August, 2013 | Year of Hospitality
FINDING HOME IN AN INHOSPITABLE WORLD Mount Aloysius Convocation Address
Delivered by John Granger September 6, 2012
Thank you, Dr. Cook, President Foley, Dr. Fulop, Faculty Marshalls, Distinguished Faculty, Dr. Dragani, Mr. Fleming, and Mace Bearer Farcus for that introduction, for the invitation to speak here today, and for allowing me to participate in the procession. My talk this afternoon is largely an extended reflection on my experiences of your hospitality here as your guest. But this talk is not for those behind me or for the faculty so much as it is for those immediately in front of me. I hope you’ll forgive me for thinking of and sharing, as I begin, the two times, too many years ago, that I sat where you sit. When dinosaurs walked the earth, I listened, first as a new undergraduate at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, and, then, after graduation, as a recruit in Parris Island, SC, on the 1st Battalion squadbay before the beginning of my Boot Camp training as a United States Marine. I received the same message in essence at both places, different as they were, each time I sat where you sit, and, perhaps not surprisingly, though neither speaker in Chicago or Parris Island touched on movies that I had seen or books that I had read—or even used the word ‘hospitality’—much of what I will say here will echo what I heard then. At my college, a professor gave the “Aims of Education” address to incoming undergraduates. As he became quite famous in later years before his death because of a book he wrote on the narrowness of the American mind, that talk is actually in print and I was able to read recently what I had heard live back in 1979. I’m sad to say
I didn’t remember hearing this talk even after having read it to myself. What I remember of that occasion was what he said, after his formal presentation to the college, at my college house when he spoke semi-privately to thirty of us in something of a question & answer session. He told us, without equivocation or adornment, lest we walk away confused, that we were literally “idiots,” the Greek idios meaning ‘private person’ or ‘individual,’ and also, in the pejorative English sense of the word, quite stupid in our conceits and self-importance. He hoped very much that reading the Great Books in that college’s curriculum would transform us from our current state, little more than baboons in his estimation, to something like human beings. I remember, too, that we resented his remarks very much and, sadly, that I came to understand in the next few years how right he was, that we did resemble the primates of his description in our ignorance and arrogance. After graduation and marriage, I decided to fulfill something of a family tradition and join the Green Gun Club, also known as the United States Marine Corps. Having descended from the bus, followed the yellow footprints and had my head shaved, the Marine Corps officer who spoke to me and my fellow recruits was much kinder than the college professor in his remarks just before unleashing four drill instructors to remake us in Parris Island’s crucible. He told us that he admired our courage for enlisting. He shared the “thanks of Mount Aloysius College | 5