From James O. Freedman, President Emeritus of Dartmouth College, to the graduating class of the University of Rochester:
Someone once asked Woodrow Wilson when he was president of Princeton University what the function of a liberal education ought to be. And Wilson replied, " To make a person as unlike his father as possible."
What he meant, I think, is that a liberal education ought to make a person independent of mind, skeptical of authority and received views, prepared to forge an identity for himself or herself, and capable of becoming an individual not bent on copying other persons - even persons as persuasive and influential as one's father.
The kind of liberal education to which Wilson referred is more necessary today than ever because the qualities it nurtures are more imperiled than ever.
We are immersed in a dot-com digital culture, a social environment of constant stimulation significantly influenced by the mass media and other unrelenting prescribers of opinion and feelings. But it is not the media alone who are to blame for the accelerated tenor of our lives.
Telephones, television, VCR's, fax machines, computers, the Internet, e-mail, cellphones, beepers and all these forms of instant communication too often create a bewildering barrage of noise and frenetic movement. It is almost as if we have surrounded ourselves with such technology in order to avoid suspended moments of silence and contemplation.
If we are to succeed in preserving our individuality against such technological tyranny, we need to slow the tempo of our lives and extend the span of our attention. We need to emphasize a form of humane education that helps students to establish a rich interior life and an enduring openness of mind. A sturdy, private self where moral self-examination can occur.