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Opening Celebration September 8, 2010
Lessons in the Liberal Arts
By Dr. Alan J. Silva
The title of my talk is “Lessons in the Liberal Arts.” I’ll begin with a few questions: What is the source of
inquiry? What creates the thirst for knowledge? What do we wish to learn? Who do we wish to be?
As we enter into the Year of the Liberal Arts, these are the kinds of questions we need to be asking and
thinking about. I know for my part that I have been grappling with them for a long time, perhaps my
whole life. And this is how I want to talk about the liberal arts today with all of you, as a journey of
inquiry and self-examination that began sometime in my childhood and that has grown and expanded
over the course of my life. I want to invite you to join me on this journey as I talk about the intellectual
labor of the liberal arts and provide you with four lessons to illustrate.
To do this, I need to turn to my parents, two people who never went to college. My parents would have
liked to have gone, but their families didn’t have the money to send them, and they had too many
demands placed upon them—my mother who was expected to work in her older sister’s store and my
father who was expected to work on his family’s dairy farm.
If you are a student sitting here today, you might be thinking of the sacrifices your parents made to help
you get to this place or if you are a student-parent, you might be thinking of the sacrifice your family is
making right now to help you realize your dreams.
Let’s begin these “Lessons in the Liberal Arts.”
Lesson #1. My mother has been a catechism teacher for 58 years. For those who are not Catholic,
catechism is the religious instruction that young people receive, usually up through about the 8th grade, from either members of the clergy or lay teachers.
Before I went to school, I would sometimes go with my mother to Monday afternoon catechism and sit
quietly at the side table, hands folded, listening to my mother’s recitation of the lessons from the
Baltimore catechism. I must confess that I cannot recall many of the specifics of those lessons so many
years later, but I can remember how my mother taught her 8 and 9 year old students how to think of
self, of others, of God. It was in this process of “how to discern” that I believe initiated my desire for self-examination.
One of my mother’s favorite words from those catechism days is “conscience.” When I would
sometimes ask her if I could do something, knowing full well that I could not or should not, my mother
would nearly always say, “Alan, what does your conscience tell you?”
Just a few weeks ago, I went back to the Baltimore (I have a copy in my office) to find the part about
“conscience.” And there in Lesson 32, item number 426 (for those who are counting) is the statement
about conscience, tied explicitly to confession:
“Before entering the confessional, we should prepare ourselves for a good confession by taking
sufficient time not only to examine our conscience but, especially to excite in our hearts sincere sorrow
for our sins and a firm purpose not to commit them again.”
Now I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to run out to confession to start a process of
selfexamination, though I’m sure some of you certainly need it. I am actually more interested in
focusing on some key phrases in this passage: “Take sufficient time to examine your conscience” and
“excite in your heart” and “make a firm purpose.” Those are powerful words that apply to all of us here,
especially in this “Year of the Liberal Arts,” regardless of your faith tradition or religious background
because they call us back to the liberal arts goal of intense self-examination.
Lesson #2. This one is from my father. Fast forward into junior high and the class project of “what do
you want to be when you grow up?” Few of us like this question and most of us try to dodge it, but this
was a class project and so I had to do the assignment. The twist on this project is that we couldn’t simply write a one to two page report on what we thought we might do when we grew up. No, we had
to actually interview someone who worked in the field we had chosen. And we could not interview
anyone in our families.
Like most kids, I changed my mind many times as to what I would be. This is the prerogative of a
budding liberal arts thinker. There was professional football player, writer, and even yes, Pope. I
actually read about the lives of the popes and saw that many of them had special monikers attached to
their names. I decided by the time I was in fifth grade that I would keep my own name of Alan and that I
would be known as “Pope Alan the Great.” Modesty was not a strong suit at this early age.
Since I was in junior high, I figured I would not be able to interview the Pope, so I settled on becoming a
meteorologist. They are kind of related; it all has something to do with the heavens. I did have a keen
fascination with weather and always wondered, as someone who was growing up in California, why the
weather was so horrible everywhere else in the world except for where I lived. We Californians figured
it was some form of predestination. I sometimes think that my coming to Minnesota to carry out my
work as a professor and as a dean has been God’s way of disabusing me of that theological error.
I talked to my parents about the interview. My mother had the idea of contacting the local community
college to see if anyone might be available. Sure enough someone was, a professor who taught physics,
astronomy, and meteorology. This professor lived about halfway from my house to the college and he
said that he and his wife could talk to me after dinner. I told my parents I could not talk to a professor.
My father said I could. He would drive me.
I don’t recall much of what transpired during the interview. I remember the professor’s cat jumping
onto my lap and sticking her claw into my pant leg. Mostly, I remember my father talking with me about
the interview on the ride over to the professor’s house. “What kinds of questions are you going to ask,
Alan?” “What do you really want to know?” And then I remember similar questions on the ride home:
“What did you learn tonight, Alan?” “Did anything surprise you in what he said?”
It’s in those inquiries that the learning experience was deepened, the kinds of questions that we learn to
ask as we study in the liberal arts.
Lesson #3. Same time period. I had become very skillful at understanding how much things would cost
and I would frequently try my mother’s patience with my knowledge. “But mother, it’s only $9.95.”
“Oh, but you know, on sale, it’s only $14.95.” Gadgets and toys were cheaper then. And this would go
on whenever I would see items advertised on TV or when I would thumb through catalogs.
And then it happened. I used to think my mother was especially tired on this particular day and that’s
why she responded as she did, but now I think she orchestrated this to happen at the perfect moment.
My mother is very fond of using tried-and-true phrases that you’ve heard before, but that always take
on new meaning because of the context in which she utters them.
So on this day, I started in again, “but mother it only costs . . .” and then it happened. She wheeled
around and looked at me with all the firmness of purpose a mother can have and said, “ALAN JOSEPH.”
Oh oh. When your mother uses your first and middle names, you know you’re in trouble. Fortunately, I
had not been confirmed yet.
Here’s the whole phrase: “ALAN JOSEPH. You know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
I had no idea what she meant. But I knew she was serious. This was no doubt clear, effective
communication, and as we like to say in the liberal arts, in a “clear and engaging manner.” But even
more, it was a window into the “value” of work and the value that lies behind all those surface details of
prices and flashy ads and come-ons for newer and better products. Did I even realize the value of work?
Did I even know how much my parents had to work in order to buy something that only costs $9.95? Lesson #4. This is the last one and it comes from my father. Now I’m in high school and I’m looking for a
little better paying summer job.
So at 16 years old I found myself working at the local poultry plant. I worked on a line putting frozen
turkeys onto a conveyer belt; I swept up feathers (and other unsightly things); I washed down floors. The plant was hot. We were sweaty. And worst of all we were filthy dirty. (I do not like to be dirty.)
After my first day of work, I walked home. It was about a half mile walk. On the way home, I decided I
would not go back the next day. I was tired. Sweaty. Dirty. I went into the garage and sat there for a
few minutes, waiting for the outpouring of sympathy from my parents. (I didn’t dare go into the house
as dirty as I was.) My dad arrived home from work.
I explained to him that I did not like to work in the poultry plant. I did not want to be hot and sweaty
and dirty. It was not enjoyable and I had decided not to go back the next day. I halfexpected my dad to
say, “OK Alan, stay home, sip cool drinks, watch some television, enjoy your summer.”
But instead my dad said, very calmly, “Alan, whatever work you do, you will do a lot of it. Find
something you want to do and do it well. Now get washed up. Your mother has dinner.”
My father was not going to tell me to go back to work or not go back to work. I had to decide what to
do based on what my conscience told me, on the questions I had learned to ask about myself, on what I
had learned about the value of things.
This is the liberal arts at work: to develop attitudes and behaviors that reflect honesty and justice in
one’s personal and professional life. This does not happen from having one life experience, taking one
class, majoring in one subject. It happens through the cumulative effect of all of those things.
In this Year of the Liberal Arts, I want to call us back to critical thinking and inquiry. Thought is the work of the liberal arts. Much will happen this year, some of which we will not be able to anticipate, some of
which might come as great surprise. More receptions and rallies and rituals will come, but beyond all of
this will be the intellectual work each of us does every day to live out the lessons of the liberal arts, to
expand our learning into new forms of inquiry and selfreflection, to activate our potential, to be who we
truly are. This is a year for all of us to recommit ourselves to the liberal arts and to find what we really
want to do and do it well.
