The Tripod

John Downes-Angus: Our school houses a number of academic disciplines. It goes without saying that within each department, students learn lessons according to their chosen study - an English Literature major will not graduate having internalized the same lessons as a Chemistry major. As a professor who presumably assigns essays that encompass the entirety of your course's material, have you ever considered an ideal "essay prompt" that you would assign to the whole student body once their studies have ended, in order to account for and assess what you consider an overarching and cross-disciplinary lesson to learn as a college student? Say, a lesson that transcends the compartmentalization of academics?

Jimmy Jones: I've thought about that a lot and I think the overarching question for all of you has nothing to do with disciplines, it doesn't have to do with what kind of art historian you would be or what kind of econometrician or what kind of biologist; I really think the most important question of them all is to stop and ponder what the vast difference between knowledge and wisdom is. If there's anything that should spring out of a liberal arts college experience, it's that. Can you graduate from here and not be bound up by worrying about the answer to that question? When I had to give the Commencement address years ago, that's the point I tried to make, by contrasting two different sets of individuals.

One was the fact that the people who built the crematoria for the Nazis had degrees from some of the finest and oldest universities in Europe, and therefore in Western Civilization. These people knew a lot of science. And they knew a lot about cyanide, and gas, and ovens. They knew a lot of science, but the morality behind the crematoria wasn't there, and the worst thing is that of the 15 people at the Wannsee Conference that came up with the entire thing, eight of them were doctors and had taken the Hippocratic oath to do no harm! You think, "Wait a minute here, you take an oath to do no harm and eight of the 15 people at the conference are physicians? And they're coming up with the 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem' ?"

So I tried to contrast the fact that those people were very knowledgeable with the fact that the smartest person I have known in my whole life was my black housekeeper when I was a little boy. She literally held my brother and me together - after our father's suicide when my mother was not very stable. And here are these two little boys and this black woman, and she called us her two white sons, and she knew the Big Stuff. She hadn't ever gotten out of the third grade and she couldn't read. But she was the wisest person I ever knew, because she knew the big one, which is that love is the only thing that can conquer death. She also knew that love had nothing to with the color of her skin or ours and she simply loved us unselfishly. There weren't any strings attached to it. She was the wisest person I ever knew - she was a hell of a lot smarter than the engineers who came up with the crematoria, because they didn't have any moral compass. And boy did she teach us to have a moral compass. She was literally the smartest person I ever knew, and she was probably the most uneducated person in a formal sense that I'd met in America.

JDA: As a follow up, would you even want the students' responses to be in the form of an essay?

JJ: Well, I don't ask that question specifically in an essay. But writing is, to my mind, the only thing that makes us think as clearly as humanly possible. Now maybe if you were Mozart, composing would be the best way to communicate. But for most of us, trying to force yourself to say something clearly goes a long way towards getting your own thinking straight. As I always tell my students, writing clear prose is one of the hardest tasks imaginable, because if you're going to force yourself to write clearly, you have to think clearly. And a lot of the time we think in muddled ways.

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