Dr. Brent Adkins Associate Professor of Philosophy 321 West Hall

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1 Dr. Brent Adkins Associate Professor of Philosophy 321 West Hall Chaos and Umbrellas Why are you here? This is a question that I ask all of my classes in one form or another. Let me tell you how the conversation usually goes. Me: Why are you here? Student: I m here to get a degree, and this class is required for the degree. Me: Why do you want a degree? Student: So I can get a job. Me: Why do you want a job? Student: So I can make money. Me: Why do you want money? Student: So I can buy things I want. Me: Why do you want those things? Student: Those things will make me happy. Me: Really? Is that all there is to it? Some set of things will make you happy? Student: Well, I suppose there s more to it. In this more lies the difference between getting a degree and getting an education. I believe that education is an apprenticeship. I believe that the purpose of this apprenticeship is to enable us to create something new. I believe that life is a struggle between the opposing poles of chaos and cliché, between disorder and what everyone believes to be obviously true. We cannot live in chaos, and yet clichés stultify life. Creating the new must risk chaos but not be swallowed by it. The artist does not begin with a blank canvas but one covered in clichés that must be painstakingly removed before creation can begin. As D.H. Lawrence notes, the usual strategy for protecting ourselves against chaos is to open an umbrella. We then paint the underside of the umbrella with what we wish were the case. This is where the clichés come in. We cover the umbrella with all the soothing bromides that seem to bring stability to the world. Education is a journey. There are no stupid questions. A college degree will get me the job I want, so I can be happy. These are the kind of things we tell ourselves here in order to avoid the difficult work of facing chaos. I believe we have mistaken the facile security of our umbrellas for a real engagement with chaos. I believe we have mistaken the certainty of our clichés for the uncertainty of life. I believe that we came here hoping to get new and better clichés painted on the underside of our umbrellas. I believe that the value of education lies not in painting new clichés but in cutting slits in our umbrellas. I believe that letting some chaos in is the only way to create something new. I believe that education does not make us safer but exposes us to increasing danger. I believe that this is the risk that all creative acts must take. I believe that this risk is life itself. That s why I teach, and that s why you re really here. 1

2 Ms. Piper L. Cumbo Instruction & Reference Librarian 125 Fintel Library The Urge to Seek Out Three years ago, I packed up my life and moved to Roanoke, Virginia, for this wonderful job at Roanoke College as the Reference Librarian. It was the first time in my life that I was in a completely unfamiliar place, with no friends nearby that I could call on when I needed them, and no certainty of what the community would be like. The thrill of starting over somewhere had led me here, but once I got here, I was very unprepared for how lonely and frightening it could be. It reminded me of starting college, only I didn t have the luxury of a dorm full of possible new friends who were also starting over. In order to find my way into the community here, I came up with a plan. I armed myself with curiosity and patience and I began asking questions every time I met someone at Roanoke College. I was very curious about the area that surrounded my new home, and instead of relying on the faceless reviewers cluttering up the Internet, I asked real people that I shared a zip code with about things that interested me. I quickly learned new things about this place and the people that called it home. By allowing my curious nature to take over and take me away from my loneliness, I made friends, I bought a log cabin, and I even fell in love and got married. Curiosity is a trait with which we are all familiar. I have observed curiosity in my chickens, my dogs, and my mom s cats; and we have all observed the innate curiosity of children. As children, we are encouraged to explore our innate curiosity, allowing it to lead us to creative endeavors, like building the only neighborhood fort that also functions as a library (that was my fort). As adults, we get down to serious matters and leave that innate curiosity behind in our childhood. This is a big mistake, as being curious is what leads people to discover new species, uncover buried ancient civilizations, and continue building better iphones. When I became a librarian, I knew my curious nature was only going to help me. But getting students to explore their curious side regarding a subject that they aren t interested in has always been difficult. Plausible scenario for Roanoke College students: You re working on a paper for a class that you don t really love, and you re struggling researching a topic that you aren t at all interested in. How do you manage this impossible task? How do you force interest in something you care so little about? Let curiosity guide you, not just the demands of an assignment. To many students, research involves following the rigid strictures handed down by a professor to find information on a question posed by that professor. Try to find a topic that interests you, not just your professor. Take ownership of the topic by thinking of other things that you enjoy that may be related to this topic. Researching about drug abuse in American society but you would rather research English poets of the nineteenth century? Did these poets have drug problems? Probably. Are creative types more prone to abuse drugs? Maybe. Bridge your curiosity of one subject to the subject that you are finding difficult. By allowing this side of yourself to take over in these moments of stress, or even boredom, you are broadening your mind, becoming more efficient, increasing your productivity, and even making new relationships. I believe that in order to get the most out of life, one must allow curiosity to happen. Seek it. Foster it. And follow it. There is so much to discover out there. There s no way to predict what the results will be, and that s the best part. 2

3 Dr. Pamela Serota Cote Director of International Education Administration Building Room 206 The Art of Being in Community I apprenticed from an early age in the art of community-mindedness. Growing up in a small, tightknit, middleclass family on the lower east side of New York City during the turbulent 1970 s, I learned from a young age that there was the big world out there and that the family home was a refuge and a place to be nurtured. This translated to participating fully in the work of being a family and spending quality time as a family: helping with housework, with preparing of meals, and always eating together. Our dinner time was spent conversing about our days and talking about current affairs in the world. As my sister and I grew older, we were expected to share stories and reflections about how we felt about our understanding of the world s rights and wrongs. My parents were socially and politically progressive, and therefore a sense of social justice and civic responsibility were woven into the fabric of my family cloth. I came to understand that my responsibility was not just to myself and my family, but that my actions and attitudes in the bigger world were just as important: how I treated my fellow man, as my father would say. This understanding of being a member of community enlarged further when I enrolled in a Quaker school in sixth grade. The Quakers emphasize community through their morning meetings, their consensus process for decision-making, their social justice actions, and their involvement in the Peace Movement. As students, we were encouraged to take responsibility for our role in the school community to make it the community we wanted it to be. We were also encouraged to participate in community service. I attended this Quaker school through high school, and even attended a Quaker summer camp in my teens, which was a more intense immersion into an intentional community. After high school, I attended a small, liberal arts college that is known for its level of quirky, creative, and participatory community activism. In college I learned the art of many disciplines from brilliant and dedicated professors; however, it was the challenging, awe-inspiring, and unrelenting spirit of my college peers which taught me the art of being in community. This included always questioning the status quo and pushing for new perspectives, seeking innovation, and organizing with others to create change together. I share my background on being a member of community to put in context what community means to me and how I interpret this through my participation in the Roanoke community, and what my expectations are for other members of Roanoke College, particularly the students. We bring our life s experiences and understandings to our present actions and our future anticipations. My past experiences being in what I would gratefully call exceptional communities has shaped my hope for Roanoke; not for us to become a mirror image of any of these other examples, but rather to find our path to participate fully and intentionally in what we can all be together given the diversity of our gifts and perspectives. I would like to close with an example. As Director of International Education, I have the privilege of acting as advisor to Catawba, the Global Living and Learning Community. At Catawba, international and American students live together in a residence hall to create a more immersive global experience of sharing cultures. It is through the spontaneous, informal exchanges that occur when preparing a meal, watching a soccer match, or playing music together that a special sense of community or second family (as the students often refer to it) develops. Although the students cherish the sense of bonding they have as a community, they have struggled with the physical space of the residence hall, which is in need of a good facelift. It became clear to me after meeting with students that there was a desire for more social space for gatherings, 3

4 and that there was a huge empty room in the basement which was not being utilized. In fact, the students described the space as creepy, disgusting, and uninviting. The truth is, the room was cold and sad. I worked with the students over several weeks to develop a vision of what that room could become, and what it would take to reach that vision. Through brainstorming and listening to what the students desired, matched by what I knew I could provide in terms of resources, we came up with a renovation plan which included a colorful wall of inspirational quotes in languages from around the world, a chalkboard wall for continual creative expression, warmer lighting, sitting areas and a game area. Over Thanksgiving break I began to work with students on transforming the room. By the end of the semester, we had succeeded in creating a community space that the students really had ownership of from design to finished product, and one they could embrace. The result is the students of Catawba have enlarged the space in which they can connect and be together as a community; it has also, I hope, concretized for them the lesson in working together to create positive, desired change. The first step is to imagine what is possible beyond the limitations of oneself: as Richard Kearney wrote in The Wake of Imagination (1988), imagination liberates us in a way which animates and enlarges our response to the other rather than cloistering us off (Kearney, 1988, p. 366). That is the challenge I bring to my own work, and what I hope others will bring to their participation in this Roanoke College community. Catawba basement chalkboard wall 4

5 Dr. Lane Destro Assistant Professor of Sociology 301 Trout Hall What Does it Mean to be Educated? Education is the most important opportunity I ve ever been given. I am grateful to my parents for starting and reinforcing the process. They encouraged me to apply to college and, subsequently, helped support the monetary cost of that education through loans and my father s own, hard-earned income. Without needing data or proof, or some kind of empirical exercise, my folks already knew its importance, knew how moving away from home and learning in a formal institution would benefit their daughters greatly. My folks weren t the only adults to give me the opportunity to be educated. I met a wonderful mentor at my undergraduate institution who, like my parents, put the pieces in place for me to attend graduate school and fulfill long-held goals: earning a PhD and becoming a professor. In writing this short statement, I want to emphasize the fact that getting an education is something I was GIVEN the opportunity to do. This precise fact is immensely important, as there is no telling with any certainty that I would ve been able to attend school, and later graduate school, without others and their acts of generosity and personal responsibility. My folks and mentor, and later others, took it upon themselves to present me with and guide me through this opportunity to learn. I also want to emphasize that, just as the opportunity to be educated was given to me, it was also up to me to know better, to recognize its importance, to reach out and take it. Certainly, I would ve gotten an education of sorts somehow. I would have learned some things, even if I wasn t given these specific opportunities, even if I hadn t recognized the importance of continuing through graduate school, even if I wasn t able to opt into education in this very special, formal way. I ve been in school for a long time. I m still in school, clearly, physically, in reality. I teach here. Even as I educate others, my own education hasn t ceased. I am learning about my responsibility to my students, to my colleagues and the folks I work with or around here at Roanoke College. As an educator and the lucky product of education, my responsibility is to remind others to be educated, not only in the conventional sense of the word, such as to be the recipient of a formal degree. Instead, I hope to create opportunities for others to learn, perhaps though exposure to an idea that gets them thinking about something they wouldn t have encountered otherwise. My responsibility is to provide this opportunity to think, to learn something that wasn t going to be presented by any other means, through any other person, or class or in any other way. At the end of the day, your education isn t just a catalog of skills, a list of classes completed. It s not even the actual degree attained. Although all of these things have power and importance, there is something even more valuable about the opportunity to be educated. Instead, it allows us to think like someone else to BE someone else and achieve a life we couldn t possibly have accomplished without it. 5