Sewanee, Tennessee

March 9, 2003

Let me add my welcome to the many you have probably already had. I hope your discovery of Sewanee has been the outcome of a path that is perhaps a bit more deliberate or at least more rational than mine was some 30+ years ago. My Sewanee adventure started on a beach in North Carolina long before I had ever heard of this place. My wife and a friend were passing the time in the sun playing with something called a Ouija Board. When queried, “Where will we be next year?” the Ouija Board pointer moved to the letter “T”. My wife and her friend, being adept if pseudo-scornful Ouija Board players knew how to play the game of elimination and asked the board, “Texas?” and the pointer moved to the “No” answer located in the corner. That by elimination left only Tennessee, so their next question was, “Where in Tennessee?” The pointer moved to the letter “S”—but did not spell any further letters. That was months before I began to apply for teaching jobs and before a letter came back to me from a place in Tennessee called “Sewanee” asking if I could come for an interview. I told my wife to throw the letter away because I was not going anywhere it didn’t snow. Little did I know. Six months later and 14 snows into my first year here, I wasn’t sure if I had been conned by the Ouija Board or was being chastised by God for being skeptical.

But in any case, however you come to be here—by Ouija Board, prayer, family tradition, or if you are just hedging your bets against a long shot at Yale, welcome. Some while back the Admissions office asked me to speak at these dinners and to talk a bit about Sewanee. I may not be the best person to do that and each year I have admitted that right up front. I would not recommend my career path to you as exemplary. I can tell you right now, your parents do not want you to approach college selection or career goals the way I did. I’ll tell you a bit more about that later.

Some people around Sewanee refer to this talk tonight as my “Seuss” talk; that, I suppose, because from year to year I have sometimes taken a theme or image or some lines from one of the Dr. Seuss books. One year in particular I did an extended analysis of Sewanee in terms of the mystical engineering of Dr. Seuss’s drawings and described Sewanee as a place, like Gertrud McFuzz’s tailfeathers, where everything was connected but nothing worked. I have not, however, limited my literary canon only to Dr. Seuss. In the past few years, I have used material from Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak, and Winnie the Pooh, Waldo, and Little Rabbit Foo Foo. And currently I am reading such important works as Judy Moody, Captain Underpants, The Magic Tree House, and the Box Car Kids. Perhaps some of these are familiar to you.

I like to talk about children’s books because, frankly, they often make more sense than many of the books I read professionally. I will take Horton Loves A Who any day over Hobbes’ Leviathan or Locke’s Second Treatise on Government; The Lorax over the pontifications of the Sierra Club; or the sighings of Eyore over all the existentialist philosophers. But there is more to this. Children’s books are often age-encrypted metaphysics or morality plays. The story line is typically simple; the action is direct, the characters unambiguous—but the deep structure of many of these stories resonates with major issues in human spirituality, morality, and in the quest for meaning. You cannot read Horton and be unmoved by the plight of the weak and the powerless or read the Grinch and not see a deeper story of revelation and redemption at work. And the calm, mortal Taoism of Charlotte’s Web should move anybody with half a heart. Sometimes I wish I could put the whole adult world back in kindergarten and sit them down and shush them and read them stories so that they could perhaps reconnect to their sanity once again.

Well, tonight my text is somewhat different from those I have used in the past: I hope you have read The Story of Ferdinand. Re-reading it recently, I was surprised to find that it has been around since 1936. Let me recall how it begins for you:

“Once upon a time in Spain

There was a little bull and his name was

Ferdinand.

All the other little bulls he

Lived with would run and jump

And butt their heads together,

But not Ferdinand.

He liked to sit just quietly and

Smell the flowers.”

“He had a favorite spot out in

The pasture under a cork tree.

It was his favorite tree and he

Would sit in its shade all day

And smell the flowers.”

Ferdinand’s wise mother left him to his flowers and cork tree and did not push him to run about and butt heads with the other bulls. In time,

“…Ferdinand grew and grew until he

was very big and strong.”

Meanwhile, the other bulls were still butting heads and fighting with each other and sticking each other with their horns. “What they wanted most of all was to be picked to fight at the bull fights in Madrid.” Now, we know this is only a children’s story and no allegory, so none of this applies to any of you. You are not running about butting heads trying to get picked for the bull fights in Madrid. Of course, not; this is a scholarship weekend—not a bull fight. Try to remember that.

You recall what happened next? When the men from Madrid came searching for the most ferocious bulls and all the bulls put on a show and butted heads and raced about in the pasture—but not Ferdinand. What did Ferdinand do? He quite sensibly, went out to his favorite cork tree and sat down to smell the flowers. But what goes with flowers??

Bees! And you know what has to happen. Ferdinand sat down on a bee and the bee did what bees do when bulls sit on them and the bee stung Ferdinand and he launched into the air, pawing and snorting and running through the pasture and the men from Madrid noticed and selected him for the bull fights in Madrid. You and I as readers of the story know that the promoters mistake Ferdinand’s motion for motivation and you and I also know that his motivation is simply external and artificial. I think there may be a moral here for us, for you as you contemplate college and as you specifically consider coming to Sewanee.

External motivation can be good, sometimes, but we have to be careful about it, because in the end, it does not belong to us and is either random or controlled by someone else. External motivation may move us but it does not arise from the center of our own life. There are many such external motivators—parents, teachers, peers, careers, stimulants. There are all kinds of people that want to make us get up and run around frantically and play somebody else’s game back in town. Often, like parents, they mean well, but often, again like parents, they may do more harm than good, especially if they have their own list of expectations that they expect you to fulfill.

Part of going to college is to be away from your parents so that the simple physical distance can create conditions where you can sort through their external motivations and your own interests and weigh them and see what is really your own. That is why we try to make the break with your parents definitive: you are with them when you arrive, they help you unpack, and then pretty quickly we send them packing. And God do they resist that! The weep and cry. They keep finding little things in the car and bring them up to you. They want to go to your orientation group with you. One year we had a mom that just couldn’t let go. She went to orientation, waited outside the language placement test, was here on the night before classes. And it looked as if she might just stay on for classes too. That was too much. We sent her away. It was time to say goodbye.

Other things will promote themselves as external motivators. One of the most powerful is career. Often without fully understanding what it means you will say to us or on some dumb form that your “career goals” are such and such. We get people every year who have known since they were about 10 that they were going to be a banker or chemist or lawyer. Saying stuff like this aloud or putting it on forms can be very misleading because then other people begin to think that is what you are going to do and they ask you about it and you begin to respond to them as if it were true—and their knowledge and expectations begin to shape your life. Over all my years of teaching here, I would say that excess pre-specification of career has ruined more education and then careers than anything else I can point to.

Sometimes the external motivation can be the simple social reality of the people you are around—people you know and would like to impress so you begin to do what they do and espouse what they espouse and drink what they drink. And you think he will think you are cool if you drink this or eat that or do this with him—and as you begin this line of thought, you begin to lose self-control and self-direction and begin to be pulled into the bull ring. Someone else and not you begins to run your life. That can happen to you at college. You don’t want anyone to think you are from some hick town or let on that you are a Baptist or Presbyterian, so you set out to show them that you can get more polluted than any of them. It happens. It may have happened to a couple of you last night.

So how do you recover self-control [and sometimes, self-respect] once these powerful forces are loose around you? It is hard, but it can be done, and learning how to maintain your integrity and live from the power of your own being is a large and important part of college experience. You may have to do what Ferdinand did. Recall that the men from Madrid put him in the ring and the crowd cheered him on but all Ferdinand really noticed was the flowers in the hair of the pretty ladies. So he refused to play the bull fight game, refused to butt heads with the picadors and ignored the matador. Ferdinand just sat down and smelled the flowers.

And here is disclosed the essence of Ferdinand: he was his own bull. That is, his motivation was personal, centered, not external and driven. Ferdinand represents the tension between action and thought, between activity and contemplation, and this simple child’s text actually points up a very deep tension in human life. And of course, most of the time the balance of things is on the side of frantic activity, the life of the city, the applause of the crowd, the approval of the spectator women. But Ferdinand recognizes not only that that is not what he wants but that the world of the ring, of the city, is for him a false world. Ferdinand wants serenity. He wants to recover the pace of his own life in the pasture. Like Thoreau at Walden, he wants to live deliberately. This little story is not, I think, a pre-school pacifist text as some would see it. No, I think there is something more important than pacificism taught here. Nor is Ferdinand simply a nature mystic beguiled by flowers and meadows. Like Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, Ferdinand had purity of heart because he could will a single thing.

Ferdinand is a hero of conscience not for his pacificism but for his will, for his self-control, for his unshakable sense of self-identity: a very rare thing these days in a world of the violent exteriorization of sensibility, a world that pulls out of us every secret, every motive, and asks us to be “survivors” on camera. In ancient India, this exteriorized world was known as “nama-rupa”—name and form, the alluring but spiritually destructive zone of sensation and perception that offers us the illusion of the world instead of the knowledge of self or God. In Buddhism this exteriorization of sensibility is called the ‘chain of dependent causation’ where one thing leads to another beginning in desire, leading to pain, and ending in ignorance. In Chinese philosophy it is called the ‘world of ten thousand things’. Hidden in the serene countenance of Ferdinand and reflected in his diamond hard will is a warrior monk, a figure of militant observance of an order of priorities, an order of being, that will not give into nor be distracted by the imperious claims of a chaotic world and debased sensibility. You have to really know who you are if you want to live not just in peace but with integrity in a world that will steal those things from you in an instant. To learn about who you are and what is deepest and most important for you and how you will live your life is the big reason for going to college.

Liberal education is something like a cow pasture—the challenge is to find meaning without stepping in something—(or sitting on something). But we must keep in mind that, in the end, children’s books are children’s books and sometimes the tales they serve us are perhaps too simple for being so morally clear. For we cannot choose as Ferdinand does, between pasture and city, between contemplation and action. Sewanee is not a refuge of contemplation intended to disable you for life in the city—in the great bull ring of whatever Madrid you destiny has in store for you. Sewanee is a place of contemplation but ours is a purposive contemplation and we refuse to accept the easy disjunction between contemplation and action and we will not let you retreat into either. Detached contemplation is an illusion and mindless action is a destructive passion. You come here for a while, but then you go back to the city: not to forget contemplation in a whirl of action—although that will perhaps be too much the tendency of your life.

Liberal education at Sewanee is intended to bridge the accepted fracture of contemplation and action, pasture and city if you will. We invite you here but we fail you if you stay here. And perhaps our worst failures, the worst failure of any good school, is to allow its students to think that those were the best days of their lives, that the goal of the good life is to graduate and then live there in their minds. We will do everything we can to disarm you of that temptation, including locking the dorms behind you on the day after graduation. Why? Because you are not meant for a pasture; you are meant for a city: and you must carry your contemplation with you. Neither were you meant simply to butt heads in the bull ring of the city. A life of work without contemplation is barren. Sewanee’s task is to suit you for contemplation in a world of action—to teach you to carry your pasture within you wherever you must work and to always smell the flowers of hope and opportunity and challenge—and to never waver in knowing who you are or what is the right thing to do, however plausible or necessary all the other options are.

That is why our support services here and our classes and the curriculum overall does not comfort you with convenient disjunctions and clear-cut categories. We will not do either your thinking or your choosing for you and we will not leave you comfortable in idle contemplation. This past year we have been engaged in a long series of lectures and discussions under the heading “How Then Shall We Live?”: in a way, an exercise in pure contemplation, but it is contemplation wedded to action, theory embedded in practice. “Contemplative action” may begin when you first meet the international student assigned to your suite or with your first conversation with a local person at the market. The melding of theory and practice may occur in an oddly practical problem in chemistry lab or in a desire you cannot suppress to major in both biology and art. It may be expressed in your need to follow your father in investment banking while you still dream of owning an ice-cream shop or writing poetry. Or it may arise for you as it did for me in the shaming maxim of my grade school teachers uttered a dozen times a day: “you know better than that” with the inexorable entailment: people who know better are expected to DO better.

More often, though, college students just don’t know what they want. A couple of weeks ago, I got this query from a student in my Introduction to Religion class. In honest openness she wrote:

“Smith,

Granted this is random question, but I was wondering what made you decide to be a professor. I know you are involved in a lot of other activities besides just teaching. I have noticed that you have done a lot with your life and not wasted a minute of it. Many people say that college is the place where find out what you want to do with your life.

However, I am amazingly lost. A bunch of different things interest me, but I have not found anything that has especially caught my eye. I do want to do more than just one

thing in my life. But I was just wondering how you ended up where you are, and if you were just as lost as I am at some point in your life.

Thanks

Johnston”

I wrote back to her:

“I started out wanting to be a Marine Corps fighter pilot, almost went to officer training school, thought I was going to be a chemical engineer, switched to math, gave up a 100% scholarship at UVA, transferred to the University of Richmond, majored in English, caught myself standing in a strange town in Asia struggling against leaving my American life and being a mission teacher on an island off the coast of Malaya, broke my engagement to one girl and married another, went to seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, intending to be a preacher, got sidetracked and planned to become an Old Testament scholar but said no to that, started to go back to graduate school to get my MA in English, transferred instead with all my junk in a U-Haul to Duke, switched to an area called Christianity and Culture, changed from Baptist churches to Methodist churches [rode a Methodist preaching circuit for 4 years], became an Episcopalian, had a run-in with the KKK, and wrote my dissertation on a Hungarian philosopher of science, and threw literally in the trashcan the first letter I had from a place called Sewanee inviting me to come teach, which my wife had semi-discovered with a friend while playing a Ouija Board. [I told her:] I may not be the one to ask for direction in your life. I became a professor because I had a great professor who was the best teacher I ever knew, and because of my illiterate grandfather who worked on the railroad and told me to get all the education I could. I stayed at Sewanee because it was the best school I could ever have dreamed of and for 33 years, Sewanee has rewarded me with great students who would listen to me talk about the weirdest things and then take notes. I never knew where it was all headed, still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, sleep with the light on and have a Teddy Bear, and would not change a bit of it. Looking back, I feel like God has led me every step of the way--but I only saw that looking back. Smith”

I did not tell her that I never got to be a Marine Corps fighter pilot, never flew F4Us or F4 Phantoms, but Sewanee provided me with other “outlets”: I became a fireman, got my certification as a fire pump mechanic, attended hazardous materials school, engineered on some awesome and very scary fires, worked on security details for the first President Bush and for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, qualified with sidearms with the police department and carry a Deputy Sheriff’s badge in my wallet. And, also, I hijacked the Good Morning America bus and parked it along with Joan Lunden and her whole crew right out there in front of the Quad. Sewanee lets you do things you don’t expect. Right now, I teach religion but my best courses are field courses and I work in Environmental Studies and in a wonderful interdisciplinary effort we have here at Sewanee called the Landscape Analysis Lab—where several of us from biology, religion, geology, anthropology, psychology, economics and political science get to play with some very powerful computers and generate really interesting maps about how we use the land. One of my current projects is directing a religion major in mapping how local Mennonites select and use farmland. Two summers ago, one of my research assistants [and American Studies major] mapped a set of very unusual Tennessee cemeteries and presented our data to the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative’s annual meeting in London.

My office has been a place where an odd lot of students have congregated. One of my webmasters became a Computer Science major and then became a specialist in artificial intelligence helping to design software that recognizes and distinguishes buildings [very useful by the way in identifying old barn types in Appalachia—or in the nose cone of a missile headed for Baghdad]. Another of my techies, who spent rather too much of his time as my intern hacking his way around the computer systems here, is finishing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and is probably headed for an intelligence career in encryption and digital counter-terrorism. But there have been others. It is not just religion majors or my interns that have proved to have interesting careers. For about 15 years, I served on the PreMedical Advisory Committee. In that time not only did 5 of our religion majors become M.D.s but we observed that Sewanee got into medical school students who represented every single one of our undergraduate majors including Fine Arts, Classics, French, English, Philosophy, and Music along with the standard and expected majors such as biology, physics, and chemistry. I don’t think any other liberal arts college has that kind of track record. Religion majors at Duke don’t go to medical school. I mention Duke, not to pick on that school [I hold two Duke degrees], but to note that pre-medical training there is very specialized and so selective that humanities and liberal arts students are just not likely to make the cut in their pre-med program.

I would suggest these things to you: most Sewanee students go to graduate school soon after their graduation from Sewanee—the figure is astoundingly high in comparison with national norms: some 70% will eventually go to graduate school [33% is the national average]. But that is not really what is so interesting. What I find interesting is that there is not a lot of correlation between our students undergraduate majors and their eventual graduate work or careers. Sewanee students explore, they study, and then they simply go off to do all kinds of interesting things: Religion majors who have entered careers in medicine, law, public administration, and especially environmental work. But also the young woman who double majored in Fine Arts and Economics—why? Because she wanted to become an Art Museum director and found a graduate program in museum management. Or the student who--so far as any of us who taught him could tell--was of indeterminate major and who spent most of his time either duck hunting or fly fishing—and got a job with an environmental law firm specializing in wetland management. Another student turned his combined skills as a student fireman, outdoorsman, and forestry major into a job organizing crews and equipment for rainforest oil platform explorations in Indonesia—a job not different in principle from his responsibilities here as the student fire chief.

Hear this from one woman, a former English major who is now an English professor in Colorado and who has found a way to serve also as slope safety manager for a major ski resort and in her off season works as an airport ramp commander for the Forest Service. She wrote me:

"a quick update on what's up with me. I spent the summer working as the assistant tanker base manager at the Grand Junction Air Center. My employer was the BLM [Bureau Of Land Management] (yes, I have a GS rating). GJ is a big aerial fire fighting center and we get air tankers (C130s, P2Vs, PB4Ys, and P3s), Smokejumper planes, reconnaissance aircraft, and helicopters in on a regular basis. My job was to keep the ramp organized, everybody fueled, and the tankers loaded with retardant. I learned that I can fit 5 tankers on our ramp, but it is tight. Mostly I tried, and was successful, to keep the planes from hitting each other while on the ground. Sometimes it was close. Being able to constantly think ahead was critical in this job, and I honestly think that being an English major was instrumental because I was able to see the big picture clearly and could readily take the long view. When you have 6 tankers in the rotation, but loading pit space for only 3 some juggling has to be done. I realized that if I could unravel James Joyce I could certainly sort out 6-10 airplanes."

Hear also one of our much older grads—one who graduated in 1890 and who led the first successful ascent of Alaska’s Mt. Denali [McKinley]. If you follow high altitude climbing you know that this is the most deadly mountain in the world. This is Hudson Stuck who led an all Sewanee group to climb that difficult mountain for the first time and who also drove a dog sled from Anchorage down the Yukon, up the Alaska coast and across the North Slope to Canada, and then back down the Mackenzie and Porcupine rivers to Anchorage—between November and March in the Arctic. He made journeys not even the Eskimos would attempt in the winter, baptizing and serving communion as he went. He was an eloquent defender of the place of liberal arts in life—reading Shakespeare and Thucydides while trapped for three weeks in a massive blizzard on the flank of Denali, who declaimed against the illiteracy of educated people who knew nothing but their own specialties, and who in the best Sewanee fashion wedded contemplation into action in his unremitting fight against child labor in the South and in America before World War I.

For that young woman who wrote me that she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, I would tell her that she couldn’t be at a better school. The flexibility and depth of our curriculum on the one hand—the combination of required courses and majors—means that every Sewanee student is going to acquire very good general knowledge. But there is something else about Sewanee—and I don’t quite know how to put this without sounding corny—but it is critical to what we are and do: Sewanee is about dreaming. Not idylls and fantasies but about the visions that inspire us, the dreams that lead us, the high idealism that makes us change the world when others quit. We are not satisfied that you might get a very good education here; what’s the point of that if you have no wisdom or compassion or generosity or leadership? We do not educate so that you can go away and feel certified and satisfied. We pour ourselves passionately into your dreams because of our dreams: you will become the way we change the world. No less than that. We live in a screwed up world that needs what Sewanee people can offer and we expect you to take up the cause, dream the dream, make us proud, make the needful smile, and make God notice. We do not admit you here to a degree program; we admit you to a life program, and we expect you to keep earning your Sewanee degree until the day you die—and beyond.

You see, what our students across a hundred years have known and what you will learn here is that Sewanee education in not about qualifying you for the right job—putting the bee in your butt so you can butt your head against the walls of the economic arena or kill yourself for the transient fame of jousting with the matadors of corporate madness. That is not what we are about—despite the fact that some of you will become very good bulls or bears on Wall Street or in the Chicago Commodities Exchange. Sewanee is not about jobs or careers but about why you have jobs and careers in the first place, about why you go to college at all: Sewanee is about making you a better person because you will learn the things that are true and lasting and are about character and goodness. And you will learn the things that qualify you not for jobs but for life by teaching you the meaning of human service and civic responsibility. That is why, while you are here, we not only overload you with reading and labs and papers but also expect you to get involved projects that make a difference in people’s lives: habitat for humanity, the Jamaica program, the Appalachian Women’s Guild over in Tracy City, the big brother/sister program at the local elementary school, in the fire department or EMT service. That is why you will serve as acolytes, proctors, ushers, assistant-proctors, Angels, and Arcadians. We will not allow you to be here and not make a difference of some good kind.

And because Sewanee is about life and not jobs we also expect you to spend a good bit of your time here “sitting just quietly smelling the flowers” like Ferdinand. Not hiding out in the pasture but nurturing in the center of your being the reserves of knowledge and wisdom and serenity so that you can then go out to do what our Statement of Purpose enjoins of all of us who teach or study here: to serve God and humanity.

There will be time enough for the bull ring in Madrid, for all the distractions of a confused world, but for now and for the next four years we invite you to come smell the flowers with us, and like Ferdinand, be happy.