Breakfast with Mauri

Have you ever wanted to use a clever statement or phrase that you heard or read and realized that you couldn’t remember its origin? That can be a real problem when working on an academic assignment. Prefacing the phrase with “a famous person once said” or “I think it was my grandfather who told me that” often gets us by in casual conversation, but most of us would still prefer to remember the context, the speaker, and the exact wording when we use a timely quote.

I spent last weekend trying to remember the origin of an old bit of advice regarding the joining of clubs.  I vaguely remembered reading or hearing something like: “Don’t join many clubs, few if any. Join the church and join the family but not much in between, except perhaps a college.”

My first thought was that this must be something I read in 1973 as part of a course on famous American orators. Daniel Webster was my best guess as the speaker to first utter something similar to this phrase. But, a check of famous quotations from this legendary orator did not turn up what I was looking for. Perhaps my memory was fooled by Webster’s memorable line in arguing a case for Dartmouth College in front of the Supreme Court in which he proclaimed, “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those of us who love it!”

I typed my remembered quotation into a search engine and found no match. Not only had I misremembered the speaker, but clearly I didn’t have the wording quite right. So, I turned to Jeff, who edits much of what I write and asked if he could track down the correct wording and the speaker. His search came up blank, but he suggested that maybe I had the wrong Webster; perhaps it was Noah instead of Daniel. Certainly Jeff’s was a solid suggestion—Noah Webster had many positive things to say about colleges and churches and was probably a proponent of families. But, no match came up among the famous statements of Noah Webster.

When all else fails, turn to a librarian. I sent Rick the request, “find me the source of a quotation that I can’t remember.” After a quick try with search engines, he went to the shelves and pulled out the hard copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1980), checked the index under “join” and found both the source and the wording that I was searching.  There it was:

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family-
But not much in between unless a college.

It wasn’t from a 19th-century orator. No, it was from Robert Frost’s 1932 poem Build Soil. No wonder it took a while to find: I was in the wrong century and the wrong genre.  And, somewhere in the 40 years since first seeing this work, I had replaced “gangs” with “clubs” and “the United States” with “the church.”

Far be it from me to ever suggest that I might turn a phrase better than Robert Frost, but in this case I like my garbled version better than the original. Of course, when he used the word gang it did not likely imply all we mean by it today and almost certainly had a more positive connotation.  And, for my purposes last weekend, it made as much sense to suggest that one join a church as to join the United States. When the phrase came to mind, I was in a church, winding my way through the visitation line for a Monmouth College student named Tommy, who had died in a tragic accident. In fact, it was the longest visitation line I had ever experienced. How could someone so young, I wondered, have touched so many people? As I looked around, the answer was apparent. He had been associated with a caring church, a close-knit college community, and a large, loving family. With apologies to Robert Frost, the situation shouted out the message:  Join a church, join a family and join a college, and you can find great joy in life.

Since my career has been spent in relatively small colleges, I haven’t attended a lot of funerals for students, but even one every year or so is too many. Each time it seems that the student was one of the most active on campus.  Maybe all college students lead exciting, busy, full lives, yet we don’t think about how special they are until a tragedy occurs.

It is particularly sad when a young person with so many adventures on the horizon is killed. When that occurs close to graduation our first thought is to think that the years in college preparing for a career and a busy life were wasted.  But, of course, those years weren’t wasted. College isn’t simply a preparation for what lies ahead. It is in a very real sense what life is all about. Being a friend, inspiring others, enjoying ideas, growing intellectually and spiritually, enriching a community—these are the riches of life and not just the preparation for some future life.

Robert Frost’s admonition wasn’t “attend college” or “go to class” or “study hard” or “prepare for a job.”  Instead he called on us to join a college in the same way one should join a family or join a country.  Joining a college is far more than taking advantage of a degree, just as joining a family is far more than taking advantage of parents and siblings. Given the exalted status of colleges, on par with family and country (and not much else), Frost certainly imagined that each of us would immerse ourselves in the full range of activities and take on both responsibilities and joys of membership in a special college community.

It was clear, as I looked at those in the visitation line, that Tommy had fully immersed himself in the gang that is Monmouth College. His professors spoke of the joy of having him in class. His football teammates carried themselves with class, seemingly trying to elevate their friend by mustering every bit of stoic dignity possible. A tearful group of volleyball players reminded us that college students don’t live in silos. Countless classmates affirmed that they had been enriched by conversations with Tommy.

College was more than a holding pattern for Tommy. It had been about much more than earning a credential. It wasn’t just preparation for life; it was life itself. And regardless of how long he or any of his classmates live, it will have included some of the best parts of life.  Indeed, a college should be joined, not just attended.

Frost was wise when he compared a college with one’s country and family. With each of these three institutions it is possible to go through life taking more than giving. Some people have no qualms avoiding taxes and dodging drafts while enjoying liberties and services. Others enjoy the family Thanksgiving dinner without offering to bring a dish or wash the dishes. Still others go to college to acquire a credential, but don’t contribute to the rich community life that does so much to change so many lives. While all of these individuals may think they are clever, in the end they miss the incredible joy of belonging to a country, a family, and a college. Belonging does require effort and sacrifice, but those who have made the sacrifice know that it is an experience like no other.

Frost’s line about gangs (or in my mind, Webster’s line about clubs) came to me while encountering members of Tommy’s “gangs.”  Clearly, Tommy had taken the effort and made the sacrifices necessary to find the rewards of full immersion within his communities. I was saddened by the death of this much-loved student. But I was happy that he spent his last three years as a member of our gang. There is no better place to live the best years of one’s life.

Last week, I attended a seminar in which an archaeology professor described the work of his students to catalog a collection of 5,000 Native American artifacts that was recently donated to Monmouth College. The collection is a remarkable resource to our students, who handle and study the stone artifacts, and to the broader academic community, as it represents one of the most complete and well-documented collections of Western Illinois antiquity.

Students from all majors are eligible to sign up for an archaeology laboratory, in which they learn to record, characterize and identify the various stone points that range in origin from 10,000 years to a few hundred years ago. The professor explained that undergraduate students often try to identify an artifact by matching its general appearance to pictures in a database. The process is slow, tedious and ineffective. It’s akin to finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack.”

In time, the students discover that identification is more efficient if they employ a well-designed decision tree. They ask very specific questions designed to rule out many possibilities with each question. By carefully selecting the questions (e.g., does it have flutes, is the base concave, do the chips all orient in the same direction?) and asking them in the proper order they can often make an identification through a half-dozen or so rather simple questions.

What a wonderful critical-thinking exercise! Most students in the archaeology laboratory will never again identify and catalog artifacts, but by learning how to simplify a complex problem through a series of logical, well-ordered steps they have acquired a valuable lifelong skill. It’s an excellent example of the value proposition that we at Monmouth College term “integrated learning.”

As I thought about the process of integrating knowledge across disciplines, it occurred to me that there are similarities between the archaeology lab and my discipline, chemistry. Specifically, I thought about the sophomore chemistry student who must learn to identify an organic molecule from its two-dimensional representation. Like the archaeology student, she soon discovers there is a more efficient means of identification than comparing it to thousands of pictures of known molecules.

If the sophomore chemistry student had previously spent a semester in the archaeology lab, shouldn’t she find organic nomenclature a snap?  After all, the intellectual basis of the process is very similar. Perhaps, but in my experience, students tend to treat each course and each exercise as a unique challenge. I know that as a student I missed some obvious connections.  For me, the process of identifying molecules was not unlike the process of identifying trees from leaf shapes, a skill that I had learned as a kid studying forestry in 4-H.  Unfortunately, that connection did not occur to me until years after college.

Transferring ideas and skills from one course to another or from one field to another is clearly not easy, but it is a crucial skill for those who want to solve complex problems. Unless we can transfer or—as we say at Monmouth—integrate that knowledge, we will always be limited by our inability to take every possible course and study every conceivable topic.

The integration of knowledge doesn’t just happen.  Students rarely discover it themselves, nor are most faculty members adept at it, having trained as specialists. So students go through colleges and universities putting knowledge into silos. Some claim to have interdisciplinary skills because the knowledge silos they use straddle several disciplines, but few have the ability to discern the connections between those silos. Consequently, they are not prepared to solve the complex problems that arise daily.

When faced with solving a difficult problem or performing an unfamiliar task, our natural tendency is to shy away from the challenge or plead ignorance. At Monmouth we believe we can diminish that all-too-human trait through the remarkable tool known as integrated learning. The heart of our curriculum is a series of courses that is called the Integrated Studies Sequence. In our Strategic Plan, we pledge to prepare students to solve complex problems by preparing them to integrate knowledge.

It may be the hardest thing for us to teach, since many of us were never taught it ourselves. It is certainly one of the hardest things our students accomplish, but, like so many other challenges, it is worth the effort for a college that believes that its graduates can and should change the world.