English Professor Laura Dassow Walls Addresses Class of 2007 at Convocation

The 586 members of the class of 2007 are taking the first courses of their Lafayette careers this week after completing the First-Year Orientation program last week.

From Thursday through Sunday, students met their resident advisers, posed for a class photograph, shared their first college meals together, learned about academic programs and other aspects of Lafayette, discussed the summer reading, attended social events, and participated in other activities.

Faculty members led students in discussing themes related to Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, a play about “a fateful meeting between pioneers of the nuclear bomb.”

The students were welcomed Thursday at the annual Convocation at Kirby Sports Center. Speakers included Gary Miller, college chaplain; Gladstone Hutchison, dean of studies; and Arthur J. Rothkopf ’55, president of Lafayette.

The program included a keynote speech by Laura Dassow Walls, professor of English. The full text of the speech and its citations:

Making the Cut
At this moment, I expect that we are all thinking about connections, as we prepare to disconnect from family and home and the rhythms of summer, and begin to form new connections with Lafayette: new friends, a new community, a new kind of intellectual family. So in my brief time with you today I’d like to talk about connections. Since we live in a single universe of interlocked pieces, it must be the case that everything is connected. The physicist Jacob Bronowski makes this point when he says, “I believe that the world is totally connected: this is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. I regard this to some extent as a metaphysical statement.” Another way this has been expressed is in the famous butterfly effect: a butterfly flapping her wings on Kirby Field is said to kick up a storm in China. So I’ve heard, but it’s hard really to believe this is true. If it were, I would have to believe that I, standing here or in the classroom next week, could have an incalculable effect on each and every one of you—really, a terrifying responsibility, and one no one could dare accept. But nevertheless, I do believe—because I’ve experienced it myself—that any one class you take here can open to you a new world, a world undreamed of, and that that world might, just possibly, become your new life, also undreamed of as you sit here today. In that sense, each course, each day in class, is, potentially, that butterfly.

But this is a tricky business, this total connectivity, because you can’t study all the connections—you couldn’t even get out the door if you insisted on connecting every event with every other. So, as Bronowski also says, to get on with the business of knowing, “We make a cut. Now, the moment we do that, we do violence to the connectivity in the world.” It’s true: every semester, you’ll decide to take four classes and necessarily close the door on scores of others, each a universe of knowledge. Will you English majors know the joy of seeing how physics hooks up the basic laws of the universe? Will you Econ majors ever take an art class and relish the sweet tang of wet oil paint? At this moment you can be anything; in four years, I will see you all graduate as geologists, engineers, poets, historians, philosophers, mathematicians. That is, each of you must make your cuts: as Heisenberg observed, you can know the velocity of a particle, or its position, but not both. This reality is built into the fabric of the universe. What I hope for each of you is that you make your cuts wisely, and that you open up some unexpected doorways, make some surprising connections, take some cross cuts: that you biologists will read Shakespeare, you English majors will discover mathematics, you art majors will delve into history and politics, you engineers will write poems about the structural beauty of bridges; and that while you are doing so, you will strive to see those hidden connections that link up the universe.

This, I hope, has been a lesson of your summer reading, Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen. This is a play by a dramatist straight out of English class, which wrestles with 20th-century physics in the context of social, political, and economic history, and asks above all a moral question: Is it right to use ultimate violence to defend a cause we believe to be good? Can we pursue knowledge, wherever it leads, for its own sake, or must we make cuts here too, demanding limits beyond which no one must go? In an “uncertain” universe, to refer again to Heisenberg’s notorious uncertainty principle, is there a moral compass, moral certainty? This is a question to which we all, poets and scientists, economists, historians, engineers and philosophers alike, need to know the answer.

When I speak of the moral “compass,” I’m invoking another image from science, an instrument that allows navigation by pointing us to the true North, a stable and unchanging pole in a world that is in constant flux around us. Without some sense of that direction, we are adrift in the flux; just as we need to make a cut, however arbitrary and difficult it is, so do we also need to establish a direction, even knowing that we may need to make corrections as we go forward, and that storms may sometimes blow us off course. To find our true North, we need all our resources, from all directions, all points of the compass, from art and from nature. This is, I think, part of what Stephanie Strickland asks us to think about in her poem, “True North I,” with which I will end:

A magnetic compass,
even without interference from nearby
masses of iron—the steel frame of a building—doesn’t point

to the North Pole; it points
somewhere
in Hudson’s Bay.

To find, or to reckon
the direction true North, you need to get help
from the spinning earth.

A lover who eschews force—anyone
coming forward to speak
is using force—

can only
stand waiting, here
on earth, where

there are no
straight
lines.

Welcome, again, to our community, and I look forward to sharing with you the joys of exploring what Heisenberg, in Copenhagen, calls “that final core of uncertainty at the heart of things,” and finding in that uncertainty a compass, connections, and a path to the future.

Works Cited

Bronowski, Jacob. The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978.

Strickland, Stephanie. True North. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997.