Convocation 2017 - Dr. Michael Patrick Lynch

Est. 1853

2017 CONVOCATION

Welcome

Thomas P. Foley, J.D.

President, Mount Aloysius College

Introduction

Dr. John Mills

Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs/Provost

Convocation Address

Dr. Michael Patrick Lynch

Philosopher, educator, writer and renowned speaker September 7th, 2017 — Athletic Convocation & Wellness Center

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WELCOME — THOMAS P. FOLEY, J.D. President, Mount Aloysius College Good afternoon to all of you and welcome to this 78th Convocation—and 165th year—in the life of Mount Aloysius.

Welcome to trustees, to faculty, staff, students, honored guests and friends. Thank you for this comfortable day, for the picturesque setting that is our College; thank you for all these uplifted faces in front of us.

It is 165 years since the Sisters of Mercy first demonstrated their affection for these Southern Allegheny Mountains, when seven of their number welcomed 22 young ladies to what was then St. Aloysius Academy. It is almost 120 years since Old Main, the building my sons think is where Harry Potter was filmed, first opened its doors as Mount Aloysius here in Cresson.

And as you sit out there—a century and a half after Sister of Mercy Francis Xavier Warde commanded a similar but smaller assembly—I am acutely aware

that your ability to concentrate is inversely related to how close we come to the dinner hour. So I have three distinct functions to perform here today, and about eight minutes left in which to do it. Let me get right to it.

First, a few words of thanks; second, a word or two about what makes this event necessary; third, and finally, a few words on our theme this year— Authentic Discourse. Let’s begin with thanks to those who make it possible.

We pause in gratitude—thanks to our faculty, thanks to our staff, thanks to our President’s Executive Council, thanks to all the folks who have worked so hard on shared governance this year, and thanks especially to our trustees, seven of whom are with us today. These five constituencies are the blood and muscle, the bone and sinew, the corpuscles and the brains behind the enterprise which will get you to Graduation Day. We thank them today—grateful for their service every day that we are on this mountain.

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Second assignment, explain why a formal convocation is necessary.

Why did we bother to set up all these chairs and require you to sit in them? In one sentence—we are acting out a symbolic tradition that is literally hundreds of years old.

opening our minds to the ideas of a prominent thinker of our time— and look for something that as one US secretary of education put it “unites us as a world.”

So welcome to your very own Convocation, 800 years after the This formal convocation ceremony first convocation was held 5,000 has even deeper roots than Mount miles and an ocean away from Aloysius College, dating back where we sit today. as much as 800 years to the —————————— traditions of teaching and learning at the great medieval universities My final assignment today—a of Europe. This afternoon, we few words on our theme this year, properly carry on a tradition Authentic Discourse. that began in Bologna in Italy and at the Sorbonne in France, Mount Aloysius is fairly unique at Heidelberg in Germany and in the ranks of higher education Edinburgh in Scotland, at Valencia institutions in that we choose in Spain, Vilnius in Lithuania, a theme each year and try to Basel in Switzerland and Oxford coordinate Orientation, the and Cambridge in England.

Connections courses, our Speakers Series, our Faculty Symposium, Nearly a thousand years after dorm activities—even the the very first convocation, an activities in our Little People’s American Secretary of Education Place—around that single idea. spoke directly to the importance of what we begin here today.

Our theme this year is two words He said: “In an interconnected, that don’t sound like they belong competitive global economy, the together, “Authentic Discourse.” only way to secure our common future is through education. It is Let me try to explain how we got the one true path out of poverty, to those two words. the great equalizer that overcomes differences in background, culture Four years ago, we wrestled with and privilege. In the 21st Century, the theme The Common Good: a quality education system is what is it and how do we pursue the centerpiece of a country’s it. We heard from a judge, an economic development, and it can ambassador, an aide to the Vice be the one thing that unites us as a President of the United States, world.” a college president, a Sister of Mercy and a Pulitzer Prize The message of Convocation is winner. We even got a Mount very simple—we are engaged, all of us—in the education of citizens Aloysius monograph out of it. for the betterment of themselves That led us three years ago and the world in which they live. to explore the idea of The We convocate—from the Latin Good Life, and we started at con and vocare “to call together in assembly” so that we can begin Convocation with a fabulous interpretation of that theme from our serious endeavors of a new Father Bill Byron, who defined academic year, in this case by it as a “life lived generously

in the service of others.” We finished that theme with Yale Law School Dean Guido Calabresi who reminded us that we often get second chances to do the right thing in our pursuit of The Good Life. And we produced another monograph that now sits in the Library of Congress.

We have a committee that helps formulate these themes each year, and it occurred to us that in order to define and act on both The Common Good and The Good Life, it was essential that we develop a Voice that enables that action. So we adopted Voice as our theme two years running and we heard from: • an intercontinental explorer who is also a Harvard-trained minister • a Pulitzer Prize winner who still loves his teachers • a Rhodes Scholar whose academic specialty is prison literature

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• a Sister of Mercy who has served as a missionary doctor on three continents • a Judge who stressed the importance of humility in the public square • a 100 year-old refugee who gave voice to thousands who didn’t escape, & from one of our own, • a Professor of English who told stories about unforgettable voices along his journey.

So we went from The Common Good to The Good Life to Voice— you still with me?

I got a letter this summer from NYU’s President-Emeritus John Sexton. John wrote to me about a friend of his who predicted 25 years ago exactly what we have seen played out in the last year or so in our country: whole groups of people completely exasperated by other whole groups of people—left, right, alt left and right, conservative, libertarian, democrat, republican, religious, atheist.

Sexton goes on to describe his own frustration with what his friend described as: The massive, stubborn and exasperating otherness of others…The unsettling experience of being shut off, not just from opinions, but from the entire life experience of large numbers of one’s contemporaries.

Twenty five years earlier, his friend predicted a: systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens who would become walled off from each other.

In the end he said that: each group will at some point ask about the other, in utter puzzlement and often with mutual revulsion—how did they get to be that way?

Whatever our perspective, we have all experienced a little of that in the last few months at least. We ask—How did those people get that way? Who are these people?

I don’t understand them at all. We have little or no patience these days for what the writer called the otherness of others.

The result of this intolerance and noise in our national coliseum, as social psychologist (and Yale President) Peter Salovey argued, is to “present real barriers”: • • •

to “reasoned investigation” to “productive exchanges between differing views,” and to “the search for common ground on the most challenging problems facing our global societies.”

Now let’s be honest, none of us is completely free of bias. And one purpose of all education is to teach us how to sort out our biases, whether they are inherited or learned.

And so, one purpose of higher education is to help you develop the critical thinking skills that will help you form and reframe opinions around a base of knowledge, that you have personally sought out and validated—and that might be our best definition of Authentic Discourse right there.

Authentic Discourse is the ability and practice of forming and reframing opinions around a base of knowledge that is sought out and validated by you. Knowledge or information about which you have a context—you can verify the background behind that information, that fact, that opinion, that conclusion.

The responsibility of Authentic Discourse means not just accepting that a sound bite on television, or a shouted epithet at a rally or a phrase written on a placard is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Instead, Authentic Discourse is built on researched and validated ideas for which you can personally vouch.

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The discourse is then authentic— the discourse really and truly reflects your research, your idea, your sources.

Spouting someone else’s opinions without doing our own research and engaging in our own discourse as it were—well, that would be to shortchange your own unique perspective and be the opposite of Authentic Discourse.

dialogue. His Ted Talk on the subject has already been viewed by over a million and a half people. He has an uncanny ability to make sense out of all this—let’s be nice and call all the shouting and the name calling and the twitter frenzy—let’s just say that it is not Authentic Discourse.

Don’t worry if we are not all on the same page on this yet—that is the whole point of spending a year trying to figure it out—we will all learn as we go.

Anyway, Dr. Michael Patrick Lynch’s ability to make some sense out of it just won him major grants from a conservative group and a liberal one—so he must be doing something right. Dr. Mills will tell you more about our speaker in a minute.

And here’s the good news. We found maybe the best person in the whole country to kick off this

Let me finish now on how we got from the Common Good when our seniors were freshman to

Authentic Discourse for this class.

What unites our Mount Aloysius community—from English professors to business office administrators, from nursing students to surg tech instructors from science to political science— is a determination to speak truth in a merciful way. Our faculty teach us to be skeptical about narratives that, as Salovey explains, “oversimplify issues, inflame the emotions, or misdirect the mind.”

Your faculty will spend the next two to four years teaching you to be critical thinkers about your field of study and eventually about your life and the opinions that will frame your authenticity and promote civil discourse.

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We want you to develop your voice so that your discourse includes listening and isn’t always combat.

We want you to avoid the temptations of what Chief Justice Warren Burger famously called “the coliseum culture.”

And we want you, paraphrasing John Sexton, to resist the inclination to pit “simplistic and bi-polar viewpoints against other in a [mere] battle of slogans.”

You are bigger than that. You are better than that. I believe that.

Our faculty and staff believe that.

Our Convocation speaker today believes that (or he wouldn’t come all the way from Connecticut to be with you).

And we want you to believe that.

Your opinion matters, but we want it to be your opinion, not someone else’s slogan. Welcome to this year of Authentic Discourse.

And welcome to this 78th Convocation in the history of Mount Aloysius.

Authentic Discourse is

the ability and practice of forming and reframing opinions around a base of knowledge that is sought out and validated by you.

Knowledge or information about which you have a context—you can verify the background behind that information, that fact, that opinion, that conclusion.

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It is my very special pleasure to introduce our speaker today. As detailed in our program brochure Professor Michael Patrick Lynch comes to us from the University of Connecticut where he is a professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Humanities Institute.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS OF DR. JOHN MILLS Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs/Provost

Dr. Lynch is internationally known and recognized for his scholarly work on truth and public discourse and the ethics of technology. But he is not only an outstanding scholar who contributes to the issues affecting our daily lives. He is also an outstanding teacher who knows how to relate and reach students at all levels—from freshmen to the graduate level. Professor Lynch has provocatively addressed the issue of arrogance in our daily discourse with others and how our use and

reliance on the internet—where we sometimes say we can learn anything—actually works to reinforce our biases and beliefs rather than helping us “learn”.

What I find especially important is that he has made it clear that those of us in the “Ivory Tower” of academe need to be aware that we are not immune to this dilemma and he has proposed a way for us to escape its grasp.

And it is simple: believe in truth, objective truth and have intellectual humility. Which is to say admit you do not know as much as you think and see that your view is capable of improvement. Today he will engage us in the theme for our year Authentic Discourse and begin to “lead us to that common space where we can listen to one another and trade reasons back and forth”. Professor Lynch.

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DR. MICHAEL PATRICK LYNCH: CONVOCATION ADDRESS — AUTHENTIC DISCOURSE Philosopher, educator, writer and renowned speaker First I just want to say thank you —to President Foley, to the Board of Trustees and to all of you, especially the incoming students here at Mount Aloysius for being here and inviting me today.

So that said, let me just show you something that you probably have with you too—your smart phone.

So, imagine you had one of these, miniaturized to such an extent that it was hooked up directly to your brain. If you had one of these implants, you’d be able to upload and download from the internet at the speed of thought. Accessing Wikipedia or social media would be, well, from the inside it would be a lot like consulting your own memory. It would be as easy and as intimate as thinking. Would mean that you would know more of what’s true?

After all, just because the way of accessing more information is faster doesn’t mean the information itself is more accurate, we all know that. And more information can sometimes mean that evaluation is harder because, well, you have more data but less time for evaluation.

And yet, I think you’d agree that a lot of us are living like this right now. We already carry a world of information in our pockets and yet it seems to me that the more information we have and share online, the harder it is for us to engage in some Authentic Discourse with one another.

And that seems to me a rather surprising thing.

So look, we have all this information and we share so much online and it seems like this means that we should be engaging politically, culturally in more really meaningful discourse with one another. But maybe not so much.

Partly not, because we all realize that we’re living in isolated information bubbles right now.

We’re polarized and not just over values but over the facts.

The internet didn’t create this polarization, of course, but it does speed it up. And for the simple reason that the magic about the internet, the reason it really works, the reason it’s so amazing is not because it gets us more information. But because it gets us the information we want.

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Our online life, we all know, is personalized. Everything that you encounter online—from the ads that you see to the news that comes down your Twitter feed— is all personalized deliberately for your—to satisfy your unique preferences. And so, as a result this personalization keeps getting us the information we think we want. It tends to inflate our bubbles rather than bursting them.

And that puts us in this weird position.

We seem to know more. We think we know more, and yet we can’t agree on what it is we think we know. So how are we going to solve this sort of problem — this problem that we might call “knowledge polarization,” and regain some more Authentic Discourse?

psychologists, and neuroscientists.

But you’re also, in my opinion, going to need help from philosophy because if we’re going to solve this problem of “knowledge polarization” and recapture some Authentic Discourse; we’re going to have to reconnect with three basic philosophical ideas. And these philosophical ideas, like a lot of philosophical ideas, are easy to state but they’re difficult to put into practice. And if we’re going to put them into practice we need to do three things.

The first thing was mentioned earlier—we need to believe in truth. You might have noticed that our culture right now is having something of a troubled relationship with that concept.

We disagree on so much that In order to solve the problem, it can seem, as one political it seems to me that we’re going commentator put it, that there to have to clearly address our aren’t any facts anymore. And technology. We’re going to have that’s a representation of a very to try to redesign our technological seductive line of thought. An platform somehow, to mitigate the argument that goes like this: effects of polarization. And I’m “Well, we can’t really get happy to report, as some of you outside of the perspective that know, that many of the people in goes with our line of thought Google, in Facebook, many very because every time we try, we smart people are working on that just get more information from right now. our perspective. So we might But, while fixing our technology is as well just give up and realize important, it’s not, in my opinion, that objective truth either going to solve the problem of doesn’t exist or really doesn’t “knowledge polarization” and matter.” help us completely regain more That’s a really old idea actually.

Authentic Discourse. And It goes back at least as far as the the reason for that is because great philosopher Protagoras ultimately, what we’re talking who said that objective truth about here is not a technological was an illusion because man is problem. It’s a human problem. the measure of all things.

And in order to solve a human problem, you’re going to need Man is the measure of all help from humans. You’re things. And that can be sort going to need help from people of a liberating thought when who study humans. People you first encounter it. We’re like political scientists, doctors, saying like. “Well, okay, so

I get to make up my own truth.”

But really, in my view, this is a bit of rationalization disguised as philosophy. So when you’re rationalizing your own biases, the thought that I am the measure of all things is a way of convincing myself that whatever I happen to be thinking at the moment has to be right. And that surely runs up against some basic features of our experience.

Look, it’s difficult to step out of your perspective. Of course, that’s right, of course it’s difficult.

Of course, it’s difficult to know anything with certainty but, actually, we all do agree on certain things. We agree, I hope, that you can’t flap your arms and fly. We agree that boas can kill people.

We agree that people are suffering from the effects of a hurricane need help. We agree that there is an external reality and ignoring it can get you hurt. But the idea that objective truth is an illusion is seductive, because it’s comforting.

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In our culture right now we are a little bit like the guy from that old movie, The Matrix. In this movie there’s a guy who realizes that his whole life is an illusion. And he has an opportunity to return but there’s a particular character who realizes, who actually just decides that he likes it that way.

And you can see why. Because in the illusion everything goes great and in the illusion you can say to yourself, “I get what I want. I believe what I want.” And that’s sort of like us. We wrap ourselves in our cozy information bubbles and we say to ourselves, “We are the measure of reality.”

A good example of this attitude that we’re in—which I call bad faith towards the truth—is the phenomenon of fake news.

Now, the fake news that was spread on the internet during the last presidential election was designed to inflate our bubbles.

It was designed to feed into polarization and it worked very well. But the really amazing thing about the fake news that’s spread online during the election was not that it got people to believe false things, although it did. The really amazing thing to me has been how we’ve reacted to this phenomenon.

Because right now, the very term fake news means any new story I don’t like. And that’s an example of the bad faith towards truth that I’m talking about. It is an example of wrapping yourself in this illusion.

The really dangerous thing about skepticism regarding truth is that it leads to despotism—Man is the measure of all things, inevitably becomes THE man is the measure of all things. Just as every man for himself inevitably becomes only the strong will survive.

The end of a novel by George Orwell, 1984 has been much discussed recently. At the end of 1984 the sinister `thought policeman’ O’Brien is torturing the protagonist, Winston Smith into believing that two plus two equals five. The point that O’Brien makes clear is to convince Smith that whatever the Party says is the truth, and the truth is whatever the Party says.

What O’Brien knows is that once people accept the idea that there are no facts, and there is no such thing as truth; critical thought and dissent becomes impossible. You can’t speak truth to Power if the Power speaks truth by definition.

Okay, so I said that there are three things we had to do if we wanted to try to regain some sense of Authentic Discourse and the first thing is believe in truth.

The second thing could be summed up by a Latin phrase that can used as a motto for the enlightenment; sapere aude—dare to know or, as Kant stated it, dare to know for yourself.

Now in the early days of the internet, a lot of us, and very much me, thought that the internet was always going to make it easier for us to know for ourselves. And in many ways, of course, it has.

But in other ways it’s made our methods of acquiring knowledge more passive. Much of what we know, again at least for me, we know through Google.

I “Google” now. I download prepackage sets of facts and then I pass them along the assembly line of social media. Of course “Google-knowing” is great and effective precisely because it allows me to outsource my cognitive effort. I offload my mental effort to networks of other

people and that’s great because, after all, then I don’t have to clutter my mind with all sorts of facts. I can just look them up when I need them. At least that’s great for me. But you will agree that there is a difference between downloading some set of facts, and understanding why or how those facts are as they are.

Understanding why a particular disease spreads or how to work through a particular mathematical proof or why your friend is depressed—really understanding those things—requires more than just looking up something online.

We all know that but it’s easy to forget. Understanding— active understanding, deeper understanding—sometimes requires getting out into the field, working through the proof, talking to someone. Now, I’m not saying we should stop “Googleknowing”. I’m not going to.

What I am saying is that we should perhaps not overvalue it. We should remember that there are more active ways of understanding, and those are the sorts of ways that you’re going to pursue right here.

One distinctive aspect of really trying to understand something is that when you really work at understanding something in that way, you open yourself up the possibility that you could be wrong.

One of the things that’s weird about `Google-knowing’ is that this type of knowledge is sort of a bubble-knowing—the kind of knowledge that you think you can find some verification for online.

But truly attempting to understand is to risk the possibility that your view is mistaken—that you don’t actually know it all.

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And that brings me to the third thing I think we need to do if we are going to regain Authentic Discourse in this country. And that is to have a little humility.

The type of humility I’m talking about is what we might call intellectual or epistemic humility.

It’s the idea that you don’t know it all, that you have something to learn, that you have limitations, that you have prejudicial biases.

Some of which yes, you’ve grown up with. Some of which you don’t even realize that you have; and that goes for all of us, including myself.

But deeper than that, the type of humility that I’m talking about really involves having the willingness to see your world view as open to improvement from the experience and evidence of other people. I’m going to repeat that.

Being willing to see your world view as open to improvement from the evidence and experience of others.

It’s more than just being open to change, it’s more than just being open to self-improvement.

It means being willing to see yourself as capable of learning something from what others with very different meanings bring to the table. I think it’s not a stretch to say that our culture is not particularly great at encouraging this sort of humility. That’s probably because, well, we tend to confuse arrogance with actual confidence. And it’s partly because, well, if we’re honest with each other, it’s just easier to be arrogant. It’s just easier to tell yourself that you already got it all figured out, that you know it all, that your moral principles are always the right ones.

Here’s the thing though; in a democracy we can’t really function politically in the way that we aspire to if we’re not willing to try to regain a common space, a common space of reason, a space where we can exchange ideas, and

in order to do that we’re going to have to remember to believe in truth. We’re going to have to remember to pursue more active ways of understanding and we’re going to have to remember that we don’t know it all, that there’s room to improve. We’re going to have to remember that we must have a sense of humility. If we want to regain more Authentic Discourse, we have to regain a sense that our perspectives—as diverse and beautiful as they are—are different perspectives on one common reality, one common reality.

Thank you very much.

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Est. 1853

Mount Aloysius College — Since 1853 Founded in 1853 by Sisters of Mercy from Dublin, Ireland, Mount Aloysius College is an accredited, comprehensive, degree-granting institution offering Associate, Baccalaureate, and select Graduate Programs where women and men of diverse cultural, educational, and religious backgrounds optimize their aptitudes and acquire skills for meaningful careers. Mount Aloysius graduates are job ready, technology ready, and community ready.

Mount Aloysius College is located on a beautiful 193-acre campus in Cresson, nestled in the scenic Southern Allegheny Mountains of west-central Pennsylvania. Convenient and accessible from U.S. Route 22; the College’s setting is rural but within easy access from State College, Altoona, Johnstown and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Mount Aloysius has earned accolades as a Best Value College, a College of Distinction, a Catholic College of Distinction, and a Military Friendly Institution. The College’s Nursing Division is ranked sixth among Pennsylvania’s largest and most prestigious nursing programs.

The College is accredited by Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the Conference for Mercy Higher Education, and by 12 separate profession-specific accreditation bodies.

Four Traditions

Mercy Tradition

Catholic Tradition

We cherish and revere the charism and example of the Sisters of Mercy, our founders and inspiration. We make concrete the Mercy Values — mercy in all relationships among students, faculty, staff, and administration, justice in all our endeavors, with hospitality and service to all at Mount Aloysius and in the larger community in which we live. In pursuit of these values, our faculty and staff personally engage, care for, and mentor each student. In practice as well as in word, we help all our students — including those facing significant challenges — to pursue their objectives.

surmount economic and educational hurdles that inhibit their aspirations for productive and fulfilling professions. To this end, we recognize that responsibility is shared across the Mount Aloysius community.

Our faculty acknowledge and promote the truth that learning for career and for life takes place both in and outside classroom settings. Our staff give daily support to students, enhancing the process that brings them to their graduation day. We require service of our students so that they will recognize that educational attainment and self-giving are inseparable components of the good life.

We rejoice in the assistance and loyalty of trustees, alumni, and the larger community who contribute in multiple ways to our mission, modeling the conviction that fulfillment ensues as a result of generous living.

We affirm and embrace the Catholic heritage of higher education, seeking knowledge, and communicating truth from its manifold sources, and welcome people of all faiths. (60% of the student body comes from other traditions.)

Liberal Arts Tradition We challenge and empower students in all programs to attain the goals of a liberal arts education — character development, critical thinking, communication skills, a passion for continual learning — and to become responsible, contributing citizens.

Mount Aloysius Tradition We honor and sustain the Mount Aloysius legacy of being an “engine of opportunity” for all students, helping them