Inauguration (1994)

Let me begin with praise of teaching.

The best teacher I ever had was at a small boarding school called Canterbury. His name was Roderick Clarke ... He smiled so much that the sudden seriousness of many of his comments caught me, and others, by surprise. ... I have had many good teachers, more than I remember, I am sure. Mr. Clarke is the most vivid to me still ...

I say all this because the best teaching I have ever known was from someone whose love for ideas-for exploration-made him not just a teacher but a scholar. And his invitation to me was an invitation not just to study, do well, and be done with it but an invitation to go on study-

ing, endlessly and playfully, in the way of the

scholar ...

We gather to celebrate a great tradition of learning. The beginning we make at Amherst today marks, in a small way, the continuing, here and elsewhere, of that tradition. Amherst College, small as it is now, frail as it was for most of its first several decades-Amherst stands for the very best within our tradition of study and teaching. If I may speak not for myself but for Amherst, then Amherst, in turn, must speak not only for itself, but for the liberal arts tradition ...

... [W]e in the liberal arts colleges believe that teacher and student must stand face to face in the many conversations that are the work of both; we believe in teaching as conversation because the best teaching is conversation; except by dialogue we cannot do our work.

The college, unlike the university, takes the dialogue of professor and student as a master principle. Neither graduate students nor teaching assistants can spell us in this central portion of our vocation. Our scale and our intimacy, our flexibility in moving across and among fields, our openness to one another and to our students-these are the strengths of a community built on dialogue.

What we recall of our teachers is rarely the lore-the fact of this or that, the rule of physics, the declension of a noun, the acquaintance with a book or poem. We take away something more elusive and more important.

From Mr. Clarke I took a sense of the play of ideas, his joy in them, but also of his insistence on rigor and discipline in embracing them. He once gave me an A on a first draft of a paper on the Spanish Armada. I typed it up more or less as it was for the final submission. I was distraught to learn that the final draft-and the grade-was a B or B+. You didn't take it far, he told me. You didn't take it anywhere.

We are here because we seek a learning we can take somewhere, a learning we can take with us into our lives. It is not a gift but an acquisition, requiring discipline as well as imagination. Mr. Clarke, however joyous, however playful, was the sternest of teachers.

... Ultimately, ours is a conversation about who we are and what we can do in our world. It is about freedom and what we can make of it. It is about reality and how we can understand it. It is about the imagination and how it can draw us towards wisdom-and towards one another.

To all who would study in this tradition, we say: Come to Amherst if you would join us in this work. Never mind whether you are rich or poor. Never mind where or how you live. Say only that you would bring to this conversation all of your curiosity, your intelligence, your passion. Say that you would engage with others in argument and exploration wherever it leads. Say that whatever else you do with your life you would take learning to heart as your calling, the calling of the scholar and teacher.

I am proud to join you in this work and adventure. Thank you.

Commencement 1996

... In Ireland once, Adelia and I gave a ride to a little boy-stout and dark-haired with a square even face. "And what would you like to do when you grow up?" I asked. "I'd like to go up North to join the Provos," he told me. "And what would you do for them?" "Throw bombs and shoot the British," he said, with the earnest expression of any child picking out an admired profession to which he aspires.

Real hatred lasts in ways that love, by contrast, rarely can. It seems a much easier legacy to pass on to the young and the innocent. We have, most of us, as Swift once said, enough religion to hate, but not enough to love.

Real hatred seems to grow when the conditions favor it:

Powerlessness, even momentary powerlessness, abets hatred and allows it to flourish.

The great insight of constitutions is that no power should go without its check, and that unbalanced powers will allow passions, including hatred, to rule us in such a way as to destroy us. We believe in checks and balances because we believe that no one in power can be trusted unchecked and without counter-balance. Given the power, each of us is capable, at the right time and under the right circumstances, of the greatest evils.

Ignorance seems as necessary for systematic, calculating hatred as oxygen is to fire. Moral ignorance bars us from fathoming the suffering of others, because we have reduced them-if only for a moment-to something less, and less important, than ourselves. Simone Weil, the French mystic, defined violence as whatever transforms human beings into things. Zygmunt Bauman, in his writings on the Holocaust, suggests that modern societies and bureaucracies may have a peculiar aptitude for distancing, for placing other human beings within the reach of our actions and decisions but outside the sphere of our sympathy and understanding.

Finally, fear feeds hatred: a fear nurtured in ignorance and aggravated by all the stray hostile emotions that plague us as a species. "You are different-in your customs, appearance, values; you have something that I want; you cannot be trusted with my family, my school or neighborhood, my land, my life." Nature has taught us to fear our differences; we must learn, sometimes against odds, to trust and value them ...

Commencement 1998

I don't need to tell you who are graduating today-and I absolutely don't need to tell the faculty-that Amherst is an argumentative place. People here argue over many issues, sometimes issues that the outside world would not understand or think worthy of argument. Principles are articulated for nearly everything that we do. And at times it seems that we do nothing-even eat, drink, or sleep-without first battling over the theory of it, the justice of it. This is right and good, as I see it, and makes us the college that we are.

William Blake called it 'mental fight,' and in his boldest assertion of its rightness said "I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land." So too at Amherst there is an unceasing mental fight over what it means to have this college on this hill built and rebuilt daily by students, by faculty, by staff, by alumni.

As you graduates make your way down Route 9 today I want to urge you to keep on fighting, to keep on arguing, in the tradition of this college and its scholars. Think of Amherst as a place where everything is questioned and challenged, yes; but think of it too as a place where some things are put forward and defended with the sword of argument. These two intellectual postures-of question and assertion-will prove vital to your intellectual and moral lives in the years to come. Works of the imagination, works of reason, works of compassion: all must take some question as their own and make some assertion, some statement of faith, in response to the world.

More mental fight is needed precisely because mental fight substitutes for and makes unnecessary the physical fight that so often settles questions in the world at large. "Rouse up," Blacke said, to stop those who would "forever depress mental and prolong corporeal war."

There can be no Jerusalem, no realized ideal, without sustained mental fight.

... I hope we have challenged you here, each of you. And I hope that you have acquired a taste for mental fight. Go now and challenge yourselves on a wider front and in a bigger struggles. Challenge us all and build your own Jerusalem.

Convocation 1999

In the last few weeks most of you have gone through the course catalog with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread utterly incomprehensible to outsiders. You have alternated, I am sure, between an impulse to take everything and an occasional urge to take nothing at all. You have wondered what intellectual and human virtues lie hidden in the names of our faculty. You have read the brief course descriptions the way some people pore over holiday brochures. You may even have had the craven thought that it would be easier if Amherst told you what to take. It's hard enough to choose a freshman seminar from the 28 that we offer.

This is the Amherst College curriculum. I welcome you on behalf of the faculty and staff to its delights and desperations. Reduced to requirements it can be summarized quickly: you must take roughly four courses each semester for four years; you must take a first-year seminar this fall; and within two years you must choose at least one departmental or interdepartmental major with various requirements that you must complete in time for graduation.

Many at the turn of the century-including many Amherst graduates-predicted the death of the liberal arts college. It would go down as a silly anachronism, a provincial and inadequate little hold-out against the superiority of the universities. Others held on more fiercely than ever to ideals of the close relation between scholar and student, ancient ideals that we see most vividly in Plato's writings about Socrates.

In Robert Frost's teaching there was a startling emphasis on words and their sounds. "As for me," he once said, "I side with those who do something, like playing a game to win or writing a poem."

This is Amherst's most fundamental curricular commitment. If you can think it, you can say it; and if you can say it, you can write it.

This is perhaps always true, whatever the requirements of a given setting or institution. But you are here for a reason. You are here because you choose to become not just someone with a degree and courses behind you but an intellectual: someone for whom ideas, the push and pull and play of ideas, are powerful and interesting and, above all, un-intimidating. Issues of freedom and structure, of depth and breadth, haunt all intellectual life at age 16 or 60, in 600 B.C. as much as 2000 A.D. The difference is that now, here at Amherst but more to the point here in you, you must take on these issues-with guidance, with structure, but with a remarkable range of choice. College may seem to mark a kind of high point in your lives as intellectuals. The choices before you must seem nearly infinite. But this is only the beginning of your freedom and your exploration. Good luck.

Convocation 2000

In the summer of 1969 someone gave me and my girlfriend a brownie baked with marijuana. It had an extravagant effect on both of us. I thought a small fire in a wood stove was as large and fearsome (and thrilling!) as hell itself. I later married the girlfriend, my wife Adelia, but neither of us was ever interested in experimenting further with drugs. Nowadays my sons tell me that I'm such a lightweight that even non-alcoholic beer affects me strangely, and I almost never drink more alcohol than is contained in a single beer or a glass of wine. Still I want to talk to you about intoxication and addiction. Clearly, I'm no expert.

What strikes me most about our national policy on drugs and alcohol is its hypocrisy. It is an organized and extensive hypocrisy, and one that seems to me silly in the small world of the campus. But it is anything but silly or laughable in the bigger world where it is observed and promoted with zeal, money-and too often with lives.

Human life is full of hypocrisy, I know. We tell people how much joy or sorrow we feel with them when we may well feel much more or much less or neither. We are polite to one another, nice to one another, when we would like to scream. We pretend to be and feel many things that we are not. All this helps smooth the rough patches in our shared lives. It spares hurt and bother and allows us to go on to other things. Hypocrisy serves us well much of the time, but not always.

Are we hypocrites? Not by choice, I can say. We resist the hypocrisy of the government's campaign for clarity and simplicity, for absolute interdiction or denial. We don't preach prohibition but moderation and caution. But the most critical or cynical among you will pick out the inconsistencies and the evasions. We have campus police, some parents say, why not set them to work searching and seizing the contraband substances? We take away kegs when there is no authorization, students complain, so why not go the extra steps and find the other beer and the vodka and the marijuana that many of our students use?

For me, as a husband and father, as a man, these are among the most important moral questions we face. And we face them on our own. The law can steer us a little, I know; the law can prod us towards what our legislators think to be-or pretend to be-the right balance. But no law and no legislator can save any of us from a will bent towards addiction, whatever the legality or illegality of what tempts us.

Convocation 2001

... In cheating, we not only take ideas from someone else-which almost all intellectuals do and have to do-but we then pass them off as our own, as our own discoveries or insights, as the product of our own work, unaided by others. The "taking" of ideas, the exchanging of ideas, is innocent-innocent, that is, unless we conceal their origins and our debt to others.

When any of us cheats in school-in research, in tests, in discussions-we paint ideas a new color, as if to say "These are mine. . . I did the work that you see or hear: I get the credit for it." We lie about the work in order to steal the credit. And often we can get away with this lie for the simple reason that we trust each other. Academic life, like friendship, requires this trust, which is what frees us up to argue hard and with conviction.

Plagiarism is a kind of intellectual theft .... But the analogy is imperfect, or at least vulnerable to a sharp critique for its suggestion that knowledge is somehow like money or a possession. Knowledge is not like money. If I earn $100 and you take it from me, I will have lost it. But if I learn an operation in calculus and you take that from me, I still have it-and you never really got it; you never learned it. What you did get was a counterfeit of knowledge that worked for this one purpose, for getting through a course with a passing grade on the exam.

September 12, 2001 message

I want to thank you all for your patience and compassion as the Amherst community absorbs the shock of this terrible American and international tragedy. All of us seek at this time to understand-and to help. But as yet we have no clarity about these events, about who caused them or how our country may respond.

Here on campus we will continue as best we can to respond to those of us most shaken by this tragedy. Most classes go forward today, many of them discussing what has happened. Athletic practices resume tomorrow and games this weekend. Travel, as you know, remains quite restricted, so that it is difficult to predict whether or not lectures and concerts will occur this weekend as scheduled. All of these events, like all of us, will be changed forever by what has happened.