Morning Address to the Class of 2008 - January 20, 2005
Headmaster Walter Johnson presented this talk to the Class of 2008 on January 20, 2005.Good morning. Mrs. Whitaker and the Upper School Deans have conceived a program whereby various members of our community will give brief talks to the Upper School classes over the coming months and years. The idea is that this can be a forum for more personal reflections than in other assemblies. And since my Moral Philosophy Seminar is only open to juniors and seniors, you're a fresh audience unused to my tendency to extravagant examples and analogies. What an opportunity!
Good morning. Mrs. Whitaker and the Upper School Deans have conceived a program whereby various members of our community will give brief talks to the Upper School classes over the coming months and years. The idea is that this can be a forum for more personal reflections than in other assemblies. And since my Moral Philosophy Seminar is only open to juniors and seniors, you're a fresh audience unused to my tendency to extravagant examples and analogies. What an opportunity!
Let me start with a question -- how many of you are excited by the prospect of a career as a high school principal or headmaster? Raise your hands! Either you're too shy to admit a vaguely shameful ambition, or the idea never occurred to you, and may even seem bizarre.
My hand would certainly NOT have gone up when I was in 10th grade at White Plains High School, despite the fact that my father was then the Superintendent of Schools in White Plains and my mother was an English teacher at Rye High School. I didn't want to be a teacher, much less an administrator. So how did I end up an English teacher and an administrator? Is this genetic determinism? In fact, before I found my way to the classroom, I tried a variety of jobs, and even started a few careers. I was, in chronological order: a taxicab driver, a graduate student teaching Freshman English at U. Penn., a museum guide, a Rare Book Curator, a museum administrator, a law student, a literary agent, and then an English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.
What drew me to teaching English was love -- no, sorry -- I mean love of literature, love of ideas, love of beauty, and love of dialogue. I discovered I was never happier than when talking with teenagers about things that really mattered to me, and which I might be able to help them discover mattered to them, too.
What drew me to become an administrator was frustration, and probably a little arrogance. I was tired of working for people who in my view did a bad job as administrators, and since I had been successful as a museum administrator, I believed I could do a better job. I thought that if I did the job well I could make more of a difference for students and teachers than if I continued solely as a teacher.
When I was a student, we talked about "the administration" more critically than you do. I graduated high school in 1970, so I was a 10th grader in 1968, if you know what that means. I believe it was Timothy Leary, an icon of the 60's, who said, "Think for yourself -- question authority!" A person in authority was assumed by definition to be bad or corrupt, because authority was a euphemism for power, and, as Lord Acton warned, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." We tended to see power only in institutional terms. The President was powerful, and he led us into Vietnam; the University President was powerful, and allowed ROTC on campus.
We also saw people who used institutional power in positive ways -- Martin Luther King, Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, among others. Usually, though, we saw them as challenging authority, and didn't think about the institutions they worked within to make those challenges effective. I had my own father as an example. As Superintendent of Schools, he led White Plains to be the first city district in the United States to integrate its schools, and he was an early leader in supporting the careers of women as educational administrators.
The reality is that there are many kinds of power, and part of growing up is experimenting with power, discovering one's capacity to influence others. There's the physical power of one's own body, the social power to include or exclude, the power of sexual attraction, the power of intellectual dominance, the power of money, the power of charisma. All kinds of power can be abused; all kinds of power can corrupt -- not just institutional authority.
I was asked to talk about something personally meaningful to me, and since my identity to you is inextricably linked to my institutional identity as Headmaster, or as we used to say in the 60's, "an authority figure," I thought I should tell you what that authority has meant to me. As I said, I became an administrator because I wanted to make a difference to the experience of students and teachers, but I've learned that authority -- that all power -- can be dangerous to oneself. William Butler Yeats has a poem entitled "The Fascination of What's Difficult," and authority is fascinatingly difficult, not so much in learning the mechanisms of how to get things done, but in learning how restraint must define and limit power.
What I have learned in my very small arena is that the more authority one has, the more important becomes consciousness of one's limits. People who don't understand my job often think of it as having power; I think of it as having limits. There are things I simply will not do, lines I will not cross. I will not allow myself to see good intentions as a justification for using my authority outside those limits, many of which are self-imposed.
There's a lovely passage in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," an exchange between Roper and Sir Thomas More:
"Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
Good intentions are one of the most dangerous causes of abuse of power. So, for me, "laws" are crucial to my own well-being, as well as to the good of the school. Our laws are policies and procedures, the fundamental fairness of treating equal situations equally, and consulting widely in those cases where ultimately I have to be the one to make a painful decision.
Mr. Cooper-Leary has one of the world’s great plays in rehearsal, Sophocles’ "Antigone." Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, and her brothers have killed each other in a struggle for the throne of Thebes. One brother was the King; the other a rebel. Antigone’s uncle, Creon, becomes King and orders that the rebel not be buried. Antigone disobeys. Her conflict with Creon is one between love and power, between the laws of God and those of man, between duties to family and duties to the state, and ultimately, between fate and freedom. Creon’s son, Haimon, is engaged to Antigone, and tries to persuade his father not to have Antigone executed. He says:
"I beg you, do not be unchangeable:
Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul–
A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty."
A beautiful warning to anyone who would experiment with any kind of power, who would be attracted to authority in the hope of doing good. In essence, the advice is – don’t confuse your self, your soul, your essential identity with some power you have, whether institutional authority, physical strength, beauty, intelligence, or popularity. Those powers are not you; they are loaned to you. It is pleasing to the self-esteem to define oneself by some power or talent one has, to feel that one has more freedom to choose, to be oneself because of that power. But what defines you is not power, but what you love, and for your own well-being, power must always be subservient to love. If you define yourself instead by your power or your talent, you may find one day that you are empty, as Creon was empty.
One reason I love high school is that students do challenge authority; all one need do is listen.
Creon says to his son, Haimon:
"You consider it right for a man of my years and experience
To go to school to a boy?"
And Haimon replies:
"It is not right
If I am wrong. But if I am young, and right,
What does my age matter?"
Back
Let me start with a question -- how many of you are excited by the prospect of a career as a high school principal or headmaster? Raise your hands! Either you're too shy to admit a vaguely shameful ambition, or the idea never occurred to you, and may even seem bizarre.
My hand would certainly NOT have gone up when I was in 10th grade at White Plains High School, despite the fact that my father was then the Superintendent of Schools in White Plains and my mother was an English teacher at Rye High School. I didn't want to be a teacher, much less an administrator. So how did I end up an English teacher and an administrator? Is this genetic determinism? In fact, before I found my way to the classroom, I tried a variety of jobs, and even started a few careers. I was, in chronological order: a taxicab driver, a graduate student teaching Freshman English at U. Penn., a museum guide, a Rare Book Curator, a museum administrator, a law student, a literary agent, and then an English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.
What drew me to teaching English was love -- no, sorry -- I mean love of literature, love of ideas, love of beauty, and love of dialogue. I discovered I was never happier than when talking with teenagers about things that really mattered to me, and which I might be able to help them discover mattered to them, too.
What drew me to become an administrator was frustration, and probably a little arrogance. I was tired of working for people who in my view did a bad job as administrators, and since I had been successful as a museum administrator, I believed I could do a better job. I thought that if I did the job well I could make more of a difference for students and teachers than if I continued solely as a teacher.
When I was a student, we talked about "the administration" more critically than you do. I graduated high school in 1970, so I was a 10th grader in 1968, if you know what that means. I believe it was Timothy Leary, an icon of the 60's, who said, "Think for yourself -- question authority!" A person in authority was assumed by definition to be bad or corrupt, because authority was a euphemism for power, and, as Lord Acton warned, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." We tended to see power only in institutional terms. The President was powerful, and he led us into Vietnam; the University President was powerful, and allowed ROTC on campus.
We also saw people who used institutional power in positive ways -- Martin Luther King, Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, among others. Usually, though, we saw them as challenging authority, and didn't think about the institutions they worked within to make those challenges effective. I had my own father as an example. As Superintendent of Schools, he led White Plains to be the first city district in the United States to integrate its schools, and he was an early leader in supporting the careers of women as educational administrators.
The reality is that there are many kinds of power, and part of growing up is experimenting with power, discovering one's capacity to influence others. There's the physical power of one's own body, the social power to include or exclude, the power of sexual attraction, the power of intellectual dominance, the power of money, the power of charisma. All kinds of power can be abused; all kinds of power can corrupt -- not just institutional authority.
I was asked to talk about something personally meaningful to me, and since my identity to you is inextricably linked to my institutional identity as Headmaster, or as we used to say in the 60's, "an authority figure," I thought I should tell you what that authority has meant to me. As I said, I became an administrator because I wanted to make a difference to the experience of students and teachers, but I've learned that authority -- that all power -- can be dangerous to oneself. William Butler Yeats has a poem entitled "The Fascination of What's Difficult," and authority is fascinatingly difficult, not so much in learning the mechanisms of how to get things done, but in learning how restraint must define and limit power.
What I have learned in my very small arena is that the more authority one has, the more important becomes consciousness of one's limits. People who don't understand my job often think of it as having power; I think of it as having limits. There are things I simply will not do, lines I will not cross. I will not allow myself to see good intentions as a justification for using my authority outside those limits, many of which are self-imposed.
There's a lovely passage in Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," an exchange between Roper and Sir Thomas More:
"Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake."
Good intentions are one of the most dangerous causes of abuse of power. So, for me, "laws" are crucial to my own well-being, as well as to the good of the school. Our laws are policies and procedures, the fundamental fairness of treating equal situations equally, and consulting widely in those cases where ultimately I have to be the one to make a painful decision.
Mr. Cooper-Leary has one of the world’s great plays in rehearsal, Sophocles’ "Antigone." Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, and her brothers have killed each other in a struggle for the throne of Thebes. One brother was the King; the other a rebel. Antigone’s uncle, Creon, becomes King and orders that the rebel not be buried. Antigone disobeys. Her conflict with Creon is one between love and power, between the laws of God and those of man, between duties to family and duties to the state, and ultimately, between fate and freedom. Creon’s son, Haimon, is engaged to Antigone, and tries to persuade his father not to have Antigone executed. He says:
"I beg you, do not be unchangeable:
Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul–
A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty."
A beautiful warning to anyone who would experiment with any kind of power, who would be attracted to authority in the hope of doing good. In essence, the advice is – don’t confuse your self, your soul, your essential identity with some power you have, whether institutional authority, physical strength, beauty, intelligence, or popularity. Those powers are not you; they are loaned to you. It is pleasing to the self-esteem to define oneself by some power or talent one has, to feel that one has more freedom to choose, to be oneself because of that power. But what defines you is not power, but what you love, and for your own well-being, power must always be subservient to love. If you define yourself instead by your power or your talent, you may find one day that you are empty, as Creon was empty.
One reason I love high school is that students do challenge authority; all one need do is listen.
Creon says to his son, Haimon:
"You consider it right for a man of my years and experience
To go to school to a boy?"
And Haimon replies:
"It is not right
If I am wrong. But if I am young, and right,
What does my age matter?"
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