Earlier this week
I attended a small evening seminar at SMU (Singapore Management University), hosted by one of the professors
there whom I had met some months ago at a dinner. He turned out to have been
friends with two Brothers in California who were also good friends of mine
(both have now passed on). We had some fine conversations that evening at
dinner, and we have since met several times. This was the first time, however,
that I was on “his turf” participating in an event such as this. The topic of
the informal seminar was university education in Singapore. The people in the
room were from various backgrounds and were currently involved in a variety of
professions. But most of them had been Fulbright scholars at one point in their
lives, and most were native to Singapore. They were bright people with bright
backgrounds who had a very wide range of present circumstances, ages,
priorities, and daily lives; in other words, a great group with which to have a
conversation about a serious topic.
I won’t try to
represent or capsulize the conversation here, let alone tease out some sort of
answer or conclusion about the present context and possible future of
university education in Singapore, based on that seminar. But I will try to
relate the foundational thrust represented by the simple fact that it even took
place.
We all have an
abiding interest in engagement and knowledge, whether through words, or
pictures, or symbols, or relationships, or tinkering, or play, or any of a
hundred other activities. Our drive is to know and to be engaged in that
knowing. Some may do so better than others, but I will bet that most of us
remember when we have done so well, and we appreciate it all the more in the
remembering.
During my
mid-life years (38-41) at Boston College, one of the most enlivening and deeply
satisfying aspects of my studies was the doctoral seminar, a time when the 6 –
8 candidates in the program (all sorts of backgrounds, interests, ages,
futures, etc.) got together for 2.5 – 3 hours of conversation around a fairly
difficult text or topic, with the guidance of one of the top professors in the
department. I must say that those conversations are still with me, not so much
in the detail as in the effect. When you sit with clever and articulate
colleagues to talk about things that are important, there is an engagement of
depth that is as hard to describe as it is difficult to shake off. It is a sort
of falling in love with thinking and talking, of being slapped by fascinating
ideas and twirling novel connections in the mind, of following fascinating
trails behind another’s mental steps, picking up on their enthusiasm even as
you stop every once in a while to gaze around at the new – to you –
environment. Even if others believe that there’s an ivory tower aspect to the
whole thing, at least you can’t argue with the fact that conversations like
this invite us to look at the used-to-be-normal landscape from a new height.
Like experiencing a wonderful piece of music, something sticks.
The same may be
encountered, albeit to a lesser degree, in the things we choose to read or see
or think about. Everything around us has the potential of being a catalyst for
engaged knowledge. One of the most fascinating things about education,
especially perhaps about a program such as the IB, is that that this sort of
this becomes the rule, habit, and goal, the expectation rather than the
exception. Within the Christian context, the notion is best conveyed for me by
Nicholas Lash: "To think as a Christian is to try to understand the
stellar spaces, the arrangements of micro-organisms and DNA molecules, the
history of Tibet, the operation of economic markets, toothache, King Lear, the
CIA, and grandma's cooking--or, as Aquinas put it, 'all things'--in relation to
that uttering, utterance and enactment of God which they express and represent.
To act as a Christian is to work with, to alter or, if need be, to endure all
things in conformity with that understanding."
I really enjoyed
that short, one-hour seminar at SMU earlier this week, even if I said very
little and listened quite a lot. Sort of like prayer, I suppose. It was the
kind of thing that provided food for a hunger that may be rarely acknowledged
but is always part of our makeup. The appropriate response is thankfulness, and
I thank my friend for having made it possible. May we all be able to do the
same for others in our own small ways.
