End of semester thoughts

On spring days with my office windows open in the Brafferton, I can hear the bell of the Wren Building chime the hour.  This is less charming than it sounds at first since the antiquated heating system in the Brafferton (built in 1723) has two settings – on or off – and we don’t turn it off until the threat of the last cold nights has receded.  So we open our windows wide, weather permitting and pine pollen notwithstanding.  Charming and venerable has its burdens.

Anyway, I was talking about the bell atop the Wren.  Once a year, today, the regular rhythm of the bells is broken by a wonderful tradition that allows each senior, as he or she completes their last class, to ascend to the third floor of the Wren Building, take hold of the bell rope, and make a joyful noise unto the world.  We even allow retiring faculty to do the same at their annual retirement dinner – and I got to do so just last week.

So, today the bell tolls all day and marks for most seniors, and me, our last days at William and Mary.  For the seniors, there will be a lot of bitter/sweet and well-deserved partying.  For me, this is even a bit more nostalgic since I mark the end of an academic career that began 48 falls ago – the day I first stepped on the campus of my undergraduate university as a student.  Imagine those distant days.  Phones had cords, music came in 33 1/3 rpm vinyl discs, John Kennedy had just become president, computers were to be found only in the basement of the Engineering Quad, and there were no photocopying machines.  In fact, it now occurs to me, that 48 years ago this weekend, in all likelihood, my father and I drove  to the university that I was to attend to buy the dorm room furniture of my former Boy Scout troop leader who was graduating.   Princeton did not furnish dorm rooms in that distant age.

I have never strayed far from campus; in fact when I retire and move, I will still be only three blocks from a university campus.  Obviously, from my viewpoint, there is something to like about universities.  Much is obvious: libraries, concerts and stimulating lectures on all subjects, athletic events, really smart people, lovely places to walk and relax, coffee shops — youth and promise and vigor and laughter and idealism and energy abounding.  But these things are found elsewhere; certainly in any big city you can put together the same package of attractions, though maybe not within the confines of a few  tens of acres.  But find them you can.  For me, personally, there is something far more important.  It is a thing much harder for many outside the academy to understand and, sometimes, something they do not want to understand.

This intangible “other” within universities that made me never leave is this: we play with fire.  Not literal fire, but intellectual fire.  When I was little, the perfect formula for my misbehavior was for an adult to forbid it.  Just as Ralphie’s lust for a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot, Range Model Air Rifle is only furthered by adult warnings that he will “shoot his eye out,” humans seem to need danger.  They climb rocks, fly in hot-air balloons, drive too fast, live on floodplains, eat fried food.  I mostly hang out on college campuses where dangerous, scary, iconoclastic, sacrilegious, and politically unsettling ideas are talked about in the open.  These ideas are always talked about somewhere, but more often through history in garrets and basements out of sight of those in power and at literal risk to life, reputation, and fortune.  In the modern university, we talk about them in the safe place that is the campus.  If we do it well, this goes well – we are civil to one another, treat each other with a modicum of respect, and require that all ideas be tested.  If we do it badly, someone gets their ideas drowned out by the majority or a vocal minority, they are left feeling diminished (indeed, of course, we all are), and some ideas go untested in the intellectual fires.

This is what I love about universities above all else.  They can be raucous, noisy, querulous, and cranky.  They won’t leave well enough alone.  They act as society’s intellectual safety valve, testing ground, and seed bed for new ideas or old ones whose time has come again.  They annoy, offend, and nag according to rules of civility and open discourse.  No one is required to attend; but everyone is obligated to listen to one another and arrive at their own conclusions.

I love that as much as I loved my Red Ryder BB gun.