The Courage to Wonder and the Commitment to Heroic Change
Wabash is a great college not because we are rushing to do what everyone else does faster or cheaper, but because we dig deeply into the lives of Wabash men and transform their sense of themselves and their understanding of the world around them.
Throughout the nation and around the world we hear calls for higher education to redefine itself, to rethink and reimagine what we do and how we do it. Writers and politicians, critics of liberal arts education and even its advocates are issuing calls for smarter, leaner, stronger delivery of education. Wise heads bemoan the seemingly inexorable rise in the cost of college, even as we ask higher education to do more to address social and cultural problems.
Clearly, the nation and the world need more college-edu-cated citizens. (India alone has more than 13.6 million uni-versity and college students currently, but will need to serve 40 million by the end of this decade.) Voices inside and outside the academy call for a three-year degree, urge the establishment of MOOCs (massive open online courses), praise conventional online education, urge credit for experience, look to develop joint high-school and college courses, and advocate for a stronger connection between higher education and the world of work. All of these innovations, some of which have been around in less fancy dress for a long time, will, proponents claim, help students “get through” college faster and “complete” their education more efficiently.
We must not reject these ideas out of hand. Wabash is a great college because at all levels we continue to be a community of learners, ready to follow good models from others and develop our own innovations. Indeed, Wabash faculty have been innovators in using technology-assisted instruction and leaders in pedagogy designed to enrich student experience inside and outside the classroom. We are pioneering new approaches to meaningful work study, internships, and summer research projects; shaping our students’ understanding of vocation through our Callings program; and continually enhancing the Schroeder Career Center programming to help Wabash men move smoothly into meaningful work. The increased support from the Chal-lenge of Excellence campaign has helped in developing new interdisciplinary collaborations, immersion experiences, and partnerships.
The Commitment to Heroic Change
As we welcome a new president, it is a good time to remind ourselves of the special qualities that flow through a Wabash education. In this time of transition, we recall that Wabash, for all of our commitment to tradition, is always about the business of change. Every year over one-quarter of our community changes: Men graduate and move on, and a new cadre of fresh faces join the entering class.
Yet in this community awash in constant change, Wabash is a great college not because we are rushing to do what everyone else does faster or cheaper or with less time on campus. Wabash is a great college because with every aspect of our skill, experience, and practice, we transform the lives of young men and teach them to think critically, act responsibly, lead effectively, and live humanely. We dig deeply into the lives of Wabash men and transform their sense of themselves and their understanding of the world around them.
We can do this only because Wabash freshmen accept the challenge in the invitation to join our community. We explicitly call young men to a life-changing experience. We promise that we will not simply deliver information or skills to their waiting minds. Wabash men do not come to us as empty vessels: They come ready for change in this place that will draw out their best imagination of themselves as characters in a story that will be greater than they ever thought imaginable—as heroes in their own lives.
We take young men and, through four years of Wabash, create leaders, self-actualized young men who know themselves, their brothers, and their world with a clarity that gives them power to achieve the next step in their lives.
The 18-year-old Wabash men are raw and in some ways unsophisticated, but they are ripe and ready. As I have had the pleasure of watching Wabash men in action for seven years, I have come to fondly characterize their readiness and alertness with a simple image—as meerkats at the edge of the burrow, standing tall and proud, alert and ready to learn and grow. It may seem an amusing image, but in this readiness lie enormous possibilities as Wabash men look around and seem to say:
What can I see? What can I become?
How do I live and move and have my being in this world?
How can I not only get a job, but build a life that will call me to the highest imagination of myself?
How do I, as Thoreau urged, live the life I imagine and go in the direction of my dreams?
How do I become the man I dream to be?
Which path will lead me to my heroic quest?
Wabash did not invent these questions in 2013, or even in 1832. These important questions have stirred in the hearts of young people, and young men in particular, throughout history. They have found their answers in religious vocation, in the military, in dedication to careers, in ancient rites of passage in cultures around the world, and in the education of elites in the days when only a small fraction of young people attended college.
Yet today, few in American higher education are talking about inspiring young men and women to take themselves seriously, to be heroes in their own lives.
There is much in our national discourse that seems to imply that we cannot afford the time and the effort to think about these matters. As a nation we find it easy to speak of skills and talents and uncomfortable to address dispositions and habits of the mind and heart. Surely there are many institutions that do a fine job of teaching a young person of reasonable capabilities how to be competent in the skills of the scientist or the English teacher or the businessman, but at Wabash we teach those skills by helping our students unlock their ambition, their avidity for learning, their curiosity about the world.
Anyone can teach students to know history. But how do you make young people so hungry that they go beyond where you take them, seeking not only to know what is known but to discover what is not known, and even more, to not just know history, but to make it—to be the movers and the shakers in the country and the world.
That is what we promise at Wabash; that is what we do.
The Courage to Wonder
Many colleges would say these questions are no longer relevant or that they are too personal or too immeasurable. I could not disagree more.
In the last paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzger-ald’s narrator Nick Carraway muses on the Dutch sailors who were the first Europeans to set eyes on Long Island thinking:
…man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Where Wabash stands distinctively strong in American higher education is in our recognition that the capacity to wonder about the world—about the self, about the future—is not something only of one moment in American life or in Western civilization, but is a quality bound in our deepest dreams and our highest aspirations for ourselves, for our communities, for our brothers and sisters. At Wabash we continue to have the courage and the wisdom to see our students as young men awake to the capacity of wonder embodied in the heroic questions within, as men ready to take themselves and their highest ambitions seriously.
This spring, 12 Wabash students have taken up The Great Gatsby as a voluntary reading group, meeting weekly to discuss the novel and its meaning in their lives. They do this not for grade or credit, but for fun and for what they might learn. I sat in on one of their sessions and, though I have taught the book many times, I had nothing to say; there was more than enough teaching and learning going on already.
I was schooled again more recently after speaking at an alumni dinner in Pittsburgh, where I brought up that image of Wabash men as meerkats. The next morning, I was a bit surprised when Bruce Baker ’65, distinguished alumnus and honorary degree recipient, told me he was deeply moved by the image.
“I was one of those meerkats, you know,” Bruce said. Awake and ready at the edge of his life when he started at Wabash, Bruce went on to become a teacher, linguist, inventor, businessman, entrepreneur, and pioneer in designing communicative devices for the speaking impaired. Equipped and inspired here to wonder, he found his own way to a heroic life.
In the gentlemen from across campus talking about Gatsby in the echoing depths of the Goodrich Room of the library, in Bruce Baker and thousands of other alumni who found in Wabash the hope, the inspiration, and the challenge to take themselves and their highest ambitions seriously, we find the future of Wabash burning bright before us.
As I leave Wabash, I am confident we will change and grow as a College responsive to the challenges of our times, and we will never give up on our highest imagination of what a Wabash education can be, nor ever lose faith in our students’ capacity for wonder and their dream of their own greatness and that of the College they love so well.
Wabash Always Wonders. Wabash Always Dreams. Wabash Always Fights.
Contact President White at president@wabash.edu