President's Office - 2005 Convocation

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Liberal Education and the Civic Professional
2005 Convocation Address
August 25, 2005

Members of the Class of 2009, we celebrate your arrival at Elizabethtown! As you begin your studies with us, we also renew our historic vocation of teaching and learning with you. Your presence will reinvigorate our work, and just so, your lives will also change in ways yet to be discovered. For our work of liberal education is nothing less than a liberating and transforming experience for all involved. Today I want to focus your attention on the importance of this liberal education for your professional future, to encourage you to embrace the highest possibilities of professional work and to use your years here to lay the foundation for a life as a civic professional.

Here we take "pleasure in the pursuit of knowledge" itself (Giamatti, A Free and Ordered Space, p.123), which enables us to step outside the conventional and the taken-for-granted to see the world anew. That pursuit of knowledge, Giamatti contends, "joins and is finally at one with our general human desire for a life elevated by dignity, decency and moral progress." A liberal education, as opposed to mere training, thus leads "to some sense of citizenship, to some shared assumptions about individual freedoms and institutional needs, to some sense of the full claims of self as they are to be shared with others." (Giamatti, p. 213)

As Bruce Kimball has shown, this connection between learning and service to society was also the formative equation that defined what it meant to be a professional historically ("True Professional Ideal" in America, cited in Sullivan). William Sullivan has elaborated that equation further by describing a professional as one who has "specialized training in a field of codified knowledge usually acquired by formal education and apprenticeship . . . and a commitment to provide service to the public that goes beyond the economic welfare of the practitioner (Sullivan, Work and Integrity, p. 36). The formation of professionals, then, was grounded in the ideals of liberal education, and service-oriented professionals exemplified the best of what liberal learning could yield.

As Sullivan makes clear however, a "crisis of professionalism" has developed over the last generation. We see that crisis in the failure of professionals to act with integrity and to uphold their public trust, as in the Enron scandal, or when professions use what Paul Starr calls their "sovereign" privileges granted for public purposes for private advantage instead. The domination of work and life by market values has also led professionals to be motivated more by economic gain than by a service ethic, and many professionals have come to see their responsibility primarily as the delivery of technical expertise, not social or moral service. In short, the classic professional ideal has been undermined in today’s world.

To some extent, that crisis reflects changes in higher education that have unraveled the alliance of liberal education and professionalism. As higher learning became open to all instead of just a small elite, college attendance gradually became focused on social and economic mobility more than nurturing the mind and soul, drawing professional aspirations toward economic success more than the call to service. As knowledge became more sophisticated and specialized, professional preparation and the liberal arts came to be sequestered in different sectors of college and university curricula, thereby separating liberal learning for life from technical training for an occupation. And the academy’s premium on cognitive and intellectual development has diminished the practical and ethical side of professional preparation so critical to realizing the classical ideal. Thus has higher education too often failed to nurture the civic ideal of professionalism in the formation of professional identity.

All who believe in the high ideals of liberal learning and professional practice are now called to renew the educational vocation of preparing civic professionals. Because of what we have been doing here for 105 years, Elizabethtown is strongly positioned to deliver such a program to you students and to be a leader in renewing professional training in higher education. Contrary to those who believe that education cannot compete with outside market forces that foster pecuniary interests, we know that powerful educational encounters can shape a person’s life toward high ideals. Against those who insist that the intellectual and ethical must be separated, we believe with Max Weber that the best education is value-relevant, engaging the deepest meaning of what we know. And quite apart from the vast majority of educators who have accepted the separation and essential antagonism of liberal and professional education, we insist that the two can and must be linked to provide the best education possible.

The ideal of the civic professional includes three elements: ethical integrity, service to others (clients), and commitment to the common good.
· Ethical Integrity – Every profession aligns itself with a set of ethics specific to its practice, as well as more general ethical principles of the society it serves. The civic professional practices according to those ethics and is accountable to them, governing her actions by principle first, not profit, thus claiming public trust.
· Service – The work of the civic professional is for others, driven by what is best for the client in light of the expertise in that field, not what is most desirable or easiest for the professional. It is by putting service above self-interest that professional work claims its legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
· The Common Good – In serving others, the civic professional also accepts a public responsibility to contribute to the common good and makes himself accountable to the public for both the efficacy and the character of his practice. The individual professional understands his work as an expression of a larger contribution to the society by the profession itself.

How will your education here build your capacity for civic professionalism? There are three things Elizabethtown offers you that make that possibility real here: a distinctive mission and ethos, an integrated program of liberal and professional education, and engaged pedagogy.
· Mission and Ethos – As we proclaim in our college mission, we believe the pursuit of knowledge is most noble when used to benefit others. In addition to educating for service, we also ground our educational mission in principles of integrity and human dignity, and we believe that issues of meaning and value are central to the educational process.
· Integrating Liberal and Professional Studies – Like most colleges, we are structured around specialized academic disciplines, but unlike most, we do not sequester liberal and professional education in separate arenas. Many departments here, for example, offer both classical liberal arts and science majors alongside professional studies majors. You will encounter ethics and cultural studies in business courses and you will encounter scientific questions in the philosophy department. Here professional training is grounded in liberal studies, and the liberal arts and sciences extend their implications to the world of work.
· Engaged Pedagogy – The education we offer is not just contained in the classroom but extends "into the streets" in a multitude of ways. In addition to our annual festival of service by that name, you will find numerous opportunities to extend your learning by engaging the realities and issues you are studying. You may conduct original research, participate in internships, travel to experience the sites and contexts described in your reading, create your own service learning project, or study abroad. Just as professionals must, we link the worlds of theory and practice throughout our curriculum.

To capitalize on those great resources as you build your own capacity as a civic professional requires that you do three things: find yourself, lose yourself, and throw yourself. What do I mean?
· Find Yourself in our Ethos – The ethos expressed in our mission is not some serum we inject into your psyche or a wedge we hammer into your heart. To experience its meaning and power, you must explore that ethos and find yourself there, clarifying for yourself what service means to you and how you can activate it in your life. When you can place yourself in that array of ideals, you will then have internalized some of the fundamental values of civic professionalism.
· Lose Yourself in your Studies – Here is where the classic principle of liberal education – pursuing knowledge for its own sake – claims center stage in professional study as well. In each arena, it is when you abandon your sense that coursework is a means to some other end – credits, degrees, expertise, jobs -- and lose yourselves in your subject matter that you experience the pure joy of your pursuit. As Sullivan notes, this "affection for the subject matter" not only animates liberal learning but also fosters a professional’s love of her craft beyond its personal rewards. A true civic professional learns and practices first for the sake of her subject and craft.
· Throw Yourself into Practice – Reciprocating that gift of learning for its own sake, professional education contributes its own distinctive principle to the preparation of civic professionals: the active practice of applying expert knowledge to human need in messy circumstances. Good professional work is a contact sport, and is not content to master theory without putting it into practice on behalf of others. So just as you must master the knowledge of your field, you must also throw yourself into a practice that extends that knowledge to service, whether you are studying occupational therapy, environmental science, or history. A true civic professional always drives toward the application of knowledge, for that is where service takes center stage.

Before you new students lies a remarkable opportunity, for yourselves and for our world. It is nothing less than to renew in your experience the power of liberal education for civic professionalism, and in so doing, to renew a world that seems to have lost its way. We have set the stage for you with our historic mission of service, our embrace of liberal and professional education, and our engaged pedagogy. Now the opportunity is yours – to find yourselves in that mission, to lose yourselves in your studies, to throw yourselves into practice. When you do so, you will realize the full power of an Elizabethtown education to shape your calling toward civic professionalism, and the world will be better because of you.

Class of 2009, welcome to Elizabethtown and the high calling of civic professionalism! Please stand and be welcomed into our community.