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As Virginia Wesleyan began its new semester with the annual Fall Honor Convocation, sutdents were not only introduced to the importance of honor, but were also introduced to the importance of inquiry.
The text below is the complete address as given by Dr. Lynn Sawlivich, assistant professor of classics at Virginia Wesleyan.
INQUIRY AND THE LIBERAL ARTS
Dr. Lynn Sawlivich, Assistant Professor of Classics
Virginia Wesleyan College Fall Convocation
August 31, 2006
I'm here today to talk to the First Year students about "inquiry." Instead of starting by giving you a definition of "inquiry," I want to tell you about a personal experience I had that was all about inquiry. When I was a student, I thrived under a standardized learning/standardized testing model, eager to master the information presented in class and then display it on an exam and be rewarded for doing well by the educational powers. But then I had my breakthrough inquiry moment which, in a real case of arrested development, didn't occur until I was well along in graduate school. Here's how it happened:
After taking general exams in the doctoral program in Classics, I chose the historian Herodotus as my Greek special author for in-depth study. I went merrily into my professor's office to ask her: "What do I need to know about Herodotus?" I should mention that this was Emily Vermeule, a world-famous archaeologist and one of the biggest names and scariest personalities on the Harvard faculty. But she'd always been nice to me, I later learned because she felt men were so intellectually inferior that you had to be gentle with them, whereas she was brutal to her female students, because she knew they were capable of so much more. I remember several times seeing one of my female colleagues in the graduate department coming out of her office in tears, while I was always spared that treatment.
So I'd gone into her office and asked her "What do I need to know?" expecting her to give me a list of main topics, significant controversies, and pieces of information that I could go learn and master.But she didn't do that. She only replied, "Well, what do you think is important to know about Herodotus?" I got kind of confused—maybe this has happened to some of you already in one of your professor's offices—and I could only ask in response, "But what do you think is important? Isn't that what's important?" So she just repeated, "What do you think is important to know about Herodotus?"
And then it hit me. That inquiry moment. That what I thought was important to know about Herodotus was what's important for me to learn about Herodotus. So I set off to find a new approach, to look around and decide what really mattered — it was my own responsibility to establish the terms of the inquiry, instead of expecting someone else to have it all done for me.
It's fitting that I mention Herodotus in my personal account of finding Inquiry, because Herodotus turns out to be an important figure in the development of inquiry for all of us. Herodotus is the earliest surviving historian from ancient Greece, sometimes referred to as the "father of history," writing in the fifth century B.C. When I say he was the first surviving historian, in a way I'm also saying that he's the earliest surviving practitioner of inquiry. Let me explain what I mean by that.
In his introduction to his account of the Greek wars with Persia, he says as his opening sentence: "Herodotus of Halicarnassus here makes public his inquiry," and the word he uses that translates as inquiry is exactly the word history. When he was using it, it didn't yet have the more specialized meaning of the study of the past, or inquiry into the past, that you would expect to find if you took a course in our History department. At this point history meant any inquiry into any topic; it was used for conducting a legal examination in preparation for a court case; it was used by the early natural scientists and philosophers in investigating nature or astronomy. But as knowledge and fields of knowledge proliferated over time, each of these areas took on new titles, and became separate fields such as biology, chemistry, political science, philosophy. Because Herodotus and his inquiry into the past had become so famous, the term history was reserved for the subject now defined as inquiry into the past.
But his history wasn't simply the gathering of information; he tells us of three motives he had in undertaking this inquiry and making his results public. And the making it public part is important; you need to tell other people about it, whether by writing a paper for a professor, or speaking in class, or making a formal presentation at our spring academic fair. Herodotus tells us: 1) he wanted to preserve human knowledge, 2) he wanted to give credit to people who had earned glory in the conduct of the war—very surprisingly, he even wanted to give credit not just to the Greeks but also to the Persians who had fought on the other side! — and 3) he also wanted to understand what had caused the war in the first place. He wanted to use inquiry to understand why things happened the way they did.
This may not seem like such a radical notion, but in fact it was. Before this period in Greek culture, where history, philosophy, and the natural sciences were developing all at the same time, people didn't use inquiry to understand why things were the way they were. They relied on a much older method: tradition told them what to think. What I'm going to say next will sound familiar to the students currently taking my Mythology class, but it's even better the second time around, so you still have to pay attention!
Before inquiry showed up with historians like Herodotus, human knowledge wasn't much admired. In Greek tradition it was the gods who knew everything, and humans knew only the little bits that the gods chose to share with them. The best example of how the process worked is from the traditional myth called the Theogony by the poet Hesiod. In the Theogony Hesiod describes how the Muses came to pay him a visit, and they've decided to tell him the whole story of the gods, and then it's his job to pass on what they say to the rest of us humans.
Hesiod tells us that he was out minding his own business one day, shepherding his flocks like people used to do, when this group of goddesses — nine of them ganging up on him — came down the mountain and started yelling at him: "Hey you country bumpkin! You are really disgusting! All you do is eat!" Isn't that a great way for the gods to interact with humans? It gets better; they keep going: "We know how to tell lies and make it sound like the real thing. But when we want to, we also know how to speak the truth." Now doesn't that inspire confidence in the literary tradition? We know how to lie, or we might tell the truth. If you think about it, it turns out that all of literary criticism really gets its start right here—the beginning of Western literature pronounces that it could all just be a big lie.
So what do we do? The Muses insult us, they lie to us and then brag about it, and then tease us by saying that there's a chance that it might be true after all, so we still have to pay attention, even if they're insulting us and lying to us. I hope none of your professors have treated you like this, at least not yet in your first week of college — I don't think they have, we're all waiting to do that later when we think you can handle it better.
OK, so why should we believe the Muses? Hesiod tells us it's because they're carrying a big stick! You should believe someone who's carrying a big stick. Well, not just a stick, it's a royal scepter, and then they give it to the poet Hesiod. Where would goddesses of poetry get a royal scepter? From their father Zeus, king of the gods.
This is how myth talks about important issues: myth uses personifications like the Muses to illustrate the role of tradition. So we're supposed to believe tradition, even when it insults us and lies to us, because it might be true after all, and because authority backs it up. That system worked for a very long time, until those trouble-making inquirers came along a few centuries later and started messing everything up. Conflicts between tradition and inquiry become so heated that in 399 B.C. the philosopher Socrates was executed by the Athenian democracy, and there's still conflict between all kinds of systems of belief in the modern world today; that hasn't changed, but it's important to recognize that those conflicts have been around for most of human history.
But inquiry doesn't mean that there has to be conflict. For my final example I'm going to fast-forward to a modern author, a writer from my home state of Maine. I know that some of you out there are from Maine, and you somehow found your way down here to Virginia Wesleyan; perhaps you're familiar with this writer from only a little more than a century ago, so by my standards completely modern: Sarah Orne Jewett, who wrote novels and short stories in the late 1800s about life in small-town New England. In her story "The Passing of Sister Barsett," Jewett tells of the sense of loss felt in a small town after the death of one of its leading citizens. But not everyone is eager to hear over and over again about how much knowledge and virtue are gone after Sister Barsett is no more. Perhaps you've had a similar experience at some point in your lives — maybe not in the case of a funeral elegy, but only in the case of being tired of hearing of how perfect your older brother or sister is, or how well they do in school, or how your parents at your age didn't make any of the mistakes that you're making; even if it's true you don't want to keep hearing it over and over. One of the characters in this story finally can't keep quiet any longer and declares that no matter how much Sister Barsett may have known — or thought she knew — still "It takes everyone to know everything."
"It takes everyone to know everything." In that case, we've got a lot to do. We'll tell you what we know from our inquiries as faculty members, you tell us what you discover in all the different paths of inquiries that you take as students, and together we might all get closer to that giant goal of knowing everything, or at least deciding what out of all that everything that we want to know, and it's going to take every one of us to do it. That's what a liberal arts college is: the Authority Muses of parents and high school have had their turn and handed you over to the Inquiry Muses of the liberal arts college, where tradition and inquiry work side by side, sometimes true, sometimes false, but always worth paying attention to, always communicating and interacting, developing into something new for all of us while we still continue as part of the same community.
Let's get started. Welcome to Wesleyan.