Dear Fellow Scholars,
The truth is, I’m not sure that anyone who would venture to pen a letter to the undergraduates of her alma mater and give them “insight” or “advice” about “what I’ve learned about the ‘real world’ since graduation” could ever possibly have a clue what she is actually talking about. The world, and thus human work and human lives, are changing at a rate rapid beyond belief. Our wildest imaginations may not be enough to predict the world of the next 10 or 20 or 50 years, which means you should probably be a touch suspicious about this quasi-life-advice-column I’m writing to you now. Permission to stop reading and go get a Bean cookie or something, it’s the end of the semester and you probably deserve it.
But, if I was going to offer you anything at all in the way of reflections on what’s stuck with me from my time at ACU, suspicion might actually be a good place to start. The world is changing faster than any concrete, “marketable skills” can hope to keep pace with, but what about those skills that require thinking like a human, not a computer? A critical, helpful suspicion is one of these skills you’ve had the opportunity to practice and refine at ACU. Why are these people in power and these people not? Why are these people rich and these people poor? Who decides who gets what? The world may evolve, but it is unlikely that the burning importance of asking these questions will leave us. I worry that there are not nearly enough people asking them.
It’s important to note, however, that one key trait in any good asker-of-hard-questions is that they are willing to turn this suspicion back to face themselves. Another word for this would be one we hear all the time at liberal arts colleges, “humility,” taking seriously the possibility that I might be wrong. At the risk of seeming didactic, I propose to you that this, humility, is actually the central mission of the “college” thing you are up to. Liberal arts colleges are, after all, supposedly “liberating.” And what is it that we need to be liberated from? I don’t know about you, but the thing I need to be liberated from pretty much every day is the easy assumption that I am Right, that the highest Truth is my own experiences, and that the most important thing is the world through my own eyes. This sounds overly dramatic, but it’s more real than it seems. Think about it—I don’t currently hold any beliefs that I think are false, otherwise, I wouldn’t believe them. This makes it incredibly easy for me to write off people who disagree with me, because, from my current view, I already have all the right answers. A suspicious critic without humility cannot hear, cannot emphasize, cannot recognize their own limitations. Only when I can break out of my automatic assumptions can I meaningfully listen, ask critical questions, stand in solidarity, go to work for the sake of justice and the other.
I reiterate. The world is changing faster than we can dream it. The problems of the future are yet unknown, as are their solutions. You are among those lucky enough to spend a few years thinking about the world, what all this means, how we might make it better. Your best tools just might be the questions you can ask, of yourself first, then of the world as it is, and then of the world as it could yet be. And if you do, you just might figure out how to make things even just a little bit better, and in these small acts, we may just change the world.
Sincerely,
Courtney Tee
