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Jean Gregorek - Antioch College Commencement 2008 - Faculty Speaker
By Horace | May 7, 2008
Antioch College Faculty member Jean Gregorek, was invited to speak by the graduating class of 2008. Jean gave this wonderful speech gave this speech at the Commencement ceremonies on April 26, 2008 in Kelly Hall in the Main Building (Antioch Hall) of Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio
Special thanks for Steve Bognar for providing this video for distribution to the Antioch community.
The text of her speech is included below:
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Commencement Thoughts April 2008
Jean Gregorek
Associate Professor of Literature, Antioch College
I’m very happy to be here to represent the faculty of Antioch College. It’s been an excruciatingly difficult year. Soon after we received the shocking news last June that the Board of Trustees of Antioch University had decided to suspend the educational program of the College, faculty, staff, and alumni began to organize. We have fought to convince the Board to reverse their decision, to establish the existence of other viable options, and, if no reversal is possible, to separate the College from the University governance structure. Our hope has been, and remains, that this plucky little institution can be picked up, dusted off, maybe given a bit of physical therapy, and put back on its feet. There have been many setbacks, and this year we have lived with the constant anxiety of the threat of imminent termination in what was designated as a dying institution. Yet despite the grimness of our situation, we have never felt alone. It has been our good fortune to have many wonderful partners and allies in this struggle. Indeed, the greatest rewards of this otherwise awful year have come from collaborating with our talented, energetic alumni, and our friends and neighbors in the Yellow Springs community. We have discovered how many lovely people care deeply about this historic institution and its success. If the fate of the College depends upon the resourcefulness and ingenuity of Antiochians and their friends, then we are truly in good hands.
So I would like to take a minute to recognize and say a heartfelt thanks to some of those who have given amazing amounts of time and dedication and in many cases, money, to the cause of Antioch College.
–The brave and resolute Antioch Continuation Corporation (ACCC)
–The hundreds of fabulous, infinitely creative alumni of Antioch College, determined not to give up no matter what— including the Alumni Board and the College Revival Fund, alumni chapters across the country, and the amazing techies who’ve set up websites and wikis, Antiochians.org. and the Antioch College Action Network
–Those renegade investigative journalists at The Antioch Papers
–The American Association of University Professors
–The loyal members of U.E. Local 767—supportive partners in struggle, many of whom have worked at the college for 15 or 20 or 30 years
–The non-union administrative staff who continue to be a joy to work with on a daily basis and who have done so much to keep up our morale
–The heroic faculty and staff of the Olive Kettering Library whose professionalism and dedication have managed keeping the library open and operating in extremely straitened circumstances
–This year’s amazing Antioch College Community Government—truly an example of grace and resilience under pressure
–Hundreds of concerned citizens of the Village of Yellow Springs who have donated their time to organizing, fundraising, publicizing our cause, letter-writing, petition circulating, sign-painting, demonstrating, planning for future directions of the College and so much more. This protracted struggle has forged much closer bonds between the community of Yellow Springs and the community of Antioch College, and we look forward to building upon these partnerships in the coming years.
–And last but not least, those we are honoring today—the students of Antioch College. You can drive us crazy—you can be incredibly aggravating–but you can also be incredibly inspiring. You kept us going. You kept your sense of humor. You kept on believing in the quality of an Antioch education. You gave me, for one, a reason to get up in the morning when things looked bleakest. Teaching this year was a genuine pleasure, and I would like to offer a special ‘thank you’ to the students in my classes for that. I know I speak for all of us when I say that the faculty has really appreciated the Antioch student body during this difficult time.
So why did we—all of these people–choose to challenge the Board of Trustees’ seemingly final, inalterable decision? Why, instead of packing up our books and papers like reasonable academics, and not looking back, did we decide this was a fight worth committing to? What exactly is at stake here? What’s so important about Antioch College?
I only have a few minutes, so I’ll try to be as direct as possible.
The Village of Yellow Springs has long sought to preserve green belts and green spaces against suburban sprawl. We know that parks and wild spaces, whether maintained privately or publicly, are absolutely vital ecologically. They are important for aesthetic reasons as well, sources of a variety of pleasures and a necessary sense of stability, continuity, and rootedness. However, parks serve no direct economic function—they often generate no revenue whatsoever and the land on which they sit would usually be worth more if it were parceled up and ‘developed.’ Such developments serve the financial interests of a few well-placed individuals at the expense of sustaining public or communal space. A loss of access to the landscape affects the well-being of an entire community. If one lives in a world of strip malls and parking lots one can eventually forget that green spaces were ever there, that they were so beautiful and so important for feeding the body and the soul. Sadly, one can become adapted to an environment of billboards, and not even consciously miss the view of the woods and fields any more.
Liberal arts colleges, I propose, can be thought of in much the same way as parks and wild places. These educational ‘green spaces’ enable a kind of ‘greening’ of the mind. Like literal green spaces, they are not profit-producing business enterprises but make vital–although hard to quantify–contributions to American life and communities nonetheless. Here are institutions which set aside four years for non-instrumentalized lines of inquiry—for silence, reflection, musings, experiment, practice, the gaining of knowledge, the trying out of ideas and art forms, the bumping up against Otherness and Other points of view, and always, for Questioning.
But, as in the parallel case of literal green spaces, one can all too easily become accustomed to the disappearance of liberal arts colleges. This loss of educational ‘green space’ is being justified by claims of the inherent inefficiency or impracticality of all that time, all those resources given over to disruptive questioning and purposeless meditations on the nature of truth, beauty, justice and self-discovery. We can no longer afford such luxuries, our opponents say. Thus educational green spaces are being paved over in the name of a lamentable but supposedly inevitable ‘progress.’
Yet the ethos we promote at Antioch College and colleges like it is far from purposeless. Aside from the (I would argue) considerable value of disinterested inquiry per se, we also serve a larger purpose—we foster the ideal of stepping up and doing things because they need doing, not because someone will necessarily pay you to do them (although if they do, all the better—I’m certainly not against this!). The ‘green spaces’ of the liberal arts encourage the idea of that each individual should spend his or her brief time on this planet meaningfully and responsibly. The world will almost never think that it needs a new song, a new play, a new theorem, a new analysis, a new philosophy—but that doesn’t mean that this need is not in fact desperate. As the theorist of revolution Franz Fanon (then age 25) commented wryly in his introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, perhaps the most influential book to date on the social and psychological disorders produced in both white and black people as a result of anti-black racism: “Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Especially those to whom it is directed.”
But the world did need that book.
And the world needs your books, your songs, your ideas.
This ethos of doing what needs to be done goes by many names: learning, curiosity, discovery, invention, scholarship, scientific findings, art, cultural production, volunteerism, giving back, community service, public spiritedness, contributing to the common good, and more. What this array of activities have in common is that their significance and worth cannot be measured in monetary terms. Often their impact is hard to discern in the short term. Often they are not registered as immediately useful or commodifiable and are therefore not seen by our society as deserving of monetary compensation. I might suggest that we refer to these various non-instrumentalized activities and enterprises as ‘work,’ as in life-work, mission, calling, or using one’s unique talents or genius. We could also designate them, if we were feeling grandiose, as ways to win victories for humanity.
I have to admit that I love our motto (but then, I am a Victorianist by training). I love its loftiness and confidence, its nineteenth-century assumptions that a better world is indeed possible, that we can agree on what a victory for all humankind would be, that we will recognize these victories when we encounter them. (Of course, victories for humanity in 1850 unfortunately included the forced assimilation of indigenous peoples in the name of Civilization…oops…) Nevertheless, despite the oversights in our history, the larger goal remains admirable. I love being part of an educational institution that dares to have a motto like “be ashamed to die until you have won a victory for humanity.” A place with such aspirations is worth saving for its motto alone.
I know I don’t have to convince this audience that the world needs Antioch, and more places like Antioch. The problem, of course, is that most of the world does not know it needs us. Our true value has perhaps become harder, given the cluttered landscape, for others to see. But it’s clear that Antioch has been one of the most fruitful and fertile green spaces of American higher education for the past 156 years—a place where students are encouraged to learn their true work. A place where flickers of dissent, of questioning, of commitment to democracy and justice, and what this year has abundantly proved, of hope, have endured. Perhaps our greatest accomplishment lies in the fact that hope persists in being kindled and rekindled here, even during the stormiest and most uncertain of times.
In the prescient words of Horace Mann, “Education is our political safety. Outside of this ark, all is deluge.” The following poem is about this idea, and about places like Antioch. At least I’m claiming it is. I love this short poem for its list of underacknowledged, seemingly superfluous, but in fact absolutely essential, values and habits of mind. The poem suggests that it is these often overlooked qualities and values that most need treasuring and preserving. I would argue that it is these overlooked qualities and values that help us characterize what education really means. So I’ll leave you with this poem, by the reclusive Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Into the Ark
(translated from the Polish)
An endless rain is just beginning.
Into the ark, for where else can you go,
you poems for a single voice,
private exultations,
unnecessary talents,
surplus curiosity,
short-range sorrows and fears,
eagerness to see things from all six sides.
Rivers are swelling and bursting their banks.
Into the ark, all you chiaroscuros and half-tones,
you details, ornaments, and whims,
silly exceptions,
forgotten signs, countless shades of the color gray,
play for play’s sake,
and tears of mirth.
As far as the eye can see, there’s water and hazy horizon.
Into the ark, plans for a distant future,
joy in difference,
admiration for the better man,
choice not narrowed down to one of two,
outworn scruples,
time to think it over,
and the belief that all this
will still come in handy someday.
For the sake of the children
that we still are,
fairy tales have happy endings.
That’s the only finale that will do here, too.
The rain will stop,
the waves will subside,
the clouds will part
in the cleared-up sky,
and they’ll be once more
what clouds overhead ought to be:
lofty and rather lighthearted
in their likeness to things
drying in the sun—
isles of bliss,
lambs,
cauliflowers.
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