Elise Salem, Professor of English and Associate Provost for Global Learning, delivered the convocation address at the FDU Academic Convocation, September 27, 2006

In early July, while vacationing in Lebanon, I checked my email and learned that I would be this year’s convocation speaker.  It had been a lovely week: late café nights, Mediterranean beaches, and the Mondiale, Soccer World Cup.  My son and I had arrived in Beirut a week earlier and were whisked from the airport to our family home to watch the great Brazilian team take on France.

In Lebanon, most families, communities, villages, displayed flags of allegiance.  Every other car on the congested highways showed off a flag from Germany, Argentina, France, Italy, and especially Brazil. But Brazil did not win that night. Depressed and stunned by the defeat, we were then surprised to hear celebratory fireworks from the mountains. Next day we learned that the Druze [one of the many factions] celebrated Brazil’s loss because Hizballah supported Brazil. Equally interesting was that many of Lebanon’s Christians did not celebrate France’s victory, despite historic ties between France and the Christians.  In the kaleidoscope of Lebanese politics, many Christians had aligned with Hizballah and, hence, were mourning Brazil’s loss with the Shi’a.

Welcome to Lebanon.  Here’s how the joke goes:  if you visit Lebanon once, you think you can write an article.  If you go there twice, you might write a book.  But if you live in Lebanon for a year, you throw up your hands in despair, as you realize you don’t understand a thing. My convocation speech would make note of that. I wanted to say something about complex cultural identity and global politics, about false assumptions and simplistic dichotomies, about how a “little learning is a dangerous thing” . . .

It’s July 9 and the final soccer match between Italy and France.  All of Lebanon is watching, divided, as usual, in the most ludicrous ways. And then the final moments: Zinedine Zidane, the glorious French superstar, captain of the team, playing his last game, was red-carded and thrown off the field in disgrace after head-butting the Italian Materazzi. It was mayhem, from Berlin to Beirut, and, suddenly, an odd unity across Lebanon, as even those rooting for Italy found themselves in agony and in empathy with the Algerian-born Zidane.  Zidane, a fellow Arab, shamed by a Westerner. What did Materazzi say to him? Certainly here was even more good material for my convocation speech.

But those were still playful days in Lebanon.

On July 12, we learned that Hizballah had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers . . .

In the many years I’ve taught at FDU, thousands of students have heard my stories: the silly antics of my children, the funeral of my American mother in our Lebanese village, and war stories. Always war stories. 

So here we are, hours into the evacuation from Beirut, disembarking from an assault Chinook helicopter onto an amphibious transporter in the Mediterranean.  On the steel deck and beside the camouflaged artillery are scores of marines in formation.  “Welcome toAmerica,” calls out a green crocodile mascot, waving and handing out candy. 30 hours into the evacuation we are lined up at a feeding station in a refugee camp in Cyprus. Conditions are deteriorating rapidly and we’re reminded of New Orleans. 65 hours later, our chartered flight from Germany lands in Philadelphia; we unload carrying children we’ve never met before, who have fallen asleep on our shoulders. Red Cross workers throw out Micky Mouse dolls. 

It’s hard to think during a war. 

We don’t train for this in graduate school. The experiences of war are so far outside education that we must acknowledge that education has to become something it is not. I can’t make the connections and don’t know how to end the story.

By mid August there is a ceasefire in Lebanon and a new UN resolution. Back in the US, media coverage shifted away from Lebanon and focused on the JonBenet Ramsey story. 10 years after her killing, the culprit may have been found. A reporter on Primetimeannounced: “the globe is focused tonight on the unfolding of this tragedy . . .”  The globe? Hardly. But then, again, is there anything in the world more tragic [and hence more newsworthy] than the tortured death of an innocent child? I recall Dostoevsky’s great novel with the desperate Ivan Karamazov compelled to reject god and a world that allows for the suffering of innocent babes: “It's not worth one single tear of the martyred little girl who beat her breast with her tiny fist, shedding her innocent tears and praying to 'sweet Jesus' to rescue her in the stinking outhouse.”

Despite what many in the world think about U.S. foreign policy, most aspire to send their kids to an American university. Higher education has done well here. To educate is to draw out, to become something you are not, to go outside yourself, to confront, to understand ideas that you didn’t invent, to put to use people you’ve never met, to inhabit a world elsewhere that becomes part of your world. Part of the job of an educator is to introduce you to those worlds. And those worlds are not so elsewhere any more.  They are, in fact, very close by, already implicating us, shaping us in ways we’re conscious, and not so conscious, of.   

But how to go outside ourselves to find the world? We would do well to reread John Stuart Mill’s classic “On Liberty.” An individual’s right to freedom of expression should never become a platitude. We must remain mindful that, as Mill wrote: “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race.” In all societies dominated by bureaucracy and mass culture, education provides a way outside of the constraints of government and public opinion. And a university is that rare site where active engagement, vocal and impassioned questioning, and even dissent, should be encouraged. The need for innovation, for thinking hard, comes with passion and commitment. And that’s the work of the faculty.  They’ve been trained to think and are hired to think and hence to teach. They teach effectively when they continue to think and think anew. That is why we need to put our trust in those we have commissioned to think. A university is also a place forever married to youth, not only because our students remain young [as we grow older], but because we hire young faculty, who are given the opportunity to shape the education of our students. 

So much depends on point of view. . . Swift’s 18^th century satire, Gulliver’s Travels has been a wonderful book to teach over the years:  Things look differently from the perspective of a minute Lilliputian or a giant Brobdingnagian, and poor Gulliver, who goes about whinnying like the horses he identifies with, when he, like us, is only a cleaned up despicable Yahoo. Who is looking and perceiving what about who?

Knowledge is power. What is taught is important, but equally important is who is teaching? To whom are we teaching? Why are we teaching what we are teaching?

There are many different ways to tell a story and no one way to educate about the world. In Arabic, the word for knowledge is ‘ilm.  If you add an A to it, it becomes ‘alam, the world. Education, in fact, is a way into the world. We do it by transgressing, by moving across traditional boundaries, by going beyond dichotomies, beyond categories of fixed identities. We do it by looking way past the “you’re either with us or against us” mentality. 

I was born in Beirut, to an Arab father and an American mother. Growing up, my siblings and I were asked:  what are you? Arab or American? We would always answer: nuss/nuss . . . half/half. Then the predictable questions: What half is American and what half is Arab? Which half do you like more? What half is stronger? Is the top half American? Is your left side Arab?

Even as kids we knew these questions were utterly ridiculous.