Let me begin right off with my Dr. Seuss quote. I have been doing these talks for a while and somewhere along the way, I began to quote Dr.Seuss-The Cat in the Hat, There's a Wocket in my Pocket, Yertle the Turtle, The Places You Will Go, and The Lorax. Once, I even used an analysis of engineering dysfunctionality of Seuss's bridges and roads as an analogy of similar dysfunctionalities at Sewanee in an essay called "Sewanee as a Seussian System." It is there on my web site if you want to read it. A couple of years ago, I left out the usual reference to Seuss and when one of my students read the advance copy, she said, "Smith, there is no Seuss. It isn't a Wilkins talk without Seuss." So here is the Seuss. It is from a small little book you may not have read.

"You can think up some birds.
That is what you can do.
You can think about yellow
Or think about blue…
You can think about red.
You can think about pink.
You can think up a horse.
Oh, the Thinks you can think!
Oh, the Thinks you can think up
If only you try!…
Think left and think right
And think low and think high.
Oh, the Thinks you can think up
If only you try!"

Ok, that's the Seuss. I may come back to it later. Each year, I try to bring in something from children's books to disarm your expectations a bit. I might have quoted a passage from Heidegger on thinking, but that would have put you to sleep too soon-and it may have caused a couple of you to start taking notes. Chill. There will not be a quiz afterwards. You don't have to take notes. [And besides, this speech is already on my website for you to read if you really need to review it.] We know things are a bit tense. A lot is at stake for you and for us in this weekend. You want to be sure you choose the right school. You want to get the best scholarship you can. AND you realize of course that everyone at your table is ahead of you. You have been sitting there at your tables trying to listen to four conversations at once trying to scope out every body here. And some of you are so nervous, you have memorized the location of every bathroom within four blocks. We know. Some of us have been that way too.

Academia can really make you tense sometimes. I don't mean when you walk into your Spanish class and there is a quiz and you just forgot about it. I mean that deep, gut-rending tension that comes in the collision between high expectations and your actual abilities. The kind of tension that comes from the collision between your parents' dreams and yours. Choosing a college is a big deal, rightly so, and sometimes more so for your parents than for you. Choosing a major can be an even bigger deal. All of us who work here know that our counseling load for sophomores goes up in the few weeks when they have to sign up for majors. When you finally have to admit to yourself and tell your parents that you are not going to go to law school but are going to major in art; that you really do find religion more interesting than chemistry.

Choosing majors is rough on advisors as well. We get calls [sometimes very confidential calls] from parents: "Dr. Smith, you are Suzie's advisor, she trusts you; please don't let her major in anthropology." Or, "You know Robert's grandfather started the surgery group here, his father is now chief of surgery. Robert just has to finish his premed." Some parents have not been so nice. I had one mom threaten to go to the dean about me because I explained to her daughter her options in majors. Mom had determined LONG ago that Becky would major in economics. That would be the only way she could get her MBA, have a career of her own and not be left with a kid and no money. All of us get these calls. And we do understand. They want you to do well and they are concerned if you major in religion or art or anthropology you will never make any money. And that scares them.

Parents can really push us a lot. I will never forget one young woman who came to my office in cascades of tears. At first I thought some terrible family tragedy had occurred. No, that wasn't it. "Dr. Smith, I need to talk to you about my paper." Ok. [I had passed back a set of papers the day before.] She sat down and began to sob. "What is wrong?" I asked. "Oh, Dr. Smith, you just don't understand. It is my grade. It is absolutely awful. I don't know what I will tell my mother." I couldn't remember giving a grade that would produce such tears. "What did you make?" I asked. "A bbbbbb B" she sobbed again. "B?" I said. "B!?" "That is a good grade. You wrote a good paper." Sobbing again. "Dr. Smith, you just don't understand." "Understand what?" A long, painful pause. "Dr. Smith. This is just awful. I have never made a 'B' before. My mom will think I am a failure."

From kindergarten to college she had never made any grade but 'A'. Her whole approach to education was to produce 'A's'. Then she said to me, "Tell me what I have to do to make an 'A.' I think it was the most pathetic request I have heard. I watched her throughout the semester. Watched her take notes. Listened to her occasional questions-always questions of clarification, never of exploration. She did not make an 'A' with me, but she went on to another department where her skills could produce the 'A's' her mother needed. In the 6000 or so students I have taught, I think she may have actually learned less than some people who flunked my courses. Her whole approach to learning kept her from learning. Her Sewanee education was wasted. In her rigid world, grades were like boxes and if you filled the box to the top with the right thing then you could produce an 'A.'

There are a lot of students like her-and unfortunately some faculty members too. For them the world is a box or a grid: everything is identifiable and everything has one and only one place. These boxes of the mind are rooted in an underlying metaphysical assumption: the law of he excluded middle: a thing can be one and only one thing at once--which is a perfectly useful idea if you are sorting bolts in the hardware store, but not particularly useful if you are trying to understand irony or an implicit pattern in a data set or especially if you are trying to understand something that has never been understood before.

My little girl Alicia is in second grade. Friday morning she asked me, "Dad, is 'A' a good grade?" "Only if that was as much as you learned," was my reply. "There is a boy in my class and he gets a lot of 'A+'s'," she said. Already the creeping pressure of grades and the bending of learning into the little preconceived categories of an outdated analytic system. The nature of knowledge will change, and with it the meaning of thinking, and the meaning of grades. I certainly do not want my little girl growing up thinking that good thought or intellectual integrity or moral passion that arises from lived knowledge is measured by an 'A.'

I remember another student--the kind a few of you might long to be. He came here with side-by-side 800's on his SAT. He appeared to be the best of the best. He lasted a semester and a quarter. Straight A's and then straight F's. He was trapped in every way and could free himself by the only creative act in his life: he quit and ran away. I don't think he had ever once before been outside of the nest of boxes that had been invented by his parents and teachers to package that enormous intellect. He, too, sat in my office and cried, sobbing--but not for bad grades; he cried for lost opportunity and for the oppression of a life made predictable by expectations and standardization. He was lost in the deepest spiritual sense: he did not know who he was or where to turn. I seem to attract students like that. Brilliant misfits.

Let me tell you about SmithLab-that is what we call my office, mainly because it looks more like a lab than an office even though I am a religion teacher. I have lots of equipment in there-a half dozen computers, scanners, TV monitors, GPS units, map cabinet and magnifying lamps, rolls of maps and blueprints, navigation charts, emergency radios, tool boxes and field kits, just the basic kinds of stuff you need if you teach religion. Yes, my colleagues wonder about me sometimes. But is it a fun place to work and that, I think, has attracted some of these students to my door. There has been over the years a whole series of them and more than a couple of them have come close to getting thrown out-not because of grades, but because of what we might call "playful indiscretions" with the mainframe. We never really shut anything down, but a time or two they knew more than they should about the status of the system. Think of them as Ferris Buehler's with brains and attitude. Charming misfits, but very, very smart. They have been my "techies", my webmasters.

Many of them have been like my son who was screamed at by his teacher and kicked out of his high school math class for cracking the box on a Macintosh and changing the settings on the machine. He knew more about computers than his math teacher and a lot of teachers can't stand that. Well, he ended up quitting high school that week, but eventually he did ok. He is now a computer systems engineer designing specialized computers to control ADSL servers and lines. Students like that just don't fit the niches. The Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago ran a special article on these high school drop outs--it seems some admissions programs had begun to make a point of recruiting them. It turned out statistically that they were very good risks in college, and had a much higher than average chance of starting and becoming successful in their own businesses. Why? Because of the same things that got them in trouble all through school: they could think outside the box. They did not like cookie-cutter pieces of information and the power of their minds could not be ladled out into jello molds of uniformity on tests and quizzes.

When you think like a misfit you are going to collide with authority and you are going to make mistakes. Collisions with authority you need to be careful about. But mistakes can be very important. Often you learn more from mistakes than from just getting something right. 3M's "Post-It" notes were a mistake. They didn't set out to design them--what you have on the back of that very successful product is a failed glue--that somebody who could think outside of the box had a use for. Not only can you learn from your mistakes, the mistakes may be a whole new opportunity revealing itself to you.

In my office we ran for several years something we called a Crash Board. It was a white marker board divided into columns for each of our computers and each of our users. When you were on a certain machine, if you crashed it, you marked that box on the board. If the crash was interesting, you wrote it up. In my office we crashed a lot of things. In the early days of Netscape we ran a lot of their beta versions before they ever went public--and we crashed them a lot. For a while one of their programmers was emailing us to find out how we had crashed their latest version. Sometimes we crashed things they thought wouldn't crash. "How did you guys manage to crash that?" he would ask, and we would send back a description of what we were doing.

In SmithLab there is a drawing on the wall; actually it is an Microsoft Excel graph overlaid on a Japanese watercolor that we pasted up in Adobe Photoshop. The watercolor is a familiar Japanese image of a fishing boat at sea about to be swamped by a giant wave. The wave rises high above the boat and in the curl of the wave on the horizon is Mt. Fuji--the great and sacred mountain dwarfed by the breaking wave. The picture is artfully iconoclastic in itself [the feminine curve of the wave encircling the phallic mountain, reversing the standard view of Fuji] and it uses interesting lines of perspective to shift your vision and your thinking. I found the image surfing a Japanese porn site; back then our experience was that the porn sites often had better graphic design than the vanilla sites. We copied the code and frames design for my SmithWeb site here at Sewanee from one of those sites. Nothing remarkable today, but in 1994 we were way out on the edge.

Super-imposed upon the wave and mountain picture is our Excel graph: a long asymptotic curve rising on the x-axis and approaching infinity at the same point on the print where the wave is about to break. It is called the Index of Mac [Macintosh for all you cradle PC users] Use. It describes the stages people go through in using computers, particularly when they start making errors or crashing the machines: The beginning user--you know, the mouse won't move; the screen is blank; a paragraph gets really messed up on copy and paste--and you hear this little lamby "Oh." A bit later when they have learned more you might hear "Oh, my," or the somewhat stronger, "Oops.' Still a bit lamby, but a little more confident. Then comes the productivity stages of errors: "Darn/Damn", and next the biggie as the screen goes blank, the entire report disappears, and you realized you did not hit "Save": "Oh, Shit." This is the defeat point for most people. They learn where this is, they learn what they did wrong, and they learn to stay away from it.

This is an important kind of learning--a curve of progress, and then a boundary experience that defines the day-to-day limits of possibility. In life and learning you need to know where the "Oh, shit" horizon is. You learn that, for instance, in just how much you can charge to dad's credit card or how many minutes--hours--you can overrun mom's cell phone account. You learn that driving when the limit is 55 and the flow is 65 and you think, "hey they don't care" and then you see those little alternating blue disks in the windshield of a neat red Nissan you just passed--and that little expletive comes to mind.

Do you all have memory of Clint Eastwood and his Dirty Harry movies? I know that is reaching a bit for some of you. Surely you remember, "Go ahead, punk, make my day." Dirty Harry was the direct action cop who put the .44 magnum Smith & Wesson in the media hall of fame. In one of the films in that series, Dirty Harry has been dealing with crooked cops--in a story line chillingly parallel to the recent scandal in the LAPD--and they had managed to manipulate evidence and witnesses to corner Harry and it looked like it is all over for him. Even the police commissioner was corrupt. He taunts Harry by telling him he is not going to kill him right there but just let the regular police do it and that the whole department will be out looking for him. So the commissioner gets into Harry's car and, smirking to himself, begins to drive off. Unknown to the commissioner, Harry has just set the timer on a powerful bomb under the driver's seat. The commissioner drives away smirking and in a few seconds one of those great FX orange fireballs envelops the car, killing the commissioner, and blowing the car to pieces. Harry walks past the burning car and doesn't even glance at it. He simply comments, "A man needs to know his limitations." Part of life and learning, a BIG part, is knowing your limitations.

In academia, we make a much more scholarly approach to Dirty Harry's wisdom. In one of his books [Facing Up To Modernity] on the role of the sacred in society, Peter Berger describes what he calls the "reality police" that patrol the boundaries of knowledge to keep us from escaping or falling off the edge. Among the reality police are moms and dads, ministers, school and college teachers, most psychiatrists, and of course, the real police. Their job is to keep us safe and to keep the world safe. They know the dangers in thinking too much. They know the risks in thinking for yourself. They know what happens when someone keeps asking "Why?" They know in mundane wisdom, "most things break". That kind of safety is important, but it is also bought at a very high cost. Perhaps most people do need to be led by the hand, spoon-fed from the box, told where to go and how to vote. Perhaps. But when we accept the coddling of the reality police, we soon find that it is not reality they are protecting. It is reality they are protecting us from. The safe world is a dream world. Don't come to Sewanee thinking you will be safe here.

Let's go back to the curve of computer experience for a minute. On my chart there is one more stage: Oh, Oh-my, Darn/Damn, Oh-No, Oh-Shit and the final Yeehaw! Very few users get to this stage in using computers and very few get there in academia. Mostly we spend our intellectual lives learning the limits of disaster and never exceeding them--and we mostly spend our lives as failed learners because we do not take risks, do not do the Butch Cassidy dance and jump off the cliff, and never live having yelled at our desks or in class, "Yeehaw" This curve of errors in computer use is also the curve of creativity in learning and unfortunately we are usually defeated or repressed just when we get close to a breakthrough. This is the great downside to our learning. Learning the things we need to know keeps us from learning the things we need to know.

In contrast to the 'reality police,' on the other side, are those poets, artists, musicians, activists, entrepreneurs, visionaries, and a few teachers who will not let us be safe. These are the thinkers who drag us kicking and screaming after them so that we see the world anew. They call into question our safe havens. They spray paint our sacred cows. Like Mr. Ives in
Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, they poop on our shuffleboard courts. They bear witness to hope and suffering and joy and generosity and the "leaping greenly spirits of trees." The keep thinking AND re-thinking. They are symbolists--they throw things together, the literal meaning of that word--and they are iconoclasts--symbol smashers--all at once. Without them our safe world is but a dream.

These are the people for whom Tennyson's "Ulysses" is a perpetual prayer:

"Come, my friends
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Nor is this only the romance of the open road, the flight from hearth and home. The quest here is not to escape domesticity; nor only to trek the mountains and seas for adventure. These are not noble nor sufficient motives. Escapism is not the heroism of epic proportions. Such a gloss of Ulysses' heroism degrades it to baseless adventurism, the kind of thing that leads men and women to meaningless death as so perceptively described by John Krakauer's Into Thin Air and the suicidal narcissism of his Into The Wild. This is not what Tennyson's poem is about. Nearer the beginning of the poem, Ulysses, grey spirit, confesses his "yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

This is why you come to a great school. You do not come here to be safe. You do not come here to learn what is already known. You do not come here only to turn aside at the first "Oh-my, Darn, or Oh-no". You come here to sail beyond the sunset of present knowledge, drown though you may in the quest. Surely by now, it must be clear to all of us who study, who learn, and who look about, that all of what we have known and taught has not kept us from great waste, tragedy, or sadness. Moreover, much of the best of what we have known has been bent to other purposes, to base motives and baser acts. In your working lifetimes, the next 45 years, the population of the United States will probably reach 350 to 400 million people. The world will approach 10 or 12 billion. Virtually no land on the planet will be left untouched. Your generation of scholars, economists, scientists, historians, teachers, doctors, leaders will face a task never before faced in human history in either scale or complexity. And if you are satisfied with "almost"; if you turn aside after failing a half dozen times, this world is not for you. You are wasting a place in the line of leadership. If that is the safety you seek, step aside. The world needs more than that. The cubbyhole thinking of the past will not cut it in the world you face. Preconceived categories based upon familiar expectations will not enable you to deal with crowding, pollution, war, or famine. If you trot out the tired formulas of the past, you may as well quit now.

Sewanee expects more of you than that. The world will demand more of you than that. We are not inviting you here to be comfortable in familiar knowledge, to learn to stagger backwards toward the future quoting Shakespeare--or Tennyson. Liberal education is not about the past; it is about the future. And if we spend time on much that is ancient, it is only because we believe the greatest truth of the past is but preamble to tomorrow. The moral imperative of inventing the future of the human community is absolute; if you think we expect less of you, find a summer camp to go to. It will be up to you, again, to move earth and heaven, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

If you come here, you must be willing to set aside safety and comfortable learning. And while not every class will make you wet your pants or run into the streets shouting Eureka!, still you must expect to be changed. You need to be able to approach your education here on the basis of Hot Damn, Oh, Boy, or Yeehaw, and if that is not happening for you something is wrong. To discover the Yeehaw factor, you will have to risk the safety of certainty for the uncertainty of actually learning. Some of you think you have it all planned out-from kindergarten to your Ph.D. and so far you are still on track. I hope you find the baggage train of those expectations gets derailed. Some of you think you already know what your major will be; but I hope not. You are not wrong to have plans and dreams, but be sure you include a little flexibility in those plans, that you dream more than one dream.

Every one of us on staff here could tell you many stories about people whose plans changed and whose dreams became bigger or different because of their liberal education. It is not that we set out to derail you; we do not set out to attack your dreams or disrupt your plans. But you must know that there is something in liberal arts, in this kind of education, that will push and test and try every thing you bring here. Some of you, perhaps many, will resist that pushing and testing and you will deeply desire the safety of certain plans, of a major that leads to a known career. Some of you will seek refuge in safe options and a few of you will earn your badges in the ranks of the reality police.

But for others of you, you will hear in a song or poem or problem, in a lecture or lab, in an ancient text or in a computer discussion group, something that calls you beyond the western seas that bathe the stars. You will spend your spring break in Jamaica instead of Vail, you may change your major, you may volunteer to build a house; one Thursday night you may read a book instead of party. And somewhere in this process you will make that discovery that changes your mind and your life, you will come to the insight that re-defines all that you have been and foreshadows what you will become, and your dreams and your life will converge. You will know the truth of Elizabeth Sewell's poem to Orpheus when she wrote,

"And Orpheus, descending, undoes the curse
That splits us into prose or verse
And, shaping, finds a universe.'

When you know the Orphic truth, when you can dance to the lyre and a song that calls the world into being, when you are able to overcome the prose/verse disjunctions of expectations, when you can lead Eurydice free out of the box-cave of ignorance, then with Ulysses, you will be ready "to follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

I still think about the girl who cried in my office about her B. She may have been the saddest student I have ever taught. She had been so programmed to perfection that she could never learn. She could never take chances, could never think outside the box. And I don't think she ever said Yeehaw. What a waste.

"Come, my friends
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."

Gerald Smith
Sewanee, TN
March, 2001