Thoughts for the Class of 2013
Each year a faculty member is asked to write a statement for the
incoming class about the value of a liberal arts education here at
Butler. This year's essay, "Getting the Message," was written by
Dr. Hilene Flanzbaum, Allegra Stewart Professor of
English.
Getting the Message
Everywhere you go, you receive messages. On a normal day, you
hear or read thousands of words - words arranged in infinite
patterns. In the first ten minutes of the morning, your alarm clock
goes off and lyrics play: "For some reason I can't explain, I know
St. Peter will call my name." The back of the toothpaste tube
promises you whiter teeth and you already have a text from a friend
that says," school, so far, is okay." You understand all these
messages: they seem to require no close attention or
interpretation. Yet even the simplest of messages requires the act
of interpretation: you no longer notice it because the process has
become so automatic. Coldplay's lyrics require that you know who
St. Peter is; you hope, but really don't believe that Colgate will
give you whiter teeth than your last toothpaste. It takes a bit
longer, however, to figure out what your friend's text means. When
she says "okay," does she man okay/good or okay/bad? You call on
your shared history and recall that once she said a guy in your
math class was just "okay" looking and it turned out he was really
cute. When she is really excited about something, she tends to
downplay it. On the basis of this information you decide she must
be pretty pumped about her college choice.
But what happens when we do not know the transmitter of the
message? We have enough experience with advertisements to know that
we cannot always, or often, trust them. We have come to expect,
perhaps cynically, that both Colgate and Crest will claim that they
are the best toothpaste. Because these messengers have profit
motives, we have learned to read them more critically. If as an
adult you remained as gullible as you were as a four -year -old
watching commercials during Saturday morning television, toys and
computer games would soon crowd you out of your own house.
Advertisers are not the only messengers that can be misleading
or contradictory. We live in a world of competing truth claims, or
to put it more plainly, constant contradiction: A guy tells you he
wants to hang out, but won't return your text; Fox News reports
that the US had a good week in Iraq but CNN reports that 26 people
were killed in a suicide bombing; sipping a Diet Coke you remember
that you read an article that says aspartame causes cancer and
quickly put the can down; then you remember another article that
claimed that it didn't and pick it up again. People can disagree,
dangerously, when the issues are crucial and life-changing: why,
for instance, are some people saying that this mild summer
indicates that global warming is a myth, while others insist that
such a wet summer proves that global warming is a reality? When the
fate of the planet is at stake, why can't Americans find consensus?
Follow any political debate, or watch a legal trial, and you will
understand that people honestly and earnestly hold different things
to be true.
The recent skirmish between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates
and Cambridge police officer James Crowley well illustrates that
two human beings of good intentions and high intelligence can
perceive a situation in entirely different ways. Anyone can spout
off about who he or she believes was right or wrong, but a careful
and considered point of view requires asking and attempting to
answer good questions. The task of learning about, evaluating and
judging human nature, actions and motives calls on many of the
subject areas that, in a University context, are called the
"liberal arts.'" For instance, a student of history asks, "What
past events have contributed to Gates' and Crowley's behaviors?" A
psychology student asks, "To what degree did fear determine each of
the men's behavior?" A math major uses statistics to determine if
Gates had ample reason to suspect racism. You can probably figure
out the questions that students in other fields of the liberal arts
would ask - from sociology, English, political science, philosophy,
religion, biology, chemistry, physics and communications, students
research the complex, ambiguous and contradictory nature of human
interactions and perceptions.
The skills developed by studying the liberal arts enhance every
human interaction, including both broad and narrow professional
circumstances. A business major learns how to balance ledgers and
estimate profit margins, but how can she decide where to build the
next Starbuck's? How does she anticipate the needs and desires of a
particular population without understanding the methods of
psychology and sociology? And once she thinks she knows, how can
she best convince her associates that she has the right solution
without learning the skills of argumentation and critical thinking?
A dance major masters a jeté, but she will perform the part of
Giselle more beautifully when she feels the depths of love and
jealousy that so prevail in nineteenth-century poetry and fiction.
To be a good physician's assistant, a student studies biology and
learns the anatomy of the heart - but he also must recognize that
there is more to human beings than their ventricle chambers.
The actual business of learning about humanity - what people do
and why they do it, what they say and how they say it, what they
want and what they need--is the project of the liberal arts. The
educators you will meet in your four years at Butler University
share the conviction that studying the liberal arts gives you the
tools to understand more fully, and to respond more effectively, to
the human challenges that surround you.
Hilene Flanzbaum, Ph.D.
Allegra Stewart Professor of English
Butler University
August 2009