22 minute read
First Year in a Box: Rediscovering My Introduction to the Liberal Arts
from Agora Fall 2023
Lori Stanley with Maasai “son” Leboy Oltimbau. Leboy has served as a cultural guide and translator for Luther College groups visiting northern Tanzania since 2005. He also initiated and was a collaborator on the Maasai Medicine Project in the early 2010s.
by LORI A. STANLEY ’80, Professor Emerita of Anthropology
Editor’s note: Lori Stanley gave this talk on May 20, 2023, as the Ruth A. Davis Memorial Lecture at the Phi Beta Kappa initiation ceremony.
Good afternoon and congratulations Phi Beta Kappa initiates, and welcome to all who have gathered here to celebrate our students’ achievements. Thank you, Professor Kildegaard, for your generous introduction, and thanks to my faculty colleagues for electing me to membership in Phi Beta Kappa and inviting me to give the Ruth A. Davis Memorial Lecture. It’s an honor to be here.
I have been asked to reflect today on what liberal arts education has meant to me. I have spent my entire adult life steeped in the liberal arts, first as a Luther College student in the late 1970s and for the past 40 years as a member of the Luther faculty. Perhaps because liberal education has defined my life, it’s not easy to capture in a few minutes the ways in which it has shaped me and how deeply important it is to me. But I’ll give it a try by going back to what I think of as the beginning of it all, and I hope you’ll indulge me as I tell a few stories.
A few weeks ago I undertook the daunting task of sorting through bins and boxes of old records and personal belongings that my spouse Dave and
I had stashed away in the storage area of our home. In the process of digging through our past I encountered a long-forgotten cardboard box containing an array of artifacts from my first year as a student at Luther College. When I lifted the lid, there on the top of the heap was my 18-year-old self smiling back at me from my very first student ID. Beside it was a cracked and faded Polaroid photograph of me and one of my first-year roommates, Esther Menn, unpacking our belongings in West Brandt on move-in day.1 Beneath the photo was a handwritten note from my other roommate, Kate Thronson, informing me that she hadn’t had time to do laundry so she’d worn one of my outfits.2 That happened a lot that year!
As I dug deeper I discovered old canceled checks for things like purchases at the Luther College Book Shop, an electric typewriter, and my $50 Luther College enrollment deposit. I also came across records revealing that Luther’s annual comprehensive fee that year was just shy of $4000, my federal loan was a whopping $300, and my work study position in the Modern Languages Department paid one dollar and ninety cents per hour.
As I continued to sift through the contents of the box it dawned on me that it contained not just amusing mementos from one year in the life of a first-generation college kid, but important insights into the person I would become and the role that my liberal arts education would play in my academic and personal development. I saw in those notebooks, course readings, term papers, and exams evidence of my evolving academic interests and growing intellectual curiosity. I saw how I was learning to become a more critical thinker and a better communicator; how ethical and moral positions I held were sometimes affirmed, but often challenged; how academic disciplines were valuable constructs but also limiting, and that learning to make connections across disciplines was intellectually exciting and led to much richer understanding. It also became clear to me that what I experienced in that incredible first year of college led to wonderful opportunities and laid a strong foundation for life-long learning.
I can’t begin today to lay out all the evidence for each of these revelations, but I’d like to share a few examples that illustrate what a liberal arts education and a career at a liberal arts college have meant to me. I do this for the students in the auditorium, in the hope that it will get each of you thinking about your own journey up to this point, where the road might lead you from here, and how you will use your knowledge, time and talents as you proceed along the path of life.
So let’s dig into that cardboard box. Prominent among the materials I found there were class notes, worksheets, and written papers from my Spanish classes. I had arrived at Luther having taken two years of high school Spanish and having just completed an intensive summer language program in Mexico. I loved learning Spanish and there was no question that I would continue to study it in college. What I didn’t realize at the time was how many doors my passion for the language would open. For example, in my first January Term I was able to participate in a study abroad program in Mexico, one of the only short-term international experiences that Luther offered at that time. The course was led by two faculty members who would become important mentors to me, Spanish professor Dennis Magnuson, who had been my teacher in the fall, and anthropology professor Clark Mallam. For four weeks our group traveled together by van, train, and bus as we studied the modern-day, historical, and archaeological Mayan cultures of Mexico, while also improving our Spanish skills through immersion in the language. It was an amazing introduction to interdisciplinary experiential learning, one of the hallmarks of the liberal arts.
That first-year January experience not only improved my language skills and confirmed my desire to major in Spanish, but it also introduced me to anthropology–a field I had never heard of before arriving at Luther–and that encounter changed the course of my life. Upon returning from Mexico I entered into conversations with my advisor about taking courses in anthropology, and before long I added it as a major. That August I participated in an archaeological field school led by Professor Mallam, and the following year, as a sophomore with only a couple of anthropology courses under my belt, I traveled to Central America to do Mesoamerican archaeology. Thanks to professional contacts made through Professor Mallam, I spent the spring semester and early summer with the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia (Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History) doing field work in northwestern Honduras at the site of a previously unexcavated Mayan ceremonial center called Currusté.3 For five months I lived in a tiny camper van parked on the archaeological site, spending every day excavating large pyramidal mounds and stone plazas and chatting in Spanish with the other crew members, all of whom were local Hondurans. In the evenings and on weekends I sat amongst the ruins making journal entries, reading about Mayan archaeology, writing papers in longhand, and doing my Spanish lessons, all so that I could earn credits in anthropology and Spanish from Luther. It was a rather unconventional form of study abroad, even in those days. And unfortunately the almost complete lack of communication I was able to have with my family for nearly half a year caused my parents endless worry. But it was an amazing period of deep learning and personal growth that enhanced my problem-solving skills, increased my confidence and my independence, and reinforced my belief in the value of combining hands-on experience with the kind of learning that takes place in the college classroom.
Returning to that musty old box, some of the artifacts found there reminded me that my early college coursework and experiences led to other important learning opportunities and outcomes beyond Luther. For example, thanks to my language study and interest in the social sciences, during my first two summers in college I found employment with a Lutheran social services organization. My role was to conduct outreach among Mexican and Mexican-American migrant farm laborers working seasonally in the sugar beet-growing region of northwestern Minnesota. Over the course of those two summers I developed close relationships with many migrant families, and I stay in contact with some of them to this day. I also began to develop an awareness of power and privilege, social inequalities, and some of the challenges facing migrant laborers in the United States. Gradually academic theories and classroom discussions from my college courses took on a whole new meaning, and by the second summer I was finally beginning to understand something one of my anthropology professors said to me when I first told him I was taking this summer job in order to “help” the migrant workers. “No,” he said, shaking his head, “whatever you end up doing there won’t help them. But go. See what you learn.” What I learned was that I needed to know more about history, geopolitics, economics, and social systems in order to begin to grasp the root causes of the challenges that migrant farmworkers faced, let alone imagine possible solutions. In other words, what those experiences reinforced for me was the great value of liberal learning for understanding the world in which we live, for solving real-world problems, and for good and responsible citizenship.
The strong liberal arts foundation that was so important to my intellectual and personal development throughout my college years continued to serve me well after I graduated from Luther, even prior to my role as a full-time member of Luther’s faculty. I’ll illustrate with a couple of examples.
In 1981 I completed a master’s degree in anthropology, and about a year later I returned to the Decorah area with my husband Dave, also a Luther College anthropology graduate, with the intent that we would start an archaeological consulting company. Most people with whom we shared our aspirations simply shook their heads in bewilderment, and undoubtedly most thought this goal would never be realized. Nevertheless we went ahead with our plan, and though it wasn’t easy we accomplished what we set out to do. After a few years I was no longer involved in the firm’s day-to-day operations or field investigations because I had begun teaching at Luther and then relocated to Missouri for a time to study for my Ph.D. But Dave ran a very successful and highly regarded business until 2017 when he retired and sold the company–Bear Creek Archeology, Inc.–to one of his longtime employees. The new owner and CEO, Derek Lee, is another Luther anthropology graduate and former student of mine, and he just happens to be the parent of two current Luther students, CJ Lee ’25 and Emma Lee ’26.
I offer this example because neither Dave nor I had any coursework in business management or related fields; no one had taught us how to run a small corporation, much less start one from scratch. But our Luther education had provided many tools that were useful to us in this undertaking. I’m convinced that it was our broad-based coursework; our problem-solving, critical thinking, communication and research skills; and our strict adherence to ethical principles in our dealings with employees, clients, agencies, and Native American stakeholders that enabled us to build a business from the ground up and keep it operating successfully for four decades. Now consider an illustration of the value of my education that is of a rather different sort. While working on my doctorate in the late 1980s and early 1990s I became part of a team at the University of Missouri that launched a long-term research project in Oklahoma working with the last speakers of a Native American language called Chiwere. Chiwere is the heritage language of members of the modern-day Iowa Tribe and Otoe-Missouria Tribe whose ancestors once lived right here in eastern Iowa and southeastern Minnesota. The kind of research we were engaged in requires a multidisciplinary approach, and I was able to draw on my background in languages, archaeology, cultural and linguistic anthropology, history and more as our team recorded this largely undocumented language, worked out features of its grammar, and explored the fascinating connections between the language and the culture of its speakers. Sadly, the last full-fledged speakers of Chiwere have now passed on. But today the Iowa and Otoe-Missouria people are using the audio and video recordings, lexicon, grammatical sketches, and other data that we produced all those years ago in their own efforts to revitalize Chiwere. As I watch the tribes reclaim the language that outsiders once endeavored to take away from them, I’m grateful that my liberal arts education enabled me to contribute in useful ways to this effort.
Finally, when it comes to my four decades on the Luther faculty I could describe countless ways in which my undergraduate education was foundational for my life as a teacher-scholar. Since you’d all like to get to dinner eventually, however, I’ll give just two last examples.
The first relates directly to my early studies in Mexico and Honduras, and my subsequent participation in a January travel course to the Pueblo region of the American Southwest during my junior year in college. Largely as a result of those undergraduate experiences, as a member of the Luther faculty I had a long-standing commitment to off-campus study and other forms of experiential and community-based learning. In the early 1990s when Luther set out to expand its January Term offerings abroad, I was fortunate to be among the first to develop a new program. In 1992, at the suggestion of study abroad director and professor of economics Mark Lund, who had many contacts in Nepal as a result of the development work he had done there years before, he and I co-taught a course on global issues in the context of the Himalayan region in Nepal. Over the next decade that course evolved into an anthropology offering that introduced students to the peoples and cultures of rural Nepal and examined the effects of tourism and development projects on their mountain communities. From 1992 until 2023 I led or co-led 23 international programs: five to Nepal and Thailand, one to Guatemala, and 17 to Tanzania. I also joined my Education Department colleague Professor Deborah Norland for four Luther College summer-school programs on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. These off-campus courses were intense, all-consuming teaching experiences, but also some of the most rewarding ones of my career.
And always in the back of my mind was the belief, grounded in personal experience, that each course had the potential to be life-changing for the students. Indeed, many participants said at the time, or in some cases years later, that their educational travels had a major impact on their career path, or the effort they put into learning about the rest of the world, or their view of themselves as global citizens and the personal choices they made as a result.
I was always grateful for the many positive ways in which those travel courses influenced my students, but I also wanted our presence in the places we visited to be about more than just what was gained by the students and their faculty leaders. I felt strongly that the people who welcomed us and made our learning possible should benefit as much if not more than we did. I did my best to convey this conviction to my students in the hope that they, too, would strive for mutuality in their relationships with the people they met.
I’ll be the first to admit that this ideal is easier expressed than achieved, but by observing and listening to people in our host communities we have found ways to reciprocate, typically by collaborating with our hosts to achieve goals that they themselves have defined. For example, when Leboy Oltimbau, a Maasai colleague in Tanzania, asked me how he could “make a book” about his people’s extensive knowledge of their traditional plant-based medicines, knowledge that was disappearing, my students and I worked with him to come up with a plan. With generous support from Luther in the form of student-faculty collaborative research grants, over the course of three summers five students and I assisted Oltimbau and other Maasai colleagues in identifying medicinal plants and documenting how they were used to treat illnesses and injuries. We then produced an illustrated guide to Maasai traditional medicine. Copies of the guide were distributed to community members and to their rural secondary school for use as a textbook for their Indigenous Knowledge course.
Other projects in Tanzania involved supporting efforts to build rural schools and churches, constructing water collection and sanitation systems, and developing economic diversification programs. In one Maasai village that hosted us annually from the first year of the program, we worked side by side with community members to prepare the foundation for the concrete block church they were building near the site of their original wattle and daub church. For two days we mixed concrete by hand and moved it by bucket brigade to construct the foundation. Another year we helped to build a wattle and daub dormitory for a rural school, and we regularly contributed school supplies and teaching materials to a preschool that is preparing Maasai children for success in primary school. One of the economic diversification programs that Luther students and faculty collaborated on involved distilling essential oils from local plants for making soap to sell to tourist lodges. In order to support women’s development projects we regularly brought glass beads and other supplies to a beading cooperative and to several independent beaders, and we happily purchased the women’s beautiful creations for our family members, our friends, and ourselves. We also worked with Tanzanians in their efforts to establish non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, that supported grassroots human rights and human development work, typically with an emphasis on women and children. Finally, in the spirit of reciprocity and with Luther’s generous support, we brought seven Tanzanian colleagues over the years to campus as visitors in residence, hosting them in our homes and introducing them to our culture, just as they helped us to learn about theirs. These are all examples of how liberal education–my own and my students’–provided the mindset, the value system, the skills, and other means for tackling big problems and taking seriously the responsibility of global citizenship.
For my final example, I’ll return one more time to my box of treasures. Among all the other mementos, I came across readings, notes, handouts and term papers from the year-long common course called Freshman Studies that all first-year students were required to take when I started at Luther. The syllabus for this course describes Freshman Studies as “an interdisciplinary course designed by the faculty of Luther College to serve as an introduction to the Liberal Arts.” It goes on to say that “the course will acquaint you with the kind of resources education can make available to you…; it will stress the value of judgments that…individuals and societies must make to constructively [use] these resources; and, hopefully, it will suggest ways in which your work at Luther might become a meaningful whole.”
Athenian tragedy Antigone, Dante’s Inferno, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and works by Plato in a collection titled The Last Days of Socrates In the spring we had units on the African American experience, Scandinavian immigration to the US, and Native American history and culture.
The syllabus reminded me that during the fall semester of Freshman Studies we read contemporary works like Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and an anthology called China: Yesterday and Today, as well as classics like the
Between the reading, the writing and revising, and the expectations set for critical thinking and discussion, this was the hardest course I had ever taken. Believe it or not, my friends and I sometimes complained about it! And yet it was exciting for the way it opened up whole new worlds for me. Best of all, the course exemplified what I had learned to love about college within just the first few weeks on campus–it integrated my learning experience, demonstrating the connections among the texts and across time, space and cultures. It was incredibly challenging, but oh so liberating! During that tough but exhilarating year in Freshman Studies, I never imagined that precisely 42 years later I would be teaching a version of that course, first-year Paideia, and would continue to teach it until my retirement and beyond. I had thought taking the course was hard, but I discovered that teaching it was even harder. And intimidating at first! After all, every instructor of firstyear Paideia must teach texts most, if not all, of which are outside their own discipline, something most academics never do. But that’s also what makes this course so intellectually invigorating. We become learners alongside our students. Of course we prepare in advance to teach texts that are new to us, but we spend a lot of our time in class figuring things out with our students as members of a close-knit learning community. We are all engaged together in the process of liberal learning, of doing what we want our students to do–on their own and in conversation with others–for the rest of their lives. I am incredibly grateful to have had that opportunity during the last years of my teaching career.
There’s no time today to talk about calculus or computer science or introduction to weight training or concert band or some of the other courses and experiences represented in that old cardboard box. Suffice it to say, every single one of them enriched my understanding of the world, fueled my desire to learn, and in some way influenced my life beyond that year and beyond Luther. I feel so lucky not only to have spent four wonderful years in a rich and nurturing liberal arts environment, but also to have recognized the value of the pursuit of knowledge and to have embraced life-long learning. For me, a career in academia was the context for much of that ongoing learning, but no matter what your career path or where you live or what your interests are, each of you has what it takes to actualize the Phi Beta Kappa motto by making love of learning your guide, now and in the future.
Students, today and in the days and weeks ahead, please reflect on all those moments, remarkable and ordinary, that you spent in the lab, in the library, in classroom discussion, in late-night reading sessions, in internships and study away, in rehearsals, practices, performances, and competitions. Where will they lead you? How will the knowledge, skills, and experiences from your time at Luther shape your life? What opportunities might present themselves? What sorts of challenges are you prepared to meet? What kind of citizen will you be? You are truly privileged to have acquired a liberal arts education, an education that will serve you well in work, in leisure, in service to others, and in home and family life. Please cherish it and make the most of it.
Thank you.
Author’s note: This talk is dedicated to my late parents, Peter and Lou Ann Van Gerpen, for their unconditional love and unwavering support throughout my educational journey; to my earliest Luther College mentors, Dennis D. Magnuson and R. Clark Mallam, for expanding my horizons and demonstrating to me the value of the liberal arts; and to all the students who have been learners alongside me over the decades.
Notes
1. Esther Menn is currently Dean of Academic Affairs and The Ralph W. and Marilyn R. Klein Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. Esther is married to Bruce Tammen (‘71).
2. Kate (Thronson) Seitz is retired from a career in early childhood education and as a registered nurse. Her daughter Audrey is a 2010 Luther College graduate.
3. In December 2008 Currusté became Honduras’s fifth archaeological park. Due to political turmoil in the country, the park was closed the following year and remains so to this day.
