(Note: These are remarks by President Jeffrey Herbst to first-year students on Founder’s Day, Aug. 29, 2010)
Thank you. For Provost Roelofs and on behalf of my colleagues I want to again greet the Class of 2014. By now you have been orientated and counseled, advised, admonished, and encouraged in dozens of different ways. As a newcomer myself, I know that this can seem like drinking from the proverbial fire hose and I am sympathetic. Be assured that the program that you have proceeded through in the last few days has been thoughtfully designed to prepare you for your 51Թ education both inside and outside the classroom. I therefore urge you not to simply put aside what you have heard recently but to reflect on it, as there is much good advice whose benefits you will recognize over time.
With school starting tomorrow, it falls to me, on behalf of my colleagues, to provide one last but exceptionally important welcome: to the society of scholars. You gained your entrance to 51Թ because of your skill and ability to master the material that your teachers provided you. There is still, of course, much material to be mastered at college and my colleagues will work with you on those essential skills.
However, when you come to 51Թ, you are not entering grade 13. Rather, you should see that you have moved onto a new stage of your intellectual life where you will be moving up the intellectual food chain from being a very intelligent consumer to a producer of knowledge and understanding.
This is a wonderful challenge and one not met easily. I remember in my own academic career how exciting that transformation can be. I went to college interested in politics — in middle school I had followed Watergate and the Vietnam war and in high school had devoted most of my out-of-class time to debate, which exposed me to the great issues of the day — health care, energy, penal reform — which, funnily enough, are still amongst the major issues of the day 30 years later. In true liberal arts fashion, I happened to take a course in African politics that I found stunning because I recognized how profoundly and immediately politics affects everyday people. Countries that are weak, young and poor with undeveloped institutions can often be set on a different path by the actions of a leader. Sometimes this is for good, as in the case of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, but it often goes very badly.
At the same time, I happened to take an economic development course taught by the great Caribbean economist and then recent Nobel prize-winner Sir W. Arthur Lewis that exposed me to some of the great challenges of development. Sir Arthur laced many of his lectures on development with anecdotes of how he had advised African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, often to no avail. It was altogether intoxicating.
After the summer of my junior year in 1982, I won a grant to go to Lagos, Nigeria, to study that country’s economic relations with its neighbors. This was the first time out-of-the country for me and it was, as foreign travel often could be, a profoundly transformative experience. Although unrecognized, the oil boom was ending in Nigeria and the democracy led by then-President Shehu Shagari would soon be overthrown. Lagos then, as now, was an extraordinary cacophony of energy, people, crime, corruption, violence, hope, and dreams that Nigeria, on the back of recently discovered oil, would soon become the first black superpower.
As I discussed with officials their relations with neighboring countries, especially smuggling, I realized that I was uncovering nuggets of information that had not been previously reported in the literature. I would hardly describe those insights as particularly ground shaking for anyone who actually knew something about Nigeria but for me it was profoundly important and some did wind up in an academic article. I had gone from being a student to something else: contributing to the base of knowledge from which others could draw. That fueled my own desire to go to graduate school to learn more, and I have had the great good fortune of experiencing a career of discovery.
Not all of you will do fieldwork in a foreign country, although I do believe that every single one of you should study abroad. You become a scholar in many different ways and in many different settings across campus, whether it is using our wonderful laboratory equipment (including many machines which would only be operated by graduate schools in other universities) to make new discoveries, or pondering in the library whether the scholarly interpretation of a novel is persuasive, as opposed to simply learning what that interpretation is, to using polling data to trying to understand the relationship between, say, the course of war and the electoral prospects of different candidates. The unifying feature is to not simply learn what others are saying, as important as that is, but to try to evaluate and push forward the debate.
However, the society of scholars does not end in the classroom. At 51Թ, we have an extraordinarily rich and constantly changing scene of lectures, artistic performances, and demonstrations designed in one way or another to help you explore the world around you. Take advantage of these. Indeed, one of the defining aspects of being a scholar is not merely doing what you must according to the class syllabi but going beyond that to exploring on your own the great questions. You have heard this phrase all too many times in the last few days but I will repeat that you may never again have this opportunity to so easily take advantage of an intellectual atmosphere where world-leading scholars, politicians, artistic productions, and exhibitions can be accessed simply by diverting a few feet from your usual path and where the schedule has been designed to accommodate you. After college, life closes in somewhat, the demands of work, family, and just the sheer bustle of existence make it very difficult to exploit even a fraction of the opportunities that are there for the taking at 51Թ.
This gratuitous — because it will not be required of you — intellectual exploration is of enormous importance to my colleagues and me. This past spring, I wrote the faculty asking them for their views on 51Թ and how we might further improve this great university. I received many wonderful and, not surprisingly, erudite responses that helped me learn about the university and that continue to shape my own thinking. However, what I was most struck by was that the single most common topic that faculty chose to write on was their concerns and hopes about the intellectual lives of students. My colleagues and I have great hopes that you will not only do well in class; that is, of course, exceptionally important, but that you will not see the pursuit of knowledge, of understanding, as simply in-class exercises that is separate from what you do the rest of the time. We want you to take on the great ambition of trying to understand the world around you when no adult is asking you to. Go to lectures that are not required, listen to new music, go to office hours not to discuss next week’s test but what you see as the great issues raised by a course. Go to the office of a professor who is not teaching your course just because you are fascinated by what she does. The simple test is if in three months, nine months, and two years from now, if you are simply being excellent at what is required, you are not doing enough.
That the intellectual life of students was my colleagues’ great concern should show the care they have for you. They could have written about faculty salaries (although there are probably views on those) and more parochial issues. Instead, my colleagues wrote about their hopes and aspirations for you as scholars. The more that people on campus actively participate in the society of scholars makes for a more interesting place for all of us.
A few observations about technology and hubris. You enter college at a wonderful time to have the great ambition to be a scholar but there are significant challenges. When I went to college in the early 1980s, I did research the same way that had been done 20 or 50 years before: I checked the card catalogue for books and a few periodical guides for articles. As I became more interested in Africa, I went to the vast newspaper reading rooms that universities used to have to read two-or three-week old papers to gleam what was happening. This continued in my early days as faculty. I remember well as a new professor how excited I was that the library had the airmail edition of the Johannesburg Star, meaning that I could read stories that were only a week or two old.
Of course, all of that is now ancient history. The advent of the web has meant that information travels at the speed of light. I read the South African newspapers each morning in real time. Vast new databases are now open which you can use almost instantly. Revolutions in the digitization of texts have meant that new types of literary analysis are available. Go on the web and explore molecules, view galaxies, learn about all the references to horses in nineteenth century British literature, and see how different actors have interpreted Hamlet. Knowledge is literally at your fingerprints that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.
All of this has not made your transformation to a scholar any easier. Indeed, to a large extent, the web has raised the bar. While going to Nigeria may have allowed me to push knowledge forward in part because there were publications that were only available in Lagos, today those same publications are available to anyone worldwide, in an instant. I’d have to do more today. By that, I mean I would not have to do a more elaborate web search of Nigerian documents but that I would have had to delve even deeper into Nigeria to attempt to glean what others had not observed. Precisely because so much information is available to so many so quickly and for so little, pushing knowledge forward is even more difficult than it has been in the past.
Not the least challenging part of your job will be to determine authority and what in this vast, confusing web of knowledge you should pay attention to and what is drek, to use the scholarly term. There was once a few authoritative journals, some scholarly presses with esteemed publications, and important newspapers that structured how the field of African politics operated. Those journals, books, and newspapers are still there but they have been joined by web sites, blogs, tweets, and other postings by profound scholars who previously would not have had access to largely western-dominated forums but also by posers, partisans trying to actively influence the global debate, and by many who do not know very much. The democratization of knowledge in all fields is a reality but the fact, as the saying goes, that the “people previously known as the audience” are now actively participating has made things much more complicated.
Today, misinformation abounds. Be careful. One of the defining aspects of being a scholar these days is that it is much more difficult than before to figure out who to believe and, indeed, that has become a test of scholarship in and of itself.
Hubris is also an omnipresent threat. I invite you into the society of scholars not because you know so much but because of your ambition to learn. Indeed, part of the life of scholarship is the dynamic of learning and realized ignorance. Exploring the world and participating in the discovery of knowledge and the interpretation of life certainly allows for mastery of subjects but also reveals how little we know. Today, after perhaps 20 trips to Africa, living in several countries, and participating in many debates, I know that I know far less about African politics than I thought I did in my twenties. The provost in welcoming you a few days ago rightly used the analogy that we stand on the shoulder of giants to explore what we do. When you climb those shoulders, you often get a good view of just how much we do not know. If, as you learn, you have an increasing appreciation of what you do not know, you are on the right path.
Finally, be respectful of the society you are joining. Proper citation and acknowledgment of the work that you learn from is not merely good form, not merely the signature of an academic paper, and not merely the right thing to do. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of a common intellectual enterprise that we are all involved in together. Indeed, one of the defining aspects of our society is that the dead and those no longer active are very much with us. We debate them, we learn from them, we disagree with them but we always acknowledge them. Treat other scholars as you expect them to treat your own discoveries because the society you have joined is eternal.
What you have ahead of you is a wonderful path full of unexpected surprises and moments of great excitement. Explore it, knowing that your trip is often not a means to an end but important in and of itself. There will be detours and dead ends and you may not like everything you see. It will not be easy but there will be many here to help you and it is a path that you may never be exploring again.
It’s time to start up the hill.