issue a plea: Do not treat the great works of the liberal tradition merely as so much material to be swotted up for exams, regurgitated for a grade, and then forgotten. Wrestle with those texts, allow yourself to be offended by them, struggle with whatever you find in them that disturbs you, unsettles you, unnerves you, and, like Jacob of the Old Testament, do not let them go until they bless you.

And to you, my colleagues, who have given your lives to the teaching of the liberal arts, I hold out a hand of solidarity and encouragement. Though it often does seem that we are condemned to whisper in a corner with a few lads and lasses, nevertheless, those whispers can shake a throne. Let us think of ourselves, with Kierkegaardian irony, as the Totos of this land of Oz, who, sniffing out the humbug behind smoke screen, reveal the constituted authorities to be nor more than pathetic old windbags.

Thank you.


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