Matthew Powers paper at the 4

Lately, I've been reading "Identity," a novel by the Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera. Like the majority of the author's works, "Identity," means as many things as there are people who sit down to read it.

This particular work is based around two lovers-- Chantal and Jean-Marc -- and their interactions. The world around them is something akin to the unwanted sister-in-law who stops by for a visit too frequently.

Chantal notices one day that men no longer "turn to look at her." In short, she doesn't feel attractive any more.

She tells this to Jean Marc, who's four years younger than she. He resolves to write Chantal love letters from an anonymous third party. What follows are a series of misperceptions and misunderstandings between the two. Jean Marc goes about this letter writing with seemingly good intentions -- he wants his lover to feel better about herself. He is madly in love and believes that Chantal is the only connection he has to the outside world.

When Chantal learns of his ploy, though, she becomes petrified. Jean Marc no longer wants me, she reasons. He's too kind to leave me on his own will, so he wants me to leave him.

What the novel spoke to me of was the precarious and fluid nature of identity, and how our perceptions, our ways of seeing each other, impact it.

I realize I'm not speaking here today as part of a book club or a literary review session. But I do think that these notions of identity and perception are two of the most important aspects of a liberal arts learning experience.

In short, every facet of the liberal arts experience serves us as a different lens of perception with which we can uncover the beliefs of others and in so doing, hopefully come a bit closer to understanding who we each are individually, as well.

My general idea, then, is that as emerging graduates, we are entering into a world that is, above all things, inundated with information. With the expected growth of library resources in the coming years, access to information will not be a significant issue. What we need now are people who can interpret it -- people who can suss out what information merits our attention and what information doesn't. We need students equipped with what Ernest Hemingway and Neil
Postman call "crap detectors."

The liberal arts experience, for me, has been a four-year crash course in this style of learning. I've come up with something of a metaphor to explain it. It's called Inside Out, Right Side Down.

First, the "Inside Out." Cultural transparencies are considered to be any event or object that becomes saturated in a cultural way of life that it has become "transparent." -- no one notices that it's there. In fact, transparencies are so pervasive that the only time we notice them is when they either malfunction or cease to exist. An example would be digital timekeeping and the Y2K fears. Timekeeping on computers never became a public issue until it appeared as though time keeping itself might fail.

What the liberal arts education can do is take these cultural insiders -- these transparencies -- and effectively turn them "inside out." The move allows us to separate ourselves momentarily from our own cultural perceptions so that we can achieve a sense of critical distance. We find this distancing prevalent through the works of some of the great thinkers across various disciplines. Jay Stephen Gould's work in the study of evolution, Eric Havelock's work in understanding the context of Greek philosophical thought, Lewis Mumford as an early critic of unbridled technophilism.

The list goes on. What I think we see from these people, though, is that they are great thinkers because they are such great perceivers. Their ability to turn things "Inside Out," to see the seemingly unseeable, allows for this to happen.

What seems to follow logically with the principles of Inside Out is a very simple qualifier. We've got to keep our minds open without letting our brains fall out. Put simply, not everything goes.

In the complex, evolving world in which we live, it can become all too easy to fall into the trap of blanketly accepting or denying any statements. Our minds, like all parts of any biological system, are both permissive and restrictive. When we realize what we cannot do (and what others should not do), we capitalize on our own restrictions. The trick, as Richard Linklater says in his most recent film, Waking Life, is to "remain in a state of constant departure, while always arriving. It saves on introductions and goodbyes."

The other part of the metaphor, the "Right Side Down" part refers to creative _expression. Neuro-Pyschology has taught us that our creative juices are birthed and stored in the right sides of our brains. The trick is to find a way to get that right side down -- a way to put your creativity down on paper, onto a computer screen, onto tape, into the ears of another person.

It doesn't matter how well we can pick something apart if we can't turn around and communicate what it is that we have learned.

And this is where I think my experience here comes into play. At St. Michael's, we learn a lot of different languages - the languages of computers, of the sciences, of the arts. Some of us learn Spanish, while others learn the language of film. What these language capacities do are enable us with not only different modes of _expression but also different modes of perceptions. This, I believe, is what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant when he wrote that language is not merely a vehicle of thought, it's also the driver. He means that the forms in which we express ourselves shape the content we hope to communicate. It follows logically, then, that the more ways in which we can express ourselves, the better off we'll be because we will be better able to understand others.

How, then, do we go about acquiring these different language capacities? The first time I met with my advisor, Kimberly Sultze, she offered me two modes. One, pick professors, not classes. Two, study abroad.

What both of these snippets of advice allowed me to do was find ways to effectively turn things Inside Out and get them Right Side Down. The former piece of advice allowed me to find the people who cultivate both perception and creativity. The foundations of any education are always the people who teach. At Saint Michael's, I think we have a pretty solid foundation.

The latter piece of advice -- to study abroad - is one that we hear so frequently that it has almost become cliché. Maybe if I personalize one of my experiences, it will illumine things a bit. While I was traveling through Nicaragua, a man stopped me and asked me to take his young son back to the United States with me. It will be better for him, the man reasoned.

I drift back into that conversation sometimes because that short moment in time effectively turned me inside out. In a lot of ways, I felt at the time as though I had been transplanted into a situation far deeper than I could hope to understand. Unable to understand it, I have catalogued this experience in the back of my mind. These types of experiences need to be shared, though; the contexts of these situations - the social conditions that allow for this seemingly precarious exchange to occur -- must be explored.

In the study abroad experience, I've found that there are a lot of things people have seen that they would like to communicate to others. That communication is sometimes successful, other times it is unsuccessful. For myself, I've found the success of a conversation to be based largely on the quality of the questions people ask.

For these shared experiences the returning student especially needs a right side down approach. The college has some impressive vehicles already in place for a returnee's _expression -- the Global Eyes Competition and the weekly international coffee hour to name a few.

The college also already offers other modes of academic _expression that allow for a way of _expression that reaches far further than just then traditional essay. I've learned (and continue to learn) various new media skills -- web site design, photo manipulation, etc., -- I've learned (and continue to learn) Spanish. I've built a musical instrument with PVC piping (that played a measly three notes) and now I'm trying my hand at clothing construction and sewing. It's my hope that I will someday in the near future hear that the college has chosen to offer a course for study abroad returnees, they have excellent stories to tell us, and the community -- those who study abroad and those who stay in Colchester-have much to learn from their stories.

I believe we have a vital interest at stake in stressing this type of language learning. With the unfolding of our most recent political events, this is the most vital time for the college to continue with unique, critical language learning.

Some of my favorite academic experiences here have taken place in small classrooms with people I didn't agree with, but who were willing to listen to my ideas. In the end, we usually found that our points of difference could be rectified, or at the very least, properly understood.

Conversely, I imagine that we can all recall an academic experience -- be it a classroom event or a special event --where debates grew heated, when people were so fixated on their particular point of view that they couldn't (or wouldn't) hear what opposing voices had to say.

These two examples provide a microcosm for what Philip Slater, a sociologist, considers two opposing cultures. The first example is what he calls a culture of connectivity -- a group of people who recognize their differences and finds ways to connect them. The latter example is a culture of division. The examples of cultures of division in the world today are daunting, the ability of the college to continue establishing a reputation as a community of connectedness will be a great benefit for not only our small community but also the larger community into which we seniors are soon to be received into.

As far as I can tell, the latter example - the culture of division -- poses the greatest threat to our academic institutions. We must find ways to create platforms for discussions and debates, not platforms for those who are willing to speak only one language. This is the lesson that we can glean from Kundera's "Identity," where two people wanted to communicate so badly with one another but ultimately failed because they could not understand each other's language.