The practical wisdom that comes from a pandemic
The question “what are we for?” takes on new meaning these days.
When the small liberal arts college where I teach locked down in mid-March due to COVID-19, we found ourselves, as in schools everywhere from kindergartens to the Ivy League, adjusting on the fly to conditions we’d barely imagined a week or so before. The highs and lows, the comedy (and tragedy) of errors, and a few surprising successes have been chronicled across disciplines and in educational settings everywhere, resulting in a kind of sobering solidarity about what was possible, what was disastrous, and what remains utterly unknown. This has been true for other organizations as well, from churches to corporations.
Most colleges and universities have long-standing mottos associated with their emblems, usually rendered in Latin and meant to encapsulate their ethos. Many elite schools in the US, established during the ascendancy of American Protestantism, retain mottos that reflect a piety now mostly absent from their curricula and common life. The scroll on the shield of Brown University, for instance, says In Deo Speramus, “In God we hope.” My own college’s motto is “Let there be light.”
After mottos came mission statements—still short but expansive enough to communicate something of a school’s self-understanding, and nowadays used routinely for branding and marketing. One of the ironies of higher education is that growing uniformity—imposed by government mandates and the popular belief that college is fundamentally career training—makes it difficult for schools to distinguish themselves as they compete for students from the same shrinking pool of applicants.
