Thank You, Liberal Arts--and Hiram College

Hiram's Hinsdale Hall--now gone
my father's office was there

I'm grateful for many things in my life--the family I was born into, the woman I met quite by accident almost exactly fifty years ago, the friends I've had (and have), the coffee shop across the street, ... I could go on and on.

But recently I've been thinking about how fortunate I was to attend a liberal arts college--Hiram College (1962-66)--at a time when the very concept of "liberal arts" was deeply respected, not under attacks both blunt (eliminating entire features--like foreign languages) and subtle ("revisions" that are often sly slices designed to hamstring).

During my college days, Hiram required us to take courses in music, art, literature, mathematics, history, biology, chemistry, foreign language, physical education, psychology, political science, religion, philosophy. I didn't love them all--I wasn't good at them all. In fact (I've mentioned this before) in my college calculus class my freshman year, my weary professor wrote on one of my mediocre test papers: Can I help you cry?

But I wasn't really crying; I was realizing more clearly something that I'd begun to figure out back at Hiram High School: Math ain't for me.

I spent a couple of college years fumbling around, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Some of my friends then were positive; some, in fact, had known since they were children that they wanted to be physicians or biologists or preachers or whatever. This certainty was nearly incomprehensible to me.

There were a number of professors who inspired me, but the principal one was Prof. Abe C. Ravitz (now a Facebook friend!), a rigorous English teacher who taught me so much about reading and literature. I now blame him for the obsession I have to read an author's complete works. See, if he was teaching, oh, The Sun Also Rises, he also told us about Hemingway's other works, and the tacit message was this: You gotta read it all, or you don't really know Hemingway! Do you?

I'm not sure where this thought belongs, but I'll put it here ... When I was a Hiram College student, most of the other students I knew were not looking at college as a vocational school, were not expecting to walk directly from graduation into a lucrative position. Most were planning on graduate and professional school. I know I was. I'd been accepted into the American Studies program at the University of Kansas, but when no financial aid was forthcoming, I knew I could teach for a few years ("a few" turned out to be about forty-five!).

Colleges now seem to have a more heavily vocational focus, don't they? (Good thing?--Bad thing? Not an easy answer.)

Anyway, after graduation, I began my teaching career at the old Aurora Middle School (Aurora, Ohio) in the fall of 1966. (In 1974 Aurora opened its new middle school building--Harmon School--and I was teaching there when I retired in January 1997.)

While I was teaching (English), I discovered the immense value of all those courses Hiram knew that I needed. Allusions in literary works to historical events, works of art, musical pieces, etc.--most I could comprehend immediately (this, in a cultural world that long antedated Google).

And then, retired, in the late 1990s I began reviewing books, first for Kirkus Reviews (I'm still working for them--and have filed more than 1500 reviews), then for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which, in its heyday,* had three pages of reviews each Sunday. I did a couple of hundred reviews for them--until, a few years ago, the vast changes in print journalism brought about very reduced books coverage at the PD--and the virtual absence of reviews by freelancers (like me). A sad, sad time for me--I'd loved working for them.

For Kirkus I do only nonfiction (history, memoir--and they send me baseball books in the late winter); for the PD I did some nonfiction, too--but lots of new fiction, as well.

And do I need to tell you how much those Hiram College years meant/mean to me in the writing of reviews? Liberal arts courses did not make me, of course, an expert in the required fields (see calculus comment above!), but they did make me feel like a citizen of those worlds. Or maybe a somewhat seasoned traveler. I could read the signs in the train station, order from the menu, find the men's room, etc. Gratitude.

In the late 1990s I returned to Hiram to teach a basic writing/lit course in their Weekend College program. Most of my students were ... older. People who were working out in the Real World, people who wanted some more powerful fuel for their rockets.

We read Othello in the class, and I liked to start off with questions like these: Have any of you ever felt you were passed over for a promotion you deserved? Have any of you ever believed that a lover was unfaithful to you? Have you ever been manipulated by a liar? Etc.?

Oh, the reactions!

The liberal arts can give us contexts for our lives, can help us understand one another better, help us realize we're not alone, help us see our world from a variety of perspectives, help us understand that things are not simple--are almost always soaked in complexity and ambiguity.

And for me? The liberal arts have made so many things possible. I know I was a better teacher because of them; I know I've been a more careful book reviewer, a more circumspect writer.

And so ... thank you, Hiram College. Thank you, liberal arts. Thank you, thank you, thank you ...

*heyday--"of uncertain origin," says the OED.