Whitman is a liberal arts college.   According to the Whitman website, “Whitman is a nationally recognized, highly selective, residential liberal arts college. Since becoming a college in 1882, Whitman College has a history of graduating ethical, unpretentious leaders.”   The first sentence is to recognize the importance of college rankings in admissions as influencing the future of colleges and universities: emphasis on ‘selective.’   The second sentence represents Whitman’s distinctive culture.   Hence, our graduates are all going to be leaders, but we will be ‘unpretentious.’

Well, what does it mean to be an unpretentious leader?   It would seem to imply that our graduates, our future-selves (for some of us, it’s the very near future), would not arrogantly speak for the people we’re supposed to lead.   It would seem to presume that our graduates, after receiving Whitman’s undergraduate liberal arts education, will be ethical (read: instinctively liberal), and go forth in the world to do good things as opposed to selling out (business school).

While these statements may be dismissed as advertising, they hint at part of Whitman’s identity that everyone who goes here recognizes but doesn’t say explicitly.   We are a liberal arts college with an emphasis on the liberal.

Now, liberal arts used to not mean Democratic Party even though everyone voted for Obama (or maybe Ralph Nader).   Liberal arts don’t mean left-wing socialist (although I’m sure the average Whittie, faculty or student, is probably more sympathetic to ranting against globalization, multinational corporations, etc.) than the average American voter, much less your typical Walla Walla resident.

Rather, liberal arts originated in Ancient Greek and Roman cultures; a liberal man (considering Whitman’s gender composition, liberal woman is more appropriate) was a man who acted freely in contradistinction to the life of a slave.   A liberal man in those days was of course wealthy but not a merchant (business school education is the antithesis of a liberal arts education).   A liberal man indulged freely in the arts (fine arts + humanities) and sciences not out of a desire to make money and gain fame, but for their own sake.

Now, the phrase “for their own sake” is incongruous to a society where most college majors major in business or now, finance.   The distinction illustrated above lies in doing something because its very activity is enjoyable as opposed to doing something for the purpose of enjoying another activity or goal.   The difference is writing poetry versus writing propaganda.   Or ask yourself, is learning how to make money in the stock market honestly enjoyable for its own sake, if you didn’t hope for a windfall of profit?   Alternatively, the stock market, in order to be enjoyable for its own sake, becomes just a game played with the pensions of millions of people by Wall Street.   And we’re living with the consequences of stock trading done for its own sake.

Now, the question I pose is how adequately does Whitman’s culture and day-to-day life accord with the original definition of liberal arts?   Yes, Olin Hall and Maxey Hall have been renovated.   Yes, student clubs proliferate year after year with young idealists dedicated to changing the world.   But, is there a tension between a desire to change the world and a desire for free spirited intellectual inquiry?

I believe so.   The illusion of the philosopher-king reaches back to Plato and has been reincarnated in Leo Strauss (called the founder of modern day neoconservativism), and I would argue, in some variations of Whitman culture.

Hence, our website describes our graduates with the qualifiers ‘ethical’ and ‘unpretentious.’   The emphasis of student activism, which I’ve definitely participated in, contains within it a call for action.   The time for waiting and thinking is over and now is the time for doing.   Yes, it’s possible to be free thinking and to work for a cause, but that possibility is more tenuous than many of us would like to believe.

Take climate change for example.   Whitman has a culture of environmentalism of varying degrees.   The cause of climate change is literally attempting to save the world.   That’s kind of a big deal.   Yet, because the cause is so big, the tendency for self-righteous confidence is great.   After all, if you don’t believe in climate change or are too lazy to participate, then you must be an ignorant warming denier.

What I mean is that the tendency to use what we’ve learned in class about real social inequities and oppression morphs into a desire to change things around us.   And in that process of trying to be an activist, trying to be liberal, in the modern sense of the word, leaves us blissfully unaware of how we inch closer and closer to dogma.

Now, the free liberal man is by definition not a dogmatic ideologue.   Since dogma is the antithesis of thinking.   So now, there becomes a tension embedded in how Whitman bills itself as an institution that graduates ethical but at the same time unpretentious leaders.

For one thing, being truly unpretentious doesn’t feed into self-righteousness whereas taking the ethical high ground can.