Robert D. Holt, University of Florida, April 19, 2023
It is a singular pleasure to deliver the Charge to the spring 2023 initiates to Phi Beta Kappa. Warm congratulations to you all!
The students at the College of William and Mary in Virginia who founded Phi Beta Kappa in 1776 had a motto: “Love of learning is the guide to life”. So, my first charge to you is: infuse your life with a continued love of learning. There is no recipe for that ‐‐ it is something each of you have to work out for yourselves.
You are not at the end of your education, but at its beginning as young adults.
You have received this honor – for which your family and friends should be so proud – not just because you excel in the parts of your education aimed at your career goals, but because you have an appreciation for a broad swath of human understanding and enterprise, encapsulated by the liberal arts and sciences. I have no doubt that you have each already demonstrated your “love of learning”.
My first inclination in devising this talk for this evening was to reflect on how my own disciplines of ecology and evolution should be central to education in liberal arts and sciences. I do honestly feel that an appreciation for nature and the history of life, and an understanding of ecological processes, is both of great practical importance and intellectually and even spiritually enriching. But then of course, any professor on this campus would surely feel that way about their own specialty! I decided maybe it would be parochial to develop a charge to you, peering entirely through the lenses of my own preoccupations.
So, let’s get back to basics.
I have long thought that there are three intertwined reasons for education, including in the liberal arts and sciences: sort of like the three legs holding up a stool. One leg is the development of the knowledge, skills, mental acuity – and flexibility – to craft a profession, a career, so to have meaningful and gainful lifelong employment. This is becoming increasingly challenging, given the exponential growth of knowledge and the rapidity of change in our societies.
Learning how to be reeducated in a continual cycle of self‐reinvention is an important dimension of any education, and one that a liberal arts and sciences education ideally helps you to achieve. In addition to your ‘love of learning’, there is thus an urgent need for continued learning.
This is difficult, given the pace of change and the accumulation of research and knowledge. Let me give you one recent example from myself. Just last week, in this building in the Ballroom downstairs, I gave a speech. The School of Natural Resources and the Environment was holding their first Annual Research Symposium, and the Director, Dr. Ramesh Reddy, asked me to kick off the day with a plenary address. I decided to give one, on the theme of how ecological principles were at play in the covid pandemic, and in our failure collectively, in this country and abroad, to contain it. It was a good theme for that diverse audience, because everyone in the room had lived through the pandemic, so could relate to the gist of the lecture. I am not really an epidemiologist or virologist or immunologist, so I had to bone up on the literature. But how large is that literature?
Well, I found estimates that from early 2020, when SARS‐CoV‐2 was discovered, up to the end of 2022 – not even counting 2023 – around 750,000 scientific papers had been published on the virus and the pandemic. That is an astonishing number: 750,000. Our minds have trouble grasping big numbers, so let me translate the number into a spatial analogue, and time equivalent. Print off all those papers, and stack them up. How high is the stack? Assume that each publication when printed is on average 20 pages long (with tables, figures, supplements, etc.). 20 pages of regular printer paper are 0.08 inches thick.
Multiple those numbers together, one gets a stack of paper, 5000 feet high – almost a mile into the air! Now, translate that stack of papers into time. When I read a scientific paper with a modicum of attention and care, it might take an hour. At 8 hours a day of straight reading, reading all those papers would require 257 years!! And we haven’t even gotten to 2023.
What to do? You get help. What I did was first to read several fine popular science books which summarized major themes in the pandemic, then some reviews in high‐quality journals. I next contacted colleagues who work at the World Health Organization and our own Emerging Pathogen Institute for up‐to‐ date insights. And that sufficed, for my purposes last week.
So my second charge builds on the first one, the love of learning – engage deftly with the intellectual resources around you, libraries and colleagues, continue attend lectures summarizing complex arenas of knowledge, TED talks and the like. You need to keep learning. You have already started developing such a skill set in college to facilitate learning, keep it up. And read books, journals, and magazines, not just snippets of fleeting text on your bloody electronic devices.
I would like to quote Horace Mann, who lived in the first half of the 19th century. Mann was an American educational reformer, active in the abolitionist movement, and a principal figure in championing public universal education. He said:
“Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows… Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.”
So, my charge to you more specifically is: read, and read broadly, honest‐ to‐God books. If you become a practical businessperson, read novels, Tolstoy or Achebe or Toni Morrison. Read poetry, from Keats, to Tagore, and the Sufi Rumi. Dig into history and popular science, not just works that polish your vocational expertise. Learn about wherever you end up living, its history, its peoples, its natural features. If you stay in Florida, delve into the history and natural beauties of our state. Our own Jack Davis in the UF History Department won a Pulitzer Prize for his sweeping history, The Gulf, a really great and well‐crafted book. I learned a lot about where I live from reading that. Subscribe to high‐quality online newspapers like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and magazine like the Atlantic, to keep stretching your mind and listening to the beat of events around the world.
A second leg of education is to craft citizens who can participate intelligently in a democracy. This does not mean merely political activities, but engagement more broadly in the society around where you live. So, my third charge is: get involved. Staying engaged with Phi Beta Kappa is one small step towards this end. Be actively involved in whatever community you end up in, in charitable organizations, unions, churches, civic organizations and so forth.
The third leg is recognizing that all human beings have intrinsic value, in themselves, qua humans, and everyone deserves the opportunity to live a meaningful and self‐actualized life. Education helps us achieve the full measure of our humanity. This thought has implications for each of you, and for others. My family had its roots in a farm in west Tennessee that had been in the family for well over a century. When I was young, I worked on the farm in the summer, and it was often grueling labor in the baking sun. I talked to my grandmother Mattie Holt once about the farm laborers I worked alongside, and about how hard their lives must be, and how I did not want to do that when I grew up. She said something I will always remember, “There is dignity in all honest work.” My grandparents were respectful to their workers, mainly black folk, who in turn were loyal to them for many, many years.
So, another charge I have for you is to treat everyone with dignity and respect. The humblest janitor on this campus has a job that in its own way is as important as anything you, or I, or even President Sasse does. Many people do not have the advantages we have enjoyed, for instance of going to a fine university like the University of Florida. But their lives as fellow human beings are as precious as our own.
I will put out a few more charges, suggested by a book I read a few years ago, and dipped into again in preparing this charge. There was a great dean at Harvard University of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Henry Rosovsky, an economist, who in 1990 wrote a fine book titled “The University: An Owner’s Manual”. I met him many years ago, when I was a graduate student there, myself, and had a nice conversation with him. He passed away only last November, at age 95. I now wish I had written him to say how I had profited from reading his book and how I admired his leadership of that College.
Chapter 6 in his book is titled “The Purposes of Liberal Education”.
Rosovsky there quotes John Buchan, a diplomat and writer of adventure stories, who wrote in 1938:
“We live in a distressed and chaotic world whose future no man can predict, a world where the foundations seem to be cracking, and where that compromise which we have christened civilization is in great peril. What must be the attitude of those like ourselves in this critical time, those who have behind them a liberal education? For if that education gives us no guidance in such a crisis it cannot be much of a thing at all.”
What was happening back in 1938? Hitler was in Germany, persecuting the Jews and others, Stalin had instituted the Great Terror in the USSR, militarists in Japan had invaded China – the Nanjing Massacre alone swallowed up more than 200,000 murdered civilians – and there was growing unrest in European colonies around the globe. I fear there are echoes of that terrible time of turbulence and uncertainty in our troubled world today. I do not need to give you a litany of these ‐‐ why spoil our evening?
What can one glean from your liberal education that provides a bulwark in your soul against the seeming never‐ending tide of bad news, at least to some small degree. John Buchan suggested three qualities that should come from a liberal education, each of which will be a charge to you: humility, humanity and humor.
Humility, he said, “because if we are educated men, the treasures of the world’s thought behind us, we shall not be induced to overvalue ourselves or to claim too much for the work of our hands.” An increased awareness of the world of human knowledge, experience and creation that we received in our education should humble us all. Never seize to be amazed at the wonderful things humankind can at times do, the glories of our arts and literature, the majesty of a Notre Dame or Angkor Wat, the depths of our understanding of the natural world. We should cherish (not envy) individuals who are smarter, more creative, more adept than ourselves – we all profit from them.
Humanity, he suggested, and I again quote “We need a deepened respect for human nature. There can be no such respect in those who would obliterate the personality and make beings mere featureless details in the monstrous mechanism of the state” and we might add, corporations and institutions.
Remember, this was 1938, when humans were being ground up in pitiless states. As I read this passage, Buchan is saying in the phrase “a deepened respect for human nature”, that your liberal education should have left you with an appreciation of the many things humans hold in common, regardless of our backgrounds. Also, at the same time, he is saying we should cultivate an ability to cherish the manifold ways in which we individuals differ amongst ourselves. You can keep doing that, again through reading widely, and opening yourself up to experiences that broaden your horizons, traveling either in person, virtually, or through a book to different cultures, climes, and epochs. Spend time with people who are not just like yourselves. Go to art museums, concerts, plays, and dance performances to experience the world afresh through the creative and discerning works of other gifted individuals.
Finally, humor. “In a time like the present, when the ties of religion have been sadly relaxed, there is a tendency for popular leaders to exalt themselves in a kind of bogus deity and to think their shallow creeds a divine revelation. The answer to all that sort of folly is laughter.”
I might generalize this, education in college and through one’s life should not just be toil, work. It should be a source of pleasure and joy and yes at times laughter even about the absurdities of the world and our fellow citizens, and maybe even ourselves.
So my final charges to you are:
Give thanks, when you think of it. If there is a professor or classmate or neighbor you cherish or admire, just tell them so, don’t wait.
Maintain a degree of humility in your work and life. Appreciate humanity in all its dimensions.
And finally, don’t forget to laugh and take joy in your lives.
I have noted in my remarks the importance of literature and the arts, so I will end with a poem I love by Mary Oliver
The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver (1992)
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
With that, go forth and do something fine with your precious life, and many warm congratulations, again.
THE END