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"The Capacity for Independent Thought"
In
his first Freshman Address, President Richard C. Levin invoked the
virtues of free inquiry.
October
1993
by Richard C. Levin
We begin
together.
As you
experience the exhilaration and the anxiety of a new home, I experience
the exhilaration and the anxiety of my first year as President.
We have clean slates before us, enormous opportunities to make a
difference, for ourselves and for our community.
It seems
fitting, as we begin, to consider just what you are beginning. Your
professors will tell you that the liberal education you are about
to acquire is priceless. And your parents will confirm that it is,
if nothing else, expensive. Let us consider what you and your parents
are buying for all that money.
Liberal
education differs fundamentally from professional education or vocational
training. It is not intended to develop specific skills or to prepare
you for any particular calling. Its teachings are more general and
less obviously "useful."
Some
commentators define liberal education in terms of its curriculum:
great works of literature, philosophy, history, and the fine arts,
and the central principles and methods of the sciences. Others follow
Cardinal Newman, who argued that education is "liberal"
when it is an end in itself, independent of practical consequences,
directed toward no specific purpose other than the free exercise
of the mind.1 From this perspective, liberal education cultivates
the intellect and expands the capacity to reason and to empathize.
The first view identifies liberal education with its content, the
second with the qualities of mind it seeks to develop.
These
views need not be in conflict.
I quote from a report of the Yale College faculty: "By a liberal
education . has been understood, such a course of discipline
in the arts and sciences, as is best calculated, at the same time,
both to strengthen and enlarge the faculties of mind, and to familiarize
it with the leading principles of the great objects of human investigation
and knowledge." These words come from the text of a report
submitted to President Jeremiah Day and the Fellows of Yale College
in 1827 and published the following year along with President Day's
own report on the plan of instruction in Yale College. Note the
faculty's emphasis on two distinct objectives: the development of
qualities of mind and the mastery of certain specific content. Concerning
the content of a liberal education, the document that has come to
be known as the Yale Report of 1828 continues: "It has been
believed that there are certain common subjects of knowledge, about
which all men ought to be informed, who are best educated."
The faculty recognized, however, that the corpus of knowledge appropriate
to a liberal education was not immutable. The authors observe: "What
. at one time has been held in little estimation, and has hardly
found a place in a course of liberal instruction, has, under other
circumstances, risen into repute, and received a proportional share
of attention. . As knowledge varies, education should vary with
it."
As observers
and forecasters of the development of the liberal curriculum in
America, the authors of the Yale Report were quite accurate. We
no longer consider rhetoric and theology, for example, to be indispensable
subjects. And, in contrast to our 18th-century forbears at Yale,
we consider the literatures of living languages to be central elements
in a liberal education. Yet the Yale College faculty's endorsement
of change in the content of a liberal education is ironic in the
context of a report that rejected curricular innovation and retained
the mandatory study of Greek and Latin. This irony reveals a subtle
truth: Though the curriculum is always changing it is rare to find
among the faculty advocates of curricular change.
This
example also teaches a more general lesson. It is all too easy to
endorse certain values and remain quite blind as to how they should
be applied in one's own life. As I shall suggest shortly, a liberal
education leads us to question and define our values. But this is
not enough. To understand fully what our values mean, we must also
test what it means to live by them.
In defining
liberal education, the Yale Report gave equal weight to the content
of the curriculum and the development of a particular quality of
mind. Although the content of a liberal education has changed, the
capabilities it seeks to encourage have not. I believe that the
essence of liberal education is to develop the freedom to think
critically and independently, to cultivate one's mind to its fullest
potential, to liberate oneself from prejudice, superstition, and
dogma.
The
content of a curriculum intended to foster these qualities is not
without consequence. Science and mathematics are essential components
of any such project, because they present to the student methods
of inquiry that are indispensable to the full development of human
mind and its powers to reason independently. In pure mathematics
and theoretical physics, for example, one learns how to reason deductively
from clearly defined premises. In the experimental sciences one
learns the method of induction, how to make proper inferences from
evidence. Similarly, the great works of Western philosophy provide
examples of how the mind liberates itself from prejudice by the
rigorous application of reason to questions of how we know and how
we should act.
What
you read does matter.
But I would suggest that we give less attention to the race, ethnicity,
or gender of the authors we read, and more to the seriousness with
which they confront what it means to be human. Truly profound works
from any cultural tradition can serve to develop and exercise one's
capacities for reflection and critical judgment. Indeed, if these
capacities were more thoroughly exercised in thinking about the
curriculum of a liberal education, the debate could be guided by
the light of reasoned argument rather than the heat of passion.
Whatever
the content of the curriculum and however it may evolve, let me
suggest that a liberal education is not intended to teach you what
to think, but how to think. For advice on this subject, consider
what Thomas Jefferson told his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Fix
reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact,
every opinion. . [L]ay aside all prejudice on both sides, and
neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons . have rejected or believed it. Your own reason is the only oracle
given you by heaven, and you are answerable, not for the rightness,
but uprightness of the decision."2 This endorsement of the
powers of reason and independent critical thinking has lost none
of its force. The University remains committed to these values of
the Enlightenment.
I have
argued that the purpose of liberal education is to develop the capacity
for independent thought, rather than to acquire specific or "useful"
knowledge. In this view I find myself allied with Cardinal Newman,
who rejected the straightforward utilitarian arguments for support
of higher education. But, as Newman concluded with some irony, a
liberal education aimed solely at developing the capacity to reason
can be defended on utilitarian grounds because it produces citizens
who can make a genuine contribution to society.
"Training
of the intellect," Newman observes, "which is best for
the individual himself, best enables him to discharge his duties
to society . If
. a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I
say it is that of training good members of society." Newman
continues: "It is the education which gives a man a clear,
conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing
them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them.
It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point,
to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical,
and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post
with credit, and to master any subject with facility."3
This
theme, that a liberal education best prepares one to serve society,
resonates deeply with Yale's historical purpose. In 1701 the General
Assembly of Connecticut approved An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate
School, which it defined as a place "wherein Youth may be instructed
in the Arts and Sciences who through the blessing of Almighty God
may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State."
For nearly three centuries Yale has fulfilled its founding mission
with distinction, supplying leaders to the nation and the world.
The
theme of public service finds a different, more immediate, and direct
expression in the activities of those who have preceded you to study
at Yale in recent years. Last year over 2,200 Yale College students
engaged in community service activities in schools, soup kitchens,
health-care facilities, counseling centers, and churches throughout
New Haven and the surrounding region. I encourage you now to join
them, and I expect that, when we gather in the spring of 1997 to
celebrate the completion of your course of study, I shall encourage
you then to keep service to society among your priorities as you
pursue your chosen vocations.
To equip
students for public or community service is only one contribution
that liberal education makes to the well-being of our nation and
the wider world. Liberal education is also a powerful force for
the preservation of individual freedom and democracy.
Let
me develop this argument, because I believe there are two distinct
points to be made. First, because liberal education develops the
capacity for reason, reflection, and critical judgment, democratic
processes work best when citizens are liberally educated. This idea
stood behind Jefferson's support for public education, and it was
well understood by Tocqueville, who observed that "in the United
States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the
support of the democratic republic."4 He described with admiration
the ability of Americans to think clearly and precisely about public
issues, and he noted especially the high level of civic intelligence
among the inhabitants of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Considering
the contribution that institutions of higher education make to civic
intelligence, it is surprising that Tocqueville mentioned Massachusetts!
Second,
a liberally educated citizenry is the most reliable source of resistance
to those forces of prejudice and intolerance that would undermine
our nation's commitment to free inquiry and free expression. Those
educated to "fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her
tribunal every fact, every opinion," are those most disinclined
to fall under the sway of prejudice, to succumb to intolerance.
It is no accident that universities have historically been bastions
in the defense of free inquiry and free expression, no accident
that within Eastern Europe and China, they harbored and nurtured
resistance to totalitarianism.
The forces
of intolerance are not easily overcome.
Forty years ago, President Griswold outlined the dangers of McCarthyism.5
Today, threats to free inquiry and free speech come from within
as well as outside the University. Doctrinaire advocates of the
"politically correct" substitute a wish to rewrite history
for critical self-examination. They, and many of their opponents,
manifest little toleration for open-minded debate. The issues at
stake need full and free discussion, with toleration and respect
for differences of opinion. We must bring to this debate the full
power of our intellects and all our capabilities for making critical
distinctions and reasoned judgments. These are precisely the qualities
which a liberal education seeks to cultivate.
A liberal
education will prepare you to be thinking citizens for a lifetime,
to subject the claims of all groups and interests to critical scrutiny,
to resist those who would substitute the emotional appeal of prejudice
for the use of reason. Given the blessing of free and independent
minds, you will have the burden of defending freedom and independence
for all.
You
enter an institution rich in the traditions of scholarship, abounding
in the joys of learning. But a liberal education is not simply given
to you. You must actively pursue it. Take every advantage of the
treasures before you. The world is all before you, where to choose
your place of rest.
In four
years, we beginners will meet again at another ritual celebration
to assess what we have accomplished. As we begin together, let us,
with open minds and steadfast hearts, dedicate ourselves to the
pursuit of light and truth.
Notes
1. See
especially "Discourse V" in John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, ed. Martin J. Savglic (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1960).
2. Thomas
Jefferson, "Education of a Young Man, August 10, 1787,"
in The Complete Jefferson, ed. Saul K. Padover (New York:
Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1943), pp. 1057-1060. President
Lamar cited this passage in his Baccalaureate Address, May 1993.
3. Newman,
"Discourse VII."
4. Alexis
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume I, ed. Phillips
Bradley (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 314-318.
5. Alfred
Whitney Griswold, Alumni Day Address, February 22, 1952, Essays
on Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp.73-83. |
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