Normally this is the speech in which I tell you about how I started out in engineering at UVA, switched to math, gave up a full scholarship, went to Richmond and majored in English, and ended up at Sewanee as a religion professor.
It is also the speech where I tell you that Joseph Banks is not the official clothier for Sewanee, that it's ok if you don't have a BMW or Saab, and where I tell you that over twenty years our religion majors have done just about every thing but go to divinity school--I think we have almost as many who go to medical school as have gone to divinity school. These are the kinds of things you can find out on your own. You don't need to hear them after dinner.
I discovered something a last fall. I was fishing with one of our students who had sat right here among the Wilkins candidates about two years ago. He told me about his decision to come to Sewanee. I was the speaker that year too. Only I nearly forgot. No. I did forget until one of Al Newell's henchpersons called me at ten after seven. I had just gotten home from the river and still had my fly fishing duds on. I went, Ooops!, did a quick change and dashed over here. Just to let folks know where I'd been, I brought my decrepit flyfishing hat along with my notes and put it on just as I began to speak. That student told me it was that instant when he decided to come to Sewanee. When he told me that, I realized that if it wasn't the formal content of my speech that was attracting students, I might as well lighten up and have some fun.
I have a confession to make. Remember the movie BIG? They made a movie about me. You don't have to grow up. I still like cartoons and balloons and playing in the sand. I love toys. My children are much more growth up than I am; they used to get embarrassed when I would play with the electronic toys in the mall at Christmas. Finally we reached an agreement. The family voted and decided that dad didn't have to grow up. I gave them my cars; they gave me their old toys. I think I got the better deal. My daughter says, "Daddy, you're weird." I can live with that.
I also love books--children's books. I know professors in blazers probably aren't supposed to sit on the floor in the bookstore and giggle, but, what the hell, I do. How can you not love Pooh? Charlotte's Web? Where the Wild things Are? Where the Sidewalk ends (some of you women may recall this one when you encounter Sewanee's gravel paths)? My favorite, though, is: Harold and the Purple Crayon: Harold could get out of anything with his purple crayon just by drawing a different picture around himself. These are getting a bit old, however, but I thought you might recognize them because my children are about your age. These are some of the books I read them.
Perhaps the most durable of all the childrens' books, however, are those of "Dr. Seuss". These have been around for years and new titles continue to appear. Green Eggs and Ham. The Cat in the Hat. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. One Fish Two Fish... and Happy Birthday to You. Remember Yertle the Turtle--and Gertrude MacFuzz who OD'd on tailfeather pills and ended up with so many tailfeathers she couldn't fly? And The Lorax? Who can forget the Lorax? Your whole generation's environmental sensibility was probably shaped more by The Lorax than by Walt Disney. Thank God.
I like Seuss. Seuss is fun. And as I sat on the floor of bookstores reading, I have discovered something else. Seuss is interesting. Now I have to admit--another confession--that I am not a conventional religion teacher. In graduate school at Duke they kicked me out of the theology program, so I ended up in religion and culture. In theology you had to talk about God--you had to talk very seriously, no jokes, (God doesn't like jokes)--but in religion and culture we talked about novels, language, movies, music--and things like hermeneutics, analogical language, predication and intentionality. We also talked a lot about the relationship between the self and the world and the metaphors of that relationship. One day it dawned on me that that is what Seuss is talking about. Now I am not going to call Seuss a theologian.
No. Seuss is something else. Not given much to reading theology and never having quite gotten over an earlier interest in engineering, I spend a bit of time reading books of management and systems theory, people like Peter Drucker. When I thought back over the Seuss books, it occurred to me that Seuss and Drucker have a lot in common. Seuss is doing systems thinking for children. Not quite how engineers and systems analysts would do it, but he is a systems philosopher nonetheless. Systems thinkers are the people who analyze, design, and manage the most general elements of total environments: information enviroments, business environments, as well as manufacturing and social environments. These are the people who brought you GM, the Pentagon, IBM, and malls, global TV and Telephone and Epcot Center. And Seuss has brought us his fanciful interconnections of eye and rhyme--but with a bit of a twist.
The Seussian world is a systems world, that is, a world where everything is interconnected. But in a Seussian System the difference is that nothing works!--or, at least, nothing works quite like it is supposed to. Seuss must have been an engineer in a former life: looks at his pictures and all the arches, vaults, spans, bridges, butresses, columns, platforms, conduits, piping, levers, wheels, gears, arms, pulleys. And the fantastic creatures--like Gertrude MacFuzz and the birds that fly out to rescue her. In these images we see the generic characteristic of the Seussian System: everything is connected.
There are other characteristics of a Seussian world:
One day in the midst of my Drucker/Seussian meditations something amounting to a revelation came to me. Having spent 22 years here not only teaching students and arguing over budgets, but in doing systems analyses of fire protection and dumpster locations, this is what I realized: Sewanee is a Seussian System. Once I made that discovery, I found the wisdom of mellowness. I finally had the key. I understood. Things that seemed dissonant before now became harmonious. Sewanee is a Seussian System: everything is connected, but nothing quite works like it is supposed to.
You discover this when you try to get a course grade changed from P/F to a grade just before Commencement when it should have been done in mid-March, or when you "forget" to preregister and try to find your adviser on Saturday afternoon, or when the Macintosh system eats your disk at 4:00 am on the day you leave for Spring Break and the paper was due yesterday.
You discover Sewanee as a Seussian System when the person from home you told you were going to be out of town shows up at the same party you're at; or when your parents friends see you in Destin when you were supposed to be Sewanee in class.
Sometimes you discover Sewanee as a Seussian System when you encounter those daffy characters only small towns in the South and in New England can breed; those people whose scorn of convention--in politics or dress or thought or faith--is so unique they create anew for us the possibility of freedom.
And you may discover Sewanee as a Seussian System when you can pass from the odd and the comic to the playful, for this is also a place of play: a place where freedom and innocence can still engender the leisure that is the basis of all reflection.
It is not just a place of quirks and madness, of charm and mist, of gravel walks and bumpy roads. That's just our Seussian worn familiarity. If you discover that sometimes our play has verged on folly or that our administrative bureaucracy possesses an intricacy that redefines the word Byzantine, or that our collage of solutions to problems themselves become the problem: like our tock tick traffic light that makes traffic problems instead of solving them--if you discover these things, try to remember this: Sewanee is the genius of itself. Somedays it may be daffy; some days, maddening. Be patient with Sewanee. Bewilderment and frustration are the beginning of learning. And learning is but the first step on the road to wisdom.
And if you don't find any Truffula Trees in Sewanee, don't despair. In Sewanee we call them Farkleberry Trees and they sprout like weeds--but only if you cut them down first. Like I said, it's a Seussian System, but you have to be here a while to understand what I mean.
In concluding this bit of play, let me read to you from the most recent of the Dr. Seuss books, Oh, the Places You'll Go. If you haven't see this one yet, go get it, read it and then give it to a friend. Never mind that the Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Summary on the reverse of the title page tells you the book contains "Advice in rhyme for proceeding in life; weathering fear, loneliness, and confusion; and being in charge of your own actions." Now if there was ever some one who needed Dr. Seuss, whoever wrote that did. Never mind. Seuss is all the summary Seuss needs:
"Oh, the places you'll go...
You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high flyers
who soar to high heights.
Except sometimes you'll get hung up in a prickle-ly perch:
And your gang will fly on.You'll be left in a Lurch.
Or land with a bump in a slump, but you'll go on:
Oh, the places you will go! There's fun to be done!...
Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.
Except when they don't.
Because, sometimes, they won't.
I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.
You'll get mixed up, of course
as you already know....
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
So...
be your name Buxbaum, or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
you're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!
On behalf of the University of the South, Lorax Enterprizes, Inc., welcome to the Mountain!