God Bless the Laconic Man.
Words have become shields. Subterfuge. We talk face to face for forty minutes, yet we fail to communicate. A friend left his sophomore interview with a dean, and he said, “The deans are fake.” Dr. Warner offered a taste of how things could be; how things should be. In simple language, scorning ostentation, Dr. Warner assessed the college of today and for tomorrow. He did not pull punches: the endowment has lost tens of millions of dollars, self interest consumes us. But he suggested how we could pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off.
Perhaps Dr. Warner has a privileged position to judge this campus. On sabbatical from his tenured position as professor of history, Dr. Warner resides in a tenuous position as the associate dean of students. And this balancing act – caught not only between the faculty and the administration, but quite literally as one of them – gives him the necessary perspective to realize that we each have different roles, but essentially “we are all down in this mud together.” The students, the faculty, and the administration must make their own proper adjustments, but at the end of the day, we are all Wabash. If we fail, we have all failed. If we succeed, we have all succeeded. There has been enough blame, we must accept responsibility and move onward. As he said, it is time that we stopped complaining, and we began finding creative solutions. In awareness and simplicity, in returning to the basics, we can learn that our large endowment was always the result of the education, it was never the cause. To see otherwise is to turn a soup into a pretentious bowl of foreign sounds and empty tastes. We have taken many blows this last year, but we are not done fighting. Dr. Warner’s talk was not particularly inspiring. If my fraternity brother could not stay awake, I can understand. It did not evoke a standing ovation or even hearty applause from a demonstrably easy audience. But it held truth. There has been enough blustery eloquence on this campus. There have been enough metaphors, allusions, rousing and emotional pep rallies evoking the rhetorical flavors of filet mignon, Chateau Rothschild Mouton, and tiramisu. It overwhelms my palette with falsity. I want the boring, the soporific, the simple. I want soup. |
