When I think of what our graduates will do, I mentally pose a question for those out in the greater world who are in the position to make choices. What kind of person do you want for your business or your school?
Sometimes it strikes me that what we do at Wyoming Catholic College — small as we are, remote as we are from the great urban centers — makes us more central than most of our well-heeled peers in higher education. For example, the idea of living without mobile phones sometimes erupts into the public consciousness, as it did this week when the New York Times featured the teenager “leading the smart phone liberation movement.” Well, WCC made “smart phone liberation” a policy when our first students arrived in 2007. Without being ideological luddites, our students read real texts, work and pray in real time with each other, and encounter the natural world as few people do in our virtual age.
When I think of what our graduates will do, I mentally pose a question for those out in the greater world who are in the position to make choices. What kind of person do you want for your business or your school? Somebody with technical expertise, trained in some one specialty? But suppose such a person is incapable of taking a broader perspective, writing cogently, or speaking coherently in public? Perhaps you think having a graduate of a prestigious university will guarantee that you get the best, but suppose that person also feels entitled to perks and privileges for having bestowed themselves upon you? Do you really want someone thoroughly indoctrinated in the gospel of woke, trigger-happy with grievances?
Or do you hope to meet a young man or woman who is morally serious, mentally agile, and present to the complexities of situations as they arise— not to mention practiced in the responsibilities of leadership?
I have thought about it often this week, which we have set aside for Senior Orations. Oration Week at WCC is a thing, as people say these days. From a few notes, each senior gives a 30-minute talk on a topic of his or her choosing after working with a faculty advisor, first on the senior thesis and then on the oration itself. When the hour comes, each one is up there alone, sometimes with an audience of a hundred or more. After the talk itself, seniors field questions for another half hour, having to think on their feet and adjust to perspectives that might not have occurred to them in their preparations.
It’s striking to hear what they care about and what they argue so forcefully for or against. No one has on blinders with respect to current problems. But a topic like Abigail O’Brien’s, “The Age of Gnosticism: Transgenderism, Transhumanism, and Human Identity in the Digital Age,” puts a major aspect of contemporary progressivism in a context that would literally be forbidden at most universities. The range of topics is impressive in itself, especially in a cultural climate when “diversity, equity, and inclusion” dominate the agenda of government education from the earliest grades.
Our students are reason for hope (which, by the way, was the topic of Braden Licciardi’s oration). I invite you to experience what I mean.
Republished with gracious permission from the Wyoming Catholic College Weekly Bulletin.
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The featured image is “The Blue Coat School (officially Christ’s Hospital)” (1808) by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) and Augustus Charles Pugin (1762–1832) (after) John Bluck (fl. 1791–1819), Joseph Constantine Stadler (fl. 1780–1812), Thomas Sutherland (1785–1838), J. Hill, and Harraden (aquatint engravers). The picture shows the Great Hall on St. Matthew’s Day, September 21st. On this day two senior boys destined for scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, known as Grecians, gave orations in praise of the school, one in Latin and the other in English. Along the wall on the right, a painting by Antonio Verrio This engraving was published as Plate 10 of Microcosm of London (1808) (see File:Microcosm of London Plate 010 – The Hall, Blue Coat School.jpg) This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.