"Specialization is for Insects"

Wilkins ScholarshipTalk

12 March 2000

One of the reasons they have me do this talk is to try to help you relax a bit--not as if you are nervous or anything. We have all been where you are--somewhere between tears and wired. You probably don't quite know whether to wet your pants or to run screaming from the room. That's OK--and if you do either, Sewanee will send somebody to look after you.

This kind of competition is nerve-twisting--and not least because it is all so uncertain. You don't know if you will get a scholarship, you are afraid that everybody in this room, from what you have heard, is smarter than you, AND you are not really sure you want to go to college anyway. And more than one of you have thought, "Why can't high school just last a couple more years?" I have been there.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do either. No one in my family had been to college before, so we didn't know how to play the admissions game. I only applied to one school. I told my father that UVA seemed like a pretty good one. My duPont scholarship interview--the equivalent of this weekend-- was a moment of singular terror in my life. I was sixteen. Somehow, I managed not only to get admitted to UVA but to get one of the old-fashioned duPont scholarships--the kind that paid for everything: tuition, room, board, books, and fees. All I had to do was pay for my clothes.

I thought I wanted to study chemical engineering. Then I switched to math. Then I switched from UVA to Richmond and majored in English. Then I went to study theology at one seminary, transferred to Duke, applied to the M.A. program in English at UVA, got two degrees at Duke where I intended to become an Old Testament specialist and ended up writing my Ph. D. dissertation on a Hungarian philosopher of science. If you are a bit uncertain and if you are nervous--not to worry. It will all work out.

I grew up in an odd family. My father and uncle were very fond of playing a game called "Let's go see." What this game involved was creating some imagined or real excuse for going to investigate some occurrence or place or sight that they hadn't seen. Really it was a game to get the men out of the house on the weekends. The game was played by getting in the car and driving until a turn or crossroad was reached. Then my father or uncle would ask, "Have we been down that road?" The other would reply, "I dunno, let's go see." By this random process we managed on a given Saturday or Sunday to wander over a good bit of Northern Virginia--and sometimes Maryland and once into southern Pennsylvania. My father and uncle never used maps as they drove; their only concern when they got to an intersection point was "Let's go see." It was marvelous fun that took my cousin and me from the mountains to the coast--and to a lot in between. Actually, they did use maps--once we got home; they would sit down in the living room and get out the box of state highway maps to figure out where we had been that day.

They trusted their intuition up front and read the maps later. They did the same things with motors and toys and anything else needing to be assembled--they read the instructions afterwards--as they said, to see if the instructions had been accurate. Now this is a rather peculiar way to view the world and it was a strong influence upon me as a young boy and later as a student. Of course, I could write it off as eccentricity--and God knows, they had a good enough model for that in my grandfather--but something more was involved than just cussed oddness. What was involved was an adult sense of play and a lot of creative imagination--along with personal resourcefulness. I learned a lot from these men. They taught me how to think, as we now say, "outside the box."

I will confess, I don't often read the instructions. And I have never read a computer manual. My theory of using computers is to keep hitting keys until something interesting happens. That is not the way the serious "computer class instructors" approach things. I once saw a woman standing over other women with a Microsoft manual in her hand drilling her workers from the manual so that they would understand how the computers worked. When I walked up and pressed the shift key and then dragged my hand across the keyboard and said, "watch," she screamed at me. When I suggested the best way to teach people to use computers was to take the office staff to a video arcade, they looked at me with that fearful bemusement that arises when you don't quite know whether you are talking to a jester or a madman.

This approach to things, which I blame or credit to my father and uncle, has served me well--and also gotten me into a lot of trouble. My approach to a library or bookstore is the same as my father's at an intersection: "Let's go see." I treat a room of books as unexplored country just waiting for me. My whole life has been a prolonged errancy of studies. One day in graduate school, my advisor called me in and told me that my courses in theology had been cancelled; from that point on I was to take philosophy. The theology professor had basically kicked me out of his classes. The reason he gave for kicking me out was that I always read the wrong books. I think he knew me too well. And better than I did myself at that time.

Since then I have gone on to make a kind of career out of reading the wrong books. I read children's books and military history and technical books, books on systems theory and technology futuristics; I read Chinese poetry and business ledgers of country stores; I read mountain climbing stories and agricultural ecology. In fact, I read just about everything I can get my hands on and despite my commitment to the use of computers my house and office are literally mounded against the walls with something over 12,000 books.

Liberal Arts will do that to you. I mean, why does anyone really need to read just Shakespeare? Or just Chaucer? Or Newton? Or Copernicus? Or Jesus or Gotama? Or Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes? And then to go to all the trouble of doing it in Greek, Latin, French, German? Well, ok. I know you have to read all the classics. But why stop there? Whoever said the agenda of our minds has to be set by what our teachers told us to read? Hey--if you never read more than your teachers, you will never know more than your teachers. Do you want to settle for that?

I love Sewanee because it is the kind of place --unlike Duke--where I have been able to make a career out of reading the "wrong books." Let me distill a few bits of wisdom from those wrong books.

Do any of you know Robert Anton Wilson's book, Prometheus Rising? If you are into right-brain, left-brain distinctions or if your angle of vision is just slightly awry, you will like the book. Here is a sample of some of his insights:

"Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers."

"The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born." I like that one. Wilson is concerned about all of the multiple layers of imprinting upon our minds that take place once we are born and create what he calls 'tunnel-vision' reality.

Or try this one:

You may not read Wilson in an English or a Philosophy course--but you ought to read him and deal with your brainwashing.

Another of my wrong books has been Michael Resnick's book, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams. Resnick teaches at MIT and his book is about the end of what he calls the "centralized mindset"--the traditional belief that everything must have a leader or cause. This is the mindset, for instance, that makes us assume that flocks of birds have "a leader" or that traffic jams are caused by an obstruction. In contrast to this Resnick describes 'self organizing' phenomena--events and processes that become organized but which have no leader or cause. It is very important he says not to try to understand things just one way:

Resnick is talking about technological understanding, but his point could not be more relevant to the liberal arts. You will see what I mean when you take your first religion class or engage The Tempest from the multiple perspectives we teach in the Humanities Program. Or when you take Environmental studies and your professors come from physics, biology, forestry, political science, philosophy, economics and religion. There is no way that the model of a single perspective will get you through such courses as these.

Or consider this insight from Nicholas Negroponte's book, Being Digital:

I am tempted to take up Negroponte's theme of play, but I have done that in other talks. Just visit my website. I will permit myself one comment: play is the essence of learning.

But let's look at another wrong book. This is from Robert Heinlein (as quoted by Wilson in Prometheus Rising). It is another kind of comment on what we do in liberal arts education.:

I now have a bill pending before the faculty legislature to reform the curriculum to allow not only for sonnet writing but hog butchering and pitching manure. We already give some credit [on essay exams] for pitching manure, but the curriculum committee is at an impasse on hog butchering--they can't decide whether it should be taught in the biology department or offered as PE.

And another word about specialization: choosing a major is choosing a specialization. Majors are one of the worst distortions we perpetrate in the liberal arts. I fervently hope that you don't know what you want to major in--or that if you do, you will keep it a secret on the chance--the very good chance, I might add--that it will change at least twice before you declare during your sophomore year. And I also hope that, if Sewanee has done its job while you are here, that when you come to your senior year, you have at least half a thought that you majored in the wrong thing and perhaps ought to change.

I say this, not to denigrate the very important work that goes on in our majors, but to emphasize something else: the choice of a college major, like most of the books you read, is largely irrelevant to the life you will live. Now, I know that some of you have been primed and preened by well-meaning adults to select a certain major since about the sixth grade and you come here already specialized in your minds. And on occasion, a cosmic match is made at an early age. But know this--at Sewanee we do not have a pre-med major [we have a pre-med advising program, but not a major]--and yet, we have somehow managed to get into med school students from everyone of our academic majors including Classics--and including at least 6 who were religion majors. Liberal education at Sewanee is not defined by our majors; it is defined by a quality of mind that informs all our majors.

Sewanee has produced an amazing run of scholars and leaders who are well-placed and influential in important sectors of American life from religion to law to business to government and art--and some of them are in careers cognate with their undergraduate majors. But many of them are in careers that have nothing to do with those majors. That is the genius of this place: that it recognizes the limits of specialization and rises above those limits. It gives its students a vision of the unity of learning and much more important, a vision of the purpose of learning that reaches far beyond any academic specialty.

As I was working on this speech, I mentioned it to my research assistant, Lonsdale Green. [Lonsdale is a good example of what I mean when I say majors are irrelevant. She and I spend hour upon hour tromping pastures and woods looking for old graves, documenting the stones, and searching out the vanishing traces of the first settlers in the coves around here. Lonsdale--American Studies major, by the way--can read maps upside down, edit web pages, tweak digital images in PhotoShop, climb barn lofts, and talk all afternoon to farm ladies and old men in country stores.] Lonsdale has heard several of my public talks and has read all of my Wilkins speeches. She said to me, "Are you going to talk about Dr. Seuss?" I said, "Well, I talked about Seuss last year." And then she reminded me, "Smith, it's not a Wilkins speech if you don't talk about Seuss."

Actually she was right. I mention Seuss nearly every year. Yes, I still read Dr. Seuss. Not because I still have small children [which I do], but because I like children's books of all sorts. Children's books seem to make more sense to me some days than what we call "real" books. I find in them images and parables about many other things. To see what I mean, you might want to consult my webpage and take a look at one of my old Wilkins speeches entitled "Sewanee as a Seussian System." You will never see Sewanee or Seuss the same way again.

So a few nights ago, after the children were in bed, I went rummaging about the house looking through the bookcases for my Seuss books. My children seem to have the most peculiar notion that I buy those books for them and they are forever running off with them to their rooms. But I found a stack of them--and among them one I had not read for a long while called "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut." Here is a message from Dr. Seuss for you who are about to embark upon the liberal arts:

"The more that you read,

the more things you will know.

The more that you learn,

The more places you'll go.

You might learn

A way to earn

A few dollars.

Or how to make doughnuts….

Or kangaroo collars.

You can learn to read music

And play a Hut-Zut

If you keep your eyes open.

But not with them shut.

If you read with your eyes shut

You're likely to find

That the place you're going

Is far, far behind.

So….

That's why I tell you

To keep your eyes wide.

Keep them wide open…

At least on one side.

You see, these are not just children's stories. He might have as easily entitled the story, "I can think with my mind closed." The point is the same. If you just read what they tell you to read or think what they tell you to think when you read it, you might as well be reading with your eyes shut--and you might as well save your parents the money and just go get a job if that is what you are looking for in an eduation.

Let me assure you it will not be that way if you come to Sewanee. I will not imply that we are all crazy and throw away the instructions with the box and read all our maps upside down. But I will tell you that we are seriously committed to critical and creative thinking. That we expect you to read more than the books on the syllabus and when you do, to read with your eyes--and minds--open.

Let me conclude all this now in another way. Here is a comment from a former Sewanee student, Kate Belknap--Hockaday girl, Sewanee English major, fieldhockey, Dallas debutante [but wearing a camouflage garter], hell of a wingshot, flyfisher, mountain ski instructor. She came to Sewanee in her Jeep Cherokee with her shotgun and flyrod. Here is what she wrote me back in the fall:

Exactly. Or solve the mystery of a disease, or plan the White House state visit of the Chinese ambassador, or manage a multi-billion dollar corporation, or trek from Siberia to the tip of Argentina recording string music of folk cultures, or have tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury. It doesn't matter what you do--as long as you don't read with your eyes closed.

Sewanee is a college of liberal arts--the arts that set us free, free to live and act and dance and help and make and dream--because that is what we are called to do as human beings. You will go out of here knowing a lot of things, but this will not be the point of your education. Sewanee will make you consummate generalists. Specialization is for insects.

Let me welcome you to the Sewanee, and wish for you a long bibliography of the wrong books and hope that you will all major in Seussian studies while you are here.

Gerald L. Smith

Sewanee, TN

Wilkins Scholarship Weekend

12 March 2000