LiberalArtsOnline Volume 1, Number 9
October 2001
by Joseph M. Kippenberg
Professor of Politics, Associate Provost for Student Achievement
Oglethorpe University
I was supposed to talk about Thucydides at 9:50 a.m., Tuesday, September 11th. We didn't get around to it, spending our time sharing the fragments of information we had gleaned from our car radios and television sets in the first few moments of that shocking and difficult day. When we finally returned a few days later to what the syllabus said were the requirements of the course, I found my students eager to discuss and explore this old account of how a democracy prepares for and conducts a war.
The subtlety of Pericles' strategy for winning a long war of attrition, his consideration of the constraints posed by the emotions and attachments of a democratic public, his funeral oration, the debate between Kleon and Diodotus about how best to respond to the offense of the Mytileneans É . These were no longer mere historical artifacts or objects of purely theoretical interest, but potential lessons for how we should conduct our lives and policy in the days, and indeed years, to come. In his timelessness, Thucydides had become timely. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that I had all my students on the edges of their seats, they were certainly more attentive than they would have been under other circumstances.
Those of us who teach in liberal arts colleges are rarely called upon by the news media to comment on the great events of the day. Or more precisely, we are called upon only to the extent that we possess the (strictly speaking, illiberal) expertise that happens for the moment to be in demand. Commentary about high policy is by and large left to the experts in the think tanks and research universities. Moral and spiritual questions seem to be the preserve of our religious leaders. And the emotional fallout is handled by the therapeutic community. Ordinary people, well- or ill-educated, are asked only about their experiences or their feelings; they provide grist for the mills of the experts or they are offered authoritative advice. Liberal education as such would seem to be irrelevant.
But we teachers and devotees of the liberal arts are wont to claim that what we offer our students is, as Thucydides says, "a possession for all time." We claim to be able to help them, in the words of my university's motto, to "make a life." We insist that a liberally educated person is uniquely well-equipped to make his or her way through a complicated and confusing world. At the moment we have, it seems to me, an extraordinary opportunity to vindicate this claim, not by conducting seminars on great, or merely good, books on national television, but by demonstrating to our students that the books, authors, and questions that move us can speak to them in this time when they are overwhelmed by emotion and information. They can, for example, learn things about current events from reading Thucydides, things they would never get from the New York Times, CNN, or "The Drudge Report," as a result of which they are more thoughtful and intelligent consumers of the information and analysis all these outlets provide.
I would like to invite my colleagues from across the country to offer examples of how they were able, in their classrooms, to bring to bear the resources of the liberal arts to help their students come to grips with the events of September 11th. I'm certain that we have an enormous treasure on our hands, one that we can share with one another and with our students. And in so doing we can vindicate very powerfully the claims we always make on behalf of our common enterprise.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.