By Charles F. Lauter
Originally published in the Fall 2000 issue of Lawrence Today
The Class of 2000 asked Dean Lauter, who was retiring after 31 years at Lawrence, most recently as dean of off-campus programs and international student advisor, to be the speaker at their Baccalaureate Service. This article is excerpted from his remarks on that occasion.
In talking about liberal education -- which intends to liberalize, liberate, or free a person -- I believe we must talk about values. In some university settings a statement like that brings about a shudder, because many people are concerned that moral education or education about values is an inappropriate activity in a college or university. Richard Morrill, in a book titled Teaching Values in College, worries about this phenomenon, which he describes this way:
"Many, perhaps most, contemporary academicians assume that values are subjective in nature and wholly a function of personal choice and desire, that they are preferences. To seek to influence another's preferences is to intrude upon personal freedom, to meddle in private matters, and to set arbitrary standards. From this viewpoint, instruction in values lies beyond the proper scope of higher learning. Colleges and universities should limit themselves to their proper business -- the discovery and transmission of knowledge and the development of the skills of the intellect. Educators should bear no responsibility for shaping a student's values, for that task can be accomplished only through indoctrination. Since differences in values cannot be resolved by an appeal to objective criteria, the attempt to teach values is alien to the basic purpose and responsibilities of higher education.
Morrill disagrees with that position and so do I. Morrill also quotes Wittgenstein: "Values. A terrible business. You can at best stammer when you talk about them!"
I do not wish to stammer about values. I wish to trumpet their importance.
Values as process
The reason I am more comfortable than some with values education is that I view education itself, and particularly liberal education, as a process, not a product. I used to have a favorite poster in my office that showed a group of Antioch College students arduously trekking through the Saint Elias Mountains in Alaska, and the wonderful caption was "Education is a journey, not a destination." It is that notion of process as the principal task of education that allows me to discuss values comfortably. We are not talking about indoctrinating people with isms; we are talking about helping them to learn a process of valuing, a way to arrive at and enact values, rather than the content of those values.
One educational process dealing with values is called values clarification. Everyone has values already. None of us is a blank slate when coming to a university setting, and so we must clarify the values we already hold. To arrive at our present values, we have had to choose from alternatives. I hope we have learned to choose a particular belief or value only after we have considered the consequences. I also hope we have learned to choose the value freely without someone coercing us.
Stated that way, arriving at a value or belief seems rather simple. However, embedded in those actions are more complex processes. To choose from alternatives, we must educate ourselves about the myriad alternatives. To choose wisely, we must know and understand the consequences. To do that, we must inquire, analyze, and criticize, and then we must accept and recognize that the belief is our choice. It is not enough just to go through that process and then smugly sit on the belief. To be effective, values demand action, and the first action stems from our free choice; we must embrace, prize, and cherish our beliefs. We must affirm our beliefs when it is appropriate. By that I do not mean we wear them on our sleeves, but we should be willing to "stand up and be counted" when it is necessary. Then we must act on our beliefs, regularly and consistently.
Playing with verbs
The title of this piece is "Values As Verbs," so let us play with some verbs. Playing is a form of process, and talking about values as verbs is clearly process-oriented. Because the word process implies movement and action rather than stasis, it captures the very purpose of verbs in our language; verbs specify actions!
A good place to start with values as verbs is with the Lawrence University Mission Statement.
The Mission Statement, I have to tell you, does not do as good a job as I would like in dealing with values as verbs. There are only two strong verbs: to educate and to prepare. These do denote important value actions; however, several other strong values are put in noun or participle form. The Statement refers to the development of intellect and talent and to the cultivation of judgment and values rather than stating the case more actively. We might instead declare that we develop intellect and talent. Similarly we could say that we cultivate judgment and values. Instead of listing the nouns service, achievement, leadership, and personal fulfillment, we could state that we prepare students to serve, to achieve, to lead, and to fulfill. I realize that these seem like minor criticisms, but if we truly believe that values should be action-oriented, we need to pay attention to such issues. The Mission Statement goes on to list the purposes of the university, and here we do a much better job, starting each purpose with a strong verb: to promote, to nurture, to foster, to design, to contribute, to seek, to provide, to support, to sustain.
In spite of its limitations, I commend the Mission Statement, and especially its statement of educational purposes, as a document that you can return to in the future as you examine and act upon value positions.
Playing with nouns
Let's look at some other values besides education. This is where the sense of play with values as verbs comes to the fore.
The English language is a very noun-centered language, and that encourages a tendency to think of values as entities or possessions, acquisitions, objects, or things. I hope I have already signaled to you my disquiet with that notion and my desire for a much more dynamic view of values. We have a serious problem, in that many of the values of a general nature that we consider most important exist only in the noun form: values such as peace, happiness, wisdom, honesty, justice, community, goodness, truth, courage. Each of them needs a helping verb to put it into action. Thus we seek peace or seek happiness. I would note that seek could be the helping verb for each of those values that I just stated. In itself, to seek is a very powerful verb and could even be seen as a positive value in its own right, but we can also establish or make peace or provide happiness; those verbs direct the value action outward to others. We can embrace wisdom, we can foster honesty, we can promote justice, we can build community, we can cherish goodness, we can affirm the truth, or we can engender courage. That last one is also fun to play with, because if we put engender and courage together we get the strong verb encourage. There is another category of value verbs, and those are ones that have noun equivalents. I recognize that you can take virtually any verb and make a noun by using its gerund form, but I am talking about verbs that have a separate noun equivalent: to know and knowledge, to tolerate and tolerance, to liberate and liberty, to commit and commitment, to act and action, to inquire and inquiry, to analyze and analysis, to criticize and criticism, to accept and acceptance, to affirm and affirmation. Several of these verbs have interesting aspects when we see them as personal actions. To educate, a very important verb for us, implies the education of someone else, unless we use it reflexively to mean to educate one's self; I believe we need to embrace both of those aspects. The same is true of to free or to liberate; those actions are usually directed towards some other entity, unless we use them reflexively to free or liberate ourselves. I believe we must acknowledge both forms.
Having dealt with values that are nouns and value verbs with noun-equivalents, we come to my favorites, those values that are verbs, some of the most potent and critical values we can utilize. These are such words as value itself, which has both the verb form, to value, and the noun form, a value. Likewise, the word respect, which is a quality and also an action. The word hope provides us with another example; we hope in the verb form that something will occur, but we also have hopes. Care is another powerful word in this category. We care for someone or something, but we also have cares. Perhaps the most powerful word of all, love, is a word that in its verb and noun forms provides a highly meaningful action and a heartfelt condition. Although I cannot claim to be exhaustive, I am chagrined to point out that it was much easier to come up with lists of values that were nouns and values with noun-equivalents than it was to come up with the more powerful form -- values that are verbs.
Lest I seem Pollyannaish by dealing with only positive values, I want to point out that the same type of classification can be applied to negative values. We have nouns like vice or prejudice that also take helping verbs like encourage or engender. Prejudice can also be a verb, as when we prejudice someone else. And then we have the negative verbs that have noun equivalents, like violate and its noun form, violence. Finally, we also have the most powerful forms, where the one word serves as both the noun and the verb form, such as hate.
A confession
I have a confession to make. Some readers may already have caught the fact that there were a number of times in the preceding paragraphs when I used a value verb in a noun or participle form, or -- heaven forbid -- in the passive voice, when I am supposed to be talking about values as active verbs. However, I have already said that our language is much more noun-centered than verb-centered, especially when it comes to values. In order to overcome that, I would have had to create -- and, believe me I tried -- some terribly convoluted sentences. Rather than subject you to that, I gave in and surrendered to the more obvious conventions of our current language and culture. I hope you will forgive me for that. (Note how I exhorted you to act, with the verb forgive, one that I had not dealt with previously.)