Ronne Hartfield
Shimer College Commencement Address
May 6, 2007
My warmest greetings and
congratulations to you, the Shimer graduating class of 2007,
and to those parents, friends, and
teachers who have supported and sustained youthrough the years with books,
computers, IPods, endless cups of coffee, and advicesought and unsought, useful and less
so, though mostly worth pondering at least.
My thanks to you, dear colleagues, for
such a generous introduction. When I considerthe professional journey that you just
summarized, I am sometimes left to ponder its many surprising and unanticipated
digressions. Since that culminating moment over a half century ago (can it really have been
that long?) when I, like you students before me this afternoon, was completing arguably the
most significant chapter of my education, myyears in the College of the University
of Chicago, I have never ceased to value andrespect that time of deep immersion in
the great ideas of western civilization. To paraphrase Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.'s wonderful phrase, the arc of my education has been
long, but it bends toward rightness.
It is of that rightness that I want to
speak this afternoon--not the rightness of my ownpath, but of the one which lies before
you, in a time that seems infinitely more complex thanthe one I approached with such
eagerness in 1955, in a world that seems more fraught with terror
than with optimism, in an America that holds at once more possibility
and more vulnerability than my classmates and I could ever have
imagined.
With all of our nation's acknowledged
and unacknowledged shortcomings and failures,our mid-twentieth century America still
defined itself as the world's greatest nation and much of the world
agreed. Our generation had an agenda, a set of plans to address what
wasn't working, and at the threshold of unprecedented scientific and
technological advances, we were perhaps insufferably confident about
our ability to solve whatever challenges lay ahead.Our social scientists were developing
new understandings of culture, and we were rewriting earlier
histories to create newer, truer and more inclusive ones. Our
artists,writers, and musicians, were creating radically new images,
abstract expressionism replacing impressionism and realism, disjunct
harmonies replacing the smooth sureties of the past.
By the time we
matured in 1976, two hundred years after the founding of
this country, after Vietnam, after terrifying and tragic
political assassinations, our confidence was shakier, but we were
still assured by visible successes. Though still woefullyinadequate, we saw gradual advances in
Civil Rights, impelled by Black demands that America hold true to its
earliest principles; we saw movements for women's rights that while
some may only recall them humorously as the bra burning years, they
were serious and committed protests leading to the radically
increasing presence of women in graduate education and in the
workplace. Withal, we still held, albeit tenuously, to the early
assurance that America's Great Idea, this Grand Experiment for
freedom and Democracy, could be a beacon for a more promising future
for the rest of the world.
And then, one year into the new
millennium, the world we knew came to an end, and an unanticipated
era was harshly ushered in on September 11. 2001, by those
life-changing events that we refer to with awe and in appropriately
harsh and truncated language, as 9/11. And, students, the
ineradicably horrifying images of the twin towers of the World Trade
Center under attack, disintegrating before the eyes of the whole
world, remain the most powerful symbols available to us that our
America, indeed the world that we had thought futilely that we knew,
would not, could not ever be the same again. Thetragedy of 9/11 and its timing as a
defining event coincided oddly, even eerily, with the new millennium.
At the very onset of the twentieth-first century, America as a nation
has been faced with realities that, although simmering for decades
before, have now come forcibly to the very front of our
consciousness, demanding profound redefining, reshaping,
reevaluating, replanning. And you, Shimer graduates, have the
humbling task of taking your place among those whose minds and skills
will be called upon to assume these awesome responsibilities.
The good news is that none of this is
unimaginable. We need to remember that American history, in all of
its bloodiness and arrogance, is nonetheless characterized by
resilience and triumph over obstacles. Your histories and mine are
honored in the title of Stephen Ambrose's great document of the famed
Lewis and Clark expedition that openedAmerica's path to the northwest, limned
in his accurate term "Undaunted Courage."Now let me talk for a moment about why
Shimer College has provided you marvelouslywith the fundaments you will need in
order take your places, if not as grandscale moversand shakers, if
not as "deciders," certainly as definers and shapers, of
what willinevitably be this new millennial
world. My confidence in you is rooted in the fact that your Shimer education has given you at
least three tools for the work you are poised to engage:
FIRST: In exploring the Great Ideas
that reside in the great texts of the western world, you have learned the importance of
serious inquiry. In studying the archive of what might be the most significant body of
classical knowledge available to us, that collective of thought and
experience that has withstood the test of time; you have lived
closely with the minds of writers and thinkers
who were about transformation as well as formation. You have also learned that
all texts must be open to reexamination in new circumstances and reinterpretation with
new and wider lens, that all canons are amenable to augmentation. It is
gratifying to note that your curriculum here at Shimer now comprises works by Hannah Arendt
and W.E.B. DuBois, among others whose ideashave contributed measurably to present
dialogues.
SECOND: Through serious struggle with
serious thought, you have learned the value ofauthentic attention. Your knowledge and
insights into a past which you did not inhabitenable a thoughtful informed set of
responses to issues in the world where you will now reside. If you are familiar with the
classical debates between Hamilton and Jefferson, between Woodrow
Wilson and Robert LaFollette, you cannot approach complex predicaments superficially, nor can you
be glibly contemptuous of alternative views. Within the complexities inherent in
decisions for or against a war, or when or when notto call an end to military occupation,
the insights of Thucydides or Euripides should notbe overlooked.
THIRD: With a Shimer education, you
have learned to approach current ethical and moral problems from a rich context of
reflection, with a permanent resource for approaching timeless questions inherent
in all human experience: How does a moral person make wise choices in the midst
of a society that has no consensus on such issues? How and on what
basis can anyone decide when human life begins and when it should end? How and with what information does
one accept scientific advances that challenge former sureties, the artificial
fertilization of embryos, the use of embryonic tissue forpharmacological purposes, or at the far
end of contemporary challenges, whether or not to consider human
cloning, for any purposes conceivable. The spiritual struggles of St. Augustine, or those to be found in
philosophical inquiries from other traditions, such as the Tao te
Ching, enrich the conversation with scientific questions posed by
Galileo or Linnaeus.
So. Finally. As F. Champion Ward, then
Dean of the Hutchins College, once confirmed, citizens are liberated not from but
through a knowledge of history, noting that those whowould move the
world must first be given a place to stand. What I want to leave youwith here is an abiding respect for the
learnings provided in what you will come to look upon and speak of as
your Shimer years, with a commitment to take your places as leaders in any disciplines or
professional fields where you choose to invest your energies.You have
been given a place to stand.
The Great Books must not be
misunderstood as the keepers and protectors of any outmoded status quo. Rather, they are
the raw materials for reconsiderations of everything. They are a resource for
leadership that is deeper and more useful than Forbes Magazine or the Wall Street
Journal. Adam Smith may provide more understanding of the positive
potentials of a humanistic capitalism than does the Director of the Federal Reserve. Shakespeare may
provide military insight and moral direction not readily available in the televised
reports from Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. Nineteenth century novels may illuminate the
nearly invisible but intractable structures of social class and caste that impede affirmative
action in education and the workplace. Plato can elucidate society's
vague but persistent distrust of artistic freedom, and the demands torearrange our thinking made by quantum
physics are less onerous if one has read Newton and Einstein first.
You will be grateful - and so will the world - that you have
actually read Darwin and can respond
intelligently to concepts of intelligent design that exclude his
seminal research. Popular books or videos that purport to expose The
SECRET, with their too-simple recipes for living,
should be open to informed questioning, and you need to be able to respond seriously to
hackneyed questions about What Might Jesus Say.
Of course, God willing, you will be
living well into this bare-begun century. And as you are livingon a sadly ailing planet, you will need
all of your creativity and will to changewhat has constituted pretty comfortable
ways of life. You will need to read many Great Books that have been heretofore omitted
from the canon---books by Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Wole
Soyinka, and books by writers from all over what used to be called the Third World. And you
will read Great Books as yet unwritten, perhaps even one written by a Shimer graduate.
You will need to open your minds and hearts toideas and experiences from what has
been called the "Runaway World." And you will becalled upon to engage all of this with
moral urgency and commitment---with not onlythe right stuff but with your best
stuff, with grace and grit and gravitas. As one of my favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks,
demands, know all of this, and go down the street anyway. Go down the
streets of the world as it is given, respect histories already lived,
and change them; make the old worlds better, make
them new. My faith is in the Great Books, and in you.
Ronne
Hartfield is an author, essayist, international museum consultant,
and former executive director at the Art Institute of Chicago and
Urban Gateways: The Center for Arts in Education. In 2004, Ms.
Hartfield published Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in
One Chicago Family to critical acclaim.
