Phi Beta Kappa Initiation Ceremony
April 16, 2024
Mary Watt
Professor, Italian Language, Literature and Culture
Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“The Problem with IF.”
Good evening and thank you so much to Ira Fischler for inviting me.
This is a great honor, so when Professor Fischler asked me to speak, I accepted immediately, but then the more I considered the opportunity, the more I was hard-pressed to think of what I could bring to you to inspire you. Thinking about the notion of a “charge,” I imagined my task as getting you prepped up and ready to embark on the next leg of the journey of life. Please note that I study Dante’s Divine Comedy, so I tend to see most things in metaphoric terms. And so, it occurred to me that I might think about my own journey … what inspired me when I was getting to your stage and what inspired me to keep going forward. That was a very good starting point, but I was cautious of boring you with my tales of growing up in Scarborough, that is, east-end Toronto in the 1970s: bad fashion and great music were about all I could really bring to the table in that regard. Nonetheless, I started to think about some of the moments from that part of my life that have stuck with me … and how they might be helpful to you.
I know that PBK salutes more than superior academic achievement, ethics, leadership, innovation, and love of learning. So, let’s think about that for a moment and see what I can offer you:
Hhhhhmmm – about a hundred years ago … 1981 to be exact, I was invited to a Dean’s list dinner and was understandably feeling pretty proud of myself. As a first-generation student, I had finished the first year of my BA and was being celebrated with a great dinner at my college, University of Toronto dinner china set on white linen cloths … and real silverware – very fancy. Between the main course and the dessert, we were asked to listen to a speaker.
The speaker, a university professor, started out by saying that he was a Marxist and, therefore, eschewed any kind of elitism, especially academic elitism, and would ordinarily have turned down the invitation to speak at such an event. Yet, he went on to say, as he gave the invitation more thought he found that feting the Dean’s list would not compromise his Marxist values. For, as he told us, what marked us as worthy of notice was not so much the gift of intellect, which, as he pointed out, might really have simply been an accident of birth, a function of circumstance, and was not anything we had achieved through our own labor and was nothing to be proud of. “Wow,” I thought, “I feel so special – NOT!!!!!”
But he went on and commended us for not having squandered the circumstance – the happenstance of intellect – that we had not simply accepted that we were bright and expected the rest of the world to be impressed. Rather, he pointed out, we had proven ourselves capable of the hard work, what he referred to as the ability to “keep on keeping on.” He was, of course, cribbing from Curtis Mayfield’s classic lyrics but what’s a little property rights sharing among Marxists?
In any event, the talk stuck with me, and after some 40 years, I have still looked at academic achievement this way. Superior academic achievement is indeed the result of hard work. There is no other way to cut it. It is an ongoing exercise in delayed gratification: study now or go for coffee? Finish my paper or go out with my friends? And yet the sweet irony is that the more you delay one kind of gratification, the sooner another comes, that is, the gratification of finishing your work.
So in this, I salute you all for your hard work; your ability to defer your appetites is what will mark you in the end and will replace the most transient of pleasures with the satisfaction of a job well done.
But most importantly, and I can tell you from experience, that hard work tends to minimize regret. When you know you have given it all and done as much as you could, you will rarely have to ask yourself, “What if I had done more? If only …”
This brings me to something I have been thinking about for some time: the problem of IF…
“If I get this … (e.g., a scholarship), if I get an A .. if I … If he … etc., the following will happen… yet we can rarely control the IF, and the IF often leads to disappointment.
It seems to me that it is in striving, in attention to hard work and the resultant superior academic achievement, that serves to eradicate the problem of If … and the disappointments and lack of control and absence of agency that it represents.
Allow me for a moment to demonstrate and perhaps we can play a little bit of Name that tune …yes, it’s from the 80’s …
Now do you know these lyrics? ….
“If I was a soldier, captive arms I’d lay before her…
If I was a sailor, seven oceans I’d sail to her…”
Yes, you are right: Midge Ure (late of Ultravox) …
Or perhaps you are familiar with this one – (let me go back to Scarborough for a moment😊
“If I had a million dollars …” as the Bare Naked Ladies tell us, “I’d be rich …”
But, of course, we know right away from the “if” that I am not rich. The IF signals desire and wishful thinking, but at the same time, it deprives us of agency. That is, it causes us to set up contingencies and functions as a distraction, and it causes us to rely on things often beyond our control…
In the context of superior academic achievement IF negates reality and realization …
IF comes disguised as hope, but in many respects, it is the renunciation of hope.
Perhaps an even better example of the desperation of IF was articulated by William Shakespeare:
If I should think of love
I’d think of you, your arms uplifted,
Tying your hair in plaits above,
The lyre shape of your arms and shoulders,
The soft curve of your winding head.
No melody is sweeter, nor could Orpheus
o have bewitched. I think of this,
And all my universe becomes perfection.
But were you in my arms, dear love,
The happiness would take my breath away,
No thought could match that ecstasy,
No song encompass it, no other worlds.
If I should think of love,
I’d think of you.
And very often, it causes us to look back … The poet Dante, unjustly accused and exiled from his native city of Florence, in his despair looked to IF, writing:
“If it should happen . . . If this sacred poem—referring to the Divine Comedy, can ever overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair fold where I slept, that is Florence – I shall return as poet and put on, — the laurel crown…”
He never saw Florence again.
Now, let’s see what happens when we replace IF with WHEN.
WHEN I work hard, I can achieve … when I keep on keeping, on I will produce superior product… when I do rather than wish … when I have done these things I will transcend the IF …
How does this then relate to ethics, another attribute that your society values?
Allow me for a moment to cite a few lyrics from a famous poem …
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn out tools:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much…
Now before you go and try to finish it –I know some of you are already googling it on your phones… it’s Kipling.
The poem is advice from a father to a son and is, by its very nature, speculative. It is hopeful but not certain and, of course, is good advice. Ultimately, it is about recognizing that moment WHEN the son will be all his father dreamed that his son could or should be. But imagine the poem with WHEN substituted for IF. Then, it becomes a credo. It becomes an ethos and a series of uncompromisable principles by which one will live – not might live – and in this, your commitment to whatever values you espouse will be the rules by which you live not the rules by which you hope to live, and by which you govern your lives.
So let us think for a moment of an ethos without IF and the poem as a template for WHEN rather than IF. When I treat others as I would have them treat me, when I give credit where credit is due, when I acknowledge the shortcomings in my research, my teaching, my service, I can address them and make myself a more ethical, more successful being.
Which brings me to my last point – Leadership.
I recall a comic strip many years ago. In the first pane, a supervisor says to the admin assistant, “I bet if you work past quitting time, we could get this report done and sent out this evening.” In the next pane, the admin assistant replies, “I guess we’ll never know.” In the third pane, she walks out of the office, and the supervisor looks dumbstruck.
IF, therefore, articulates mere possibility. And I know that here it was done as politeness but again it is unclear. The supervisor was asking, “Can you stay? Will you stay?” and thus transferred agency to the admin assistant. Now, of course, the admin assistant could have said no had she been asked directly but you get the point … “I guess we’ll never know.”
Leadership, then, is not based on IF. Leadership is not based on maybe. Leadership is based on clarity not contingency.
Action and agency do not depend on IF. They depend on when and how. Leadership exists in the present, not sometime in the possible/probable, even doubtful future.
Admittedly, I have a personal tendency to obsess over eventualities and multiple possible outcomes … and see it at times as smart planning. But the contemplation of the IF and WHAT IF and the IF ONLY takes time from me, a precious commodity that is not infinite …
Right now, at this stage in your lives, IF might seem a comfortable go to but really, it will slow you down…and cause you perhaps to look back too often.
So, my advice to you tonight is to check your IF at the door. Substitute WHEN instead, as you set your life goals and pursue them. Dream, yes, but despair, not. Articulate your ethics and then act in accordance with them, and finally, determine what you want to accomplish and share that with others, defining your leadership by realization, not speculation…
Do this, and indeed, you’ll be rich.