By Andrew Darien
History Department

Drew Darien

I often think with great reverence about Salem State University as a people’s institution.  One of the university’s most distinguishing features is its ethic of openness, democratic opportunity, and student support.  Although Salem State students generally do not come from privilege, teaching here feels like a privilege.  Every semester I am blown away by the life stories of students who overcome herculean financial, social, familial, and personal hurdles to pursue higher education.  Our history majors are especially impressive, seeking education not as a mere utilitarian vocational exercise, but to fulfill an intellectual curiosity about the past and the human condition.  I am heartened by, and remain deeply committed to, the college’s self-identified mission to “provide a high quality, student-centered education that prepares a diverse community of learners to contribute responsibly and creatively to a global society, and serve as a resource to advance the region’s cultural, social, and economic development.”

Teaching at a people’s institution in the Commonwealth, however, means paltry resources, crumbling facilities, subpar technology, and limited administrative support.  Our students already endure the pressures of attending school full-time while shouldering heavy work and family obligations.   Many become lost without proper administrative and financial support.  Massachusetts state colleges and universities remain at the mercy of the state budget, pleading for resources like a dependent and neglected child.  Education should be the great leveler of privilege and the gateway to good citizenship.  And yet, as my colleague Brad Austin so often reminds me, we work at a public college in a state that values private education.

Faculty at Salem State find themselves inundated with responsibilities, scrambling to juggle a heavy teaching load, advisement, committee work, community outreach, and scholarship.  The demands of the semester, for both student and faculty, are so great that it is easy to lose sight of the higher purpose in which we are engaged.  There are times when I feel as if I am more of a worker of the college than an historian, academic, educator, or intellectual.  Teaching can be inordinately gratifying, but there are moments in which my mind, body, and spirit ache for nourishment, a reminder of what I loved about being a student and why I became a history professor.  I never aspired to live in an ivory tower, but visiting one every now and then has its virtues.

This past summer I had the honor of being one of twenty-five national faculty members elected to participate in the Wye Faculty Seminar at the picturesque estate of the Aspen Institute located on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.  The seminar consisted of a week-long series of facilitated discussions drawing on primary texts from antiquity to the present, both Western and global.  For one week we roamed the classic works of literature, philosophy, and history, and debated their meaning from our own disciplinary and political perspectives.  Our focus was on citizenship in the American and global polity, and we examined texts from Machiavelli to Madison, Socrates to Said, Confucius to King.

The seminar challenged us to question some of our fundamental assumptions in our personal philosophy, politics, and pedagogy.  How have the world’s greatest thinkers conceived of our responsibilities as citizens?  What is good government?  What is the essence of human nature?  How do we create the conditions which can bring out the best in humanity?  We discussed the many dimensions of the texts, the tensions within them, and the implications of them for our own day.  This was just my kind of academic meal.  Some of my friends joked that I was going to nerd camp.  For me, it was intellectual nirvana, a spa for the mind.

It had been ten years, dating back to my doctoral work at New York University, since I had engaged in this kind of deep contemplation and uninterrupted dialogue with fellow academics.  The seminar reminded me of my early days at NYU in which my fellow graduate students and I, free from responsibility, had the privilege of fellowships that afforded us the opportunity to study history as a full-time endeavor.  In addition to structured class seminars, our conversations spilled out into bars, coffee shops, and diners.  But even that experience was not without its perils.  So much of graduate school was filled with anxiety about one’s status in the program, doubting of one’s intellectual heft, posturing relative to one’s peers, and constant worrying about the absolutely brutal academic job market.

The beauty of the Aspen Institute was that its sole objective was contemplation, which liberated the participants from professional and academic agendas.  My cohorts were seasoned and accomplished faculty from a multitude of disciplines and institutions, secure enough in their careers to check their egos at the door.  For one week we could forget about our teaching, research, and administrative commitments and simply contemplate ideas.  This was a genuine community of scholars sharpening their skills of cooperative conversation and collective intellectual engagement.  Each morning we would spend four hours discussing five or six common readings related to citizenship.  How fascinating it was to listen to a criminologist make sense of Hobbes’ Leviathan, a military historian riff on Thucydides Peloponnesian War, or a religion scholar interpret David Walker’s Appeal.

The Aspen Institute encourages scholars to nurture their bodies and spirit as well as their minds.  Each morning’s seminar was followed by quiet time for reading and reflection.  Our afternoons were free for swimming, biking, walking, running, or canoeing.  The Wye River complex is a stately setting along the Eastern shore of Maryland, surrounded by wooded preserves, green pastures, and bucolic farms.  The Institute housed us in comfortable rustic cabins, treated us to gourmet cuisine, and encouraged us to gather socially for each evening’s cocktail hour.  How pleasantly removed this was from using my Clipper Card to purchase a tired Chartwells sandwich to be frenetically consumed at my desk in the brief respite between classes and meetings.  My Aspen evenings were in stark contrast to the usual fare of cooking dinner, bathing my children, reading Harry Potter, and then providing menacing glares at the boys as they come out of their rooms with impish grins in multiple infractions of the bedtime curfew.  This was an escape to be cherished.  One could not but help fantasize about what it might be to live with permanent pampering.  It is a guilty pleasure to imagine living like a Greek philosopher, supported to inhabit in the world of ideas.

As an avid runner, I was especially appreciative of the opportunity to sort out my thoughts while frolicking along the country roads.  I always do my best thinking while my body is on automatic pilot and toxins are spilling out of my pores.  As an urban resident, I felt particularly fortunate to be at Aspen where I could glide through the placid country landscape.  It was quite easy, for a time, to forget the demands of teaching, researching, advising, administration, and other responsibilities.  But reality has a way of intruding upon one’s bliss.  After a while it was difficult to ignore the fantasy of our existence.

Following an especially long run in the afternoon of my third day at the Aspen Institute I sat doubled over in gleeful exhaustion on the steps of the Wye House.  As I got up and turned to take in the stunning Georgian and Federal Architecture of this U.S. National Historic Landmark, it suddenly dawned on me that I was residing at a former plantation.  The gorgeous estate upon which we were so privileged to stay had been built on the backs of slave labor.  During its peak, I would later learn, the plantation surrounding the house encompassed forty-thousand acres and was home to more than a thousand slaves.  The property is still owned by the descendants of its original owner, Edward Lloyd.  Frederick Douglass spent a few years of his life on the plantation, and would later write in his autobiography of the brutal conditions there.  To make matters more uncomfortable, many of the current service workers at the Aspen Institute were deferential and “respectable” African-Americans under a predominantly white management.

How ironic that our seminar had just read an excerpt from Douglass’s “Do Not Forget Truth and Justice,” in which he challenged his fellow citizens to lend purpose and dignity to the violent horror of the Civil War.  Douglass questioned the half-measures of his white brethren in the Union Army who fought for emancipation but fell short of delivering full citizenship to black Americans.  “They are good as far as they go, but alas! How far short they stop!” noted Douglass.  “They are blind powers, they can destroy but they cannot build up.  They can overcome, conquer, and subdue the organized physical force of the rebels, but can they reform the national heart, quicken the national conscience, root out wicked prejudices, abolish evil practices, and destroy the great moral evils which have filled our goodly land with blood and terror?”  While the Eastern Shore of Maryland is not quite the racial caste system it was in Douglass’s time, his haunting words were a powerful reminder of inequality in America.  It was clear that the work required to translate these magnificent ideas into reality beckoned us back at our home institutions.

The Aspen Institute was a uniquely rejuvenating experience that furnished me with innumerable ideas and principles about citizenship, collegiality, and morality.  I made some wonderful friendships, and returned to Massachusetts with a renewed sense of vigor about my responsibilities as a citizen, historian, teacher, and parent.  To ascend from Plato’s cave into the light can be a blissful experience, but this is no final resting place.  That kind of enlightenment demands that we return to our fellow citizens, roll up our sleeves, grab a sandwich from Chartwells, and get back to work.

This article is part of ASpect’s September 2010 issue on Liberal Arts.