Nick Minton: Last Lecture

The following lecture was presented by Professor A. Nick Minton on Thursday, October 19, 2000, at a series entitled: “If This Were The Last Lecture I Would Give, What Would I Say?” organized by the Multi-faith Council of the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

THE POLITICS OF LIVING

Several weeks ago one of my colleagues in the political science department met up with me and asked if I were feeling ok. I said that I was and I asked why he was asking. He said that he had read that I was scheduled to give my "last lecture." I told him that I really didn't plan for it to be my last lecture and hoped that it would not be, but, after all, one never really knew. Recently I've been reminded of this as a result of a tragic accident which occurred on my street a short time ago. There was a major professional bicycle race in my town. It was a big deal, and a sizable sum of prize money was at stake. The women's race was to occur first--42 miles being done in 11 laps right by my house. I watched it all and cheered the cyclists on. On the last lap, less than a mile from the finish line, the star female cyclist, touted as a future Olympian, struggling to take the lead which would have enabled her to claim a quarter of a million dollars in bonus prize money, was catapulted from her bike and she slammed into a tree on the edge of the street. She probably died instantly. She was just 24 years of age. It should not have been her last race.

But, after all, we are rather fragile reeds. A mosquito bite, a scratch, a virus, a germ, equipment failure, a fire, a gunshot, an accident, or any one of a thousand other things could easily make "last lectures" a reality. But perhaps most of the time the odds are that we will live to "lecture" another day, and, because that is true, we continue to do those things which are necessary to prepare for tornorrow and the tomorrows after that.

Though I have agreed to deliver a "last lecture," I'm going to cheat a little bit. In the first place I don't have enough time for a "last lecture," Twenty or even thirty minutes isn't long enough. So, instead of a "last lecture," I'm going to say that this is more of a "prelude to a last lecture," or it could be the first installment of a "last lecture series"--though I realize that the chances are slim to non-existent that I might be invited to complete such a series. Nevertheless, I'm going to hedge my bets by declaring that this is not planned to be in fact my last lecture.

I could tell you about my growing up as an orphan who passed through a series of foster families until finally as a an adolescent boy of 13 I was adopted by an elderly Episcopal minister who saw to it that I was cared for in a loving environment and encouraged to go to the state university where I could seek the education for the life that I enjoy now. I could tell you about my growing up as the child of a single teenage mother, living a precarious life in ghetto poverty. A life where petty crime, school truancy, gang relationships, and occasional arrests marked my existence. A life heading for an early death or prison until one of my teachers in high school believed that I could be somebody and slowly, but surely, showed me how things could be different and convinced me that I could be somebody. Or I could tell you about my growing up as the only child of wealthy, privileged parents, who provided me with the good life in abundance, seeing to it that I had the very best of most everything, including private boarding schools, fantastic trips abroad, and connections to the right people.

Yes, I could tell you any of these stories, and I probably could make them very interesting. But I'm not going to, for in order to do so I would have to reinvent myself. Because, of course, none of them is true.

They could be true; they are for some people. We don't get to choose our parents, or whether we are born into poverty or into wealth, whether we are born black, white, Asian, or Hispanic, male or female, sickly or healthy. The environment in which we develop where we might have an easy life or a life of struggle is something over which we personally have little, if any, choice. Any of us might just as easily have been the child of a Mongolian herdsman, of a rural Chinese peasant, of an aristocratic English family, of a famous artist, or of a notorious crook--or a million other possibilities. The hand that we are dealt at birth certainly helps to determine the kind of game that we can play. Perhaps the hand is so bad that the cards get folded early. Perhaps it is a middling hand and with luck and skill it can be parlayed into a good winning hand. Perhaps it is an extremely good hand leading to easy winnings, providing that one doesn't foolishly misplay the hand or fail to recognize the value or the importance of the cards.

Perhaps I am stretching the card game metaphor too far, but the point is that we all begin with a set of circumstances and resources over which we have precious little, if any, control. But if we survive our beginnings, we do begin to influence our destinies. Perhaps it is true that we have no choices that we can meaningfully make--that our behavior, our lives, are pre-ordained--that we don't really have any options or choices. But we generally act as if we do. We develop some sort of philosophy of life, some sort of understanding about the meaning of life, a set of moral principles which are used to provide us with guidance in the making of our perceived choices, and by which we judge our own behavior and that of others.

At some level, perhaps both consciously and unconsciously, we grapple with these things throughout most of our lives. We may end up questioning and even discarding values and principles which gave us direction at some point in our lives. Consistency is not necessarily a virtue. Life is sometimes thought of as being a quest--but a quest for what? For happiness? For fame? For fortune? For inner peace? For personal power? When I was a student in high school and in college I seemed to be particularly engaged in some sort of search for meaning. In some way I was on a quest for the TRUTH. Somehow I thought that if I looked long enough, read enough, discussed enough, and thought hard enough that I would find the TRUTH. I wasn't sure what the TRUTH was, but if I found it, then all the questions about life and its meaning would be answered--that I would know the TRUTH and with that knowledge my life in some way would be complete. I suppose that in some measure I am still on that quest but as I have grown older--and not necessarily wiser--I have begun to understand--or at least accept--that full knowledge of TRUTH is something that I will never achieve--that indeed if there is such a thing (and that is a big IF), it will not be fully grasped by me or revealed to me or anyone else (the claims of various gurus and of various cults notwithstanding). The question "What is life?” might be answered by various people in all sorts of ways. But we all do try to answer it so that it means something to us. It has been said that "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." There probably is a good deal of truth in that. Perhaps life is a series of accommodations. We constantly have to adjust our hopes, our dreams, and our plans to our realities.

We all can be dreamers--and should be. We can dream of all sorts of things--better worlds, better lives. And we need to try to achieve those kinds of dreams--or at least work toward the goals of such dreams. But, while dreams are needed, flights of fancy will not get us very far if we dwell on them for too long. None of us can do everything, and none of us can do everything we would like to do. There is much that I love about classical music. Listening to a good symphony orchestra perform a Mahler or Bruckner symphony is a most enjoyable experience. My mother once asked me if I enjoyed music so much, why didn't I pursue a career in music. My answer was short, but to the point--an insufficient lack of talent. I can dream about being a good--if not great--symphony orchestra conductor. But I'll never be that. And that's ok. I'm quite happy to be a political scientist and a teacher at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. That I think I am able to do reasonably well. Perhaps, fundamentally, politics is about the making of decisions--who gets to make them, for whom do they get made, under what conditions are they made, for what purpose are they made, and what is the result of their making. Earlier I indicated that there are many aspects of our lives over which we have little, and can have little, if any, control. Spending our lives lamenting that situation will not get us much of anywhere. We must concentrate our energies on those decisions we can make--and make the most of them. If being a great conductor is not a rational choice for me, then maybe being a political science professor is. Such are the choices for us all.

As we live our lives and are faced with decisions, there will be times that we make the wrong choice. When this happens we should seek instruction from our mistakes. As we go through life we learn things about ourselves, and that knowledge might be useful to us in making future decisions. Sometimes what we learn about ourselves isn't very flattering. Self-awareness is not always pretty. For example, several years ago I spent a few days in Hong Kong--when it was still a British Crown Colony. I went for afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel. There was a small orchestra playing on a balcony above the tea room. The atmosphere and the ambiance as well as the decor was a throwback to the heyday of the British Empire which is when the Peninsula Hotel was built. I let myself be carried back in time and indulged myself the fantasy of being a privileged British colonial enjoying a leisurely afternoon tea in such pleasurable surroundings. Of course it was a relatively brief fantasy-but I eventually became aware that I was really enjoying it far too much.

It was a bit frightening. I became aware that if I had been born a hundred years earlier and had been born to wealth and privilege, I very well might have seen such a pleasured life as my right--that I was deserving of rank and honor--and those less fortunate were equally deserving of their status and living conditions. I didn't want to see myself that way--I wanted to think that I would have been a progressive, fighting to eliminate injustice and the privilege of birth, gender, and race, promoting greater social, economic, and political equality for all in the society. So my immense enjoyment of this afternoon tea was tempered by the fear--maybe the knowledge--that I would not have been the sort of person I claimed to want to be if I had been born to those privileged circumstances. I would like to think that with that experience I learned something about how I might have perceived myself--not only a hundred years ago--but how I might actually be perceiving myself now. Am I taking my own privileged existence as my right and seeing others of lesser privilege as deserving of their lot? I must continue to wrestle with this question.

Another example goes back to my junior year in college. This was the early 1960's. I was a student at Wake Forest University, a private, church-related, all white school in North Carolina. The civil rights movement was being faced by my generation. None of us could easily ignore it. Did we support the movement in promoting racial integration and racial justice? Or, did we resist? Less than ten years earlier the U. S. Supreme Court had finally tackled the issue of legal segregation by race in public schools and other public facilities. But the implementation of racial integration was extremely slow. And integration was only one facet of the larger issue of equality and justice. During my sophomore year several other students along with several faculty members began meeting to develop a strategy to persuade the trustees of Wake Forest University that the "whites only" admissions policy of the school was unjust and needed to be scrapped. We thought the easiest route was to request that the school admit a well qualified young man from Kenya. This student would go through the regular admissions process, and having excellent academic credentials, there would be little reason to turn him down. But in order to admit him, the trustees, at least, would have to made an exception to the existing "whites only" admissions policy. It was a "foot in the door" strategy. If an exception were made for a non-white foreign student, then we would argue that academicaliy qualified Americans of color should have the same opportunity to attend the university.

We were prepared for the trustees to reject our request to change the "whites only" admission policy--but, also, we announced that we were committed to bringing this student to the United States and would enroll him temporarily in what had previously been an all-black public university across town--and that we would each year seek his admission as a transfer student to Wake Forest. So the issue of integrating Wake Forest University would not go away if they refused to accept our initial request for a change in policy. One of the things we did was to bring the issue of integrating the University before the entire student body. One of the chapel services (back in those days there was mandatory chapel twice a week--as well as Saturday morning classes--among other barbaric practices which have now, thankfully, generally passed into oblivion) was to be devoted to a discussion of whether Wake Forest should change its "whites only" policy which would lead to a racially integrated student body. If there seemed to be considerable support from the general student population on the campus for a policy change, this would be possibly helpful in convincing the trustees that it was timely and right to make a policy change.

Both faculty and student spokespersons for our organization--known as the African Student Committee--presented our proposal and made the case why this policy change should be embraced by the entire university community. But other voices were to be heard as well--voices which argued that such a change in policy for the university was not timely, that it would lead to controversy, division, and trouble of unknown proportions on the campus. These voices spoke with strong emotions, with ringing passion. I could sense the agreement of the audience. At the conclusion of the debate a request was made to do a vote. Students who wished to endorse the existing policy--the "whites only" policy--were asked to stand. There was a tremendous rustle as what seemed like the entire student body almost literally jumped to their feet. I was somewhat taken by surprise--the opposition seemed overwhelming, so vehement. Could I have so badly misgauged the attitudes and the feelings of my fellow students? What seemed to me to be so rational and so just seemed to be so easily and so strongly opposed by so many. People were standing all around me; people who were my friends; people I liked. At some level, I didn't know what to think. The sheer size and the passion of the crowd both frightened and bewildered me. I was convinced we were trying to do a good thing, but our reasoned and eminently rational request for a policy change in the promotion of diversity and racial justice was being rejected by such overwhelming numbers and with such vehemence that I wasn't sure what to think or what to do. I was still seated, but not for long. I slowly got to my feet and stood reluctantly, but nevertheless stood, with the crowd. As I stood I was trying to justify my action in all sorts of ways. I thought to myself that maybe, after all, the time wasn't right for what we were trying to do--that we had so badly misgauged our audience--that we had been premature in trying to get a policy supported which required at least passive consent from the student body. I also convinced myself that this vote was no more than a straw vote, that it was merely a sense of the student body, that formally no policy of any sort was being confirmed or rejected. So my standing with the vast majority of the student body, seemingly in support of a policy that I knew to be wrong, that with a few friends and colleagues I had worked to change, didn't really mean anything. It was a good rationalization. I could defend it all, if I had to. The straw vote was soon over and the convocation came to an end and we filed out of Wait Chapel and went on to our classes. And our attempt to change the admissions policy of the university did not end with that rejection by the student body. The trustees did initially reject our request to change the "whites only" admissions policy. We did bring our African student to the United States and enrolled him in the institution across town. We brought him to our campus as often as possible during the next year and had him seek admission to Wake Forest as a transfer student at the end of that year. And, for whatever reason, the University did admit him, and in so doing brought racial integration to Wake Forest University. So the end result was a victory for the promotion of diversity, equality, and racial justice. And I am proud to have been a part of the effort.

But that day in Wait Chapel when I stood with the mob, knowing that I truly disagreed with what they were saying, but trying to justify my standing with them, is not something I will ever forget. I learned something about myself on that day, and what I learned wasn't pretty. This event taught me in a very personal way that the crowd, the mob, if you will, can be persuasive; that one can easily attempt to rationalize one's actions which fundamentally are wrong, inappropriate, or just plain cowardly—in order not to call attention to oneself, make trouble for oneself, or even just give offense to one's friends or colleagues. Sometimes I wonder about all those people who stood around me—whom I joined. Do they remember that convocation, the debate, their vote, and possibly their rationalization for voting the way they did? Today, nearly forty years later, do they feel any sense of regret? Did they learn anything about themselves by their behavior on that day? Well, I hope so.

What I'm trying to say is perhaps too obvious. Life will be full of mistakes, of failures of one sort or another. We will have hopes and dreams which we will not be able to realize, often due to factors over which we have little, if any, control. We must make our bargains and deals with life the best we can. Sometimes we just can't get the job we most want to have; sometimes we have to enroll in a college or university which is not our first choice; sometimes we have to eat burgers when we would rather have prime rib. Life is indeed a series of accommodations. The more that we can learn from our mistakes, our failures, and our disappointments, the more successful and satisfying our lives will be. None of us can do all things and none of us can be all things. But each of us is somebody and there are things that each of us can do--and do well. Make the most of it!

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A. Nick Minton is a professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell.