"Last Lecture" - May 14, 2012
Professor of English Bob Cowser Jr., Owen D. Young Outstanding Faculty Award Winner

A Little Out of Your Way

Thank you, Class of 2012, for this singular honor. It's fitting that, after four years of me assigning you writing, you got the opportunity to give me an assignment. (I hope you find this to your liking.) I actually asked University Registrar Carolyn Filippi how many of you had taken a class with me. Seventy-two, she told me, out of four hundred and some. But if I was never actually your professor, maybe I cheered for you on the athletic field or grunted in your direction in the fitness center or met you at a writer's series event, so that I feel like I know you. In any case, again, I thank you.

To be recognized from among such a talented and tireless faculty, men and women who have taught me so much over the last 13 years about integrity and commitment, who've taught me to walk this line between sharing what we love with others and protecting these traditions from harm - it humbles me as few other things in my life have. Perhaps it goes without saying, but I accept the honor on behalf of these valued colleagues. Let's give them a round of applause.

You may also know that I'm the son of two English professors, so that college teaching is a sort of family business. Your affirmation that the business is in good hands with me means almost more than I could tell you, and I can promise you it makes them very proud.

I've always wondered what the world would look like from up here. I'm drawn perversely to pulpits - my mother's father studied to be a Paulist priest but eventually left the seminary, unable, in the end, to take the vow of obedience. I guess I owe my very existence to his stubbornness, when you think about it. And the fact that I'm a professor and not a priest perhaps proves that his stubbornness is a heritable trait. Ralph Waldo Emerson walked away from the ministry too, from the very Unitarian Church upon which St. Lawrence was founded, frustrated with how hollow the practice of religion had become. In an address to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School (not unlike the one I'm giving now), he told those assembled, "I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more... A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital secret of his profession, namely, to convert life into truth, he had not learned."

I have borne Emerson's words in my mind as I composed these. I hope that doesn't sound too precious, and I'm not about to preach to you, but I did want to try and convert some of my experience into truth here tonight.

Prodded no doubt by this gracious invitation, I have been thinking recently about my last few days as a student on the campus of my own alma mater, Loyola University in New Orleans (I just missed my 20th class reunion last month). What I remember best about that weekend was a run I took on the morning of graduation around the bridle path that rings Audubon Park across from the campus, while the members of my family who'd come down to celebrate the occasion with me lay asleep in their hotel rooms. I listened to Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" on my Walkman (a cumbersome precursor to the iPods you kids use today), a piece I had first heard in my "World of Music" course that semester, a class which was supposed to have been a blow-off (I trust this is a familiar concept, the blow-off course?) but which instead became a source of real solace during the frenzy of that last term.

The park was my favorite place in the whole city, classroom and cathedral and gymnasium all in one, and it was where I learned that you don't need to own something for it to belong to you. As I ran, I thought about all the work my degree represented and looked with excitement toward the next phase of my life. Heady times. Amid the craziness of your senior week and commencement, you should carve out time for reflection in cathedrals of your own, time to consider your achievements, numerous and noteworthy, and what is ahead for you.

Of course many of you won't begin your lives in earnest right away. "B.A." will come to mean not only "Bachelor of Arts" but also "Boston After," or you'll get yourselves to Jackson Hole or Vail and bum for a while. Maybe you'll be bumming on mom and dad's couch. And that's fine. Our culture encourages that in twentysomethings, particularly of a certain social class. Self-regard is permitted as we make our way in the world - even lenders give us a six-month grace period before they expect payment on our student loan debt (just paid mine off, by the way, twenty years after graduation, which I think warrants a round of applause).

A SLU senior recently emailed me about the anxiety he was feeling about this "grace period," at the prospect of just floating after graduation. What he was struggling to resist, I suspect, was what Bobby Kennedy called "the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education." I told him the drift was not unusual, temptation's pull is strong, but also told him, and I will tell you now, that when you're finished floating, when you alight somewhere, I hope you'll find that your time here has prepared you well for the world beyond the SLU bubble. If we've done our job, you've identified talents and affinities, things you do well and things you love to do, and you've found worthy mentors who've helped you hone valuable skills.

But I hope we've also encouraged you to think about how these talents and skills will allow you contribute to the communities you live in, and that these contributions will feel satisfying to you, have value apart from merely what is recognized in the marketplace. A liberal arts education ought not to be just about making a living, after all. Even more, it is about making a life.

Many of you came to college concerned about getting ahead, "lest shame and starvation catch you," the writer John Leggett explains. Your parents no doubt encourage this kind of thinking - a college education represents a huge investment for them, and they want to see you come out the other side aimed toward gainful employment. They want some assurance that you'll have rooves over your heads (and preferably not the same rooves they raised you under). Americans grow up believing that as long as we achieve, we will be loved and valued perpetually, and that this will be enough. The good life.

I lived that way a very long time. Trust me, it wasn't any particular conviction that sent me straight to graduate school after college. Anxiety, mostly. Having grown up on a college campus, I was a creature of this sort of institution and probably feared leaving the university "bubble" even more than the average senior. I have enjoyed the comfort of one ivory tower or another for all of the last twenty years. It wasn't until I had achieved a level of security and comfort only possible inside the academy, only after, frankly, the whole thing began to bore me a little, that I ever gave a thought to leaving my garrett even for a little while. I suppose what follows is a story about what I found right under my nose.

Six or so years ago, when University Editor Neal Burdick, one of SLU's true "good guys," asked me for names of writers who might be interested in teaching a summer writing course at the federal prison in Ray Brook, NY, I think he was a little surprised when I offered my own. I was a little surprised myself. There are a couple of explanations for my interest in that work: for one, my father had done prison teaching in my childhood in Tennessee, so it was something I'd always been curious about. For another, I was writing a nonfiction book about a man who'd spent twenty years in prison so I wanted an introduction to that world, the "inside world" one of my students has since called it. But perhaps most importantly, there was this complacency that I had begun to feel about a professional life spent in pursuit of financial security, accolades and acknowledgement and approval.

So I signed on, became "writer-in-residence" at a federal prison. Little surprise, probably, that the work there was a revelation. Of course there were the almost incredible stories the incarcerated men shared in the essays I had them write. A description of the great lengths to which one man went in order to prepare for his cell mates the traditional Christmas lasagna his Italian mother used to make, hoarding commissary tomatoes in his cell for weeks, straining cottage cheese through a gym sock until it passed for ricotta, standing in front of a microwave oven for four hours, all for that taste of home. Or the Chicagoland gang-banger who described thirty days in the hole and how he eventually learned to survive there, though college was an institution he never learned to navigate (he'd won a scholarship for a free semester through a reform school essay contest). "I couldn't get used to all those white people smiling at me all the time," he wrote.

But even more impressive to me was the great value these incarcerated men placed on education, on learning, though in the beginning I could offer them no academic credit for the work they did. What I came to realize was how my SLU students and I took the privilege of our working together for granted - to most of us college must have felt like a birthright, but it was beyond the wildest dreams of most of these imprisoned men, whose enthusiasm restored to me faith in what I was teaching, faith in its worth. At a celebration of folksinger Pete Seeger's 90th birthday several years ago, Bruce Springsteen said that Seeger believed music could change the world and lived his life every day as though it were true. I saw very clearly that this was what I wanted, a true sense of vocation.

After his night in jail for civil disobedience, Thoreau wrote that entering the inside world had been "like traveling to a far country," that when he came out "a change had to his eyes come over the scene "greater than any that mere time could effect." "I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived," Thoreau wrote. In the same way, after my first prison teaching experience, I sensed how this work might bring me out of my ivory tower once and for all, allow me finally to acknowledge that I was part of a community, one that I shared with my students, incarcerated and otherwise, with university and prison staff, and on and on. I had really struggled to put down roots in the North Country, but maybe this was the way to do it finally.

At that point, one in 100 Americans were behind bars, more than in any country in history. Adam Gopnik, as recently as March of this year, has called incarceration, "the great moral crisis of our time." The prison industrial complex was one of very few "growth industries" in northern New York, and prisons still dot the local landscape like Wal-Mart. When the state threatened to close one prison near campus, the rhetoric of the opposition, their out and out fear-mongering, alarmed me, and flew in the face of what I had experienced at Ray Brook and the handful of other prisons where I've since taught. I recalled Bobby Kennedy's 1968 warning after the MLK assassination: "When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies...to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city but not a community."

"But," writes contemporary essayist and 2013 SLU writers series visitor Rebecca Solnit, if "prison is anything that severs and alienates, paradise is the reclaimed commons with the fences thrown down, and so any step toward connection and communion is a step toward paradise, even if the route detours through jail." I gradually came to understand that I needed to get my SLU students involved, for their sakes and mine, and I that needed to work at getting academic credit for the inside students. With the help of staff local prisons and members of the SLU community, and the board of a national prison education network, working together for several years, we were able to make that happen. Last fall we launched the inaugural SLU Inside-Out course at Upstate Correctional Facility in Malone, New York State's "maxi-max" prison (the only such program hosted by a maxi-max).

Many of the members of that inaugural class are in the audience this evening. Chelsea Hammond and Molly Lunn will graduate with you this weekend. Amy Callahan may be here too, and Conner Eldridge. They have my endless gratitude and admiration. When we got together for pizza at the end of the term, I thanked the students for their extra effort, for making the detour with me. "You went a little out of your way," I told them, "100 miles round-trip once a week, and look at the difference it's made." I know they aren't the only ones among you who've pushed past charity and service toward forging real community in the North Country, and I commend all of you.

Yet as good as our work made me feel, I was still suspicious of that good feeling. I have never been a man for others (ask even those who love me) and have always mistrusted any do-gooding impulse that arises in me. I am suspicious now. Though my alma mater Loyola is a Jesuit university dedicated to social justice, I paid almost no attention to that mission in my time there. My favorite "Friends" episode involves Joey challenging Phoebe to find a good deed the doing of which doesn't make her feel good about herself (of course she can't do it). What's amazing, and a little sad, is how long that same cynical attitude kept me in the bubble.

It was my SLU students who have really changed my mind and heart. They helped me to understand my cynicism as, in part, generational. Cornel West and others have called the years of my adolescence and young adulthood, the Reagan-Bush dynasty, "an ice age of moral concern." The 1980's were famously the "me" decade. But current students are different, more earnest, with moral outrage to spare and a sense of urgency, also terrific imagination. So many of you are determined to change your world.

Just after your degrees are conferred next Sunday, ink still wet on the diplomas, the chairman of the board of trustees will task you, the class of 2012, to show your allegiance to your alma mater by considering a donation toward the furthering of her mission, the value of which no one understands better than you as her most recent graduates. That is all well and good. Philanthropy has its place. But traditional philanthropy won't really do much to close the vast and ever-widening income and opportunity gap in our society, which an experience like a prison course makes so painfully clear.

So I am going to challenge you now to give in another way. St. Lawrence is a tight-knit community - we pride ourselves on that, and on our exclusivity, on our status as a highly selective private university with a network of alums ready to serve us once we emerge from the bubble. That exclusivity is surely part of what your parents are paying for, part of what you've borrowed to attain - it ensures the good life. What I'm asking is that you endeavor to consider ways to be more inclusive, to share the great worth of your education with people who haven't had the opportunity, to acknowledge that we share our communities with them, that our fates are bound. That's what "redistribution of wealth" has come to mean to me.

I wish I could show you the faces of those incarcerated men when I showed them their names on a university class roster. Not on a diploma like you'll see Sunday, mind you, but a simple roster. And it cost us nothing to go there but the gas money, cost us nothing to extend the opportunity you've all paid so dearly to have except the time it took to drive there, the effort it took to extend ourselves. Yet I'd argue the potential for real change was huge. In the end, for all their differences, perhaps the one thing these two institutions have in common, prisons and universities, is a responsibility to transform the people in their charge.

Not everyone in the prison is happy we're there - corrections officers, resentful that felons got free credits while they must pay to educate their children, called us names like "hug-a-thugs" and even "little bastards." But what hurt worst was when one guard told a student "I could tell you were from SLU, you look entitled." It hit close to home. When I was a kid, we sang a cathechism song that said, "they will know we are Christians by our love." How will they know we are Laurentians? I guess that's really the question I want you to think about. Are we distinguished by our privilege alone? Or might we come to be known by what Thoreau called our "greatly purposing to do right," the real risks we're willing to run in the sacrifices we make to other people.

My father was a graduate student living in Dallas almost fifty years ago when JFK was assassinated there. He never talked a lot about it, but recently he sent me a link to an interview he did with a local NPR affiliate. "I remember I was on my way to class when I heard," he told the reporter. "I just turned around and went home. And I just sat down and wept, and I thought, 'what's going to become of this world?'" That's still the question, really. I understand it's hard to know where to begin when it comes to social change. We talked about that often in my advanced non-fiction writing class this spring. One of my favorite essayists, Scott Russell Sanders, writes "if you try and save all the world's problems all at once, you'll likely quit before you finish rolling up your sleeves." I know the enormity of that prospect kept me in the ivory tower at least an extra decade.

But, Sanders says, "if you stake out your own workable territory, if you settle on a manageable number of causes, then you might accomplish a great deal, all the while trusting that others elsewhere are working faithfully in their own places." What I'm advocating is that once you leave the SLU bubble, you explore a few detours from your career path, go a little out of your way. The challenge, Sanders says, is to find "those causes which are peculiarly our own, those to which we are clearly called, and to embrace them wholeheartedly." Consider this line from Pete Seeger's song "To My Old Brown Earth":
Guard well our human chain,
Watch well you keep it strong...
And this our home,
Keep pure and sweet and green.

The Earth and it's people - there's plenty of room for each of us along this continuum, I think. Again, we just have to trust each other to work faithfully on the causes in our own corners of the world, wherever we alight. Take heart. Dig in.

At nearly forty-two years of age, I'm aware in even the most optimistic of scenarios, my life is half over. I am twice as old as most of you, and it's taken me all this time to arrive even at these meager insights. I offer them now, humbly, that you may "get ahead of the curve," as it were. That has to be the point of such a last lecture. I am tempted to say that I envy you your boundless futures. I remember fondly the excitement of those last few runs around Audubon Park, the Copland music reaching crescendo. I'd almost agree to blink and go back, if it were possible.

But I can't account for my good fortune between that time and this, and I wouldn't want to tempt fate. The view from 42 ain't bad. Mid-life has not only its infamous crises but also very real satisfactions, which everyone ought to have the chance to enjoy. When I was where you are, I was careful to dream simple dreams that might actually come true - of a family with whom to share my life, of fulfilling work, the continued good health of everyone I love - but what I've come to understand is that the realization of even the smallest of these is a bit of a miracle, and always requires the help of others, sometimes hundreds of others. You, the class of 2012, have helped me to realize a dream here this evening. Again, I thank you.

Here's to the realization of your college dream - let me be the first in a long line to offer you congratulations on the achievment. And here's to the future fulfillment of your own grandest wishes. To going a little out of your way in order to acknowledge community and extend opportunity in your corner of the world. Here's to making a life and not merely a living, one that represents a real grace period, a ridiculously extended period of grace.

So the world is yours now, to save and change. Welcome to it. Keep in touch and let us know how we can help. As grand ole Sgt. Phil Esterhaus used to say on every episode of "Hill Street Blues," "Hey, let's be careful out there."

Thank you very, very much.