New Student Orientation Faculty Address

New Student Orientation Week

RICE NEWS OFFICE
August 27, 1998

By David Nirenberg
Associate Professor of History
Aug. 24, 1998

Salve, o pulcherrimae spei adolescentes! Multa quidem sapienter a maioribus
nostris inventa atque instituta sunt, quibus haec universitas fundata ad bene
vivendum ordinaretur; sed nullum aeque praeclarius quam quod, cum nobis anniversarium
hunc diem ad studiorum exercitationem per aestivas ferias intermissam de integro
repetendam constituissent, cum oratione habita, qua adolescentes ad labores
alacri animo capessendos exhortaremur, inaugurari voluerunt.

Oh, my apologies, I seem not to be speaking English. And why am I wearing these
silly robes? I must be stuck in the Middle Ages again. I’m a medievalist, and
this happens to me frequently. But this week it is happening to you as well.
Did you feel the change of time zone on Sunday when you marched through that
Sallyport in ritual formation? Did you feel sucked out of that location in time
so precisely expressed by the title "Class of 2002" and into a land
that somehow resists chronography? You should have, for when you strode through
that arch you walked into a world different from the one you were in before
and from the one you will enter four or five years from now, when you walk through
that arch again at graduation. You have entered a Middle Earth, peopled with
strange beings (most of them your roommates), a place where everything you do,
everything you think, is both of the here and now and outside of it, the past
present in time future.

I know I sound crazy. Professors often do. But let me try to explain what I
mean. One way to do this is by asking you to return to the Sallyport. Stude
Hall couldn’t be easily set up for slides, so I ask you to call upon memory
and imagination. Yesterday you entered Rice ceremonially as freshmen when you
walked through that arch. What did it look like? Although built in this century,
its architecture is not modern. It derives rather from monuments of the distant
past, from the triumphal arches of Roman emperors, and from the Christian adaptation
of those arches in the Middle Ages into the westworks of cathedrals. Westworks
were massive doors, victory arches grafted onto buildings. When medieval people
passed through these gates into the church they left behind the world and entered
triumphantly, as Christ was believed to have done, into a heavenly realm.

You, too, have entered such a realm. You’ve walked through the Sallyport, and
what do you see? Rows of columns supporting arches that march along the sides
of the quad. Anthropology, art history, physics and, yes, even admissions and
financial aid, all are arranged in what is called a cloister: that is, an architectural
feature of medieval monasteries designed as a space for contemplation. An architectural
tour of Rice would show you other buildings whose design consciously echoes
the Middle Ages, and the same is true of many colleges across the United States.
There is even a style of architecture called American College Gothic: the style
of Yale, Princeton or Duke, to name a few.

This architectural tour is just one example of the many ways in which our university,
like most others, resonates with a medieval past. I wore this robe as another
example. It is derived from the dress of medieval students, and nearly every
aspect of its design, down to the tassel on the cap, draws on ancient symbolism.
(The tassel, for example, was said to symbolize the large size of the wearer’s
. . . brain). The college system you’ve just moved into was originally formed
by students who banded together in the Middle Ages to defend themselves against
professors, arrange lodging, facilitate studying, organize a kitchen and establish
a joint wine-cellar (alas only Cambridge and Oxford preserve this last venerable
tradition). Our titles–bachelor, master, doctor–all date back to that age,
as do the honors (cum laude, etc.) that will be conferred with them at graduation
and the traditional parchment diploma for inscribing them.

In fact even the ceremony of welcoming the new students is medieval. It is
true that there were no O-week advisers in the Middle Ages and that freshmen
today are treated a bit better than they were then. (At Heidelberg and Leipzig,
for example, laws had to be passed forbidding everyone to "insult, torment,
harass, drench with water or urine, … defile with… filth," or physically
assault freshmen.) But the general atmosphere was much the same. And then, just
as today, university administrators got angry when these ceremonies got out
of hand, although the consequences were more severe. "The students of the
university of Avignon," wrote one administrator in 1441, "have continually
practiced nefarious and incredible actions at … what is vulgarly called the
purgation of the freshmen, and in consequence God, perchance angered, has scattered
the same students by means of [plague] … ." Thankfully, God seems less
concerned about O-week pranks than in days of yore.

I give you these anecdotes to point to a continuity that is at first blush
quite surprising. Rice was built in the 20th century, its faculty pursues research
on the frontiers of disciplines unimaginable just a century ago, disciplines
like parallel computing, nanotechnology, or queer studies. It is even located
on a continent unknown to medieval Europeans. Why, then, should such a modern
institution construct its space and its rituals in ways that so consciously
echo a premodern past? Without embarking on a disquisition, I want to suggest
that some of the possible answers to this question can tell us a great deal
about the endeavor we are embarking on this week, the endeavor of teaching,
learning and living together.

The most obvious, and in some ways the least interesting, reason for the continuity
is historical. Institutionalized universities originated in the Middle Ages,
and though they have changed a great deal since then, one can still detect the
influence of the older forms. Economists call this "path dependency,"
which means something like "where you have been affects where you are going."
To give but one institutional example of this dependency, consider the curious
judicial autonomy of universities. To protect students from local lords and
stimulate the growth of universities in the Middle Ages, kings and popes gave
them charters containing many privileges. One common privilege was that of jurisdiction.
It stated that no matter what a student did, whether murder, rape, theft, or
plagiarism, that student could only be judged and punished by the masters of
the university, and not by the civil authorities. Such privileges turned universities
into virtually autonomous self-governing institutions within medieval cities.
They also provoked a great deal of violence between students and townies. Knowing
that they were protected from the local police, student behavior sometimes tended
toward the outrageous: smashing up bars, pissing on passers-by from college
windows, playing practical jokes of dubious legality. (Compare the debate over
the events preceding last year’s Beer Bike.) Conversely, gangs of townies resentful
of these privileges sometimes prowled the streets, looking for students to beat
up or rob.

Today the law is very different, the town-gown divide much less sharp. But
the university is still in some ways an exceptional place, even in the eyes
of the law. Students all over the United States run naked through university
streets without being arrested for indecent exposure. (At Princeton they do
it through the snow, and run a gauntlet of ice balls. Now that’s a challenge,
Baker 13!) More seriously, many universities allow administrators, courts and
honor councils to judge violations, both of internal rules (such as the one
against plagiarism) and of external ones (like copyright violation, weapons
or drug possession, and petty theft). Some universities even allow the bringing
of assault and rape accusations before internal committees rather than local
criminal courts. This devotion to self-governance is quite unique among modern
institutions (can you imagine corporations like IBM or General Electric appointing
committees to investigate accusations of serious crimes?). In this sense the
university remains a privileged space, one with more room for experimentation
and error than the rest of the world provides. Today these liberties are given
to us not as a right, as they were in the Middle Ages, but as a privilege, in
the recognition that they are helpful in the difficult process of learning how
to live as a responsible individual in a community. Teaching us how to live
as a community is indeed one of the critical functions of the university, and
I urge you to take advantage of the privileges for that purpose. But I would
remind you as well that only if we are careful not to abuse these privileges
will their future be as long as their past.

But I am both moralizing and digressing. To return to the question at hand,
another reason that modern universities echo medieval ones has less to do with
historical continuity and more with similarity of purpose. Both institutions,
medieval and modern, exist to bridge the transition from youth to adult, from
dependence to independence (and, I might add, from ignorance to knowledge).
In this sense, too, the university has always been an in-between space, a middle
passage. Yesterday’s matriculation symbolized your entrance into this in-between
state, even if it was much less explicit than the medieval rituals marking the
transition. One 15th-century parody of such rituals begins with a dialogue between
upperclassmen. Says one: "What’s the stink that’s smelling up this place?
We can’t stand this! There’s either been a corpse rotting here, or a goat, filthiest
of beasts… What do I find here? What sort of monster is this? … this beast
is horned, has ears like an ox, and his teeth … bite like a wild boar."
"If I’m not entirely mistaken," says the other, "it’s a freshman."
Throughout the rest of the dialogue, the upperclassmen focus on turning this
beast into a human being. They tie him up and cut off his horns, pluck out his
nose hairs and shave his beard, bathe him and deliver him to the professors,
who are the only ones who know how to get rid of the freshman’s smell. For these
parodists the university straddled more than the border between youth and adult:
It marked the boundary between animal and human.

The medieval transition was sharper than the modern one, partly because few
people went to college and because the distance between a student’s former life
and that within the university was greater than it is today. For one thing,
university life was conducted entirely in Latin, not in the "vulgar tongues"
that were the students’ native languages. From this point of view the medieval
university was thought to mark a frontier between barbarism and civilization,
between animal incoherence and cultured speech, in a way that is not perhaps
so recognizable today. But in many other respects the university’s role in the
transition from the dependence of youth to the independence of adulthood was
much the same.

Indeed a primary function of the university is and always has been to provide
a protected space for emancipation, a time and place to find your own way of
living and of thinking, away from the close supervision of parents and grammar
school teachers. Like medieval students, many of you are living away from home
for the first time, with full discretion to decide where you live, what and
how you eat and drink, when and how much you sleep. Never again will you have
so much freedom to live life in your own way and at your own rhythms. This is
indeed a thrilling time, but it is also a chaotic one, particularly in this,
your first year, as you cast about to find your own pace and style.

Fortunately, you are not alone: A thousand years’ worth of students precede
you, and some of them left advice manuals for future generations. Some of the
advice is very useful, even today: "Avoid eating raw onions … because
they dull the intellect." Sleep for "a fourth part of a natural day.
… To do otherwise is to pervert nature." "Choose lodgings removed
from all foul smells" (this may be a problem in some of the colleges).
"Too much labor is to be avoided. …" But I do not want to offer
advice, and I’m sure you don’t want to hear it. Instead, I want to use some
medieval student experiences as illustrative examples of the opportunities and
perils of freedom.

To parents, medieval students generally wrote about the responsible way they
had gone about setting up a life oriented toward scholarship (which is, after
all, what their parents thought they were paying for):

This is to inform you that, by divine mercy, we are living in good health in
the city of Orleans and are devoting ourselves wholly to study, mindful of the
words of Cato, "To know anything is praiseworthy." We occupy a good
and comely dwelling, next door but one to the schools and the market place,
so that we can go to the lectures every day without wetting our feet.

Such letters often concluded, as perhaps some of yours will, with financial
requests: As one medieval father put it, "A student’s first song is always
for money, and there is no letter that doesn’t end with a request for cash."

But of course college life is and was about much more than study. Letters to
parents were generally discrete about the matter, though occasionally parents
heard rumors ("I have recently discovered," wrote one irate father,
"that you live dissolutely and slothfully … strumming a guitar while
the others are at their studies. …"). But if we really want to learn
about the ways in which medieval students experimented with their new-found
freedom, we need to turn to their poetry:

To die inside a drinking-shop
That is my true vocation.
To pass away in Holy Bliss
Through high intoxication.
And all the angels watching me
Would shout to God in Heaven–
Lord have mercy on his Soul–
He’s drunk before eleven!

So wrote one 12th-century forerunner of the modern frat member, and there are
many variants on the verse. ("In the public house to die / Is my resolution;
/ Let wine to my lips be nigh / At life’s dissolution.") There are also
more sobering poems that remind one of the dangers involved in such experimentation.
I discovered one such poem in Madrid this summer, written on the front cover
of a 14th-century chess manual. It lists the cumulative effect of each cup of
wine upon the drinker, ending: "If a ninth cup you consume / It will send
you to the tomb."

I am sure that nowadays college students are not interested in alcohol, nor
in another area of active experimentation for medieval university students,
love and sex. In the Middle Ages, however, the average age of college students,
coupled with the fact that college represents an interlude between the parental
household and married life, produced an outpouring of poems about love:

"Go study," urges Reason.
I would obey indeed,
But when Love whispers treason,
Whose bidding should I heed?

Another poem makes love a prerequisite of student life: "Who lives the
goodly student fashion / Must love and win love back with passion." Of
course medieval examples urge caution here as well, as the autobiography of
Peter Abelard, perhaps the most famous of all medieval students, makes clear.
Abelard called his book the "History of My Calamities," and the first
of those calamities was his castration by the irate uncle of Heloise, his beloved.

Somewhere behind all these irrelevant examples a point is lurking: A fundamental
continuity, or at least parallel, between colleges medieval and modern, is that
both are something of a laboratory for living. Within these hedges you are at
liberty to experiment, to try out new activities, new relationships, new ways
of dressing, eating, praying. … I hope you will take advantage of this relative
freedom to fashion your identity, a freedom far less common than you may realize.
But, with Abelard in mind, I want to remind you that experiment carries with
it the risk of failure and of pain (I hope of a different sort than Abelard
experienced!). So experiment, but experiment with care for yourself and others.

There is still more to learn from Peter Abelard. He was one of the first "professors,"
a founder of the greatest of medieval universities, that of Paris. But already
in those early days, he was insisting on two tenets still at the heart of our
endeavor. First, Abelard urged students to accept nothing as true merely because
it was stated by an authority or was the received wisdom. As he saw things,
it was each individual student’s responsibility to subject the pronouncements
of professors to the test of reason, and to challenge those that did not pass
that test. Abelard drove his own professor out of the academy by repeatedly
standing up in class, calling him a fool, and demonstrating his errors. True,
his rudeness eventually got Abelard locked up in a monastery, but the ideal
still stands. No matter what the subject, it is critical understanding and not
merely faithful repetition you should seek. Of course no place is free of pieties
and dogmas, and you will find plenty here. The difference, however, is that
here we claim to be ruled by quality of argument, not by authority or majority.
Exempt no one from that standard, even if it is an ideal that can never be fulfilled.

Abelard’s second tenet was that self-knowledge is an important goal of education.
Certainly he considered the various arts and skills he taught to be important
in and of themselves, but a great part of their importance for him derived from
their role in helping the individual analyze and understand himself and his
fellow humanity. To that end Abelard wrote a book entitled "Ethics: or
Know Yourself." The subtitle echoes the phrase engraved in gold upon the
temple of Apollo at Delphi: "know thyself," a phrase which had been
the motto of educators like Plato and Cicero in the ancient world. Abelard was
one of the first to revive this ideal in the Middle Ages and place it at the
heart of higher education.

In choosing to come to a school like Rice, committed to general education and
to the liberal arts and sciences, you have inherited this ideal. What does this
mean for you? It means that your education here has two broad goals. One is
to train you in a few of the ways of thinking, the habits of thought, the skills
and techniques, that we use to understand and function in the modern world.
You will emerge from here disciplined, specialized by your majors into one or
another of the many directions of human thought and activity deemed productive
by our economy and our society.

The other goal is both harder to explain and harder to achieve. It is to help
you know yourselves as individuals within a larger humanity, to help you place
yourselves in relation to something beyond the reach of any single method or
self-contained method of thinking, beyond the technical demands of whatever
here-and-now you happen to function in. This second project is very different
today than it was in the Middle Ages, when it focused on searching for the eternal
in man and on the relationship between the human and the divine. In fact, today,
when so little seems transcendent or eternal, there is very little consensus
about what we should teach to achieve this second goal; indeed I hope that you
yourselves will participate in the current debate at Rice over what general
education is and what it should teach.

But however difficult, however much debated the task is today, it is more important
than ever. Precisely because we have no dominant or transcendental context through
which to understand the human being in modern life, there is little to protect
us from the reduction of humanity, and of human education, to economic functionality.
The need for such protection is great and was brought home to me a few weeks
ago when I heard a speech that triggered the harangue I’ve been addressing to
you. During the Houston Independent School District’s equivalent of O-week,
a higher education official who shall remain nameless addressed all the assembled
teachers. He wanted to give them a pep-talk in advance of their grueling year,
to remind them of their importance to society. They were the foundation of economic
prosperity he told them, the future of the Texas economy was in their hands.
I quote from memory, and so cannot claim precision, but his line went like this:
"If you treat your students as well as we’ve treated our cattle and our
oil wells, then Texas will experience the greatest economic boom in our history."

To be able to see and nurture the difference between a human being and a cow,
between an individual and an oil well, between a productive object and a thinking
subject, that is the second goal of education at a liberal arts university.
Perhaps this is another reason that we continue to build the medieval into our
universities. Awed by the archaic grace of the Sallyport as we march through
it, we are meant to remember that the space we are entering is not only about
utility or the material needs of the moment. It is also about struggling to
understand what it means to be human.

It is my privilege to welcome all of you to this struggle and to express the
joy of the faculty at your presence. I began with words from a faculty address
of 300 years ago, Giambattista Vico’s welcoming oration of 1699 to the students
of Naples, and I will conclude with them as well:

…stimulis omnia abundant, omnia diffluunt incitamentis, copia doctissima
suppetit, locus amplissimus datur; vos ad omnem eruditionem facile ac brevi
perdiscendam nati et facti estis. Quid igitur reliquum est? Ne nolitis.

Roughly translated: A marvelous four years lie before you. Grab them with both
hands. Thank you.