The First Day of Adulthood

Freshman Orientation

Remarks to Parents and Students
August 19, 2004

Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Several years ago I received letters from Wilmington, North Carolina, written by Robert Fales, an alumnus from the Class of 1930. Those of you from “Down East” may know of the notable medical career of Dr. Fales, who also distinguished himself as a local historian of his native New Hanover County. In addition, Dr. Fales recorded his memories of Wake Forest in letters to me. His vivid recollections of the chapel talks given to entering freshman by President William Louis Poteat especially caught my attention. Here is a section:

One day Doctor Billy — as he was always referred to — read us a letter that he had recently received from a mother of a Wake Forest College student in which she asked Dr. Poteat why Wake Forest College had made a fool out of her son. He read a reply to her [in the form of a letter] in which he stated that W.F.C. does not and has not made a fool out of any boy, but that W.F.C. only brings out what is in the boy.

I will not venture to say whether this is the sort of reply you parents could expect should you write a letter complaining to the President. When I first read Dr. Fales’ letter, however, I was struck that President Poteat’s words were so well and fondly remembered after more than half a century.

High school graduation marks the end of your youth. While certain friends and associates from those years will remain, new friendships, ambitions, values, and decisions are just beginning to form — even here, right now — that will shape your lives henceforth. “Wake Forest University, Class of 2008” will forever be a leading fact of your biography.

Across this portal awaits a new life, an adult life, upon which Wake Forest will exert profound influence. Parents, your task — while certainly not ending — must change today as well. The child beside you is a young man or young woman. This marks the first day of adulthood.

I

With great pleasure, I welcome all of you — students and families — to the Wake Forest community. Born in a village in the forest of Wake County, where we lived for a century and a quarter, we seek to preserve the congeniality and concern for each other rooted in our small town origins. This sense of community directs our common life. Our aim is not only to see that you are successful and fulfill your highest ambitions during your career here at Wake Forest but also that your success extends to the future that awaits you beyond these halls. You may have heard stories of opening convocations where the president warned the freshmen how many would be gone by the end of the year and how few would survive to graduate. I offer no warning, but a welcome.

You are here because you can and should succeed. We greet you — parents and students — in that spirit. We want you to prosper intellectually and personally and to see Wake Forest as your particular field of dreams.

As we welcome our first-year students, we welcome also new faculty, whose presence will enrich our community. Wake Forest prides itself on the degree and quality of its interaction between students and faculty. As our new students will soon find, at Wake Forest you will have, in class and out, access to committed teachers.

II

Arriving here, from high school, you probably know what subjects you like and do not like based on where previously you struggled and succeeded. Many of you have had unique learning opportunities, such as travel to important historical and cultural centers. You come here self-aware, savvy, and sophisticated. If school is a game, you are winners.

Paradoxically, these very achievements may pose a threat to your career at Wake Forest — the threat that you may seek here too small an ambition. Your past achievements may have resulted in a narrowing of choices, a selection among options. You may come here thinking of college as a set of undertakings, the terms of which you have thoroughly mastered. Your plan here may be to take further steps along a foreordained path. College? It is courses, grades, and a degree that is a ticket to a job or graduate school. If you come to Wake Forest to attend college in that sense, you may miss the fullness of opportunity that is yours.

Shel Silverstein has a marvelous little homily describing the choice that is yours today at the start of your journey:¹

You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa
If you just tell it where.

So will you let it take you
Where you’ve never been before,
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your Floor?

Do not come to Wake Forest to get a degree to get a job. Do not miss this ride. It is the ride of your life.

III

What must you do to achieve everything possible at Wake Forest, everything to prepare you for a life of fulfillment and service?

The first and most urgent requirement is the development of character, which is the supreme achievement of a life well lived. Indeed, character is destiny. In college and in life, it matters what your intellectual abilities are. In college and in life, it matters what you know and what you can do. But what matters most in college and most in life is what you stand for and are committed to, the ideals by which your life is governed. Character alone will earn for you the trust of others, that trust which is the foundation of the democratic community.

With the advent of adulthood is given life’s most difficult and precious gift: freedom. Your families and your communities have taught you important values, but these do not of necessity become your own until you freely adopt them in your individual quest for adulthood. What kind of person will you choose to be? Character provides the answer to that most basic life question and is the foundation for the appropriation of adult freedom.

Young adults sometime misunderstand freedom, regarding it negatively as freedom from the authority of parents or schools or laws. Rather, the freedom that forms character is positive; it is freedom for achieving worthy purposes.

This matter of freedom explains our urgent educational interest in binge drinking, a problem on college and university campuses now receiving national attention. Binge drinking demonstrates a lack of control and absence of judgment, and precludes the exercise of the most fundamental elements of character.

Our regard for personal character is reflected in our Honor Code, which is the ethical center of the Wake Forest experience. Your presence here involves a social contract committing you to our Honor Code. The pursuit of truth requires discoveries that are honestly made and conveyed and the relationship of honor among students and with faculty is a basic assumption of all teaching and learning. Our honor system is not simply morally correct: this code is essential to the right conduct of the educational enterprise.

With each New Year, we celebrate a rich heritage that we honor and respect. Those good Baptists who founded this school and fought to keep it open through tribulation, war, and fiscal calamity believed that Wake Forest was here for the social and moral betterment of young lives and, through you, the improvement of the world.

The Jew from Nazareth taught that we must love our neighbors as ourselves, and we embrace followers of all faiths, knowing that we enrich one another as we walk various paths in quest of transcendence. In response to the question “Who is your neighbor?” Jesus recounted the parable of the Good Samaritan about overcoming every prejudice and distinction that divides the human family.

The Wake Forest motto Pro Humanitate encompasses that spirit of universality and inclusion. This guiding principle enjoins us each to act in goodwill toward all members of our human family, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. No one is excluded from the requirement that we love each and every one of our neighbors.

This is not a slogan for the politically correct, but a moral requirement grounded in our religious heritage. Indeed, the Wake Forest motto is more than a humane ideal. It is a mandate — a practical imperative — for living in a world whose human community co-exists on an ever-smaller planet. All members of this global family are our brothers and sisters.

With Pro Humanitate as our ideal, we remain committed, as we have been for 170 years, to an ethically informed conception of education and the educated person. Great ideals should animate your dreams and ambitions as you walk the hallways and pathways of this school in preparation for a life of service.

IV

To be magical, your carpet ride has a second important requirement: the cultivation of the sense of wonder. Aristotle said that all knowing begins with wonder. A persistent and compelling curiosity about nature, and about human nature and the transcendent, will provide the attitude and disposition to make your education and your life a voyage of discovery.

To cultivate wonder, you must be prepared to leave your safety zones, those domains of achievement where you operate with familiarity, comfort, and success. Wonder demands that you confront the difficult, the perplexing, and the unfamiliar.

Several years back, Kate, a student friend, told me about the phone call she made to her mother explaining her plans to join the Wake Forest group going to Calcutta over the winter holidays to care for the dying in Mother Teresa’s City of Joy. “You want to go where to do what?” was the horrified reaction. But go she did, beyond her safety zones, and she returned with a transforming moral passion.

To practice wonder, you must nurture creativity and your imaginative awareness. In school, we spend too much time teaching and telling you about what is not, and what is not, and then requiring that you recite this back. The imaginative domain concerns not what is or is not, but what might be as a result of your creative choice.

Emily Dickinson said it succinctly:²

I dwell in Possibility —
A fairer House than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors —

An abundance of windows and doors exist in your world of possibility — more than you can imagine. Seize the day and cultivate wonder. In the process, you will begin to see that the world is a wonderful mystery whose puzzles are there for you to solve. If you quit the piano or violin too soon, take it up again. Is there something you are tempted to try — photography? creative writing? drama? Now is the hour. Do some new things.

When I am asked, as I often am, about the education of men and women who have become wise, the story is always of a small number of teachers, sometimes just one, who pointed the pathway to Socratic self-understanding.

Education that is transforming is always a personal as well as an intellectual transaction. Your teachers, whatever the field, are experts in the detection and development of human potential. Transformational teaching, which you will find here at Wake Forest, is always about personal discovery as well as intellectual growth. Every teacher values these prized relationships with students more than any other aspect of the profession.

I was an undergraduate in Alabama during the turbulent days of Dr. King’s civil rights revolution. I will never forget those souls in the philosophy and religion departments who guided our hearts and minds toward a new moral and spiritual understanding. These guides and mentors are here for you as well, but you must be more than a taker of courses. Engagement with faculty members exacts the price of your commitment to the expansion of wonder.

Life here is full. Religious assemblies are here for your worship, supported by the work of our campus ministries. Student organizations nurture your interests and are valuable avenues of friendship and service. The Deacons are competitive in every sport, and our intramural programs are thriving. The love of beauty in all things should infuse your life here — be it at Reynolda House, Museum of American Art, our new cultural partner, or in your favored campus locations that dispose you to reflection and contemplation.

These years will bring lifelong friendships. Wake Forest people love this school with passion; a love, I should warn you, that is contagious. Many parents are embraced by the Wake Forest sense of belonging to this place where a future full of wonder is unfolding.

V

In the end, the ride of your life will, we hope, lead not to a job — or even to a career — but to a vocation. I used that older term with its explicitly religious connotation because your professional goals should be attached to causes and ideals you believe are worth living for and working for. Work should be part of your moral vocation and not simply what you do for economic reward.

One thing is certain; there is growing convergence between the elements of the liberally educated mind and the economies of this new century. The abilities of calculation, communication, and reflective judgment are basic to the liberally educated mind and fundamental to every vocation and profession. To be worthy of trust is the highest requirement for any purpose or position.

International education has been a traditional emphasis at Wake Forest and globalism is a dominant theme of the business and professional world. You should use these years to become conversant with the global outlook that will shape your lives beyond Wake Forest. You should travel, study abroad, and use the language requirement to achieve fluency in another language. More than half of last year’s graduates earned academic credit abroad. We want your numbers to be higher yet.

You are not forced to choose between the requirements of your education and the imperative to secure a place of opportunity in the economic order. Six months out of Wake Forest, essentially all our graduates are in graduate or professional school or have that first job. If you succeed at Wake Forest in beginning the path to becoming an educated person, there will be opportunities aplenty when you choose a place of service.

CONCLUSION

In my alumni wanderings a few years ago, Kenneth Hite of Greenville, North Carolina, gave me his freshman student handbook for the year 1934, produced by the Student Council. I was much taken by this small book and kept it on my desk for many months.

In 1934, freshmen were required to learn the school songs in the first week, to wear freshmen rat caps or beanies, and were not allowed to wear wristwatches or raise mustaches. They were to attend all athletic contests, to follow the cheerleaders, but — think of this! — never to cheer when an opponent was penalized! The Honor System was a simple comprehensive code of conduct: students are on their honor to do right at all times and to abstain from the wrong. There was, for cultivation of the spirit, daily chapel.

But if much has changed in these intervening years, including even the location of the school, much abides. The book is filled with names of those I have known and loved. The paintings of J. Allen Easley grace the walls of my office. In 1934, he was pastor of the First Baptist Church in old Wake Forest, and he became Professor of Religion and one of the most revered figures in Wake Forest history.

Another student officer in 1934 hailed from Birmingham, where I was at the time of my Wake Forest appointment. It appeared in the local paper that I was coming here as president, and the first phone call I received from an alumnus started with, “I don’t know you, but I love you because I love Wake Forest.” True to that declaration, Bert Shore loved me and Wake Forest all the days of his life. For years and years, Bert drove from Birmingham to Winston-Salem for every home football game every season, and greeting him was always a declaration of love.

Old Wake Forest had character. In a word I have been using, advisedly so, there was love abundant there. The handbook reminds its readers on every page of the college’s religious and moral expectations. It repeats the constant desire of every student and faculty member to be helpful to each other. Wake Forest is a community where caring extended even to the local proprietors. “Don’t go to Raleigh to the picture show,” the book advises. “The Castle Theater in Wake Forest shows the best of pictures, and Mr. Whitacre will appreciate your patronage.” Such was the place we were. May we forever so remain!

The 1934 handbook editor, Thompson Greenwood, had a final comment to the entering class. “I like you because you have come to this great old school. If I can ever be of any assistance to you, call on me. Please remember always to work and do the right thing — and the gods will be kind.”

Seventy years later, in a new era, in a new millennium, on a new campus, in another city, I cannot improve on that advice: work hard, do the right thing, and God will visit you with His kindness.

I have myself experienced the special gift of Wake Forest during the past year. I was unexpectedly diagnosed with a brain tumor. Such moments, as you have or will someday discover, bring into immediate focus what is central to your life. My family — my wife, Laura, and our extended family — were magnificent. But another family — the Wake Forest family — gave us such inspiration and support that I am before you today. I will retire at the end of this year, so this day will be my hale and my farewell to this class. With pride and honor I welcome you.

You too can find here, as I have, a tradition of care and concern that is alive and flourishing as it was in the town of Wake Forest where we were born.

To the Class of 2008, welcome to Wake Forest, and may its spirit embrace you.

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¹ Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic (New York: HarperCollins, 1981), p. 106.

² Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), p. 327.