Photo by: Greg Anderson

Lynn Franken, vice president for Academic Affairs and dean of the College.

One difference, it has been observed, between college and the real world has to do with the different ways we respond to problems. In the real world, problems are viewed as impediments, as difficulties to be solved. In college, we seem to enjoy problems, going so far as positively to celebrate their complexity. So my theme today is problems, or really just one—what’s wrong with the world?

What’s wrong with this glorious late summer day? What’s wrong with all we know and can do? What’s wrong with your life as a brand new student? Or yours as a brand new (or crotchety old) professor? What’s wrong with Beloit College?

What’s wrong with the world—with this day, our knowledge and skills, your life and mine, with the college we have all chosen to labor and find satisfaction within—what’s wrong with the world is, it’s not finished yet.

In college, especially for students, there are always myriad new encounters—with roommates, perfect and impossible; with long lists of unfamiliar books to be read; with unprecedented freedom; with loneliness and crowds of friends; with golden opportunities and fool’s gold that glitters only to disappoint. In college, in other words, there is always paradox, tight little packages of equal and opposite ideas we’re invited to tease open, looking for the surprise of some larger truth that makes sense of the seeming contradiction.

Once you are tuned into paradox, when William Faulkner tells the graduating class at Pine Manor Jr. College, in Mississippi, in 1953, that what’s wrong with the world is, it’s not finished yet, you understand that he means two things at the same time: both that it’s too bad we’ve not come further and—Hooray, Hallelujah, Hosanna in the Highest.

All praise, Faulkner means, to the world as it is because the most salient, most hopeful, most enticing, most hospitable quality of this old and always brand new world is precisely its quality of being unfinished. The wrong of the world, its unfinished state, is, paradoxically, the self-same quality that is most right with the world.

Why? Because only in a world not yet finished can we humans find purpose and meaning.

In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, when a girl named Miranda—just a bit younger than you first-year women—sees strangers for the first time in her life, including, by the way, a handsome young stranger not much older than you first-year men, she is more than astonished. She’s overjoyed. “O Brave New World,” she says, “that has such creatures in it.”

On public television, there’s a program from Canada called The Red Green Show. It’s a sort of Saturday Night Live for 60-somethings. Every show has a segment in which the host tells a story of trouble between men and women. The thing I like best is that the trouble is always the fault of the men. After he tells the men how to straighten up and fly right, he offers this comfort: “Remember, I’m pulling for you. We’re all in this together.”

My favorite literary critic is Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian. My favorite thing Bakhtin ever wrote is this: “We come to full consciousness only in the presence of another.”

The common thread among these stories is that our humanity comes most fully alive in the company of other human beings, who must be both honestly what they are and say “yes” to the very different thing that you are, and I am.

The finest gift of college life, especially of a college such as Beloit, is the rich company we keep, a company rich not in wealth and possessions, but in variety—of age, country, state, language, tradition, allegiances, and stories to tell.

For Bakhtin, each of us is like the world, always in the process of becoming, always unfinished. And we walk the path toward our completion in the company of, and in real conversation with, other human beings, the more different from us the better: neo-conservative and knee-jerk liberal, say; Jewish and Palestinian residents of Gaza; or George Bush and Cindy Sheehan—just to cite some of the more challenging conversations of August 2005.

Before I leave this subject of learning to become human through encounters with difference, I want to read you a few lines spoken by a Palestinian political science professor in Gaza City. This was last Thursday, as he watched Israeli Jews forced to leave their homes in Gaza:

I feel that as a Palestinian, this is my territory. This is my land. This is my life, and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it’s something on the human level—it’s not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave.

In the process of our becoming more fully human, it seems, there is a great deal to be said for owning up to complexity, and owning up frequently means finding the honesty and humility to say “yes” to the claims of others.

As teacher/scholars, staff, students, parents, alumni, trustees, and friends of Beloit College, our daily challenge is to contribute something good to the eternal process of finishing ourselves, our goofy roommate, our misguided colleague, our political adversary, our classes, our college, our world. We are all expected to be agents in the world and to use our agency for the good of all. The promise is that in so doing we will become our own best selves, our most productive, most successful, most satisfied, happiest selves. As Socrates famously (and paradoxically) claimed: “To know the good is to do the good.”

Or, as James Sanger, a member of our board of trustees, co-chair of our comprehensive campaign, and, with his wife, Marjorie, sponsor of the Sanger Summer Research Fellows Program, has so memorably put it, Beloit College is in the business of cultivating human potential—human flourishing—and we do this best, Jim says, by engaging with all our strength and passion the most difficult, complex problems of the world and by taking the trouble to understand and apply multiple perspectives to solving these problems. Jim’s vision, which I share, is that we act in concert to celebrate the complexity that makes life so interesting and solve the problems that impede our way forward or keep us apart.

Today, on this glorious late summer day, in the presence of this grand collegiate company, my encouragement to all of us is that we seize upon every day as an arc toward the higher—toward the best and noblest we can find within ourselves—secure in the knowledge that the arcs of our own lives will provide both example and safe passage for others—our roommates, our friends and adversaries, our professors, our deans and president, our children, even to the next generation of teachers and learners at Beloit College.

This is the way of the eternally unfinished world, which waits upon us, welcomes us, and is in immediate need of our full and most passionate presence.

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Lynn Franken - Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College

Susan Kasten - Editor, Beloit College Magazine